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Living Cozy: Ash Read on content businesses and niche media sites · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [gentle music] This episode of Content Briefly is brought to you by our friends at Editor Ninja.
• 0:06
  Editor Ninja is the Internet's favorite copyediting and proofreading service, focused on marketing content and especially blog posts and AI-generated content.
• 0:14
  Their editors will spruce up your team's writing and make sure to adhere to your style guide.
• 0:18
  We use Editor Ninja for Superpath Marketplace content, and I've been really pleased with the quality of the work and the quick turnaround time.
• 0:24
  With over four and a half million words edited by real professional human editors in just 18 months, Editor Ninja has what it takes to edit your content correctly. You can go to editorninja.com to learn more.
• 0:39
  [gentle music] A really important moment about six to eight weeks after it launched, I made my first affiliate sale.
• 0:45
  I made nine pound thirty-seven because someone bought some bedding off the site through one of our affiliate links, and that moment it really hit home. I was like, "Well, it's made some money." Like I've...
• 0:56
  Outside of my day job, outside of freelance work, I've not really made nine pound thirty-seven before. So that kind of really made me realize I could probably turn this into a business.
• 1:05
  [gentle music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, I'm talking with Ash Read.
• 1:14
  You may know him from his work at companies like Buffer or Wayflyer, but he's also a niche media site entrepreneur.
• 1:22
  A few years ago, he created a site called Living Cozy, which curated direct-to-consumer household brands that sold things like furniture and kitchen stuff, things like that.
• 1:32
  He eventually turned that side project into a full-time gig and actually recently sold the site and is actually now launching more niche media sites. This podcast checks two very important boxes for me.
• 1:42
  One is that we talk about content marketing from a totally different perspective, and there's a lot to learn there that could be applied to your current day-to-day work. The other is learning about Ash's career.
• 1:52
  I'm always curious what content marketers do with their writing skills once they're ready for a new challenge, and Ash has a really, really cool story in that regard.
• 1:59
  So if you're the type of person like me who always has a side project going, or maybe you aspire to have a side project or even turn that side project into a full-time gig, you're gonna love this one.
• 2:09
  Ash is really smart. He has a great story, and I think you'll get a lot out of this one. Hope you dig it. Take care. Also, just a quick reminder to check out the new and improved Superpath Slack group.
• 2:21
  It's now 20 bucks a month. You can also get an annual discount. Your employer should probably cover it for you since it definitely counts as professional development.
• 2:28
  And I think what you'll find there is gonna be really exciting. There's some really interesting high-level strategy discussions, in-depth conversations on things like people management and career development.
• 2:38
  Honestly, it's awesome. I'm enjoying being in there more than ever. I think you will too. If you wanna check it out, just go to superpath.co/community and sign up there. [gentle music] Hey, everybody.
• 2:50
  Jimmy from Superpath here today. Very excited to be talking with Ash Read, formerly the editorial director at Buffer. That's how I know you best.
• 2:59
  I mean, that-that's kinda the first thing that comes to mind when I think of you and your work. But you had a job between Buffer and your most recent project, which is called Living Cozy.
• 3:08
  We have lots of questions about that. But maybe, Ash, could you, for the benefit of listeners, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your career in content marketing and how you got to where you are now?
• 3:17
  Yeah. So probably over, like, 10 years ago, managed to get, like, my first freelance writing gig, which was actually for Crew's blog, which has now transitioned into Unsplash.
• 3:27
  But yeah, got my first post that I ever got paid for on that blog. That's a pretty good start. Yeah.
• 3:32
  I'd kind of blogged a bit, like, on my personal site and had been writing online since I was, like, 18, really, like, trying to kind of figure it out. It was something I always enjoyed.
• 3:42
  And I think before that Crew post, I was just like, I didn't know if that was something that could be a career.
• 3:48
  And yeah, I think that helped me kind of realize, yeah, it definitely can be something that I could get paid to do. So yeah, it was, like, a really, really great place to start.
• 3:57
  Jory, the editor there at the time, I still speak to him every now and then, and he was great.
• 4:01
  Kind of transitioned my first post from something that probably wasn't publishable to something that I was really, really proud of. So, um, yeah, working with an editor for the first time as well was really eye-opening.
• 4:11
  And then, yeah, from those initial blog posts, I freelanced with a few different startups around Europe, some based in England.
• 4:18
  Done a bit of content marketing, a bit of growth marketing, a bit of product management or account management style stuff.
• 4:25
  And then, yeah, actually applied to Buffer two or three times before I landed the job there, which is, I think, a fairly common thing for people that- Yeah, yeah... do end up at Buffer.
• 4:34
  Like, it's not always first time lucky, so. Totally. I applied there twice also. [laughs] I didn't get a job either time. Yeah, tough place to get into. And to be honest, I couldn't really believe it when I did.
• 4:45
  It kind of felt like a bit of a dream come true, really.
