Slickdeals

Disclaimer: As Slickdeals is a current client, I won’t divulge specific data points. Instead, I will discuss general performance trends.

Recruiters contacted me in July of 2019 about an opportunity with Slickdeals, a popular deal-sharing website. Less than a month later, I was working with the company’s Los Angeles-based content team.

Introducing the Project

The project was immense. I was to create and monetize a vertical from scratch.

Prior to my arrival, Slickdeals had experienced success driving affiliate revenue from credit card conversions in its deal threads and forums. Naturally, the next step for Slickdeals was to establish a content vertical that could maximize revenue growth with its banking and financial services partners.

Hiring managers were impressed with my accomplishments as managing editor of the personal finance blog Sapling, as well as my B2C experience with the Boulder-based marketing team Truth Company.

While the vertical I created now enjoys its own subdomain, Money.Slickdeals.net, when the initial project begin in the third quarter of 2019, we were literally building our content and funnels from the ground up.

Recruiting a team

I assembled a team of some of the top editorial talent in the personal finance space. I recruited subject-matter experts who were recognized authorities in topics such as rewards credit cards, rewards travel, brokerage accounts, cryptocurrency exchanges, and deposit accounts.

Ultimately, our editorial team included former bankers, brokers, travel-hacking bloggers, financial advisors, and a crypto millionaire. All had produced content for the most prolific personal finance publishers, including NerdWallet, Bankrate, The Points Guy, and more.

Developing the content strategy

Tapping into my editorial background from years of working in newsrooms and, also, leveraging the search engine optimization (SEO) training I received from Leaf Group, I developed both a content strategy and a content marketing strategy. I would eventually combine these two playbooks — dubbing the result as my “offer-led content strategy.”

Rather than deploying the strategic list beats and bullet points found in online marketing guides, my offer-led content strategy bypassed low-intent traffic from passive audiences and focused, instead, on high-intent queries whose content could be directly mapped back to their impact on revenue goals.

Modeling revenue opportunities

Slickdeals works with multiple affiliate networks that each house hundreds, if not thousands, of potential affiliate offers. Yet, nobody had bothered auditing these networks and offers to compile a list of potential financial products to share with Slickdeals’ audience.

I delved into each of the affiliate networks — Rakuten, Impact, Commission Junction, Awin, PepperJam — and created a master list of merchant parters. The ensuing spreadsheet included financial institutions, specific offers, commissions, cost-per-acquisitions (CPAs), and affiliate offer terms — many of which were not being leveraged or maximized.

Producing an inventory of affiliate offers was the first step in modeling opportunities and forecasting revenue potential.

Setting goals and KPIs

When working with progressive and adaptive companies like Slickdeals, you’ll often have a number of goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) that represent the mission and diversity of the people you’re working with. As a team member, I certainly had these types of organization-based goals.

However, sooner or later, even with the most agile of employers, your fundamental goal comes down to revenue. And the vertical I was charged with monetizing was no different.

Traffic is important because traffic begets revenue.

But conversion was king and queen in the early years of the project.