Google Crushed Affiliate Websites. His Grew Anyway.

[00:01] getting pummeled. Traffic gone. Affiliate revenue gone. Whole businesses shut down. This guy didn't get the memo. His organic traffic is up 249%.

[00:13] This is Brian Powell, and he founded iRunFar, an affiliate site focused on trail running. He has 20 years in the game, survived every Google update you've heard of. And right now, while everyone is sinking, he's growing. So, I

[00:25] flew out, met him on the trail to find out how he's thrived through the most volatile times in the history of the internet. And in this video, you'll learn the things that led to continued growth and the levers he hasn't pulled

[00:37] >> Ready to have your mind blown? >> I'm going to blow your mind. >> But first, how does a one-man trail running blog become this? >> Uh I was a a big city attorney. I worked two blocks from the White House in

[00:49] Washington, D.C. >> Brian wasn't an SEO expert. He wasn't a marketer. He was a lawyer with a passion for running. In 2006, somebody asked him to be interviewed for a Runner's World article. He took the notes he'd written,

[01:02] posted them on his blog, and watched people actually show up to read them. That was the spark that got him and his wife turning the blog into a resource. They covered races, wrote reviews, and gave training advice. Slowly, iRunFar

[01:16] became the place trail runners went to figure out what to buy and where to run. Then in 2021, someone came knocking. >> We got approached by what was then Lola Digital Media and is now AllGear Digital. It worked out in January 2021,

[01:31] >> They acquired iRunFar and did what every content company was doing. They scaled. They created more guides, more categories, more content. Every affiliate site was running the same playbook. But this playbook is what

[01:45] Brian says almost killed iRunFar. And that's because of one simple concept. >> The attention dividend is simple. The pages you pay attention to are the ones pages you pay attention to are the ones that pay you back. The rest, they decay.

[02:00] affiliate world who's trying to manage 75 buyers guides. You're You're a >> So, Brian stepped back into the site he'd sold and was asked to do the thing >> I actually came in with a mandate to cut almost down to 20. And I was like, "Yes,

[02:16] but um it was ahead of the holiday buyers season. We're going to take care going to focus our attention on exactly updated 10 in the first month, another like 10 in December, and another 10 in

[02:30] January. And also at the end of January, cut about 25 guides. So, we updated at that point we'd updated 30 of the 50 that are in the portfolio. >> The results were shocking. >> Organic traffic is up 249%.

[02:44] >> Up 249%. Revenue per buyers guide up 140% through the worst content downturn in a decade, while the rest of the industry was getting cut in half. Brian explained that by having less inventory, it

[02:58] revenue. But cutting content was only half the equation. Knowing what to update, when to update it, and how to update it is where the magic happens. Brian doesn't just publish and walk away. He manages every page like a

[03:12] position in a portfolio. >> How do you decide if a page needs to be >> We have still 50 live, and maybe 25 or 30 key ones. In my mind, there's 10 or 15 that I'm looking at the traffic, if not daily, definitely weekly, and I can

[03:25] tell when there's been a drop-off in ranking. It's also having a schedule built out for how competitive is this category. Trail shoes I might update six times a year. And it's looking at Ahrefs historic traffic. You can look through

[03:37] schedule. >> So, it sounds like you have your own schedule based on the level of competition, and then you also pay you're like, "Oh, why is the traffic dipping so much?" then you're like,

[03:51] "Maybe it needs an update. >> Watching 50 pages a week manually is a lot of work. Later, I'll show him how to automate the whole thing, which he has no idea is coming. But even when automated, monitoring is

[04:04] just maintenance. Anyone can do it. What's actually moving the needle is something no competitor is willing to do. His moat >> Say a running shoe is going to be included in one of our guides, it

[04:17] absolutely has to have been tested 100 miles in lots of cases. Well, more than >> Every shoe in iRunFar's buyer's guide is run for at least 100 miles by an actual ultra runner in real conditions. Most are tested way more than that.

[04:31] >> We would build a spreadsheet and look at the entire category, like listing out about them. You bring them in the field and you test them well, you get feedback data holistically, and figure out putting together a mix of products that

[04:46] really fit the different need. >> His process is simple but brilliant. The people who test the shoes aren't the people who write about them. Real ultra runners wear them for days, months, sometimes years. Then they hand the data

[05:00] to writers who turn it into guides built to rank and built to convert. Everyone's working to their strengths. I thought he had it all figured out until I asked him the one question every content site is trying to figure out.