• 4:47
  Like, I'd followed Buffer really closely because I realized Joel was from the UK, and there wasn't many people from the UK, like, in startups and tech at that time, or certainly not people that I'd, like, followed closely or people that built products that I used.
• 5:00
  So that kind of really stood out. And then the more I learned about Buffer, like, it, it seemed like a cool company. And spent six years there, done some of the, like, best work of my career there, I think.
• 5:11
  We scaled the blog to over a million sessions a month.
• 5:14
  You know, I'd done a bit of work on the podcast, like Hayley and Brian kind of led most of our first podcast, The Science of Social Media, but then I launched our second and third podcast series, which were more kind of like documentary style shows, which were really, really fun.
• 5:27
  And then I actually started Living Cozy in 2020 while I was still at Buffer, and then between Buffer and going full-time on Living Cozy, I spent 12 months at Wayflyer, which is an e-commerce funding company.
• 5:41
  So they provide finance to e-commerce brands looking to kind of scale quickly and buy inventory or fund marketing. And that really was kind of...
• 5:50
  I could have gone full-time on Living Cozy at that point, and I debated it.
• 5:53
  But after six years at Buffer, I kind of felt like I needed a new challenge, and not that building my own thing wouldn't have been a challenge, but I think the fast-paced environment of Wayflyer, like, it had just become a unicorn when I joined.
• 6:05
  There was only, like, two people on the marketing team when I joined. Oh, wow. It was kind of like a wider marketing and sales enablement team, but, like- Mm-hmm... pure marketing, there was only a couple of people.
• 6:15
  And in my time there, the team scaled from, like, 250 to, like, 500, 600 people. Oh, wow. So it was, like, really rapid growth, and that's kind of exactly why I joined.
• 6:25
  It was more so to, like, prove to myself that I could operate a unicorn company that was growing really, really fast compared to Buffer's more laid-back approach to growth. Buffer certainly has goals.
• 6:34
  You know, we chase our targets at Buffer, but it was kinda like a more slower, purposeful growth, whereas at Wayflyer it was kind of almost growth at all costs.
• 6:43
  And yeah, it was really nice to get exposure to kind of both worlds before IStepped out on my own finally. That's really cool. You know, Buffer hired a content crafter earlier this year.
• 6:53
  We're recording this in fall twenty twenty-three, and I heard that over fifteen hundred people applied, and I bet that five years ago or eight years ago or so, as Buffer was hiring content crafters, that there were probably even more people applying.
• 7:07
  So you must be pretty darn good, and I mean, I seriously, I mean that as a compliment. Like, congratulations.
• 7:11
  Buffer's sort of a legendary B2B content marketing story, and we could probably go really deep on all of that, but I do wanna talk more about Living Cozy, which is a niche site that you built from nothing and recently sold.
• 7:23
  Could you tell us the story of Living Cozy? Like, why did you start it? How did you start it? And then tell us a little bit about, like, what is the site? Like, who's it for, and what is it for? Yeah.
• 7:30
  So the site kinda started as, like, a bit of a weekend project. I'd been...
• 7:35
  So at Buffer, we've always built for small businesses, but we kind of spent about six months, like, really focused on e-commerce and direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands.
• 7:47
  And through that focus, I discovered, yeah, like, this whole world of B2C, which, to be honest, like, I'd heard of Casper and some of the other big B2C brands of, like, the kinda twenty tens, but I didn't really know much about the industry.
• 8:00
  And through that work, I just discovered, yeah, like, there was thousands of these brands that people were building, and it just so happened, like, around the same time I moved home.
• 8:11
  And as I was kinda looking to furnish the house, like, I started paying attention to these brands a bit more, especially in the home space.
• 8:17
  And I kinda realized the way they all grow was through Facebook and Instagram ads. They were actually really hard to discover organically.
• 8:23
  Like, I was just refreshing my Instagram feed, almost, like, hoping that they would advertise to me. And I mean, it sounds really kinda sad, [chuckles]
• 8:31
  thinking back, but I had a little spreadsheet where I would save them all. And one day, I just decided, you know, I'd wanted to learn Webflow, which is, like, a no-code builder.
• 8:39
  I'd tried a few times, but, like, it was just incredibly confusing. Like, there seemed like a steep learning curve to actually get started with it. So I needed a project to test it out.
• 8:48
  Another helpful coincidence, like, it was in the middle of the COVID lockdown, like, there was not a lot else to do.
• 8:54
  So over a weekend, I just, like, hacked together this directory of direct-to-consumer furniture and home brands on Webflow, published it, and it got a good reaction.
• 9:04
  Like, I mean, it didn't go viral, but ten, 15 people replied to my tweet, said it looked kinda cool. Good feedback, encouraging stuff to kinda help me keep going.
• 9:12
  And then from there, I knew I wanted to focus on it more, but I felt a little bit stuck. I was like, "Well, it's a directory. How do I get traffic to it?" And then I was like, "Well, just lean on your experience." Right?
