From Pandemic Side Project to $20k/Month

The site is ZenmasterWellness.com and it was actually earning $40k/month at one point, but is now at around $15-20k 🤑

That’s according to a recent interview with founder Matt Oney.

His site reviews health and wellness products, and earns money through affiliate partnerships.

Matt registered his domain in February of 2020 and built up the site during the pandemic. He was into health and wellness himself and it seems his main “hack” was to focus on reviewing newer brands…

Matt didn’t do a deep dive into how competitive the telemedicine niche was.

But after publishing reviews of some relatively new brands, he ranked number one for his focus keywords — a rare feat for brand-new domains.

[…] One of the first articles Matt put out compared three at-home smart gyms. He was one of the first to that piece of territory, and it led to a spike in traffic.

He eventually got into affiliate partnerships with all three companies, and three months after he published that article, he saw his first dollar of affiliate income.

Some of the brands Matt reviewed didn’t even have affiliate programs, so he would help them set one up. Smart way to build relationships and limit competition 😎

Matt focuses on quality over quantity, and still only has about 50 articles published on his site. Search engine optimization is crucial, with most traffic coming via Google. 

One of the big factors for improving SEO is building quality links to your site, and Zenmaster Wellness has racked up 1900 backlinks from 800 domains in only 3 years, including a bunch from DR80+ sites (source: Ahrefs) 🔗

Sounds like Matt’s most reliable source of backlinks has been HARO (Help A Reporter Out), “an online service for journalists to gather feedback from the public.”

Matt apparently pays health and wellness experts to answer journalists’ queries there. Then, if a journalist quotes one of Matt’s experts in an article posted online, it will often include a link back to Zenmaster Wellness 👍

Lastly…

The biggest thing that surprised Matt was the fact that all he had to do to start and grow his side hustle was put the time in.

“Nothing that I do is rocket science,” Matt said. “As long as you’re going about things the right way, good things will surely follow at some point in time.”