His Website Gets TONS of Traffic but Makes $500? How I'd Fix It

This is Shane. He runs a site called Just Flip a Coin, which does just one thing, flips a coin. His site pulls 250 to 350,000 visits a month, but revenue 5 to 600 bucks a month. 500 to $600. I've seen sites like this make 10 to 100 times more. But that was just the start of the problem. The truth is that your site has been just doing one simple thing. There's no moat. I tested it myself and I was able to replicate your site in 18 seconds with chat GPT. I'm a little bit worried about the future success of your site. I wanted to show Shane what went wrong and help him build a strategy to 10x his traffic and revenue. But first, I had to show him the ticking time bomb. Something hiding in plain sight. There's something that I want to show you here. So, if we look at the top pages report for Just Flip a Coin, I want you to read that number right there. 100%. That's one page. If this was like a business where you your livelihood depended on it, you could be in serious trouble. Yeah. And so I want to show you what something healthy looks like. Let's use a site like Canva. We'll hit up their top pages report. So they they have actually quite a lot to this top page. 21% but that that's their homepage. It's because 23 million people search for Canva every month. Wow. So if we look at this, so PDF editor, their most traffic, non-branded page with 2.3 million monthly organics. But look at I want you to read that percentage. 7% of their traffic. Yeah. 0.7%. So if they lose all of that traffic, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Right. Is they're hedged. And so if you're putting all your eggs into one basket, you are not hedged at all. And in the case an algorithm update comes up or a new competitor comes up, then you have that one page that could get wiped out in a matter of months. So there's basically two things that need to happen for your traffic to grow. You need to be going after net new traffic. And then the second thing that you have to do is you have to protect your current traffic. Basically, the first thing that I do, and this is just like the lowest hanging fruit because it's super simple, is a keyword gap analysis. What are the other flip a coin pages ranking for where you're not? Right? So, we have some of your competitors here, flip simu, random.org. These are basically the two main ones, right? So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to select those two competitors here, and I'm going to open it up in content cap. We're trying to find keywords that either flips simu or this random.org coins page ranks for, but your website doesn't. Okay. Flip two coins. We see this one here, too, is flip 100 coins, right? All right. So, I wonder how many like permutations there are of of something like this. That would be more like random.org's thing, I think. Yes. And if you look at just flip a coin, you don't have that function. You literally just have that's it. This thing. Now, if we look at the flip simu one, we can flip like 100, 10 coins, whatever it is. But Google knows clearly since they're ranking that page, you can flip it two times, 100 times, whatever that is. Mhm. Technically, if you add a feature like that where you can change the number of times you can flip it, then you can rank for more keywords. We found a gap. These pages are ranking for these, but yours isn't anywhere in Google's top 100. Wow. There's 200 searches for this. Just this one per month. 150 searches. And this is just in the US. Take global and it's a little different. So, you know what? Let's actually open up keywords explorer and we're going to type flip coins. And this is just showing us like keyword ideas here. So we can see here, flip three coins is actually even more popular. Flip two coins. Flip three coins. That makes sense because it's like it's a tight like best out of three kind of thing. Yeah. Right. So we can actually even narrow in more. Yeah. And it's showing us quite a bit here. In total global search volume that's 2,300 new searches per month. Okay. That you could potentially get through that. So now we have a new product feature idea based on keyword research. Does that make sense? Mhm. Makes total sense. Thank you. We should get into the actual keyword expansion so that we're not seeing like this maxed out traffic. I think here how do we get that next leg up so that we can go like this. How do we do that? The first place that I always look is who are your competitors and see how they're getting traffic not just to their coin flip simulator but other pages they might have. So let's start here with the the flip simulator thing. And I actually just want to go to their their top pages report cuz they get 370,000 visits. We're basically looking for other ideas. like is there anything in here that could be interesting to add to your site? So in this case, for example, we have like a dice roller. A coin flip is essentially like making a decision. A dice can do that as well. Even a yes or no test. Like that's basically what it is is people might search for heads or tails, right? That's yes or no. But what if you actually had something that was just a yes or no test? Like is there any search volume around that? Very curious. So we'll look yes or no. Okay. Yes or no wheel? Like this is it. You want to take a wild guess at how much the top ranking page for this? Like how much traffic they get? 25,000 a month. I don't know. 288,000. Estimation. But yes, we just found another tool that we can create. So