• 9:22
  Like, I've, I've worked in content marketing. I know SEO. So I just started writing blog posts.
• 9:27
  There was a lot of weekends where I was questioning myself, like, you know, "Why am I spending Saturday afternoon writing about bar stools?"
• 9:33
  But eventually, it kinda started to work, and there was a really important moment about probably six to eight weeks after it launched, I made my first affiliate sale.
• 9:43
  I made nine pound thirty-seven because someone bought some bedding off the site through one of our affiliate links. And I think that moment, it really hit home where I was like, "Well, it's made some money."
• 9:54
  Like, I've, outside of my day job, outside of freelance work, I've not really made nine pound thirty-seven before.
• 10:01
  So that kind of really made me realize I could probably turn this into a business, or if not a business, at least something that will make a little bit of money on the side. That's really cool.
• 10:09
  You know, I wonder, on a recent episode, we were talking with Aaron Orendorf, who was talking about some of the challenges that his customers, which are e-commerce brands, face, and one of the key challenges for them is that the cost of customer acquisition is very high, which I think makes it difficult, or at least a little tricky, for individual D2C brands to do content marketing really well, which I actually think opens the door to a site like Living Cozy, where you can sort of spread the monetization out across a number of brands, create stuff that's genuinely useful, and then the affiliate strategy means that you can monetize.
• 10:43
  I'm wondering... Well, I guess one of the things I'm thinking, is there, is there a B2B version of that?
• 10:47
  I mean, I guess, like, G2 and Capterra kind of do that, but I do wonder, like, as content marketing changes, which it does seem to be changing fairly rapidly right now, whether there could be or should be a Living Cozy style site meant for people who are looking to adopt new SaaS products.
• 11:02
  Yeah. I definitely think there would be space for it.
• 11:04
  One of the things I think about content marketing, you know, reflecting on the last decade, I feel like it was very SEO-driven, like the whole HubSpot playbook, kind of what Buffer done, like the Buffer playbook.
• 11:15
  I don't know that it necessarily works as well now, and I think the personal trusted recommendations worked well for home products or gift guides around holidays the, the big publishers like GQ or whatever will put out.
• 11:28
  I definitely think there's space for a B2B version of that because people trust people, and if I know a CMO I look up to or a content marketer I look up to is recommending certain products, then yeah, like, that's kind of all the cosign I need to give them a try.
• 11:43
  So yeah, I think there's space for this in all types of industries. One of the other good things in B2B is the LTVs are quite high.
• 11:49
  So if someone's actually buying into, you know, a software product and the LTV is maybe a couple of thousand dollars, the cost per acquisition from the brand side is normally higher, so there's probably good revenue splits to be had on the brand side as well.
• 12:02
  So I think it could work for both parties. Yeah. That's a free business idea for somebody listening. Um, so you've now sold Living Cozy.
• 12:09
  I have a ton of questions about that, but I won't press you 'cause I'm assuming most of that stuff, you know, you signed an NDA on.
• 12:14
  But you have, in the meantime, also created at least two other similar niche sites, right? Yeah.
• 12:19
  So to be completely transparent, like, the other two sites haven't really got too far off the ground yet, but they were projects that I started probably, like, six months ago because, for me, like, one of the key things about the industry was diversification.
• 12:33
  I think there's a lot of risk if you have one asset and 18, 19% of your traffic comes from Google.
• 12:39
  You know, you can do everything right, everything by the book, and you can still get caught up in an algorithm update that maybe shouldn't have impacted your site as it did, or Google can change things like the helpful content update a couple of weeks ago.
• 12:52
  So like, yeah, we're speaking in late September 2023. There was a helpful content update, and, like, that hit a lot of small niche publishers really hard. It promoted, like, Quora and Reddit above a lot of publishers.
• 13:04
  I feel like they might reverse some of that in future updates, but, like, yeah, you can get caught at any moment, even if you do everything perfectly.
• 13:11
  So yeah, the plan was to basically, like, build out a small portfolio of niche sites, all vaguely around the home, because that was where Living Cozy was focused, and that kinda meant we can take advantage of, like, interlinking a little bit between sites, not too much to make it spammy, but also all the contacts that I'd built up over the years of Living Cozy, like, would be helpful for the future sites.
• 13:32
  So yeah, for me, it was just like a kind of spreading of risk out across multiple properties rather than being, like, all in one.
• 13:37
  ButNot long after I launched those two, I started the process of trying to sell Living Cozy, and that honestly just, like, took up all the bandwidth that I would've invested in getting those two off the ground. Sure.
• 13:49
  And so now those two sites, is that your primary focus? I'm kind of deciding if I'm gonna go all in on those sites or maybe a different niche.
• 13:57
  I've been looking at potentially launching a media brand in, like, health and fitness 'cause that really interests me.
• 14:03
  You know, I think I learned to love and enjoy home and interior design and that side of it, but, like, I'd like to build something that is in a space that I'm, like, more passionate about.
