We analyze a 13-year-old personal finance calculator site, Dqydj.com (Don’t Quit Your Day Job). The site receives 206,000+ pageviews per month (Ahrefs estimate).
This site is interesting because it demonstrates how you can receive a ton of traffic and links by providing simple calculators that answer specific questions.
Calculators can generate a huge amount of traffic because of the large number of people searching for calculators for various problems. This presents an opportunity if you can develop calculators in a specific niche or add them to your existing sites.
Creating an online calculator is not overly difficult. You can hire an inexpensive programmer to create them or even use Chat GPT to generate the code for a specific calculator. There is an opportunity because most people aren’t willing or able to develop online calculators.
This is what we cover in this report:
- Website overview
- Major highlights
- Competitor overview
- Easy wins to increase revenue and/or traffic
- Actionable takeaways you can apply
Let’s get into it!
✅ Website Overview & Highlights
This website has maintained stable traffic for many years and has stayed above 100k traffic since January 2019. It had a slight decline from the peak in 2021 but is trending back up.
The site’s calculators are major link magnets with more than 30 pages receiving over 100 referring domains. One calculator page has over 800 referring domains (S&P 500 return calculator).
A second type of content that is attracting a lot of links and traffic is statistics pages. Some good examples are “Historical US Home Prices” (1k referring domains) and “How Many Millionaires Are There in America?” (200 referring domains).
The site has attracted links from a lot of the top media outlets including Washington Post, NY Times, WSJ, MSN, and more.
The site was started in 2009 by “PK” on the domain Dqydj.net and was later redirected to Dqydj.com around 2017.
The Dqydj.com domain was previously used since 1998 by a music recording company (Don’t Quit Your Day Job Records).
The site started as a blog that covered interesting investing topics in an analytical and data-driven way. PK has written most of the articles and has some help from a couple contributing writers.
Over time, the finance calculators became the most popular pages on the site.
While investing topics can be very competitive, calculators can have less competition because of the limited number of people with the ability to create calculators.
The website design is slightly outdated although it looks more modern than similar calculator sites like Online-Calculator.org.
It has a nice “featured on” box on the homepage that helps increase trust and authority for first-time visitors.
It is worth noting that the owner followed his own advice and didn’t quit his day job as a software engineer. He may lack the time and motivation to make improvements that would grow the site and increase revenue (there have only been two “Weekender” blog updates in the past 2 years).
Highlights
- Over 8k referring domains with DR 71 in the competitive finance niche
- About 60 different calculators
- About 700 well-written articles with data-driven analysis
Why is this site winning?
- Easy to use calculators to solve specific problems
- It’s targeting and ranking highly for “calculator” keywords with high volume
- Links from a large number of high authority media sites like NY Times, CNBC, MSN, and Investopedia
Top 3 Competitors
Here are similar competitors targeting many of the same keywords:
- PlanetCalc.com – A large library of investing and miscellaneous calculators with 570k traffic per month.
- CalculatorSoup.com – Another library of calculators with an outdated design and an impressive 7.2 million traffic per month.
- Online-calculator.org – Another large library of various calculators with 1.3 million traffic despite a “2019” in the site’s logo and outdated design.
Let’s get into the easy wins to grow this specific website.
🔥 5 Easy Wins To Grow This Website
There are opportunities to significantly grow this brand. I break down the following easy wins:
- Decrease header section height
- Add affiliate product boxes to relevant pages
- Add internal links from top-linked calculators to money pages
- Update content and article dates
- Change to a brandable domain name
Let’s get into it!
➡️ Win #1: Decrease header section height
A large header section for articles is a popular design pattern for WordPress sites but is not ideal for monetization.
A large featured image section takes up valuable real estate above the fold that could be used for display ads or call to action buttons.
We recommend decreasing the height of the background image containing the title so that the visitor can see some content above the fold.
This will help increase the display ad impressions or show a call to action button to anyone who lands on a page (especially for mobile visitors).
Additionally, the large background image has a large jpg file size of about 200 kb which slows the page load time. Reducing the image size will help improve user experience and Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics.
➡️ Win #2: Add affiliate product boxes and comparison tables
With several high-traffic pages related to investing, this site could increase revenue by adding product boxes and comparison tables on relevant existing pages.
For example, the page titled “Bond Yield to Maturity Calculator” could feature some personal finance products that help people buy bond funds like Robinhood, eToro, Acorns, etc.
Smart Asset is a popular personal finance site that displays a comparison table for savings accounts on an informational article about “Robo-advisors vs index funds”.
With populator finance calculators like “S&P 500 Return Calculator” and “Networth by Age Calculator”, the site has some good topical authority in the competitive personal finance niche.
The site can leverage the authority it has earned in Google to target some moderately competitive personal finance keywords by publishing new informational articles and adding affiliate product boxes.
One approach could be to publish more data-driven articles that explore topics related to robo-advisors, online brokerages, and savings accounts. An example could be: “Robo Advisors vs Financial Advisors by the Numbers”.
➡️ Win #3: Add internal links from top-linked calculators to money pages
With some existing calculators receiving over 500 referring domains, the link equity of the site can be better utilized by adding internal links to money pages like personal finance affiliate reviews.
The site does a good job of internal linking to similar financial calculators and could add internal links to their affiliate review pages like Fundrise, Personal Capital, and M1 Finance.
Additionally, there are site-wide links in the navigation to social media accounts that haven’t been updated in years. The RSS feed link is also unnecessary because very few people use RSS today. These links could be removed from the top navigation so more link equity can be directed to important pages.
Also, it may make sense to remove articles on the site that are no longer relevant (e.g., “Weekender” blog updates from 2014 that just discuss what the owner is working on). By removing pages that get very little traffic, more link equity can flow to pages on the site that are more important.
➡️ Win #4: Update content and article dates
For many keywords, Google prefers to rank fresh content over old or outdated content.
Additionally, if older dates are visible in the Google search results, click-through rate may be lower (as some people may prefer the more recent article).
Many of the pages have publish dates in search results that are 8-9 years old.
One way to improve this is to update old articles with high traffic and then change the publish date.
Another option is to remove dates from all pages to avoid the problem of old dates showing up in search results. This can be a better option if there isn’t enough time to consistently update a lot of old articles.
➡️ Win #5: Change to a brandable domain name
The domain name Dqydj.com can be confusing for first-time visitors or searchers seeing the URL in Google search results. Additionally the name “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” is long and difficult to share.
One way to improve the branding of the site is to change the name to something short and descriptive. A good example of this by a competitor is Calculator Soup (7.2 million traffic per month).
A brandable name could increase click through rates in search results because it more closely matches the financial calculator keywords the searcher is looking for.
Although DQYDJ is a clever acronym, most people would not guess what the letters stand for. At worst people may assume dqydj.com is a spam site.
A brandable name would also boost mentions and links which would lead to more traffic and an increased valuation of the site.
👉 Actionable Takeaways
Here are actionable takeaways that you can apply to your niche website today:
- Remove large headers or hero images that take up too much valuable real estate above the fold.
- Review the “best by links” pages in Ahrefs and look for opportunities to add relevant internal links to important pages.
- Don’t overlook adding affiliate product boxes to relevant informational articles where it makes sense.
- If you have old dates showing in search results, consider updating those articles and changing the publish date.
- An unbranded or acronymn domain name can limit the potential of a site and may be worth changing.
