[Journey] Starting a New Life

[GoldenTouch]

Mar. 20, 2021 | Day 20

Weekly Update

Productivity:

Wrote 2 informational articles, 1160 words and 907 words for a total of 2067 words written today.

Stats For The Site:

GSC



Seems like a bit of a decline here but not really. It just happens that the GSC updates to more accurate numbers only after a few days and the days with the most traffic were the last 2 days. It actually shows one day earlier as the last day for the last 7 days report which is from 3/12 to 3/18, and the analytics show the results from 3/13 to 3/19, hence the difference. Look at the analytics screenshot below for a better understanding and more realistic last 7 days traffic report.

Analytics



You see here that the real traffic number is nearly identical to last week. The numbers started to rise towards the end of the week, and hopefully, they will continue rising throughout the next week. Again, as I wrote in the last week's report, I'm still not expecting any traffic changes.

I checked, and some of the articles published during the journey are getting a few clicks which is always nice to see. The real traffic spike will probably happen in a few months, so this is all expected.

Amazon



Amazon earnings continue to rise despite the stagnation in traffic. The conversion rate here is crazy! The buyer intent article that ranked before I started the journey climbed up the SERPs and is now getting consistent targeted traffic, and that's evidently reflected in the commission increase.

I'm not sure what to expect next week but I always take these early statistics with a grain of salt since the traffic is low and the rankings aren't established. Until the buyer intent articles start ranking, the statistics don't mean much.

Productivity For The Week

Articles Published: 9 (5 buyer intent and 4 informational)

Words Written: 18,765

Improvement (compared to last week): +3K words and +1 article

What I Learned This Week

I tried to write that extra amazon article to improve the number of published articles per week. I forced it, and it didn't work since my current capacity is 1 amazon buyer intent article per day or 2 informational articles per day.

Until I become a more fluent and better writer and reduce the time on research, I cannot write more articles in a day. I will be patient and stick with the writing amount that works for now until I see some improvement.

That's it for this week, guys! See you on Monday, and stay safe!

 

[pepekobasa]

Hey man nice journey! I am having traffic 100-200 per day but I ain't having some amazon affiliate earnings No one is buying from my website. I got some clicks but no purchase. Any advice? Hoping for your success

 

[Halch]

Nice to see that you're making progress. It's hard to write good content sometimes, took me whole day to write 1300 words yesterday. Took some forced rest for that reason. Hoping for today to be better.

 

[pionhy]

Really interesting. I have subscribed to this thread. Good Luck on your journey

 

[hollywood43]

Good luck wish you continued success

 

[GoldenTouch]

Mar. 22, 2021 | Day 22

Productivity:

Wrote and published 1 amazon buyer article of 3124 words. Mondays are always so god damn slow... I always struggle to write on that day... Maybe I should start the week on Tuesday

Anyway, I got the work done and am happy with it.

Hey man nice journey! I am having traffic 100-200 per day but I ain't having some amazon affiliate earnings No one is buying from my website. I got some clicks but no purchase. Any advice? Hoping for your success

Hey man, thanks for stopping by. The lack of Amazon earnings can be a result of million things. The most obvious ones would be what kind of articles are they, what is the quality of the articles, and how do you get your traffic.

If you write informational intent articles, you'll get close to no conversions. If the quality of the articles and searcher intent is not met, nobody will click on your links. Do you get your traffic from search engines, social media, or some other way? Amazon only really works with targeted traffic that has buyer intent.

If the searcher is looking for the best headphones for under $50 and clicks on your article, you are very likely to get a click and order from that visitor. If, on the other hand, a searcher is looking for information on whether wireless or corded headphones are a better fit for him and clicks on your article, your chances of making a sale will plummet.

If you want, you can share more details about your site so that I can give you a more specific answer.

Nice to see that you're making progress. It's hard to write good content sometimes, took me whole day to write 1300 words yesterday. Took some forced rest for that reason. Hoping for today to be better.

Hey Halch! Yeah, consistently producing a large amount of good content is close to impossible. I know that my content sucks some days, but hey, what can I do. Got to keep writing so I don't lose momentum.

Just don't go over your current writing capacity like I did last week. The content will be awful and you'll feel like shit writing it. I think that taking a break as you did can help sometimes. Just don't do it too often or you won't make progress.

There will inevitably be days when you won't feel like writing, but if you go through them and fight the urge to stop, you'll be one step closer to becoming a better writer. Just my 2 cents.

Keep moving forward, my man!

Really interesting. I have subscribed to this thread. Good Luck on your journey

Thank you!

