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Maciverse.com is a website for Apple fans to get Mac help.  Find out how Dan drives 150,000 unique visitors a month to his site.

Hello Dan, tell us why you started Maciverse.com and a little bit about yourself.

First a bit about myself, I’m approaching 30 years old a bit too quickly and have a small family at home that does a good job of keeping me humble.  I love sports and technology and got my first “tech” gig while still in high school.  I build the entire local network for George Washington’s Executive MBA department.  I did it for what seems like pennies now, but got to take advantage of their dedicated T1 line and the FTP servers I setup.

Maciverse.com started in 2008, shortly after the first iPhone was announced.  I had made the full jump to Apple products just a year or so earlier and had spent a lot of time finding how to optimize my Mac experience.  I figured that the iPhone would lead to a significant increase in Mac users that all would have similar questions to those that I was trying to answer for myself and figured it would be beneficial to make the answers public on a blog like site.
Looking back, I should have invested in Apple stock as I was dead on with my prediction for Apple converts, unfortunately I didn’t really have any extra income at the time.

The Mac blog space is very crowded.  How are you able to carve a space?

When Maciverse first started we aimed to be a Mac Help site that provide tips and tricks for getting the most out of your Apple products.  it wasn’t until earlier this year that we started to mix in current Apple news and commentary to the site.  We started discussing Apple rumors, providing more hardware and software review, and providing insight into what we’d like to see Apple do.  The site now has more variety in terms of Apple coverage and insights. Each of our authors take their own unique perspective but we have individuals that are new to Apple computers, old Apple Fanboys, and computer experts that write from each of those perspectives. We were mostly able to carve out space by answering questions no one else was answering.

In the early days I would browse through the questions on other Apple forum sites, and find those that no one had provided an answer to.  I’d solve the problem, write up the solution on Maciverse.com and then point the individual on the forum to Maciverse for the answer.  This started to draw in some daily traffic, but it had a lot more lasting impact in a way I hadn’t expected. Since I was answering questions that many people had on my site, I started showing up in Google for answers to those same questions.  Today, 80% of Maciverse.com comes from Google and we spend a significant amount of time doing Search Engine Optimization and research to keep that new traffic high.  Its our biggest growth engine.

At the end of the first year, Maciverse was getting about 20,000 visitors each month and through the methods described earlier, and a few other tricks like reaching out to individuals through twitter and guest posting on a wide variety of sites we have been able to drive monthly traffic above 150,000 visitors.  The site is still growing from 10 – 20% each month and we hope to keep that number increasing.

Why should someone come to Maciverse.com?

Maciverse is still, at its core, a site to find out how to do stuff on your Mac, iPhone, iPod, iPad and other Apple Products.  We also cover the latest Apple and tech related news and provide insight into what’s coming, what’s worth purchasing, and what you have to have from Apple.

How much startup capital did you use to launch the site?

I think I spent $100 to host Maciverse for a year when I got started.  Besides that I didn’t put any additional money into the site until we started making over $1000 a month.  Now we pay for new site designs and development and to pay our author team for their contributions.  Really, not a lot of capital has gone into the site, just a lot of hard work and research.
We’re always looking for more authors, so if you know of any Apple product owners that would like to join the team send them our way.

How do you figure out how much to pay your author team?

Pay depends on experience, how many readers an author may bring to the site, and really what I have in budget.  Like any job, pay for authors on a blog is a negotiation, but usually is based on a per post bases with conditions about post length.

How does Maciverse.com make money?  Would you be willing to approximate what your yearly revenue is?

Right now Maciverse makes money in a number of ways.  We utilize Google Adsense, Direct ads through buysellads.com, affiliate networks like cj.com, as well as affiliate networks like Amazon.  Each has its own strengths and weaknesses and we’ve found that balancing them out provides for higher earnings.

Maciverse.com yearly revenue right now is probably around $20,000.  Other markets would probably have higher earnings per visitor than the Apple product line but we’re expecting a lot for the future with our growth rate.   We also have a number of other sites that also help bring in revenue.

How much traffic do you get and where does it come from?

As I mentioned earlier, most of our traffic comes from Google search results.  We see a spike now and then when an article of ours is featured or linked to from the New York Times, but most our consistent traffic comes from Google searches.

Did you do anything to help get your articles be linked by the New York Times?

No, actually the author that linked back to Maciverse did it on their own.  We were ranking #1 for searches related to installing Apple’s operating system onto a USB Flash drive and the author from the NYT referenced it on his own.

We’ve spent most our time developing strategies for building through organic search and we’ve seen that pay off.  We may spend a bit more time next year with traffic from social networks from Twitter and Facebook.

What is Maciverse’s strategy for building through organic search?

To keep things simple, we do our best to have our site seen as an authority site related to Apple topics.  This means lots of guest posting, backlinking, and providing quality content that is matched to what people are searching for.  Answer a question no one is asking doesn’t help much.  We research what people are asking and then provide the answers in high quality and easy to understand posts.

