Many Ecommerce Stores, SEO & Adwords journey

[Pinktoe]

This is my first journey. I've been following other journeys & they've been a joy to read and I'd like to contribute.

A little bit about my self

I came to America from Wales almost two years ago to be with my now wife.

Her mother owned a small manufacturing business, which sold products online. I ended up running this business for over a year. I had no prior experience with anything IM. I ended up hating everything apart from the IM side.

I joined BHW a year ago. I learned pretty much everything SEO here, and adwords & CRO elsewhere, and applied all of it to the business. What I know now compared to two years ago is night and day.

I quit my job three months ago to go full time IM - to do what I enjoy.

My current assets

3 SEO clients.

3 Dropshipping niche stores currently monetized by adwords. I have 10/10 QS on most of my keywords, others are 9/10 8/10. Content on all three sites is 2-3 months old. They all have ~20k words each currently. They are currently making $5.5k profit per month.

A list of close to 100 uncompetitive niches that I would like to eventually get into. Some can be monetized immediately.

A blueprint for developing the ecom sites from the ground up without significant time commitment from my side due to outsourcing most of the processes that can be outsourced to my awesome VA's & awesome US based writer.

PBN of 60 low hanging fruit auction domains. (40-60 RD, 15-20 TF etc.) This cost me $7k (domains/hosting/content/website setup etc.)

$7k worth of HQ links & PBN links from vendors that I trust from BHW, coming in over the next two months.

$30k more to invest over the next few months

The plan

SEO & The websites

Build 3 to 4 sites a month (Avg $1.5k budget per site). I will focus mainly on niches that can be immediately monetized. What I'm looking for: If I can dropship it & if I think I can make money through adwords, then I can immediately monetize it. There are some niches that I don't think is favorable for adwords, or some that I can't dropship (I would need inventory), but still look favorable in the long run.

Build links to the first three sites over the next few months using 70% Brand, 25% Generic/URL, 5% sentence phrase match anchors. No exact. Most links (60-70%) are going to home page. The links will be dispersed throughout the entire site, with a lot going to informational pages. I'm not going by the anchors or link distribution of the niche.

For future sites, I do not have a clear path in terms of link building. I will focus more on minimizing footprints than I have for the first three sites. I will start in three to four months. I will be testing different processes during that time, and talking to different people.

Depending on how the first three sites are doing, I will probably spend most of my $$$ building $500+ domains PBNs for each money site. Each PBN would have 20k+ words worth of informational content related to the niche. I am hoping that I will have a process on outreach that can be scaled by that time.

I am hoping that the first three sites will start to have substantial growth when the bulk of the content is 6 months old. This will be in March. We will see.

Other stuff

I'll be buying inventory from China for the three sites and bringing them over to a local fulfillment center that I have previously worked with sometime during next year. I am not sure when, but most likely after the sites start ranking.

I have hired a SM expert to work on growing the social media profiles I have for my current and hopefully future sites. He actually has a journey thread here.

I'm tracking 100s of KWs per site. I'd rather just share search console screen.

Site 1

Site 2

Site 3



I will reply when I can, but I will most likely update once every month unless something of note happens.

My current goals is for the three websites to make $10k/month by the end of January, to eventually move back to Wales, and to make enough so I can afford to fire my seo clients.

 

[blogzandstuff]

Nice journey, I wish you well. Why you getting rid of your clients? Why not keep them and sub out the work?

 

[MisterXYZ]

All the best for your journey.

Following..

Can you suggest any good source on learning Adwords & CRO

 

[Hammaa]

Nice journey, interesting in it.Good luck OP

 

[money2money]

I want to start dropshiping business too. Can you shere me the link where I can find dropshipping products providers from china?

 

[adako]

I want to start dropshiping business too. Can you shere me the link where I can find dropshipping products providers from china?

Aliexpress or Alibaba

 

[Pinktoe]

Nice journey, I wish you well. Why you getting rid of your clients? Why not keep them and sub out the work?

I'd like to only have to worry about my projects. It will free up some time for my self (give me more peace of mind) if I didn't have to think about their projects.

They're in a very technical space (think manufacturing), and I feel like I'm giving them much more value than what they are paying right now, and not rewarding my writer enough.

