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Epic Gardenings Epic Business
Alex Horsman
October 27th, 2023
Today I’m doing a breakdown of a guy who is ~niche~ famous in the niche site game.
Kevin Espiritu.
Kevin runs the website https://www.epicgardening.com/ and it’s an affiliate site turned e-commerce store.
In my eyes, his story is the ideal outcome.
I spent some hours this past week listening and reading a few of his interviews and there is a lot of valuable information from this man.
Some quick highlights:
$17.5 million raised in 2021
$27 million in revenue in 2022
1 million+ monthly organic visitors
2.7+ million TikTok followers
2.5+ million YouTube subscribers
1+ million Instagram Followers
Let’s dive in.
EPIC GARDENING'S EPIC BUSINESS
First, it’s worth noting his CLIMB during the helpful content update.
From ~470,000 → ~800,000.
I’m no mathematician but that looks like a 70% increase.
I think the man is doing “all the things” but there are two key areas I want to talk about today.
Strategic Acquisitions
Direct Traffic
Kevin announced a few days ago that:
“Earlier this year, I purchased a blog called All About Gardening that my friend Jason Wilson created”
He goes on to say:
“He'd built a gardening blog to an impressive scale in a short period of time, and most importantly to me - he did it the right way.”
When he says “the right way” I’m assuming he means:
Didn’t use junk A.I. content
Created helpful content
Didn’t buy crappy links
The merge of All About Gardening is what we see time and time again.
The “All About Gardening” homepage links to an “acquisition” page:
The acquisition page has a ton of link juice (all the links from the All About Gardening homepage), so they add internal links from this page to their “hub” pages on Epic Gardening.
In addition, all of the articles that used to exist on “All About Gardening” are now live on Epic Gardening:
This seems to be a very smart acquisition on his part.
“It took a few weeks and it wasn't without issues, but post THE MERGE, we now sit at:
+270% YoY traffic increase
+105% YoY RPM increase
And these are just first-order effects.
What about second-order?
It’s a flywheel baby.
These numbers also mean:
“Increasing email and SMS subscribers, subscriptions to our 4+ YouTube channels, more customers purchasing our Botanical Interests, Inc. seeds, raised beds, seed starting trays, etc.”
Cool, Alex, but I don’t have 6 figures to drop on a website and merge into my existing site.
Fair enough.
Let’s address the second talking point I mentioned above which is a lot more manageable, direct traffic.
Google stated this:
“The "why" should be that you're creating content primarily to help people, content that is useful to visitors if they come to your site directly. If you're doing this, you're aligning with E-E-A-T generally and what our core ranking systems seek to reward." (source)
According to ahrefs, 4,700 people each month straight up search for his website.
This ahrefs number doesn’t include all the visitors who just go directly to his site and don’t need to search for him via Google.
This tells me, he’s built a brand.
Now, why are people coming directly to his site?
For starters, he produces helpful content.
He is a gardener and understands the needs, wants, pain points, and desires of other gardeners.
This goes back to what I’ve been preaching time and time again.
Stop using crap A.I. content.
Get a real expert who knows what they are talking about to write your content.
Quality > quantity.
In addition, Epic Gardening is everywhere:
2.7+ million TikTok followers
2.5+ million YouTube subscribers
1+ million Instagram Followers
100+ interviews
He's diversified his traffic outside of Google and he’s also building trust with his audience via other channels.
This trust then gets people to come to his site directly.
People want HIS answers on a topic.
They don’t need to Google questions anymore.
They go directly to him.
Because they trust him.
This in turn helps him rank higher.
He then gets discovered by new people.
They start seeing him everywhere.
Trusting him.
Then go directly to him instead of Google.
And the cycle repeats.
Again, it’s a flywheel.
Remember - quality, quality, and a sprinkle of more quality.