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Spoiler alert: it wasn’t easy.

Just so we’re clear, that’s $1M total. Not an annual budget.

I’m including costs like:

👩‍🔧 salaries - for myself and my in-house team.
👨‍🔧 vendors - for freelance writers, agencies, and design.
🔗 PR & link building costs — sometimes you need to grease the wheels a bit.
📆 spread over 3 or 4 years, give or take.
😒 paid media to promote our content (though we didn’t spend much on this)
📽 equipment costs (for a makeshift video studio in the office)

I remember running my numbers and saying: "Holy cow! We’re about to make up everything we spent since we started this thing… in just this quarter alone."

At that point, we could have cut spend to $0 and still made millions that year.

Next one, too.

That’s how powerful SEO & Content Marketing can be.

It’s that kind of ROI that attracted me to this industry in the first place.

As a consultant, I’d advocate for this stuff until I was blue in the face.

But saying it is one thing. Doing it is another.

This was HARD.

☑ I built an editorial team that scaled production to 100+ articles/month in 2 years.

- I hired Editors who really knew their stuff AND had talent.
- They worked with hundreds of freelance writers.
- We set an incredibly high standard and fought like hell to maintain it on budget.
- We cleared roadblocks with virtual assistants.
- I saw us as a media company first, even if the business didn’t.

☑ I built an in-house PR & link building machine that landed thousands of links/month.

- I trained up the brightest entry level marketing talent I could find.
- I taught them the playbooks and how to manage an offshore team to scale up.
- We even ran “Content-Led PR” campaigns cited by WSJ.

☑ We started slow and anytime the monthly revenue = cost, we increased our budget to double our production goals.

☑ We covered high-converting, high-intent, bottom of the funnel topics FIRST.

- Then we moved up the funnel from there until we covered the entire customer journey.

☑ I used the blog as a testing ground for ideas and built business cases.

☑ I played “Growth PM” and worked with Product to roll out thousands of Programmatic pages

☑ We rolled out dozens of interactive front-end tools, too

- some call this “Product-led SEO” but I think it was more like “SEO-led Product.”

☑ Eventually, we’d grow the website from like 30 pages to 1M+.

We had a solid product with a healthy LTV. Not insane or anything, but strong.

I had an executive team who believed in SEO and they had enough runway to have patience.

I had a friendly Product & Engineering team who did too.

Plus, Google’s algorithm was relatively stable through those years.

Times have changed — Google’s different now, Social Media matters more, the field is more competitive, etc. — but the opportunity is still there for those who are willing to put in the time and the effort to seize it.

Are you?

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Matthew Proctor CEO @ Narrative Bent