I am only paying my writer $30/500 words for technical writing, which is not a good rate for a technical writer. She has learned those niches through and through and the clients are super happy with the content, much better than their previous writers.

Instead of firing, I'd much rather just give the clients to the writer, and help her with link building. My approach to links is pretty simple when it comes to anchors and link distribution so it shouldn't be a pain. Think it's a win win for both of us if she takes over eventually. Although I'd rather have her work on my projects, fkk

All the best for your journey.

Following..

Can you suggest any good source on learning Adwords & CRO

Honestly I just googled it a crap tonne.

My biggest gains in adwords has been getting 8%+ ctr, which resulted in 10/10 QS for a lot of my kw's. If you can get much higher CTR than your competition, you're golden. Targeting specific KW's that are most likely to buy, staying away from the main KW's unless cpc is crazy low. Cutting off KW's that are not converting as much as you'd like. And updating my negative kw list. The simple stuff.

For CRO, a lot of it is making the buying process as simple as process, make sure you have a proper sales funnels set up. Installing something like lucky orange and looking at how people browse is pretty good at catching pitfalls.

I don't have enough traffic to A&B test properly yet but I intend to once my sites start ranking

I think I might give weekly updates rather than monthly updates;

As for the last week,

Site 1



COGS: $670
Adwords: $345
Revenue: $1777
Profit: $762

Site 2



COGS: $290
Adwords: $338
Revenue: $1456
Profit: $828

Site 3



COGS: $750
Adwords: $365
Revenue: $1833
Profit: $718

Total profit for the 3 sites: $2308

They're probably performing very similar to each other because the adwords budget is $50/day. I'll probably increase this but as of right now, I'm not really missing much. I may target more KW's.

As for rankings:

Site 1: Main KW has 301k searches a month and I'm #58 right now.

I am ranking on page 2 for a bunch of long tails.




Site 2: Main KW has 110k searches a month and I'm N/A right now. What I'm most excited for is that I'm #8 for a pretty big KW, this KW is my biggest earner in adwords, they convert, really well. So if I make it to #1 I will be very happy and this project will probably double in revenue just from that.




Site 3: Main KW has 12k and 6.6k searches a month and I'm N/A right now.



As for more content, over the next few days, site 1 will be receiving around 10k worth of articles soon. I'm adding 270 products, 6 categories, and one article to site 2, which is 20k words worth of product descriptions! 3k for categories/article. I will be adding more to site 3 within two weeks hopefully.

As for link building that's already done to the sites, all 3 sites has local citation links that I bought from BHW.

Apart from that, site 1 currently has 14 links from my network pointing to it. Mostly brand, to the home page and 4 different money pages.

Site 2 has 21 links from my network pointing to it. Mostly brand and 5 different money pages.

Site 3 has 2 links from my network, just to the home page.

As for pbn links on the way

Site 1 has close to a hundred auction public PBN links coming in over the next two months, and 50 scraped public PBN links. Half is going to the home page, and it is pretty much all brand/url/generic, I might use more aggressive anchors in a few months. I spent $2200 on these.

Site 2 has close to a hundred auction public PBN links coming in over the next two months. Completely different network to the above. Spent $1.7k on these. I paid for 4 months worth, in 4 months I'll need to decide if I should buy a years worth or not. I will if the site ranks.

Site 3 has 50 auction public PBN links coming in over the next two months. Same seller as above. Paid for 4 months, and will decide in 4 months if I pay for a years worth or not, spend $700 on these.

Outreach links

One of the premium PBN sellers here is testing a new outreach service, I wanted to be his guinea pig when he told me about it his idea. I just needed to cover his costs. So I only spent $900 on these. I got 30 links in total, 15 to site 2 and 15 to site 3, from completely different domains.

I was completely blown away from what him & his team did. I will probably just completely forget developing my own outreach method and just depend on this guy to do everything. The top 3 were amazing (majestic stats):
14.8k RD & 62 TF
5k RD & 25 TF
2.2k RD & 37 TF

The average for RD is 1k, the median for RD is 243. Average TF is 13. These are all real websites and not used as link farms.