we have a dice roller. We have a yes or no wheel. Now two ideas that could potentially double your traffic, right? Uh let's look at random.org. And yeah, so they get 934 monthly organics. So, let's see where their traffic's coming from. So, they have like a random number generator. That's their main tool. Let's just look at generator. Let's do picker wheel roller chooser. Like, it doesn't really matter what we're doing here. And then we're going to go to the matching terms report. And there's this awesome filter here, include. So, now we can add the word random. And now it's going to show us any keywords that mention any of the our our seed keywords and random. Cool. So, random number generator. Boom. 82,000 random name generator. That's another one that you could do as well. Word generator. Like there's so many different tools that you can make in here. 32,000 monthly searches for random letter generator. Like can you not just pick a letter? Can we go to the top site for that? Letter picker. 36,000 monthly visits. Hey, it's the pickerwheel.com. Oh, so look at this. So, what we just found is another site that is creating tools. That is potentially what you would want to create. So, what are we going to do? We're going to take that back to site explorer. We're going to paste that site in here. We're going to go and we see that they get a ton of traffic. So, we're going to go to the top pages report. And this this is going to show us the pages that get the most search traffic. So, we have the yes or no wield. 768,000 monthly organics just for that one tool. Wow. Tons of different opportunities you can find here. The difficulty now is really ranking for them. Uh you are going to have to build links and I can almost guarantee you that for a good number of these I'll just open them. So we have something called DR domain rating which represents like the strength of your website's backlink profile. Generally speaking higher DRS tend to rank better like here yes or no wheel. A DR7 site which is a homepage which has quite a few referring domains. This is a DR2 site is in the top 10. I would 100% try to make a yes or no wheel. Like it's it almost seems like silly not to do it right now. Yeah, absolutely. Now, we need to actually get into like protecting your traffic, right? So, how do we maintain that traffic so that these other websites that are coming creating similar tools? How do we prevent them from actually going ahead? The reason why you're ranking high is you have better links right now. But I don't think you have that many links more. Mhm. Right. Yeah. So if we go here and we look up backlink checker, we have been in position one like almost forever for this query. Ignore back links but look at domain. So how many unique domains? So we call it referring domains. How many unique websites are actually linking to that page? For us, we have almost 8,000. It's not about sheer quantity, but it's about like the quality of those. It's going to be tough for these people to catch us. This is only for the query flip a coin. Okay. They actually have more than you. Wow. But what we see is that in terms of quality of domains, you have a similar amount. Random.org is not that far behind. So, let's look at your backlink profile. And there ain't no way we're going to be looking through like 700 links. So, let's just get a rough idea of like what are your good links. So, we have this feature called best links. We have 15. What we want to look at here is context. Why are they linking to you? We see here 25 fun Zoom games teachers can play with students of all ages. And the context is present your screen to the just flip a coin web page. So what are they talking about here? Okay, so they're saying one of those games is heads or tails, right? So they're saying use just flip a coin to to flip heads or tails. That's the first thing that you need to do. Okay, so that's in the context of Thanks board teachers. Yeah, that's the context of of games, right? Mhm. We see this one here and it says a coin flip will determine which team starts the game. The content is about a cross word challenge and it's telling people how to play. So now we have rules. Okay. They're actually kind of similar if you think about it, right? They're in the context of games outlining a list of rules and they're saying flip a coin to do it. Just go to this website. So now what we want to do is we want to find out how can we get more links like this, right? Who's going to link to us? It's probably people who are talking about board games rules to start like what are some games where you would need to actually flip a coin to get started. So if we go to content explorer we can search this database of 17 billion pages and we can get like SEO metrics on on all these pages. Basically what we want to look for are footprints. So these phrases that people would mention where it makes sense for them to link to you. Flip a coin. Like it's totally natural. And now we have 230,000 pages. If you can't make up your mind between two options, flip a coin, right? New York Times. These are the kinds of pages that we want to find where people are saying this and you solve a problem there. Flip a coin day. What? That'd be a good one to be on. I would be asking them for a link. So, I'll give you a decent pitch. I would just tell them that I'll rebrand the entire site to yours for that day. Ooh. Right. There's a clear value prop now. Why wouldn't they promote it? and no one's going to come back and edit out your link and there's no reason for them