Good luck wish you continued success

Thanks!

 

[zionbar]

Just from a quick look at your screenshot it looks like you can get a lot more traffic if you improve your CTR.
Try creating better looking snippets with call to actions and maybe even a little medal or emoji thatll catch the users eye.
I would also add the date (i.e “ 2021” or “updated march 2021” on older articles uv written) that also helps with getting more clicks
Good luck op

 

[pepekobasa]

Hey man, thanks for stopping by. The lack of Amazon earnings can be a result of million things. The most obvious ones would be what kind of articles are they, what is the quality of the articles, and how do you get your traffic.

If you write informational intent articles, you'll get close to no conversions. If the quality of the articles and searcher intent is not met, nobody will click on your links. Do you get your traffic from search engines, social media, or some other way? Amazon only really works with targeted traffic that has buyer intent.

If the searcher is looking for the best headphones for under $50 and clicks on your article, you are very likely to get a click and order from that visitor. If, on the other hand, a searcher is looking for information on whether wireless or corded headphones are a better fit for him and clicks on your article, your chances of making a sale will plummet.

If you want, you can share more details about your site so that I can give you a more specific answer.

Do you have skype? Can you please pm it to me so that I can share details to you. Thanks

 

[TheBragi]

Bookmarked this one to read all the replies, looking good so far @RedMoonVPN. I wish you nothing but the best. I used to work in construction, my back will never be the same.

 

[GoldenTouch]

Mar. 23, 2021 | Day 23

Productivity:

Wrote and published 1 amazon buyer article of 2579 words. Finished writing this one pretty fast, so I decided to spend some time editing a few pages on the site and doing some kw research.

Spent around 1 and a half hour on brainstorming keywords. I don't exactly have enough informational intent keyword ideas so I thought it would be nice to get some more.

I used the knowledge I have in this niche and I brainstormed a few ideas and checked them in ahrefs free tool to get some traffic estimations and more ideas. I ended up with 35 new keyword ideas that will help me balance the buyer intent and info articles ratio.

Why am I writing those informational articles? Well, mostly because of topical authority. In the niche I'm focused on now, there aren't any sites with more than 50 articles about this topic. I can literally rule the SERPs if I cover every single topic in this niche and interlink the articles properly.

I plan to end up with at least 300 articles on this topic and I estimate that I'll be able to get about 100k monthly visits from Google. I figured I can do this really fast because of low competition, especially if I establish topical authority in the field which I'm planning to do with these info articles.

I also edited 2 pages where I wrote short intros for my categories, designed the pages, and linked them to the navigational menu.

Just from a quick look at your screenshot it looks like you can get a lot more traffic if you improve your CTR.
Try creating better looking snippets with call to actions and maybe even a little medal or emoji thatll catch the users eye.
I would also add the date (i.e “ 2021” or “updated march 2021” on older articles uv written) that also helps with getting more clicks
Good luck op

Thanks for the advice! The low CTR in my case is caused by a large number of impressions and rankings that are not established. I wrote articles that are 6 or 7k words long and super broad. I ranked for thousands of long tails and got thousands of impressions for those articles.

But the article was focused and written for the main keyword for which it didn't rank. I ranked for all those long tails for which the article is maybe 20-30% relevant and hence the low CTR. For the articles where I rank for the main keyword, I have CTR that is well over 10%. I think the overall site-wide CTR will improve dramatically when the new articles start ranking and the overall topical authority rises.

Bookmarked this one to read all the replies, looking good so far @RedMoonVPN. I wish you nothing but the best. I used to work in construction, my back will never be the same.

Thank you, man! Back issues are so damn common among construction workers that it's crazy. I was fortunate to avoid them since I didn't work for too long (1.5 years), and since I'm relatively young. My boss complained about his back and knees on a daily basis.

Glad you don't do that shit anymore, it's so no worth it when you factor in risk and reward. Your life span is drastically reduced and you make shit while others are making a fortune from your misery.

Thank you again, and all the best to you as well!

 

[Halch]

Mar. 23, 2021 | Day 23

Productivity:

Wrote and published 1 amazon buyer article of 2579 words. Finished writing this one pretty fast, so I decided to spend some time editing a few pages on the site and doing some kw research.

Spent around 1 and a half hour on brainstorming keywords. I don't exactly have enough informational intent keyword ideas so I thought it would be nice to get some more.

I used the knowledge I have in this niche and I brainstormed a few ideas and checked them in ahrefs free tool to get some traffic estimations and more ideas. I ended up with 35 new keyword ideas that will help me balance the buyer intent and info articles ratio.