The links went live yesterday. They all went to money pages. With branded/url/generic anchors. I had some minor criticisms that are easy fixes. I am really looking forward to him offering this service on BHW, I think this will be the best value service there will be on BHW.

More websites

Site 4

Content plan & all of the products that I'm going for is ready for site 4. I really couldn't find much to write about. It's going to start small at only 10k words. Hoping to get this site up and running in 10 or so days. I need content written, the site to look pretty, and for adwords to be setup.

Site 5

Same as above but I taught my friend from back home to do all of the content planning & Kw research for the niche. I am super happy and impressed with what he did. I intend to use him for a lot of my future sites. This site will probably be 30k words big at first. Hopefully this site will go live within 10 days too.

Site 6

Waiting for KW research & content plan to finish, hoping this goes up by the end of the month.

 

[Florin94]

Hi.... Im just more tehnical there that I should. I want to ask . Do you create yourself these site, do you upload yourself the content on it, do you add products manually or use something to do this job? Thank

 

[TechEinstien]

Amazing journey

 

[Pinktoe]

Hi.... Im just more tehnical there that I should. I want to ask . Do you create yourself these site, do you upload yourself the content on it, do you add products manually or use something to do this job? Thank

1. My VA's does everything apart from the logo / banner stuff. My wife makes the logos/favicon/banners (she's a game artist IRL, so she's a pretty sick graphic designer).

I just have a pretty extensive google docs on every step when it comes to creating these sites on shopify (which is very simple) and my VA's follow them to the letter. I will need to change things to avoid footprints though.

2. My VA's uploads all of the content & posts pictures etc. Although I do slightly edit the articles later on for interlinking purposes, this is something my KW research guy from back home will do hopefully.

3. My VA's does everything, using oberlo. Part of the content/KW research is also getting the product KW's. There's a content plan for the writer, but there's also a product plan that I share with the VA. The VA then goes through aliexpress, finds everything that he thinks fits the site/kws, and then after I ok them (I just use urlopener.com/homepage.html and open 10-300 links at the same time lol). After I know what products to go with, those get added to the content plan.

 

[payal23j]

Wow. Well things going like this way. If you give all your task to VA and says that complete it one day or 2 then he/she never be able to do a single task also. If you tell them step by step day by day then work will increase and responsibilities too. Where you can faith on your VA for any task related to that job.

1. My VA's does everything apart from the logo / banner stuff. My wife makes the logos/favicon/banners (she's a game artist IRL, so she's a pretty sick graphic designer).

I just have a pretty extensive google docs on every step when it comes to creating these sites on shopify (which is very simple) and my VA's follow them to the letter. I will need to change things to avoid footprints though.

2. My VA's uploads all of the content & posts pictures etc. Although I do slightly edit the articles later on for interlinking purposes, this is something my KW research guy from back home will do hopefully.

3. My VA's does everything, using oberlo. Part of the content/KW research is also getting the product KW's. There's a content plan for the writer, but there's also a product plan that I share with the VA. The VA then goes through aliexpress, finds everything that he thinks fits the site/kws, and then after I ok them (I just use urlopener.com/homepage.html and open 10-300 links at the same time lol). After I know what products to go with, those get added to the content plan.

 

[Pinktoe]

Update for the last week

Site 1

​

COGS: $363
Adwords: $364
Revenue: $1070
Profit: $343

Site 2

​

COGS: $306
Adwords: $395
Revenue: $1675
Profit: $974

Site 3

​

COGS: $705
Adwords: $358
Revenue: $1764
Profit: $701

Total profit for the 3 sites: $2018

Site 1 sales is down because a lot of people buy this product for gifting. Site 2 and 3 isn't really something that is affected much by Christmas.

Total profit so far for the month: $4326

As for rankings, from now on I'll include a small table that summarizes the biggest KW's I'm going for (they all have buyer intent), as well as a serplab screenshot which is typically long tails:

Site 1:





Site 2:





Site 3:





As for links/recent jumps

10% of the PBN links to site 1 is now indexed. With a lot more coming over the next two months.

Since the last update, 30 outreach links to site 1 and 2 is indexed, with a lot of PBN links to come over the next two months.

