[Journey] My first ever white hat project!

[Spencen]

Hey everyone!

I guess I should start with a bit about me. I've been into IM since I was a teen. I've had plenty of fun with all the new and shiny black-hat tools of the time, from SpK's youtube bot(s) to Massplanner/Jarvee. I've had my share of (though not much!) financial success with the black hat marketing. BHW is a big confounding factor to all my knowledge and experience that I gained over the years as a lurker.

I'm 22 now. Too much time on my hands has renewed my interest in IM, thanks to COVID-19. There's no better place than BHW to look into whats hot these days. This time, I'm going to invest my time and efforts into a White-Hat Project.

A Rough Outline:

I plan on starting off with a Quiz Oriented Site that will eventually grow into something authoritative-as and when the ROI allows. Since I'm not an expert when it comes to long term projects and quiz websites, I'll take things slow while i read what other people here on BHW have been doing. ("My Journey Discussions" is a goldmine!)
I'll start by building up the site, promoting it on Reddit, Instagram, Facebook(+/-). For the content, I'll start with quizzes on TV Series,Tech,Games trending right now.


Things Done So Far:

Got a catchy domain name, which can be used for a Quiz site (as of now) and will also be relevant down the line.
Got Shared Hosting
SSL
Installed Wordpress


To-Do:

Design Banners and Logos for the site using Canva (I suck at Photoshop)
Setup a theme
Integrate GA into the site
Look for similar sites in the niche to see what they're doing and how it can be improved.


Expenses: $16.5

This Journey will serve as a Journal for me to look back in the future and hopefully for others as a motivation.
Cheers!

 

[Spencen]

Update #1

After a lot of hiccups and learning,I finally got the site to work with a decent GT M score and no crashes(Phew!).
Going through @Jammy0308's journey thread, gave me a lot of new ideas for my own project, It's totally worth the read!


Reading back on my post,I realised that a lot of things are left hazy. Here is an in-depth plan for this project:

Domain and Hosting
Purchased a catchy domain name from godaddy. ($2.5) Unfortunately the .com was costing way too much so i went with an atypical extension instead. For hosting, I went with the basic plan (Stellar) from Namecheap. It's not the best but serves the purpose for now. It came with a free CDN which is nice. The one year plan costed about $14.

Setup
The DNS propagation took a whole day for some reason, it's usually pretty fast. I installed Wordpress with Bimber theme. I was able to find a copy of the same in the downloads section. Huge thanks to @Festinger for the same! I went with the minimalistic demo. It also comes with a lot of plugins which are unnecessary at the moment. Removing them gave my site a slight load time improvement. I tidied up the theme to my liking.I also setup an email account, WP Rocket, GDPR Compliance, Google Analytics.

Quiz Plugin
Installed WP Quiz Pro for now. When this project starts to look fruitful, I'll migrate to Quize by @se900se (Plenty of good reviews)

AdNetwork
I plan on going with Adsense+Hooligan. I have prior experience with adsense but since Quiz sites perform better with CPM (and Adsense is CPC), I will be applying to Hooligan as well. The idea of header bidding looks interesting. I will look into it once the site takes off.
2-3 Ads per page for now should be alright.

Content
I have 3-4 ideas in mind that are going to be "viral" soon. I will use these to make my first few quizzes and other content. Reading Journey Threads and seeing what other webmasters are doing (and improving on that) is the way to go!

Traffic
Will start with Reddit as my free traffic source. I have looked into relevant subreddits for the same. Creating my own subreddit down the line is on my list. Paid traffic from Instagram promotions comes in bursts and often debilitates humble shared hostings (like mine). So,I plan on sticking to free traffic sources for now.

I'll hopefully have my first batch of quizzes published by the end of this week. Any and all suggestions are welcome.
Hoping for the best!

 

[Deleted member 813988]

Good luck on the journey, keep us posted

 

[SEOREAPER]

First lessons to come brother. I wish you the best, but if you hit rock bottom, take it as a lesson!

 

[Jammy0308]

Will start with Reddit as my free traffic source. I have looked into relevant subreddits for the same. Creating my own subreddit down the line is on my list. Paid traffic from Instagram promotions comes in bursts and often debilitates humble shared hostings (like mine). So,I plan on sticking to free traffic sources for now.

Glad you found the journey useful!

I wish you the best of luck!