[05:14] How are you using AI? >> I use AI as an SEO consultant. I can go this buyer's guide. What are some areas I can improve it in?" And like I can ask stronger? I don't use it as the only authoritative source, but it's a way for

[05:29] me to investigate an area. >> He uses AI the way most people do, as a consultant. He asks, it answers, he decides. What I brought him was >> You told me that you use Gemini as an SEO consultant.

[05:43] >> Just now. >> Not a consultant, an operator. Agent A is an AI agent with full unrestricted access to Ahrefs data. So, it doesn't just give advice, it can actually build tools and make strategic decisions for

[05:58] you. The kind of work Brian needs a team for, he can now do by himself without the overhead. And I was about to show him exactly what Agent A had already discovered about his site. Plus the automation he had no idea was coming.

[06:11] The first discovery was shocking. I looked through your actual content and >> For sure. >> And so, I thought that Agent A was hallucinating. So, I went here and I was just like, okay, they must have like

[06:24] comparison content. So, let's see. And when I saw that you had zero, I was in shock. I Run Far has reviewed every major running shoe individually. Hokas, Salomons, Brooks, On, every model. But, he didn't really have any comparison

[06:38] posts. Not one Hoka versus Speedgoat, not one Salomon versus Brooks. Agent A, it's saying you should create a Hoka Challenger versus Speedgoat post. It has queries that it covers are like the Challenger versus Speedgoat comparison.

[06:53] But, you know, there's so many different permutations of like how, like, which >> There's purchase intent right there. And it doesn't cannibalize at all because >> Exactly. >> Whether they're looking at the buyer's

[07:06] >> The next thing Agent A found was even bigger. Not a missing post, a missing of >> trail running, state of ultra marathons. that because naturally people want to reference and cite that.

[07:21] >> I Run Far publishes tons of articles a year. Almost none were designed to attract backlinks. They're built to convert. That's a different game. >> Yeah. >> So, state of running, 373 referring

[07:33] domains. State of ultra running, which is like totally down your alley here. So, 229. They have statistics here. >> Yeah. And they just they didn't collect >> Right. >> Yeah. Like this looks cool. And you know

[07:45] what? They're becoming the authority in this. Imagine if I run far, the 20-year authority on trail running, published the definitive state of the sport report they compound. >> It's the long play, and that's part of

[07:58] iRunFar's moat is that we've been doing this for 20 years, and it's having all way to to build it even further. And this is a very targeted way to do that year. >> Agent A had already given Brian two

[08:12] ideas worth thousands, but I wanted to show him what AI can actually do for his business on a day-to-day basis. And it had everything to do with the one thing he still does by hand every day, monitor decaying pages.

[08:26] spend to do that? >> Oh, I mean, I'm doing it on an ongoing day, 15 minutes every day. >> Okay. That's over 60 hours of manual >> I'm going to I'm going to get on the edge of my seat right here.

[08:40] >> Brian spends 10 minutes every single day checking which of his pages are slipping in the rankings. I asked Agent A to do it for him, and it did. What I was about to show him could change the way he runs iRunFar forever.

[08:53] >> What it does is anytime you hit run new scan, then it'll scan your your top scan, then it'll scan your your top 1,000 pages, and then it'll detect right Within the past month, this is how much traffic you've lost. In the past 3

[09:06] months, you lost this much. Year over year, this much. So, it kind click it, it actually charts it out for you, and it shows you exactly which keywords you lost. And so, now you can see here in

[09:19] 2024, you were like best cushioned running shoes, you were on top of the world, and then it just died. And so, I don't know if that's just a matter of an manually you would need to go in and assess everything that happened. But you

[09:32] can see the top lost keywords that you lost. You can see what happened in the SERP. Who's your top competitor now? You can see that it's this one by Runner's can be like, "Okay, well, what are they doing that, you know, is is better than

[09:46] we can learn from them?" Anytime, you can set this up on a schedule if you wanted to. So, it could just run every week, every month, every day if you wanted to. Have it email you a report. If you have Slack, it can send a message

[10:00] connect whichever applications you want. And then, >> you're able to do that here. So, this is basically it. These were 1 2 3 top 10 >> You wouldn't just say, "Show me decaying pages."

[10:13] >> Believe it or not, it is that easy. >> It cost $3.52 I didn't expect. >> Yeah, I can make a decaying pages month, which is great. Like, this is not a this is not the world's on fire, but I

[10:29] demoted. >> Or you know, like we like search serp >> I expected Brian to be impressed. I didn't expect him to start building. He was already thinking about I run far specific edge cases, the daily

[10:43] demotions, the serp shifts, the things only a 20-year operator would notice. I came to find out how he survived and thrived. And Brian, he left with a list of ways to grow and to start automating his marketing.