[First Journey] Content Site, Highly Competitive Niche, White Hat

[paraztos]

Hi Everyone,

I think it is time for me to start documenting my white hat journey. I hope to stay white hat throughout, but we will see how that goes.

[Story]
I don't even remember how I stumbled upon BHW, but I somehow ended up on the forum and started lurking a little bit. I found the content of the forum intriguing and interesting so I kept coming back until I stumbled upon a post asking where to trade websites. Now I didn't even know website trading was a thing (although in hindsight why wouldn't it be?) and was instantly taken away by all the websites being auctioned off on Flippa. What's even better, at this time I was looking for some ways to invest. Didn't have a lot to put into investing (remember, handle investment money as LOST money), but there were a lot of 'starter/template' websites on Flippa I could afford.

Yes, I do realize they are way overpriced for what they offer. The people building them can probably put it together in WP within a couple of hours. However, I found one particular site, that has a good domain in a niche I see myself enjoying. Started bidding a little bit, to tap my feet in the water, but I guess I got pulled right into 'auction mode' and ended up taking the site for a little less than 100USD.

This is how I ended up with my website. I instantly started researching BHW and educated myself in KW research a bit. It's this time I realized my niche is super competitive and it will be really hard to rank for anything. Regardless, I am happy to try. I will be producing the content myself as I generally enjoy writing and I think I can start out in a sub-niche where I can use my personal experience to produce better content than some low effort sites.

[GOALS] .... for now
Rank on page 1 for one post
Have 10 daily visitors
Grow my social sites to 100 followers (not doing FB)
Publish 100 blog posts
Make $1



[So Far]
I am ranking on page 7 for one article (yaaay)
Created all the social pages I want for now. Pinterest is left, but first I need content to make pins for.
Got traffic from Baidu
Set up GSC and Analytics
Ordered SemRush 30-day free trial
Ordered KW Research on BHW (this is to kickstart my blog)
I am saving the Ahrefs 7-day trial until I am more proficient in KW Research. For now, BHW did me good on this topic.



Monetization: It is an affiliate site. No Adult or Gambling content. For now no ads, and if I can make enough from affiliates I will keep my blog posts ad-free.

 

[GVald]

Wish you the best for this one! The fact that you're starting from an existing may help, is it already out of the sandbox? I'm also building a website, full whitehat, but my niche is not that competitive! Already 2 months in if you want to check it out:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/b...-to-passive-1k-month-already-started.1292705/

 

[Nabeg]

what's the niche bro ?

 

[bhcg101]

Congrats on taking action. That's the first step that many don't take or aren't willing to. Since you've invested in Semrush, take advantage of their featureset for keyword research. That's my go to tool and I love it. Even though many prefer ahrefs, I think Semrush has a lot to offer that makes it just as competitive in the keyword research space.

 

[paraztos]

Wish you the best for this one! The fact that you're starting from an existing may help, is it already out of the sandbox? I'm also building a website, full whitehat, but my niche is not that competitive! Already 2 months in if you want to check it out:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/b...-to-passive-1k-month-already-started.1292705/

Don't think it's out of the sandbox yet. The site was specifically created to be sold, hence it is young. The domain itself is 10+ years old, but I am unsure how that affects google ranking.

In any case, considering the research I've done, I expect to see real traffic in 6-7 months only. Until then I will keep building up my content, and building up great internal links to keep people engaged on my site.

 

[GVald]

Don't think it's out of the sandbox yet. The site was specifically created to be sold, hence it is young. The domain itself is 10+ years old, but I am unsure how that affects google ranking.

In any case, considering the research I've done, I expect to see real traffic in 6-7 months only. Until then, I will keep building up my content, and building up great internal links to keep people engaged on my site.

Well, do you know if there was any activity on the domain before? Check Web Archive, that could affect Google rankings in bad and good ways. 6 to 7 months is what people usually have to wait to really see growth, I'm hoping for the same timeline for my journey. What's your articles upload frequency ?

 

[paraztos]

Since you've invested in Semrush, take advantage of their featureset for keyword research

I was looking into Semrush KW Research but will need more time with it. My problem seems to be that any KW I find on SemRush are either not rated (I guess not enough traffic) or is 70%+ difficulty. Honestly when signing up, I thought I will have difficulty scale for all KWs, regardless of search volume.

 

[paraztos]

Well, do you know if there was any activity on the domain before? Check Web Archive, that could affect Google rankings in bad and good ways. 6 to 7 months is what people usually have to wait to really see growth, I'm hoping for the same timeline for my journey. What's your articles upload frequency?

I've checked the Wayback machine, and there are no snapshots for my site. Also, there are no existing backlinks according to Ahrefs Dashboard. I think its a clean domain, that someone just holding onto for resale later.
For now, I am trying 1 article/day. I try to produce content on the weekend and schedule release throughout the week. BTW forgot to say, but good luck for your journey, I will follow along. Hopefully, we both can succeed.

 

[AMLurker]

Good luck mate, I myself have just started with limited experience.

I'll be following along!

 

[bhcg101]

I was looking into Semrush KW Research but will need more time with it. My problem seems to be that any KW I find on SemRush are either not rated (I guess not enough traffic) or is 70%+ difficulty. Honestly when signing up, I thought I will have difficulty scale for all KWs, regardless of search volume.

Well just because it may show a high level of difficulty doesn't mean you should abandon it.. some of the pages targeting the same keywords may not have optimized pages for it. I would analyze who's ranking for the keyword(s) and see what you need to do outrank them.