• 14:11
  Like, when I'm not stuck behind my desk typing, I'm normally out for a run or trying to do something healthy and fun. So yeah, I'd like to build in a niche that I'm more interested in.
• 14:22
  But I definitely want to do something with those two sites. Like, I'm thinking about, like, maybe using them as a sandbox for just testing things out.
• 14:28
  You know, there's gonna be a lot of changes coming with Google's search generative experience and probably a million other AI things coming out, stuff that we probably haven't even thought of yet.
• 14:37
  So I think it's quite nice to have potentially those sites as just, like, experimentation grounds and places to play around with techniques and strategies and see what works and, and what doesn't. Yeah, yeah.
• 14:48
  I would imagine, and maybe I'm assuming too much, but I would imagine that a q- for any niche media site, you can probably identify a ton of stuff to write about very quickly.
• 14:56
  Like, I'm guessing you don't ever sit down and say like, "Gosh, we don't have a topic to write about this week."
• 15:01
  But since that list is probably quite long, you have to think about, well, how quickly can we produce content? How much is this gonna cost? Is there room for AI to do some of this work for us to speed things up?
• 15:12
  I'm just sort of curious, how do you think about the content production workflow, and then kind of balancing the investment needed to produce that content with, you know, I would imagine the lag that happens once it's up there.
• 15:23
  You gotta get it ranking. It might take a while to get the affiliate rolling, et cetera. Yeah. To be honest, it was a very different experience to, like, working for B2B software.
• 15:32
  I think with most B2B companies, there's probably really only, like, 100, maybe 200 pieces of content you actually need on a blog if you're servicing your niche. Oh, interesting. I like that take.
• 15:43
  You know, you can very easily start just going too far one direction that doesn't really relate to your product and, like, writing just for page views rather than what's actually gonna convert for your product.
• 15:52
  But in a niche media brand, if I wanted to cover every topic about the home, like, I could be going for another decade trying to get all of that content done. Right.
• 16:00
  So I think for me, the prioritization was just kinda niching down. So I started out just broadly writing about home and furniture.
• 16:08
  Then I would love to kinda sit here and tell you I'd planned everything out and there was a strategy from day one, but, like, it really was kind of build it as you go.
• 16:16
  And one day, I sold a sofa from the website, and I saw the affiliate commission and realized, okay, that's where I need to focus.
• 16:24
  You know, if you're getting between 2 to 12% commission on a sofa, you don't need to sell that many for it to start adding up. So yeah, then it was just kinda like, okay, what keywords are there about sofas?
• 16:36
  Which ones are gonna make money?
• 16:38
  So there's the roundup pieces, like best sectional sofas, and I wrote all of those first because they were kinda like the money keywords, and I could then add more internal backlinks to them, build external backlinks to them if I needed to.
• 16:50
  And then there was, like, the supporting content, so, like, the topical authority pieces, like where to place a sofa, how to choose a sofa color, all of those things.
• 16:58
  So yeah, eventually it was kinda like going, like, room by room, piece by piece around the house to figure out, like, what I needed to cover, starting at, like, highest average order value and working my way down.
• 17:09
  But that strategy kinda came into place once I'd kind of figured stuff out a little bit more, to be honest. It wasn't from day one.
• 17:16
  A lot of the strategy from day one was kinda scouting what I started calling, like, throwaway content, and that was content that was published on, like, a high-authority domain.
• 17:26
  So for me, it was, like, Apartment Therapy, The Spruce, Architectural Digest. Because, like, all of the SERPs in the home space, they are dominated by those big brands.
• 17:34
  But quite often, or certainly the case in 2020 when I started, there was a lot of content that was ranking because it was on those domains, not necessarily because it was good content.
• 17:44
  It was something that was probably thrown up by an editor over, like, an hour or two. It was under 500 words, hadn't been updated for a couple of years. These were, like, the criteria I looked at.
• 17:54
  No expert quotes, no original photography.
• 17:58
  And I would scout the SERPs for those, and those were the low-hanging fruit pieces that I felt I could go after even as a small startup media brand without domain authority that isn't able to publish five pieces of content a day.
• 18:10
  So yeah, that was the initial strategy. From there, I kind of built this layering up strategy on top of it. My idea there was just publish something as soon as it's ready. For example, best sectional sofas.
• 18:21
  That was one of the top pieces of content on the site. You know, some months, that one page could get, like, 30,000, 40,000 page views on its own. Oh, wow.
• 18:29
  But it started out as a list of companies that sold sectional sofas, and I hadn't tested any of them or Living Cozy hadn't tested any of them. I didn't have any expert input from the brand.
• 18:40
  So, like, I published it, and then the next layer on top of that was can I go out and speak to interior designers and get their advice on how to buy a sectional, what to look for, what makes a good one, any recommendations of brands they've worked with, add that in.