The outreach links have been indexed for a week, with branded/generic/naked anchors, and is the only link building activity I have done in over a month for site 2 & 3 (None of the PBN links are active, but the drip will start in a few days). So either these links are super strong or the age of the content is kicking in.

The progress in the serps is very exciting and I can't wait to see what happens by March.

More websites

Site 4

Waiting on content

Site 5

Waiting on content

Site 6

Waiting on KW research

Site 7

My friend is about done with KW research for this niche, this one is pretty exciting as the top two sites have 400k/traffic a month and each conversion is around $40 profit.

Site 8

Keyword research to start soon

Site 9?

Talked to a friend today who's a product developer in a space I'm interested in. Looks like we may start a JV January if she's up for it. None of the products in this space is available in china (in the standards that is acceptable)

Also figured out how to Silo properly in shopify today. Using the navigation menu to organize the categories.

 

[googleagent59]

As for more content, over the next few days, site 1 will be receiving around 10k worth of articles soon. I'm adding 270 products, 6 categories, and one article to site 2, which is 20k words worth of product descriptions! 3k for categories/article. I will be adding more to site 3 within two weeks hopefully.



3k words for categories/articles- will you post this articles in blog section and link back to categories

am I right?

 

[Droger99]

It's pretty amazing journey!

Could you tell us more about:
1. The transition time from quitting your job to full time IM.
2. The transition from one-man operation to team operation.

I am in those kind of state now. I'll be glad to learn from your experiences. Thanks

 

[Pinktoe]

I apologize for going MIA for the past 2+ weeks, I just got my greencard a couple of weeks ago (which means that I can travel again). Decide to go home to Wales for three weeks, I'm here for another 10 days.

This has resulted in failing to meet my goals of finishing site 4 and 5 by the end of December.

The biggest changes that has happened is that Site 2 & Site 3 has had a very significant jump in organic traffic and rankings. I also had to pause the adwords campaign for Site 1 two weeks ago because it stopped being profitable. I will resume it again soon.

The summary of December for revenue & rankings:

Site 1


COGS: $1161
Adwords: $900
Revenue: $3399
Profit: $1338


Site 2


COGS: $1157
Adwords: $1510
Revenue: $6046
Profit: $3379

Site 3


COGS: $3261
Adwords: $1510
Revenue: $8282
Profit: $3511

Total profit for December : $8228, increase of 49% compared to November

As for rankings & traffic:

Site 1

SEO traffic per day at;
Journey start: 11
Today: 31
Traffic type: Mostly commercial





Site 2

SEO traffic per day at;
Journey start: 32
Today: 97
Traffic type: Mostly commercial





Site 3

SEO traffic per day at;
Journey start: 33
Today: 309
Traffic type: Mostly informational






As for links/recent traffic jump

The only link building that's been done to site 2 & 3 over the last 45 days has been outreach link insertions into existing articles. Both got 15 links each, ever since, traffic has been going up a considerable amount on both. If some one were to do these through a VA, you could be paying $25 - $30 per link. I will probably learn the process in the future, using a combination of paigham bot and scrapebox.

It's possible that the age of the content, and the difficulty of the niche also had a huge impact, but I am super happy about these links. I think they could be better than PBNs. Definitely less likely to get slapped than using PBNs. I am considering going all in with this type of link building over PBNs in the future.

Site 2 & 3 still have the rental PBN links to come in. $2400 worth, content was late a month so I got a month extra to cover this. The two month drip started a couple of days ago.

Site 2 is very close to making real money. It's on the bottom of page 1 for some very big buyer intent keywords. I've ordered a further 30 outreach link insertions to this site.

More websites

Site 4

All content is delivered and on the website. I will monetize this site when I get back to America in 10 days. Should hopefully be part of the journey soon.

Site 5

Waiting on content.

Site 6

Keyword research started

Site 7

Waiting on content.

Site 8

Keyword research started

Site 9, 10, 11 are all possible JV's that are looking likely.