 

[Spencen]

Good luck on the journey, keep us posted

Thanks

Glad you found the journey useful!

I wish you the best of luck!

Thank you!

First lessons to come brother. I wish you the best, but if you hit rock bottom, take it as a lesson!

Certainly, I will. Thanks!




Update #2

Time for the second update!
I'm getting around using wordpress, it's a new platform for me.

I finally put together my first quiz and published it with a nice featured image+a nice description.
Reddit will take time to become a dependable traffic source,I'm farming karma for my account as of now.

However, I wanted to test the flow of the quiz and to make sure everything is working perfectly. I created a facebook account and joined 4 groups for the niche. Next, I registered a freenom domain and posted in 3 groups with the freeom link. To my bad luck! the freenom domain didn't work, It probably costed me some visitors. I guess this was my first lesson

I replaced it with bitly links when i realised this. I still have to figure out a solution for this.

Anyway, the quiz was a success! People liked it and were quite active in the comments. Many posted their score page scroonshot in the comments aswell.

The analytics looked as follows after 2 hours (What do you think?)




WP Quiz Pro tells me 237 people took the quiz till now. It is a 15 page quiz with 1 intro page. Assuming a 3 ads per page setup. This would've yielded a little more than 10k impressions. 91% of these would have been from T1 users. Of course this is a very crude estimate, but something good enough to keep working.

Next Up:
I'll add some non-quiz content to the site.
Probably make 3 more quizzes
Apply to Hooligan Media (When would be the right time,keeping the current test traffic in mind ?)

 

[Spencen]

Update #3


Nothing out of the ordinary for the third update. I have added 2-3 more pages of good quality content. The first promotion of 3 facebook groups brought me 10k pageviews in-toto.Not bad for a rand new site i guess. I have applied to Hooligan Media and hope to start working with @se900se soon!

Till then,I'll focus on studying reddit as a traffic source.

 

[Deleted member 813988]

Update #3


Nothing out of the ordinary for the third update. I have added 2-3 more pages of good quality content. The first promotion of 3 facebook groups brought me 10k pageviews in-toto.Not bad for a rand new site i guess. I have applied to Hooligan Media and hope to start working with @se900se soon!

Till then,I'll focus on studying reddit as a traffic source.

The best way to work with Reddit is to pick a subreddit first, then create quiz for that subreddit. Chose something like RDR2 as it always has thousands of live users. Before sharing quiz there - engage, become visible, this is basically the trick to get your links live and upvoted. I also run first 15 minutes with no ads (the plugin I use allows to turn them on and off), so the first comments won’t have anything about ads (they will eventually complain a lot, but that’s fine).

 

[IG Professor]

Sounds like the beginning of a great journey.
goodluck

 

[hamukione]

Following, this looks interesting!

Good luck!

 

[jonnyinsta]

good luck ...keep us updated

 

[Spencen]

The best way to work with Reddit is to pick a subreddit first, then create quiz for that subreddit. Chose something like RDR2 as it always has thousands of live users. Before sharing quiz there - engage, become visible, this is basically the trick to get your links live and upvoted. I also run first 15 minutes with no ads (the plugin I use allows to turn them on and off), so the first comments won’t have anything about ads (they will eventually complain a lot, but that’s fine).

Sounds like a good technique, I'll try this out with my next batch of quizzes. Thanks!

Sounds like the beginning of a great journey.
goodluck

Following, this looks interesting!

Good luck!

good luck ...keep us updated

Thank You! Will post the fourth update soon.

 

[stfumanish]

Goodluck bro

 

[RoyalCobra777]

Interested to see if this type of method still works. Keep us posted.

 

[Ranking Expert]

Good luck @Spencen

 

[Spencen]

Goodluck bro

Goodluck bro

Interested to see if this type of method still works. Keep us posted.

Good luck @Spencen

Thank you!

 

[Don Danny]

Good luck and all the best...

 

[PhotoGallery]

Good luck! Keep it up.

 

[easytutorial]

Following... May I ask how you added quizzes to WordPress? Is it a CPT or just a plugin?
Good luck mate!

 

[Spencen]

Following... May I ask how you added quizzes to WordPress? Is it a CPT or just a plugin?
Good luck mate!

I use the WP Quiz Pro plugin for making quizzes.


There's not much to update. I'm waiting for approval from Hooligan Media, it's been 10 days. Hoping for the best!