• 18:53
  Then the next layer is, like, can I go to any of the brands that I've mentioned and get quotes from them about their sectionals, about their specific pieces, like what's good about them, what makes them different?
• 19:02
  And then the final layer, which was the hardest, most time-consuming, was actually trying to get the brands to ship the sofas out to some of our contributors so we could do first-hand reviews. So I wanted to do that.
• 19:13
  I'd had it on my to-do list for months because at the end of the day, like, if you're recommending products, you should test them. Like, you need to get your hands on them and try them out.
• 19:22
  I'm based in the UK, so none of the brands ship to me, which made it hard.
• 19:25
  But I got hit by Google's product reviews update in December 2021, and had, like, the Christmas holidays off getting over it, like, sulking about my traffic hit and trying to forget about it. [laughs] Yeah.
• 19:37
  And then January, I was just like, "Right. I need to do these reviews," and just kind of started reaching out to freelance writers, reaching out to brands. By that point, we had good traffic.
• 19:46
  We had probably 100,000 page views a month. We were generating some sales, so the pitch to brands was easier. Then at one point in Q1, in what?
• 19:54
  2022 that would've been, I probably had, like, 10, 15 sofas with various writers or in various states of transit across the US. Um- [laughs] That's so cool. Yeah.
• 20:04
  I feel like I've covered a lot there, but yeah, that's kind of the initial strategies and, yeah, feel free to ask anything around that too.
• 20:10
  I think that to get something off the ground, it seems like you took the exact right approach, is like-Prove it out, make sure it works, patch up the system, make sure everything is functioning like you want it, and then as you build authority, it becomes easier and easier for you to create the content you wanna create, start competing with those big brands, which honestly, everybody is probably happy to have bumped off the SERPs because they're not helpful anyways.
• 20:31
  So I think that makes a ton of sense. I am also curious about the Webflow component. How good are you at Webflow? How hard was it to learn it, and how important was that piece of it for making the site work? Yeah.
• 20:41
  So I would say I'm okay at Webflow.
• 20:44
  I'm not a designer, so I start with a template, like Living Cozy started as a template I bought for, like, probably seventy-nine dollars, and it's probably completely unrecognizable now from that original template.
• 20:54
  But yeah, I would struggle with Webflow to build a site from scratch, but I know enough to jump in and edit a template, make it do what I want, to create a CMS, add fields, to do some stuff with Zapier to, like, connect email signups to ConvertKit or whatever it needs to be.
• 21:13
  But I would say with Webflow, it feels daunting. The learning curve initially feels steep, but it's kinda like the whole eighty/twenty, twenty percent of the skills will allow you to do eighty percent of what you need.
• 21:23
  I don't know if anyone from the Webflow content team listens, but their content is amazing. Their onboarding and support and Webflow University is one of the best examples I've seen to kinda help you get going.
• 21:34
  And then I think in terms of, like, how important Webflow was to the journey, I think it was integral.
• 21:39
  I know enough, like I've used Ghost before, I've used obviously WordPress a lot, but there's still, like, elements of code you need on both of those.
• 21:48
  And in the early days, I must have redesigned the site, like, three or four times, which I wouldn't have been able to do without a no-code tool.
• 21:55
  And the ability to be able to make custom landing pages, custom content pages for certain articles without code, without an engineer, was really important to me.
• 22:05
  And also, like, out of the box, Webflow's SEO capabilities are, like, fairly good. One of the things I really liked about it was...
• 22:12
  I mean, I think they've opened up, like, plugins now, but at the time there wasn't any plugins.
• 22:18
  And, like, I know with WordPress, it's easy to kind of run into a problem and then add a plugin to solve it, and then before you know it, you have a bloated CMS with hundreds of plugins that are outdated, and some of them might become security risks.
• 22:31
  And yeah, like, Webflow was just, was just straightforward. So yeah, it was really, really important. Yeah. That's awesome.
• 22:37
  Has email been an important part of Living Cozy, and do you anticipate that it will be important for other niche media sites?
• 22:42
  And kind of the primary reason I'm curious about that is because SEO is so important, and I feel like sites that focus heavily on SEO have kind of like a loose audience.
• 22:51
  The audience is kinda like new people every day rather than the same people over and over. Do you think about the audience as one cohesive group of people, and do you continue communicating them with email and social?
• 23:01
  Yeah, definitely. So email was an important part of the site from day one. I had email signup forms, a newsletter.
• 23:08
  It was the first newsletter project I'd committed to on my own, outside of Buffer or Wayflyer, where I broke 100 editions of a newsletter.
• 23:16
  And yeah, I sent out a weekly email pretty much from day one, but really didn't focus on growing it too much. It was just, like, organic, people that signed up from visiting the site.
• 23:26
  And, you know, if I could start again, and, like, when I start again, email will be much more of a focus from the start.
• 23:32
  By the time I sold it, the email list was just under five thousand people, but the audience, as you mentioned, it's quite transient, especially for the type of site that Living Cozy was.