Why am I writing those informational articles? Well, mostly because of topical authority. In the niche I'm focused on now, there aren't any sites with more than 50 articles about this topic. I can literally rule the SERPs if I cover every single topic in this niche and interlink the articles properly.

You might be aware that there is semrush partnership you can get here free for a month. They will ask credit card thought. Alternative is Ahrefs 7 day trial for $7 you can pay with paypal.

I'm exploiting it atm. Just put your main keyword and add "how", "why", etc. there and it will give you lots to work with. I think the same works with Ahrefs and other competitors as well.

My go-to strategy is to use free periods and copy-paste hundreds of keywords lol.

Edit: works with "buy" words as well.

 

[GoldenTouch]

Mar. 24, 2021 | Day 24

Productivity:

Wrote and published 2 informational articles of 1088 and 919 words for a total of 2007 words written today.

You might be aware that there is semrush partnership you can get here free for a month. They will ask credit card thought. Alternative is Ahrefs 7 day trial for $7 you can pay with paypal.

I'm exploiting it atm. Just put your main keyword and add "how", "why", etc. there and it will give you lots to work with. I think the same works with Ahrefs and other competitors as well.

My go-to strategy is to use free periods and copy-paste hundreds of keywords lol.

Edit: works with "buy" words as well.

I already used the SemRush trial last year and I exploited the ahrefs trial numerous times. If you change the email address on the PayPal account you can have infinite ahrefs trials, and that's what I did.

I just had some free time yesterday and I brainstormed some ideas with much broader knowledge in the niche that I have now. I first did the keyword research for this site about 6 months ago, but I didn't have any knowledge of the niche and just did the good old seed keyword research where I added the best, review, and top words combined with the seed keyword.

I got around 100 solid keywords that way, but I now know a lot more specific topics within this niche that I can do keyword research for. I'm planning on getting another ahrefs trial when I write articles for all the keywords that I have currently.

Yesterday's research was on informational articles only since I wanted to balance the number of buyer and info articles to a 50-50 ratio. I needed a small number of ideas, so I just brainstormed some seed keywords and added them to the https://ahrefs.com/keyword-generator and got more keywords and some traffic estimations from there.

I like tools like Ahrefs and SemRush for discovering keywords and getting ballpark traffic estimations, but when it comes to keyword difficulty, they are useless. Keyword difficulty or competition can only be analyzed with common sense. There is no tool that I tried that accurately analyzed competition for a keyword, it's just impossible for the limited software to do that.

 

[GoldenTouch]

@Halch and I forgot to ask, what kind of site are you building? I've seen on Kikerinkas thread that you mentioned you already have 120 articles on the site.

 

[Halch]

@Halch and I forgot to ask, what kind of site are you building? I've seen on Kikerinkas thread that you mentioned you already have 120 articles on the site.

I passed 200 articles last night. I got a call on Monday that there is work for me again, plastering and rendering some building facades and balconies so I've been only writing 2 articles per day.

I have to say I'm a little depressed about that, but kids need to eat and get some new clothes. As there are a million sites about home renovation I've got no problem to say that I'm there as well, hunting those difficult topics that keyboard warriors can't answer well. All respect to them thought.

The main philosophy on my journey is that I'll provide tons of quality and build such a quantity that I'll someday tower over all of them like a pyramid. They can write as much about surface scratches as they want, but I'll provide in-depth about the topics.

I've been working on constructions on and off for 18 years now and I got quite a lot of insight about quite a lot of things. What I don't know I can easily fill online and make a lot of educated guesses based on those.

Tbh I don't know if I will succeed or not, but I'll continue building that blog brick by brick.

Edit: I realized I might sound proud, but the point of having high goals is having high success. Even if it lands in the middle it's worth it.

 

[GoldenTouch]

I passed 200 articles last night. I got a call on Monday that there is work for me again, plastering and rendering some building facades and balconies so I've been only writing 2 articles per day.

I have to say I'm a little depressed about that, but kids need to eat and get some new clothes. As there are a million sites about home renovation I've got no problem to say that I'm there as well, hunting those difficult topics that keyboard warriors can't answer well. All respect to them thought.

The main philosophy on my journey is that I'll provide tons of quality and build such a quantity that I'll someday tower over all of them like a pyramid. They can write as much about surface scratches as they want, but I'll provide in-depth about the topics.

