How Alex Goldberg Used Paid Media to Grow a Seven-Figure Website Portfolio

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The importance of traffic diversification has never been more obvious than it is today. The volatility of Googe search results shows that any site relying exclusively on SEO could be one algorithm update away from catastrophe.

Alex Goldberg, like many content website owners, focused exclusively on SEO for a few years and experienced a lot of success. But the more his traffic and income grew, the more he realized just how dependent he was on SEO.

To diversify and reduce risk, Alex branched out and experimented with ads and paid traffic. His site was monetized with affiliate programs, so Alex sent traffic to his top-performing pages, and it worked!

Alex continued to drive traffic to his site through organic SEO, but paid media allowed him to scale and grow while reducing dependency on organic search traffic.

Earlier in 2024, Alex sold his portfolio of content sites for a seven-figure sum. As he shares in this interview, traffic and revenue from paid media was crucial to his successful exit, as his site had taken a hit from Google’s infamous Helpful Content Update in September of 2023.

Alex has a wealth of knowledge on growing affiliate revenue and using paid traffic. Read on to learn more about his approach and how it allowed him to grow a million-dollar business. There’s a lot to like about this strategy, as you’ll see from the details Alex covers. And if you’re interested in learning more about how to use paid traffic to generate affiliate commissions, check out Alex’s new course, Paid Media Affiliates.

Please tell us about your background and how you got started with online marketing.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to run my own business. Marketing seemed like an essential skill, so in college I joined a competitive advertising club and interned at several fast-growing tech startups. One even generously offered me a full-time role upon graduation.

That first job turned out to be a springboard. My boss gave me outsized responsibility and a long leash to run growth experiments. Online and offline. Paid and organic. Domestic and international. I got to try it all.

In a few short years, the company scaled from a handful of employees to hundreds. I got bored and left for another early-stage tech company, spending two more years in startup land before feeling an itch to experience marketing at scale. That led me to a more mature tech firm, Houzz, where I managed 8-figures in annual ad spend globally.

It was there that I realized: as fun as it was to grow someone else’s company, it was time to build my own. So I began tinkering on nights and weekends with the goal of replacing my income. Amazingly, one side project called Fin vs Fin ended up doing just that and more!

Why did you build a portfolio of sites rather than focusing only on your primary site?

For context: the first affiliate site I created that gained any meaningful traction whatsoever helped shoppers compare health and wellness products. It was focused on SEO (launched in 2018) and the initial trickle of organic traffic swelled into a steady stream. Growing revenue made it impossible to pay attention at my day job, so I quit and dove into running Fin vs Fin full-time in 2021.

Expanding beyond one site was a strategy to diversify earnings. The looming threat of organic algorithm updates kept me up at night, and one potential solution kept resurfacing: why not rank more than one site in the top 5 organic listings? With multiple, we could double dip on keywords we already knew were lucrative, and potentially even crowd out competitors. If the algorithm shuffled rankings overnight, it seemed more stable to have multiple horses in the race, rather than a single stallion.

And as an added bonus, a portfolio enabled us to:

• run more SEO experiments without risking performance on our primary site
• offer brand partners more value with more placement opportunities
• double down on the most lucrative niches discovered via Fin vs Fin

The challenge was managing multiple sites with limited resources. We found that content publishers don’t benefit from economies of scale – mostly because articles need to be updated often to win traffic. We bought two existing sites with existing domain authority, but ultimately we never could prioritize them enough internally to get them to grow meaningfully.

Ultimately the solution to sustainable portfolio expansion was to partner 50-50 on joint ventures. I reached out to talented friends / former colleagues with a proposition. If they could commit to managing the content strategy, I’d give them access to my stable of writers, editors, and designers, as well as lucrative affiliate partnerships. This worked three times, and when I sold the portfolio in 2024, my remaining partners cashed out too.

When and why did you transition to focus on paid traffic instead of organic SEO, and what impact did that have on your business?

Roughly a year after taking my side hustle full-time, revenue was still growing but I was eager to de-risk. Upon discovering that many larger publishers profited more from arbitraging ads on Google and Meta than from SEO, I realized that paid media could help us grow and diversify earnings too. We already knew which keywords were lucrative organically – why not pay for that traffic, too?

I started cautiously at first, only increasing ad spend upon finding profitable [exact match] keywords. The strategy paid off, doubling our profit in a year. It also added a ton of value to our partners, many of whom noticed conversion volume scaling rapidly and reached out to increase our commission rate.

And in September 2023 when organic traffic suddenly dropped due to the Helpful Content Update (HCU), profit from Google and Facebook ads held steady, just as hoped. Acquirers require predictable, diversified income, and having a profitable paid media motion (in addition to lucrative SEO traffic) made my business attractive.

Please give us a high-level overview of your approach to paid media. 

I generally recommend starting with search over paid social. Bidding on high-intent queries and directing traffic to a comparison page featuring a few high-quality offers is the general formula. I’ve also had success driving traffic to individual reviews and advertorial articles, but a simple top 5 landing page is generally what helps shoppers most.