• 23:43
  If you want to buy a sofa, it might just be a problem that you're trying to solve in that moment in time, like you might not necessarily want to be on an email list.
• 23:51
  The email list was kinda more for the home enthusiast, the type of people that read Apartment Therapy, probably get Real Home magazine delivered, like, those kinds of audiences.
• 23:59
  And the plan had I have kept the site was to focus on email and growth on email throughout 2023, um, to experiment with some, like, paid acquisition there and just to scale the email list as quickly as we could to, one, build some defensibility against Google, that if you have a website, you know, it could lose its traffic in a Google update, but, like, they can't touch your email list once it's signed up.
• 24:23
  And if you have an email list of twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred thousand people, like, you still have a business regardless of what your SEO traffic is. So that was always in the back of my mind.
• 24:33
  And secondly, as we started working closer with direct brands and selling direct brand deals and sponsorships, the email list is just, like, more inventory that you can add onto that. So yeah, email was important.
• 24:45
  It was something that I wish I'd focused on more, but yeah, something that I definitely will focus on with what I do next. Did you invest in any editorial style content?
• 24:54
  I'm thinking stuff like a tour of someone's home or interviews with an interior designer or, or that type of thing. Or do you feel like that stuff is... it's a little too indirect for the purpose of the site? Yeah.
• 25:04
  So it was something, like, I'd done a bit of at the start, but mostly with the goal of generating backlinks. I didn't ever have any home tours and things like that.
• 25:14
  I think that's the type of content that I would've focused more on this year to, like, help scale the email list. Like, I feel like that's the type of stuff subscribers want as well.
• 25:23
  People don't wanna subscribe to a list and just get the best of whatever home furniture every week. So I think that type of content would've been great for the list.
• 25:31
  It probably would've been good as well to, like, get return visits.
• 25:35
  But every piece of content I publishedHad just a focus on, like, how it's gonna generate revenue for the business, and I think some of those pieces for the strategy I was running at the time would've been difficult to draw a direct line between publishing this and revenue coming in.
• 25:50
  So in the early days, I'd done a lot of interviews with founders because it was really important, I think, to have that on the site to show that we do speak to the brands that we feature, that we go behind the scenes, we give you something a little extra that you can't get anywhere else.
• 26:03
  But also, those pieces were great for backlinks.
• 26:06
  So if a company had a press page, I would email the press contact, arrange an interview, then when it went live, I would say, like, "Can I have a backlink," or, "Can you link to it on the press page?"
• 26:16
  Nine times out of ten, they would, and that helped the site to get a ton of really relevant backlinks from sites in the same niche.
• 26:23
  We also started doing more of that editorial style content in direct partnerships with brands. One of the ways that we worked with brands was through whitelisting.
• 26:33
  I called it, like, performance publishing, but essentially it was, we would work with a brand to create a piece of content about a new product launch, a sale they were running, maybe even just the founding story of the company, and we would publish that on the website.
• 26:47
  We'd feature it in the newsletter, and then we would also whitelist the brand to run ads on Living Cozy's Facebook and Instagram. So basically, they could create their own ads and run them under Living Cozy.
• 26:57
  As a publisher, with whitelisted content, ads tend to perform a little bit better when they're published on behalf of a brand from a publisher than the brand themselves. Sure. Because they feel less like an ad.
• 27:09
  It's more editorialized. Brands often use them at the kind of middle stage of the funnel. So we would produce some editorial pieces, and then the brands would boost them themselves.
• 27:17
  But yeah, like, for me, I think because it was a fully bootstrapped company, every piece of content I published, I wanted to have a way that I knew it was gonna make money as soon as possible. Yeah.
• 27:27
  That is a good segue into something important I wanted to ask you about, which is the data points that you care about.
• 27:33
  I ask this to everybody on this podcast, and most people say MQLs or SQLs or pipeline or things like that. What metrics do you care about?
• 27:40
  I'm assuming traffic actually is very important in this case, whereas maybe for a B2B site, traffic is not necessarily an indicator of how well things are going for the business, anyway.
• 27:48
  Is it affiliate sales exclusively, or are there other things that you found track closely to the success of the company? Yeah.
• 27:54
  So the number one thing I started focusing on probably about 12 months ago was clicks to brands or, like, clicks to partners.
• 28:03
  So through each of the affiliate platforms, we could see how many clicks we've sent each week, each month.
• 28:08
  And that was kind of my number one metric, because I can influence sales to an extent through the content we have, but whether or not the brand closes the deal once we send them to the site, I have no control over.
• 28:19
  But also, what I found was that sometimes traffic might go up, but clicks to brands might not go up so much.
• 28:26
  Sometimes we might have, like, a ten percent traffic dip, but actually, the clicks to brands and revenue isn't impacted because we've lost traffic to more, like, interior design-focused pieces, how to arrange rooms, and things like that.