to like you're actually just helping them by providing a service for them. So, let's assume that we found another website that's talking about a game and it's saying, uh, if you can't decide who goes first, then just flip a coin. At that point, now it's all about outreach. And so, you're emailing these people and you're saying, hey, like I saw your rules on whatever game on the crosswords, uh, and you said to flip a coin, nobody has a coin, so I made this free app. Thought that your readers might find it helpful or something like that. You're not trying to sell anything and at this point you're now building good quality links that you can vet yourself. If you have links from New York Times, I don't know, CNN, Hasbro.com, like how are your competitors going to replicate that? Yeah, makes sense. So, we know how to protect your traffic. We know how and where to get new keyword ideas. And I think at this point, like you got to kind of decide like what do I really want with just flip a coin, right? As novel and trivial as as the tool seems, I would personally want to think of how can I make this product better. It's a product, right? As simple as it is. Do you have any ideas of how you can make your product better? Have you thought of anything? One of my strategies has been to just keep it very simple, so I don't want to necessarily junk that up. What if I could upload my face on the on the head and my butt on the tail? Yeah, right. Why not? Right. It's like McDonald's or Taco Bell. You could even just type it in. McDonald's Taco Bell. who audience are actually coming to us playing board games. Like 80% are playing board games. Why don't we create more content around board games or tools for board games? Now you're actually building an audience of people who will say go to just flip a coin for this. Like if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, you have to go just flip a coin and you can have all those decisions made for you. Yeah, I think I would want to keep it simple, but just try to make it better than the competitors. Make it easier to use, make it more fun to use. Yeah. And I think another way that can potentially lead to links, too, is to add a tracker. How many times have we flipped the coin? How many were heads? How many were tails? Studies that actually end up using something to say, is it is a coin flip really 50/50? We'll start referencing you, saying that we did our coin flips through just flipcoin.com, and that's a link for you. Sure. Okay. You got to realize that because there isn't much competition, you don't need that many. You just need slow and steady that are going to drip in. After diving into content and link opportunities, I was excited to shift to monetization. Specifically, one idea that could 10x his revenue. So, right now, you monetize through display ads and you're using ISOIC here to Mediavine. Yes, they've actually reached out to me several times. Mediavine usually has better RPMs. So the first thing I would do is I would look at your ISOIC ad revenues, mark down in a spreadsheet like traffic revenue, whatever, take an average out over several months and then do Mediavine for that same duration. I have seen websites that have gone from like Google ads and they have tripled their revenue. Does that mean it'll work for you? I have no clue, but I would definitely sign up with them. The second thing are potential affiliate offers. The affiliate offers I think make sense after you understand the audience a bit. For all you know, there could be people coming to your site saying, "Let's flip a coin for five bucks, for 50 bucks, for 500 bucks, $5,000." Right? In the case that you find out that, let's say, for example, 25% are are betting money, I would be looking at gambling affiliates. And even just having some kind of banners or whatever, if if you do find out that it is like predominantly a gambling, like online gambling audience, I would probably create blog content for that specific audience. If we're talking about like poker odds, like how do you calculate the odds of of specific hands? I will be creating that because now you're attracting an audience. It's a little bit of a moonshot, but if it does hit, there is a lot of money in there. Now, what I think your biggest opportunity and fastest opportunity is is to sell sponsored coin flips. So, the more you understand your audience, the easier it is to sell to advertisers. Like if I am some poker website and I say that I have 400,000 people that come to my website to flip a coin and 38% of those people are people who play online poker. Would a poker site pay $5,000 $10,000 a month to have their logo on one side of the coin? I think that you could sell that for $5,000 per side. And if you find that you have crazy demand, I would just keep increasing the price. Mhm. Makes sense to me. There's actually one thing I left out of this story. Before I gave Shane any advice, I made him a cash offer to buy a site. It's cash, buddy. He turned it down. Now, at the time, I was glad. I figured he'd take the strategy and run with it. I was genuinely rooting for him. But now, a few months have passed and nothing's changed. And I can't help but wonder, would the tips and strategy I recommended have worked for him. So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm building my own free tool site from scratch using the exact advice I gave Shane. Same approach, same monetization, same SEO playbook. And if you want to see how far it goes, drop a comment, subscribe, and maybe I'll document the whole