Social whitelisting on Instagram and Facebook is another lucrative strategy for publishers to leverage paid media profitably. It works by granting advertisers access to run ads with your social handles, and essentially they drive paid traffic to your content. It’s less risky than fronting ad spend on Google, but it also offers less control.

As someone with experience in SEO and paid media, what are some pros and cons of paid media arbitrage?

SEO traffic is cheaper (read: not exactly free), but updates can be devastating, and recoveries painfully slow. These days, publishers need to do more than ever to win organic traffic, including: creating a social following, engaging subscribers via email, and/or producing a podcast or YouTube video series. All require creators to update (and re-update) content across all channels to stay fresh.

Contrast that with paid media. Launching a campaign only requires a landing page and ad copy. You don’t need to generate new viral ideas every week to keep revenue flowing. In this sense, ads are far easier to manage than SEO because it’s inherently more stable and “set and forget.”

With paid media, you’re far more in control than SEO, too. It’s less of a black box. You can turn traffic on and off, target geographically, and a/b test new messaging very nimbly – all of which aren’t possible with SEO.

Lastly, ads fully align affiliates’ incentives with the platforms’. Google and Meta are profit-hungry corporations, after all, not charities. They are in the business of serving advertisers, not publishers. Thus paying for traffic is a much more stable position long-term.

That said, running ads poses a downside risk that organic traffic doesn’t. Given that you have to wager hard-earned dollars that you hope to recoup later via affiliate commissions, it’s not hard to lose money running ads. With SEO, on the other hand, you often only forfeit your time. A failed SEO experiment means lost time, while a failed PPC experiment typically means lost time and money.

When and why did you decide to sell the portfolio of sites? 

After 4 years of running my sites, I felt the itch to try something new. Earnings began to stagnate just north of $1m, and the work needed to grow it to $10m felt daunting. Although I had dreamed of selling to a strategic buyer who valued my business for more than just cash flow, I knew that finding them would have an ambiguous timeline. With high interest rates and a softening economy, I engaged Quiet Light, an online business broker trusted by others in my network, to push my business quickly and gauge the markets’ response. 

Tell us about your experience selling the business at the same time as the HCU. How did your shift to paid media impact your ability to close the deal?

I had three years of tax returns, and my business was eligible for SBA financing. That unlocked a larger pool of potential buyers, as did packaging my sites together – rather than selling each one individually.

Despite high interest rates, stagnate revenue, and a recent 50% decline in organic traffic thanks to the HCU, I received about 10 LOIs [Letters of Intent]. I chose the second-highest bidder, and worked closely with them on due diligence for 5 months (Note: do your best not to list at the end of the year because banks basically shut down for an entire month for the holidays.)

My buyers had concerns about declining revenue from SEO, but ultimately steady earnings from paid media bolstered the bottom line enough. And in March 2024, the transaction finally closed for about 3x annual earnings.

Without the profitable paid media motion, I don’t think any buyers would have found my portfolio attractive given the precipitous fallout of the HCU.

Tell us about your course, Paid Media Affiliates.

After arbitraging ads profitably for the last 5+ years, I recently launched an in-depth Google affiliate marketing course to help publishers de-risk and future-proof their business.

No, SEO isn’t dead. But as an affiliate, you should internalize the inherent volatility and strategize accordingly. In addition to an in-depth review of what’s worked well for me (and most other large publishers, too), my course covers how to:

• Persuade partners to let you run paid traffic to their offers
• Forecast profitability before spending your first dollar
• Identify lucrative keywords in your niche
• Build high-converting landing pages + ad creatives
• Implement offline conversion tracking to enable advanced bidding 
• Scale budget methodically to maximize profit

Ultimately it was challenging to structure lessons that appeal to both expert media buyers and novices alike, but so far feedback from students with all levels of experience has been overwhelmingly positive.

What types of niches work best for this approach?

Arbitraging ads can work in most niches, but generally the most profitable exhibit certain characteristics:

1. A considered purchase (i.e. shoppers need to do research before buying)
2. With high margin or LTV (i.e. high customer lifetime value)
3. Where there are only a handful of competitors to choose from

It’s also important to remember that Google makes it more difficult to arbitrage in categories like prescription meds, CBD, crypto, etc. where they put specific policies in place to restrict keywords you can bid on, words you can include in your ads, and content you can include on your landing page. Usually, you can iterate around these restrictions, but they do limit the opportunity size in certain niches.

What are some of the key skills that must be developed to succeed with paid media arbitrage?

The two biggest skills required to pull off paid media arbitrage are:

1. Partnership development
2. Funnel Optimization

Note that these are both critical to success with monetizing SEO as well! 

By partnership development, I simply mean persuading brands to let you run ads. There are a few common objections you need to know how to overcome.

Funnel optimization is just a fancy way of saying matching user intent with high-converting ad and landing page copy. You can hire someone on Upwork to create a landing page and outsource your ad copy to ChatGPT, but knowing what to iterate on next to remove friction and lower CPA is both an art and science.

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