What’s the hardest part about making money online?

The hardest part about making money online is keeping at it and thinking long term.  Everyone that tells you you can do something easily and quickly is probably lying.  Like the real world, building a valuable and residual income stream takes hard work, time, and patience.

Young entrepreneurs have a real advantage here as they can see what’s going on now and get on board while they’re still young.  Maciverse may be 10 times the size it is now if I would have started in college.

How often does Maciverse put out a blog post?

Its changed over the last few years but right now we hope to have at least 1 post published per day.  We’ve gone months before in the past with just 1 post a week and still saw growth.  With a larger subscriber base and more authors we try and post at least daily.

What were the “secret sauce” things contributed to the success of Maciverse?

I may sound like a broken record, but search strategy and quality content has really made Maciverse a success.  People need to understand how other people talk and search about a niche and then capitalize on that information to help their sites grow.

What do you mean by understanding how other people talk and search about a niche?

Something we realized is that people don’t search for things the way they talk about them.  While I may talk about the latest Google Nexus S phone, I may search for it by simply typing in “Nexus S”.  Using Google Keyword tools and other online references can help you see how people are actually searching for things.  Matching those patterns in your articles makes it easier for Google to realize that your article has an answer for those searches.

Combining high quality content with search friendly structure is a guaranteed success path for growing a site online.

Did you have someone guiding you in how to make money online?

No real one person has helped me make money on the Internet, but I do spend time reading what others are doing to make money online.  Problogger.net is great for beginners and there are a hundred of other sites that have helpful and realistic tips for building an online business.

I’d recommend seomoz.org to anyone hoping to understand search engine strategies and optimization.  They also stay on the cutting edge in terms of all things search so that’s helpful.

At what point did you realize that it was possible to make money from your site?

About a year in I started seeing consistent earnings on a day to day basis.  It was about this time that I also got bold enough to start asking application and game developers for free copies of their content in exchange for a review on our now successful website.  Having over a million readers each year makes that process a bit easier, but I’ve never once had anyone tell me no.

What did you do with the free copies of the content?  Did you give it away?

Most the time we’ll use it ourselves and provide reviews.  Periodically we’ll give them away, but you can’t give away software licenses after they’ve been used so we just get the added benefit of having the free software and products.

You mention to me before that you had offers to purchase the site.  How did you value how much your site is worth?

Valuing a website is a bit tricky, but traditionally its at least 24 months revenue.  Having your site be about a topic and not about you as an individual also makes it easier to sell.  If your telling your story, and you leave the site, its worth less.  So when you get started make sure you’re not being the focus of the site if you ever plan on selling it in the future.

Is selling the site a possibility in the future?

I think its always a  possibility if the numbers match.  Right now though, its hard to walk away from what seems like a continual stream of income that pays for work I’ve already completed.

I’m a big fan of residual income.

What tools helped you with building up Maciverse.com?

Google Analytics is probably #1.  I’m a real data junkie so I spent a lot of time looking at which pages are getting the most traffic and finding out why.  I’ll then try and repeat the process.

I’ve also benefited from courses like TheKeywordAcademy.com and fine tuning my research approaches with Google Keyword Tool.  For example, I want to make sure that I’m looking at “Exact Match” keyword data and not “General” when working with Google’s Keyword Tool.

Did you encounter any unexpected challenges with building your site?  If so, how did you handle them?

The only difficulty we’ve really faced is when our site would continually crash our web hosts servers.  We decided to pay a bit more and move to a server at VPS.net which gave us more control of the server as well as more resources to keep it up and running.

We also use free services like cloudflare.com to reduce the load on the webserver and keep it free from hacking attempts.

What is Cloudfare and what kind of hacking attempts does it prevent?

Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network that basically servers your website files to site visitors from their servers instead of making a complete call back to your server.  This reduces bandwidth requests to your server and database calls meaning you can server content to more people.  Cloudflare uses visitor hit data to identify Denial of Service attempts and block them as well as using their own data to determine visitor IP addresses used by spam bots and other hacking bots.  They’ll block these bots from ever reaching your server.  The best part is its free, so worth trying out.

What advice would you give to young people who are looking to make money from their website?

First, start now.  Don’t wait until you get older.

Second, find something you love and are knowledgeable about and share that information.

Third, don’t make it about yourself.  Make sure the website focuses on a topic that you’re interested in and not you being interested in a topic.

What would you have created if you didn’t start Maciverse.com?

I probably would have spent time developing other online tools.  I’ve got a few in development now with our developer team so stay tuned!

Anything last thing you want to say about Maciverse or yourself?

Just that I’m always looking to learn so am always interested in new and different things you can do on Apple products, or with making your blog successful.

Thanks for the interview Dan.

Tools Mentioned:

• seomoz.org
• TheKeywordAcademy.com
• cloudflare.com