• 28:38
  So yeah, like, the key metrics I looked at were sessions and page views, clicks to brands, and then revenue. Tried to keep it fairly simple. Got it. No, it makes sense.
• 28:47
  One other content thing I just wanted to ask you about quickly was user-generated content. Does that have a place in this world?
• 28:52
  One of the reasons I bring this up is I'm kind of always trying to tie stuff back to B2B, and I think that every B2B site has a programmatic SEO opportunity and a user-generated content opportunity, and they're different for each company.
• 29:02
  But I think they're there, and they have the potential to be extremely inexpensive ways to generate a lot of very useful content.
• 29:10
  So anyways, all of that is kind of a long way to lead into, like, have you dabbled with that for niche media sites? Yeah, I haven't too much, to be honest.
• 29:17
  It's one of those things that I definitely would like to do, and I think I agree, there's definitely huge opportunity for it, especially in showing realistic experiences with products and getting people that have tried brands to create UGC.
• 29:30
  That, I think, is a real key thing, and, like, I agree, it's a huge opportunity in B2B as well. It was just one of the things that I never really found time for.
• 29:39
  'Cause most of the time, I had Living Cozy for just over three and a half years, and over two and a half of those years, I was working full-time, so it was a side project.The list of things I wanted to do was incredibly long, but I never got around to a lot of it.
• 29:52
  But at the same time, the constraint was actually really, really good. It helped in the long run because I couldn't afford to waste any time that I had on the business. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.
• 30:02
  Are you in, like, a period of recovery now?
• 30:03
  I imagine that was fairly intense, working full-time, making the switch from Buffer to the next job, which sounded like a period of very rapid growth, then going out to working this full-time, then selling it.
• 30:13
  I mean, it sounds like a pretty fun journey, but maybe an exhausting one, too. Yeah, definitely a rollercoaster, and I'm trying to chill out. I'm not particularly good- [laughs]... at doing that.
• 30:21
  I'm not great at switching off. I've definitely had a couple of weeks of trying to binge every sports documentary I can find on Netflix. Nice. Playing a bit of PS5.
• 30:30
  But yeah, I'm generally not great at relaxing, but it has been a rollercoaster, like, especially through selling the business. Like, for probably over 12 months, I had one eye on selling it.
• 30:40
  I had, like, a spreadsheet that every month I would put in the revenue figures, and then it would work out, like, the total 12 months revenue, what that would be at, like, an industry standard multiplier if I was to sell it.
• 30:50
  Mm-hmm. But despite planning to sell it and that being something I wanted to do, actually doing it was a complete rollercoaster. Like, I would wake up some mornings and be like, "Yep, this is the right thing.
• 31:00
  It's a good time to sell. You know, it makes sense to sell, diversify, take some chips off the table." Then the next day I'd wake up and feel completely different.
• 31:09
  I would say, like, the first couple of weeks after actually completing the sale was this really strange mix of happiness, pride, relief, but also a little bit sad.
• 31:17
  And I think a lot of people say it, when you sell a business or, you know, a site, you kind of feel like, "What's next?" A little bit empty, like, "I was so busy yesterday. Now I've kind of...
• 31:26
  I'm not sure what to do with myself." And yeah, I've definitely had to try and train myself to relax and not stress about what's coming next so much. Yeah, yeah. I can understand that.
• 31:34
  I mean, I think the right time to sell a business is when it's going great, is when it's growing and profitable and you have momentum, which is also probably the time when it's the most fun to work on as well.
• 31:45
  Versus, like, if it was going poorly and you're sick of it, it's, it's not a good time to sell, [laughs] you know? Yeah. I thought a lot about, like, timing it. It was, uh, actually a tough market.
• 31:53
  There's not a ton of cash floating around at the moment. There's the threat of AI and Google SGE looming. There's a lot of things going against selling, but also things were going well in the business.
• 32:03
  I felt like there's a lot of growth ahead, and I think that's the difficult playoff is there's a lot of growth, which makes it a good time to sell, and there's a lot of growth, which means, like, I'd be excited to continue.
• 32:12
  Sure. It's definitely a rollercoaster. Yeah.
• 32:14
  I can't wrap up this conversation without asking you about AI and how much, or I was gonna say if you have been using it for sites like this, but I'm assuming you have in some capacity, and I'd be curious what that experience has been like.
• 32:25
  Has it been helpful, not helpful? And particularly since one of the main things you're looking at is getting this stuff ranked, not just getting it published, but actually getting the result from it.
• 32:33
  If it's been wind in your sails or a distraction. Yeah. I think, personally, I feel conflicted about AI. On one hand, it's incredibly helpful. I've used it in a ton of different ways.
• 32:45
  But on the other hand, I also find the idea of, like, a future where content is written by AI, ranked by AI algorithms, and fed to people, like, thoroughly depressing and, and I hope we don't reach that point.
• 32:56
  But yeah, I think also as more and more content is AI-driven, the human touch becomes more and more important.