 

[GVald]

I've checked the Wayback machine, and there are no snapshots for my site. Also, there are no existing backlinks according to Ahrefs Dashboard. I think its a clean domain, that someone just holding onto for resale later.
For now, I am trying 1 article/day. I try to produce content on the weekend and schedule release throughout the week. BTW forgot to say, but good luck for your journey, I will follow along. Hopefully, we both can succeed.

Sure thing man, it's a matter of time, only thing we have to do is stick to it. That's a nice starting point!

 

[braindancer]

Can you tell which niche generalized you're in, like health, finance, gaming, etc?
That would put things in context and will make following your journey more interesting.

 

[paraztos]

Can you tell which niche generalized you're in, like health, finance, gaming, etc?
That would put things in context and will make following your journey more interesting.

Guess there is no harm in sharing the generalized niche, it's travel. I hope I will start ranking around the time travel starts picking up.

 

[paraztos]

[UPDATE]

It's been around two weeks now with this journey for me. I have started ranking for one article, albeit quite low, but got some impressions:



I am still waiting for other articles to be picked up by Google, seems like it takes forever.

In the meantime, I am trying to build my social media following, with Twitter first. I find Twitter an easier platform than Instagram, hence I am pushing it first. Once I can build an audience on Twitter, I aim to bring some of them over to Insta.

Also, it does look like that with a 9-5, 1 article/day was a little over-ambitious. My new more realistic goal is 3-4 article/week. These are long-form articles targeting long-tail KWs. Apart from the long-form articles, I generate 1-2 filler content/week. This is for interlinking, and additional reading material to hopefully help with user retention.

E.g.: if my niche was Motorsport, and I the long tail KW I am aiming for somehow involves a Motorsport Team, I would throw together a quick 500ish word article about the history of the team, and link it in the main article for the readers.

I also got my first genuine visitors + I got traffic from Facebook and got 3 likes on my social media button. As I have no Facebook page this was genuine user engagement which I am pretty happy about.

For now, I will keep building content until more articles rank on google.

 

[paraztos]

Small Update:

Not much is happening traffic-wise. Google has decided to de-rank my one KW that was ranking in the 30s. Now anything I have is 100+. Also if I type site:mysite.com only like 4 articles show up, from the 30 blog posts I have. Guess I gotta give it time.

Contentwise I manage to keep 4-5 article/week. At least one of those is long form ranking content, others are 750ish words, supposedly super easy kw posts. Mostly I do those to improve general content on my site, to gain authority in the topic.

Still my social focus is on twitter. My page is nicely growing. Doing mostly follow-unfollow method. I'm taking it slow, probably a good target for me is 1K followers by end of February.

Also played around a little bit with article spinners and article writers. My experience for now: completely worthless for what I do. I can see some niches where they come in handy, but not for me. Good thing everything has a trial period.

Also ordered 10x500 word articles from a seller here. Choose a 'cheaper' seller with good reviews. My expectation is generally that I will be able to skip research then beef up the posts to 750-1000 words for some low hanging KWs.

Also I am putting my SEMRush 30day trial to good use, I've already got a list of 70KWs in an excel that will be quite easy to go after. After the trial is up I am 100% sure I will miss SEMRush. Really considering subscribing for real, but first I got to try out Ahrefs. Seems like on SEMRush a lot of easy KW-s have no rank and volume. If Ahrefs has a better database I will probably stick with that (+ its a bit cheaper at 99 a month)

I hope by the end of March I will see at least some organic traffic (like 1-2/week will already make me happy). For now my only real traffic source is twitter, but then again it's mostly 1-2 person a month.

 

[Fischer Flash]

Its great going.. Good luck with your journey mate

 

[migleezy]

Hey man, you should write your own articles, cheap ones always suck! Aim for the real easy keywords, don't trust keyword research tools and WRITE WRITE WRITE. Focus your time on writing articles instead of backlinks and stuff like that. I know it's boring but google will eventually start ranking you for a ton of keywords trust me.

 

[paraztos]

Hey man, you should write your own articles, cheap ones always suck! Aim for the real easy keywords, don't trust keyword research tools and WRITE WRITE WRITE. Focus your time on writing articles instead of backlinks and stuff like that. I know it's boring but google will eventually start ranking you for a ton of keywords trust me.

I've got my expectations at check. As I've said I'm looking to expand the articles I've ordered. Besides, I still write my own stuff, however with a 9-5 taking up most of my time, ordering some articles will make life easier. Luckily I have enough KWs researched for at least half a year with 3-4 posts /W so there is plenty of materials for the future.
My SEMRush trial is also good until the 15th so I will definitely be adding to that list

 

[GenesisOne]

Hey man, you should write your own articles, cheap ones always suck! Aim for the real easy keywords, don't trust keyword research tools and WRITE WRITE WRITE. Focus your time on writing articles instead of backlinks and stuff like that. I know it's boring but google will eventually start ranking you for a ton of keywords trust me.

I second this strategy.

 

[paraztos]

Not even getting traffic yet, but I've just come across a spun version of one of my articles Well I guess, if I could find my competitor, they could find me too.

While I'm here quick update:
Got articles scheduled until Wednesday right now 1/day release. My site:xyxyxy.com is always changing, guess google is just figuring out how to rank my site.

Set into Yoast Seo to not index my 'Category' and 'Tag' pages as most of my site:xyxyxyx.com were these results, and I don't want them in SERP. Think it will take some time for Google to deindex them now.