I've been working on constructions on and off for 18 years now and I got quite a lot of insight about quite a lot of things. What I don't know I can easily fill online and make a lot of educated guesses based on those.

Tbh I don't know if I will succeed or not, but I'll continue building that blog brick by brick.

Man, that's excellent! 200 articles is a serious amount, and if all the articles are topicaly related I can assure you that you'll eventually rank.

You have a great advantage if you have experience and extensive knowledge in the niche. You can provide unique insights and as you mentioned, go deeper into the topic and provide a lot of value to the readers. That's something I can't currently do...

I'm a stupid idiot that doesn't have any knowledge about anything other than knowing little SEO. I was a kingpin drug lord wanna be surfing on darknet and looking for a quick buck.

When I stopped with all the illegal shit I realized that I'm so god damn dumb and that I don't know shit. I'm not knowledgeable in any field nor am I particularly bright.

It's very refreshing that your primary motive is to provide quality and not just obtaining monetary gains. That's unique by itself and is something that I'm sure the readers will appreciate since it's rare.

Going back to construction is though but you did your best to grow the blog as much as you could with the time you had.

I'm curious how is your blog doing in terms of traffic? And if you don't mind me asking is the niche competitive and how do you monetize the articles?

 

[Halch]

Man, that's excellent! 200 articles is a serious amount, and if all the articles are topicaly related I can assure you that you'll eventually rank.

You have a great advantage if you have experience and extensive knowledge in the niche. You can provide unique insights and as you mentioned, go deeper into the topic and provide a lot of value to the readers. That's something I can't currently do...

I'm a stupid idiot that doesn't have any knowledge about anything other than knowing little SEO. I was a kingpin drug lord wanna be surfing on darknet and looking for a quick buck.

When I stopped with all the illegal shit I realized that I'm so god damn dumb and that I don't know shit. I'm not knowledgeable in any field nor am I particularly bright.

It's very refreshing that your primary motive is to provide quality and not just obtaining monetary gains. That's unique by itself and is something that I'm sure the readers will appreciate since it's rare.

Going back to construction is though but you did your best to grow the blog as much as you could with the time you had.

I'm curious how is your blog doing in terms of traffic? And if you don't mind me asking is the niche competitive and how do you monetize the articles?

It's a lot of articles, all except 7 are over 1300 words atm. I've been writing all time non-stop for 2 months, only breaks are for playing with the kids when they need attention.

Also, never downplay your own experiences. They make you yourself. Let's say you want to make a general life blog at some point, let us say you become a father for the sake of example, you could start writing from that point of angle and validate yourself to the readers.

I mean the general knowledge is always the same. You can generally write that "kids need warmth and attention", but when you put your own experience in that like "as a young person I was little astray, but I learned that kids need..." it becomes unique and lets the readers know you and validates the knowledge through your experience as a human.

I don't want to sound like a life coach lol. I might be bullshitting here as I pretty much write this from my own arse and experiences, but you know how it is.

So find yourself and your experiences valuable, most of the time it will turn into something valuable if you know how to use it. That's how I try to work my blog. I write down some facts and start going through my imaginary trip about how it would be to actually do something. Go through my memories and try to paint a real scene of how to build or fix something.

The problem with the guides is that they say "drill a hole in the wall for the anchoring" and anyone who does it often would say "check if there's pipes or electric cables before that mofo".

My site is only 2 months old, I stopped social media traffic on it and just seeing what organic google search will bring in. So far there are something like 0-1 a day, there was an odd day with 17 visitors as well.

I'm planning on waiting for some keywords to start ranking and after that, I'll exploit everyone who is weaker than me and find the keywords they rank well for lol. No mercy.

 

[Sophia9856]

surely i will bookmarked this

 

[ISTB]

Incredible work. Keep it up, very motivating !

 

[Julianf10]

Hello everyone, and welcome to my journey!

About Me

Like it says in the title, as of today, I'm starting a new life. No more bullshiting, no more whining, no excuses.

I'm going to make it now, or I never will. Period!

Today I quit the job I was working for the last year and a half. It was tough work, construction work.

Broke my back every day carrying adhesives and cement bags, freezing in the winter, and cooking in the summer heat.

6 months ago, I told my boss that I had enough and that I will quit in exactly 6 months, and that's what I did.

He's a good guy that treated me well, but I could not take it anymore. I knew that the only way I could succeed is to do IM full time.

So, I saved some money for a solid office. It's a nice place and I got a huge discount on it. I saved enough money to support myself for about a year.

