What’s a better investment than real estate? Digital assets.

No, we aren’t talking about NFTs or crypto. Craig Campbell uses powerful SEO and link-building strategies to build and “flip” websites for a much higher rate of return than you’ll find in any housing market today.

He shared his secrets at Affiliate World, so now we get to share them with you.

Strategies to Scale Digital Assets

When you want to scale a website or digital asset, your content strategy will be one of the most important components.

Craig uses SEO and link building as primary drivers for scaling. While paid traffic and affiliate links are in the mix too, organic content is one of the keys to maximizing profit from an asset.

Craig uses topic clusters for content that resonates with audiences and is relevant to algorithms. This method uses one piece of “core content” that other satellite posts link back to. This creates an internal linking structure that enhances searchability and lots of other peripherals that will give your site more authority.

In this example, the cluster topic is podcasts, and all of the related posts link back to the core piece:
Podcasts

For this strategy to work on new sites, you’ll need a rigid process that content creators can follow to create high-quality content at scale. And while generative AI like ChatGPT can be used to speed up these processes, Google is not rewarding sites that have poorly written bot content on their pages with quality traffic or search rankings.

If you do choose to use AI, run the text through tools like QuillBot, a paraphrasing tool, and Grammarly, a grammar and spell checker, to maximize readability and minimize any possible instances of plagiarism.

3 Red Flags to Avoid 🚩

Craig learned a few lessons about what not to do when you’re flipping digital assets too.

1. Avoid Seasonality

One of Craig’s “impulse buys” was a golf website that he was able to scale… for a few months. When golf season ended, however, sales dried up. If your goal is to scale an asset to sell it, look for evergreen niches that are stable throughout the year.

2. Avoid Low-Ticket Items

If you’re paying for traffic and building links to scale an ecommerce website, for example, the clicks you’re paying for will cost the same if you’re selling a $5 product or a $500 product.

If you want to maximize the value of your website as an asset, sell high-ticket items (and avoid cheap stuff) to maintain profitability and healthy margins.

3. Avoid Commercial-Only Content

One of Craig’s clients successfully scaled a website for nearly a year with sales-driven, commercial-only content. But at the end of that year, a new Google update started penalizing sites that didn’t offer informational value, and the traffic fell off a cliff.

The lesson? Balance commercial content with organic information, and consider the user’s search intent when you’re boosting that content. If someone is looking for an answer to a question, provide that answer – don’t just try to convert them.

Finally, the last lesson to remember if you’re flipping digital assets is knowing when not to flip one. If you have a website that makes money consistently and grows predictably over time, you can leverage that “slow burn” to fund other purchases and marketplace tests.