Mike Pearson: How to Get Massive Google Traffic for Business Growth

Welcome to the Scaling Success Stories series!

If you’re new to this series, I ask online entrepreneurs questions regarding growing and scaling their business.

This is the series description:

“Imagine if you could learn from the experts on how to grow and scale your business. Every Monday, I invite entrepreneurs who have conquered this challenge to share their stories, from realizing they could make money online to building thriving businesses that positively change their customers’ lives. If you want to quit your full-time job and pursue your business wholeheartedly, read on to learn how you can discover your true purpose, find success, and live the life you want to.”

You can get your fill of online business tips by reading the other interviews on the Scaling Success Stories page.

Table of Contents

Interview with Mike Pearson from Stupid Simple SEO

It was my pleasure interviewing Mike Pearson of Stupid Simple SEO, a popular SEO blog that teaches people how to break free from Pinterest traffic and get the Google traffic they desire. He’s also teaching his methods with his new site in the credit repair space just to show you it’s possible to start from the ground up if you use the right strategies.

Check out what Mike had to say to my questions!

1. Why did you start an online business and how does your passion still drive your business’ growth today?

Before I started my online course business, I used to (and still do) create niche websites that I would rank in Google, get organic traffic, and drive affiliate sales.

To be honest, when I first started out, I did this for mainly one reason: to make more money.

My wife and I had just gotten married, we were working lower-paying jobs than we are now, and living in one of the most expensive cities in the country — and I was starting to stress out about our finances.

So I started building these websites and after a little trial and error, they started making me a decent side income. I learned how to rank websites in Google and I became pretty good at SEO.

And that’s when I started my online course teaching other people the same thing.

The reason I started my online course is that I saw so many bloggers struggling with SEO. They are good at getting Pinterest traffic but they didn’t have a clue when it came to SEO. Most wouldn’t even bother with SEO because they found it so confusing.

And I couldn’t really blame them — most SEO advice out there today is awful.

It’s over-complicated and impossible to understand and the target audience is decidedly not other bloggers.

So I spotted an opportunity there where I could teach others how to use SEO to grow traffic to their blogs. And about one year ago (June 2018) I launched my course — and today, I have more than 800 students enrolled.

Those are the people that drive my growth today.

My passion is for every single person who signs up for my course to have success.

It’s easy to motivate yourself when you realize there’s another person on the end of that transaction who’s putting their faith (and their wallet) into you that you can teach them something that will help their own blog and business grow.

Editor’s note: Mike is doing this while working a full-time job. It’s possible to have a thriving business on the side.

2. At what point did you realize that your business was “taking off” and that you could really make money from it?

I did my first course launch (a “beta launch” with about only 100 people on my email list and made about $2,000 from it. That wasn’t a lot of money but it was actually at this point that I realized I had something on my hands with some real potential if I handled it right, which was extremely exciting.

I re-launched again one month later with about 350 email subscribers (and, crucially, with some big-name affiliates promoting my course) and did more than $10,000 profit.

It was at this point that I realized I just needed to keep growing my email list and I could really make some money off of it.

Since then, I’ve moved to an open/close launch strategy where I open up the course for enrollment every quarter or so, and each launch has been bigger than the last. I’m now making more money with the course than I do at my six-figure corporate day job. All in less than a year since launching the course, which is pretty humbling.

But I’m a worrier by nature and while each launch is still really exciting, I also get anxious because you just never know how a launch will go — you literally have only five days (when the course cart is open) to make money with each launch, and I always worry it will be a flop or something will go horribly wrong.

3. At what point did you realize you were living the life you wanted to?

Ha, I’m nowhere near that point.

I’m still grinding at the 9-5 because I’m pretty risk-averse and would rather have two income streams than one, and my business is only a year old so I still don’t feel comfortable enough to just quit my job.

Get back to me a year from now and I may have a different answer.

4. One of the biggest fears of outsourcing is trusting the people you hire to run your business the way you would. How did you overcome this and where did you find the right freelancers and employees to help you grow your business?

I don’t outsource anything when it comes to my course business. It’s my name and my face behind my “brand” and that’s the most valuable asset I have — how people interact with my brand, what their experience is like, if they’d recommend my course to their other blogger friends, etc.

So because of that, I just don’t trust anybody else to touch any part of my business.

I do everything myself: I write my blog posts, I write my emails, I write my sales page copy, and of course, I film all the videos in the course myself.

I’m accountable for my brand and my name is on it and so my feeling is that for anything customer-facing, it needs to be 100% me.

Editor’s note: While Mike doesn’t outsource on Stupid Simple SEO, he does hire ghostwriters for his new credit repair site.

5. A common myth is that as you grow and scale your business, you have to sell your soul to make money, especially when you venture into paid advertising. How do you debunk this myth in your business?

It all comes back to embracing accountability and making your name the face of your business.

If you’re an honest and decent person yourself, and your name is on the line, you won’t even be tempted to sell your soul for anything, let alone making an extra dollar.

6. Why do you think most people fail to grow their businesses and what advice would you offer them to keep pushing, despite all the setbacks?

I think, in online businesses, the biggest mistake people make is that they don’t start with the end in mind. What I mean by that is, they don’t ask themselves, how am I going to make money?

They just start a blog or a project because they think they have a good idea and they’re really passionate and they’re taught that’s all the really need — an idea and passion.

But that can only get you so far.

I interact with a lot of bloggers and when they tell me their niche I just know right away it’s never going to work.