• 33:02
  You know, I think especially in, like, B2C, where it's, like, product reviews, you want to know that the person writing about the product you wanna buy has actually used it. They are human. They feel emotions.
• 33:12
  They feel a certain way about a thing. But also I think in, like, B2B content, that's the same thing. I want to learn from other humans.
• 33:18
  I wanna connect with other people that are passionate about topics that I'm passionate about, that work on things that I work on. So I think AI, for me, has just been, like, a really good sparring partner.
• 33:29
  I've used it to get past the horrible first draft page and to get away from the blank page and to have something to work with.
• 33:35
  With Living Cozy, like, a lot of the content that we produced, everything that I put out, I try to include expert opinions.
• 33:41
  And I found AI tools to be really good to give a quick content brief and then some expert quotes, and then prompt it to integrate the quotes into paragraphs about that topic.
• 33:52
  It was never great, but it was good enough to give to one of the freelance writers I worked with to turn into something great. I also think where I've used it a lot is thinking through the bigger questions about brands.
• 34:04
  Like, you know, as I think about what I'm launching next, like I mentioned at the start, like, you know, exploring something in health and fitness.
• 34:11
  So as I think through, like, the positioning for that brand, I've been able to just upload everything I have, all the notes, all the research, into ChatGPT, and I've also been using Claude, kind of having conversations simultaneously with them and just ask a ton of questions like, "Why am I building this business?"
• 34:25
  or, "What makes this business unique? What audience do you think I'm targeting with this?" And that's been, like, really, really helpful as just a thinking partner. I've also experimented with, like, Zaps.
• 34:35
  So on one of my other sites, interiorinsider.com, one of the ones where I'm gonna maybe use it as a bit of a sandbox and test things out, interior designers can share their projects that they've worked on and a bit of commentary about it, and then that'll be sent over to Zapier, which will go to OpenAI, which will create a first draft from what they've sent us, and then it will send it back to Airtable.
• 34:54
  Oh, cool. So yeah, there's a ton of ways I have been using it, and I think it's a great accelerator. I just don't want us to live in a world of, of AI content. [laughs] Yeah, yeah. I... That totally resonates.
• 35:05
  I hear that. Cool. Ash, I wanna be respectful of your time. There's two important things I try to do with this podcast. One is just to explore content marketing from a few different angles.
• 35:13
  The other is to talk to content marketers and just learn about their careers and the different things that they do, and you check both of those boxes in a huge way.
• 35:22
  So thank you for making time to talk and for sharing your story with us.
• 35:26
  I think that a lot of people are gonna find a lot of inspiration from this, both things they can apply to their current day-to-day work and maybe some other kind of aspirational things.
• 35:34
  Because every content marketer I know has a side project going or one they're thinking about, you know? So this is some pretty amazing inspiration for those folks. Yeah, definitely.
• 35:42
  I mean, yeah, Living Cozy was a side project. It was just a weekend hack, and it snowballed into something bigger. But yeah, I agree, everyone has one in them.
• 35:49
  I know most people in content are trying to experiment with things on the side. And yeah, it's beneficial.
• 35:54
  Whether it scales into a business or not, I think it just helps people to learn, and that gives you stuff to apply to the day job as well. So it's all a very good thing in my eyes. Absolutely. Totally agree with you.
• 36:04
  Where can we send people to follow along with your work? Social handles, personal websites, business websites, or anywhere else. Yeah. So I'm probably most active on Twitter and LinkedIn.
• 36:13
  So Twitter is just ashread_, so that's A-S-H-R-E-A-D underscore. Yeah, LinkedIn, I guess just search my name is probably the best way to find me. And then, yeah, my personal website is frontcourt.studio.
• 36:27
  That's just a business I've had up and running for probably the last 10 years for, like, freelance stuff, and my niche sites have kind of fallen under that.
• 36:33
  But yeah, I'm gonna try and, like, be a bit more active on there and maybe blog a little bit for my own sake.
• 36:37
  I think one of the things that I'm trying to do since I've sold the business and I'm figuring out what's next is just to, like, try and find my own voice again. I feel like I've- Sure...
• 36:46
  you know, become very good at writing on behalf of brands, SEO content. I've learned to write that well.
• 36:50
  But yeah, it's been a long time since I've just written for the sake of writing something, so I wanna try and get into that a bit more. We'll be following.
• 36:56
  I think I speak for everyone listening that we'd be very curious to hear what you have to say.
• 37:01
  And we'll make sure we link to all the links that you just mentioned so that folks can just go in the show notes and, and grab those. So definitely go follow Ash. Again, Ash, thanks so much for taking the time to do it.
• 37:09
  It's great to chat. And congratulations on the acquisition. Really exciting and can't wait to see what you do next. Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Jimmy.
• 37:16
  It's been a pleasure, and always appreciate chatting with you and speaking content, so thanks a lot. Awesome. Take care. [outro music]