Expenses so far (ignoring operational costs, which are listed above, and sites i'm currently working on):

My own pbn: $7k

Website 1

Content : $1200
VA's : $200~
Link building : $2200 ($1k~ not indexed yet) $1100 indexed
Total: $3600

Website 2

Content : $2400
VA's : $300~
Link building : $3000 ($2600 not indexed yet) $400 indexed
Total: $5700

Website 3

Content : $1500
VA's : $70~
Link building : $1150 ($700 not indexed yet) $450 indexed
Total: $2720

Total with my pbn: $19000
Operational profit so far: $13728
Overall profit/loss: $-5,272

My biggest problem right now is not pumping out websites as fast as I'd like to. When I get back to America, it's looking very likely that I'm going to be paying my writer to work for me full time, rather than $30/500 words. I'm going to be paying her $20/hour and she will be working in our house. She's also going to help me with other tasks, just not sure what yet, but I will definitely keep her busy.

It's also looking likely that I will be hiring my friend in Wales for the same pay full time. Been super happy with his work. His main role has been KW research & making a huge content plan out of it, and customer service/ordering stuff (I don't rly want a cheap VA to have such responsibilities)

With how January is going so far, it's looking like I will hit my goal of $10k operational profit for the month. If I achieve this, my next goal will be $20k profit for March. Fingers crossed!

 

[Pinktoe]

As for more content, over the next few days, site 1 will be receiving around 10k worth of articles soon. I'm adding 270 products, 6 categories, and one article to site 2, which is 20k words worth of product descriptions! 3k for categories/article. I will be adding more to site 3 within two weeks hopefully.



3k words for categories/articles- will you post this articles in blog section and link back to categories

am I right?

Yep!

It's pretty amazing journey!

Could you tell us more about:
1. The transition time from quitting your job to full time IM.
2. The transition from one-man operation to team operation.

I am in those kind of state now. I'll be glad to learn from your experiences. Thanks

My answers suck because I got really lucky and I had money

1. It took about two months for things to start working out. I got very lucky as my first projects worked out very early on. My expenses were pretty low too due to my wife working full time, and having money save up helped a lot too.

2. It just happened over time. Whenever I got sick of a task or needed help with something, I'd hire from onlinejobs.ph. As for writing, I've never done any of it. My wife had a friend that loved writing and we clicked straight away. I guess it turned to a team operation pretty fast. Since the launch of the sites, I now have one more VA (main VA's GF), and my friend from back home.

 

[fly84]

Wow...youve got so much money to burn.

Thats the advantage of having money in starting a dropshipping/wholesale business.

If you dont mind me asking, how much money did you spend per site before you opened your store and before you made your first sale? How much is the daily/monthly ongoing cost average per site?

Thanks

 

[Droger99]

Yep!



My answers suck because I got really lucky and I had money

1. It took about two months for things to start working out. I got very lucky as my first projects worked out very early on. My expenses were pretty low too due to my wife working full time, and having money save up helped a lot too.

2. It just happened over time. Whenever I got sick of a task or needed help with something, I'd hire from onlinejobs.ph. As for writing, I've never done any of it. My wife had a friend that loved writing and we clicked straight away. I guess it turned to a team operation pretty fast. Since the launch of the sites, I now have one more VA (main VA's GF), and my friend from back home.

I guess, in very successful Man, there is a Great woman behind him

I should be getting married soon, LoL

 

[Pinktoe]

I reached my goal of $10k operational profit in January. Ranks and traffic is continuing to improve.

I've not done any more link building other than what was previously mentioned, just letting content and links age right now.

Judging from the last week, the sites will make $16k in Feb at this rate.

Most of the growth has come from Site 2, which is making around $350/day profit right now. It's in the top 5 for some big keywords. I am getting 4% CTR, if I make it to #1 this site could potentially start pulling in $2-3k a day, we will see.

I've been busy over the last month with another job that I found through my mother in law, I'm nearly done with it and will invoice $30k soon, I won't see the money for 30 days, which I will reinvest into this venture. I'm going to start working on this again soon, and will provide better updates. Honestly not done anything related to this since the last update.

My next milestone will be going for $20k/month which I will hopefully achieve in March. The next one after that will be $50k for May.

 

[liquidx]

Great Journey so far. I'm interested with how you are bidding on Adwords are you going for broad or phrase match? How are you tracking the conversions from there.