I don’t want to crap on anyone’s niche so I’m not going to give you any examples, but you know what I’m talking about — obscure niches with no potential but they’ve been taught to follow their passion, so here they are.

So, my advice would be to validate your niche — your market — before you even start your project.

As you know, Drew, I did just start a new website in the credit repair niche. And while I do have an interest in personal finance and do take pride in my own credit score, that’s not the reason I started this website.

Passion can only take you so far.

I started it because I know there is an opportunity for me to make money there.

I know that others are making money in the niche (I study my competition).

And, I know that I can create a better website, a better reader experience, with better content and better (you guessed it) SEO.

But that comes from studying my competition and understanding my market and starting with the end in mind: 18 months from now, I can see myself making $20,000 per month with this site.

I KNOW that opportunity is there, with this niche and with this site.

I just have to execute on it.

So before encouraging anyone to just keep pushing, I would ask them to take a step back and really analyze the other players out there.

Who is your competition?
How are they getting traffic?
How are they making money?
How is their Pinterest game?
What about SEO?
What kind of email marketing are they doing?
How much money are they making?

Answering these questions acts as a kind of self-check so you don’t allow yourself to spend too much time on effort on something that just isn’t ever going to work.

Editor’s note: I love how brutally honest Mike is. I see the same with a lot of beginner bloggers. Jeff Proctor and Kelan Kline are good examples of bloggers that have proven their concept first.

7. How important has niching down been (no matter how hard it hurts) to your business’ growth and profitability?

I know there are varying opinions on this, and I respect them, but for me — your niche is everything.

Think about it: people love to follow subject matter experts.

I’ve been able to carve out a bit of a presence in the blogging field as an SEO person. That is my niche.

I don’t teach anything about Pinterest, or email marketing, or copywriting, or sales funnels, or “blogging” — it’s just SEO.

And so when another blogger wants to learn SEO, many of them come to me — because that’s my niche. That’s what I’m going to teach them. I’m not going to confuse them or overwhelm them with the 100 different moving parts of running a blog.

I take the same approach with the websites I build. I don’t want my site to be a go-to resource for 401ks or students loans or how to get a mortgage — even though those all fall under the personal finance umbrella — because it’s much too broad.

Rather, I want to attract readers that have problems or questions dealing with their credit. Whether they also have a question about how to roll over their 401k is irrelevant to me (and also to them, when they’re on my website).

In a way, it’s also irrelevant to Google.

It’s true, Google loves niche-focused websites, and when you’re building out a brand new site and are focused 100% on Google traffic (like I am), it’s a big strategic advantage to be more niched-down than your competitors.

Editor’s note: Kara Fidd, Ben Robinson, and Sa El do a great job of serving a specific audience as Mike does.

8. What do you attribute your success to and how do you explain it? Do you think the same strategies will help you reach your next monetization goals? Why or why not?

It’s still weird to me to be making money online — it almost doesn’t feel real to me.

The money is real when it hits my bank account but maybe it’s that feeling of worry and anxiety but I always feel like it could be taken away any minute, I don’t know why.

So, I don’t really consider myself a success. I have a one-year-old course that has done pretty well, but that’s it.

I still have a long way to go.

Editor’s note: Tracie Fobes and Michelle Schroeder-Gardner went through the same realization of what it was like to make money online.

9. To scale, you really need to have a systemized business. What steps have you taken to build those systems and how do you optimize them?

It took several iterations, but for my course, I finally have a pretty solid process for launching every time now.

What I like about it is that it’s simple and repeatable:

Remind my affiliates the course will be launching soon
Write a new blog post featuring a student success story (to get my email subscribers excited)
Tweak my sales page to make it more current
Send a 5-day email launch sequence
Rinse and repeat

Of course, for this to be successful, you need a constant flow of new email subscribers, which is a topic for another day 🙂

10. If you could speak face-to-face with yourself when you first started your business, what pearls of wisdom would you impart?

To sell an online course, your relationship with your email list is everything.

About Mike Pearson

Mike Pearson is the founder of Stupid Simple SEO, where he teaches other bloggers about SEO, and Credit Takeoff, where he teaches people how to improve their credit scores.

Interested in Learning From Mike?

Mike’s flagship course, Stupid Simple SEO, teaches you the step-by-step formula loved by 800+ bloggers to rank higher in Google and get more organic traffic to your blog with SEO.

It’s designed for people who…

Know SEO is crucial for growing their blog, but don’t know how to start
Think SEO is way too complicated and requires expensive tools and software
Know they shouldn’t be relying on Pinterest traffic
See other bloggers getting Google traffic and wish they could have the same

If this sounds like you, then Stupid Simple SEO might be the course you’re looking for!

The best part of this course is the keyword research section.

That’s right…

Mike teaches you how to get THOUSANDS of keywords from a 7-day $7 trial in Ahrefs.

All you have to do is create epic content, which he shows you how to do, as well.

It really is possible to get Google traffic if you follow Mike Pearson’s instruction.

Purchase Stupid Simple SEO today!

Conclusion

Thanks for participating in my series, Mike!

As you can tell, it’s NOT EASY growing and scaling an online business, but there are some things you can do to aid you in the process.

Inspired by Mike Pearson?

Now, it’s your turn!

I assembled the Scaling Blueprint to show you how to…

Outsource Effectively
Systemize Your Business
Shatter Your Revenue Goals

After working with six-figure and seven-figure clients, I know the difference between how they function.

Let me help you start scaling successfully.

Get My FREE Blueprint!

Cheers to future success!