What Kind of IM Bussines am I Currently Doing

I'm currently focused on an Amazon affiliate site that started growing in traffic in December last year. It is the only successful affiliate site I started when I first got into IM, and funnily enough, the one I spent the least time on. I started 4 other sites along with this one, but they didn't turn out to be successful since I made a ton of rookie mistakes.

This is the screenshot of the growth in organic clicks for the site:

View attachment 164765

As you can see, it is steadily growing and is currently receiving around 50 average pageviews a day.

Here are some stats for the site:

• Total Number of Articles Published: 29 (14 real keyword targeted articles, and the rest are just filler articles that are worthless)
• Age: 10 months - The domain was registered in April last year and is in the Google index for the same amount of time.
• Niche: Will not specify. It is an evergreen niche with a ton of potential for growth since it's huge.
• Earnings: December 2020 = $11.78, January 2021 = $12.05, February 1-26 2021 = $12.31
• Links: Built some last year, a few months after I registered the domain. GSC shows 63 total external links.
• Pageviews: 1,729 in the last 30 days.
• Geo: 76.82% United States, 7.70% United Kingdom, 4.95% Canada, and 2.54% Australia.

I also have an indexing issue with this site that was not present before as all the articles were indexed almost instantly. It happened when I published the last article a month ago. It wouldn't index and I got the Discovered - Currently not indexed issue. It's indexed on Bing and actually received some organic clicks from there, but no matter what I did it wouldn't index in google. There is nothing I can do anymore, so I only hope this problem won't occur with the articles published in the future.

What I plan to do with this site and some goals I'd like to achieve:

• Publish at least 200 articles till the end of the year. Got 252 keyword ideas from Ahrefs Trial. It's a mix of info and buyer keywords with about 75% buyer and 25% info keywords.
• Get to at least $150 a month consistently with Amazon till the end of the year. (The amount needed to have my basic expenses covered)

I will write all the content myself. I'm not a particularly talented writer and I'm not exactly knowledgeable enough to write articles in my niche. I'll have to do a looooot of research and that will for sure take a huge chunk of my workdays.

My first goal as a content writer is to get to a consistent routine of publishing 1 article a day. Until then I will do my absolute best to write and learn as fast as I can and develop as a writer.

I'm actually pretty good at keyword research and I consider it to be a crucial part of a successful site. I'm focused on building a lot of topical relevancy and I have structured my site in silos. There are 3 main silos I'm targeting and each of those 3 have additional 10+ sub silos and those sometimes have additional sub silos as well. I found a lot of low competition keywords that I will target first, and when I publish a substantial amount of articles in each silo I will move to some medium and high competition articles.

What Am I Trying To Achieve With This Journey

I don't have a set goal in terms of monthly income. I would like to flip the site in the future and invest in some surgeries.

I'll most likely start a few more sites during this journey and will try to write the content for multiple sites when I get better at it (or outsource it if the earnings get high enough).

But that's not the focus of this journey. It's not about this site or other sites. It's about persistence, hard work, and discipline. Showing to myself that I'm not a pathetic loser that everyone always thought I was.

I'm removing all distractions. Social media, gone. Stupid friends that drag me down, gone. Video games, TV shows, Movies, all gone!

I have nothing to stop me now! All the things that are problematic are behind me, I have no excuses left!

I will update this journey daily, and I'm now promising to share every detail of every workday that I go through with you guys. This thread is my responsibility, I hope it will push me to work even harder since I don't want to disappoint my blackhatters. I also hope it will motivate some of you guys to work hard as well and hopefully we can share some success stories in this thread.

This journey is inspired by @Kikerinka and his wonderful journey thread. Because I saw how he and other users have benefited from his journey thread, I started this one, hoping I can be at least 50% consistent and helpful as he is.

I'm starting the journey on Monday, March 1st, 2021, and will work until I get enough money to get my surgeries done (will not specify the amount needed). After that, I will continue with this journey and try to scale things to a whole new level, but that's a bit too distant now, so let's stick with where we are now, and what can we do at this moment.

Please do not hesitate to ask if you got any questions. Will be happy to answer them.

Good luck mate

 

[GoldenTouch]

Mar. 25, 2021 | Day 25

Productivity:

Wrote and published 1 amazon buyer article of 3173 words. Finished it a bit sooner than I expected, so I did the research and picked the products for tomorrow's article.

surely i will bookmarked this

Don't forget to take action as well, mate! Reading journeys can give you motivation and knowledge, but only your own journey can bring you success.

Incredible work. Keep it up, very motivating !

Thank you man, will do!

Good luck mate

Thanks, mate!