My Biggest Journal Yet: Going 10x on SEO

[MrDearSir]

I warmed up the traffic with copy and emails rather than just linking to an offer.

Right! I totally forgot about email marketing, mate. Instead of linking to products or offers, you can get their email and warm them up then blast them with offers.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Alright, a quick round-up of the last week or so. There's been a couple of changes going on.

Starting with the bad news - things have been going great with the girl. That's bad news because she's still on furlough from her work and I've still not had a hugely productive week though I'm slowly starting to get back on track now with the last two days at the desk. It'll settle down and it'll get me to be more productive in my time at the desk so I can get away from it more.

The real bad news is I lost a roughly $10k/month income today. Wasn't relating to this project or even SEO but that stings a little. I'm far from broke but it's a good reminder that I need to keep grinding and keep pushing for some diversity.

So the good news:

Sites 3 and 4 are killing it. Traffic is up almost day by day highs and the recent content push hasn't even begun to hit the SERPs yet. As long as we have no major changes from Google they should keep growing and the content is still going up daily.

The YouTube channels are going well, site 4 even had a sale from the channel already which is a great start. Pinterest and parasite traffic is also still growing and I'm looking at pushing both of these harder now.

I've decided to just finish site 4 myself for now rather than trying to find a writer to support it. The only handling site 3 has enough on their plate and I can probably knock the rest of these articles out in two weeks or so.

The income from both sites has been growing and we've had a few spikes of $100+ days between the two of them. I'm going to set aside some time this month to improve the funnels a bit more but for now, I just want to focus on pushing out the content.

I think what I'm going to do after that is to let writers handle the parasite content and just redo the site 1 content myself. I've been working on the site 4 redesign and it's showing some very slow signs of improvement so maybe I'll get a writer handling the site content there.

I wanted to spend more time looking at buying and flipping websites but that 10k/month hit might have shaken me a little in the short term and I'm probably getting a better ROI building sites myself for now.

Published and Spent

The spent is a little short since I pay my current main writer in batches but that'll reflect later this week once they hand in some work. Most of it is for video work at the moment and I don't really track how many videos I've been publishing.

There's also a bunch of content backlogged at the moment which will probably go up over the next week or so.

Site 3: 4,400
Site 4: 13,500
Parasites: 21,500
Spent: $55

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Going to keep it brief today. Getting back to the desk properly and really drilling into the content production.

Updates and news since Wednesday:

• The new YouTube channel is off to a great start. At this rate, it'll outgrow the first channel for sure and I want to try and put some time into more promotion for it this week. I pushed a bunch of traffic myself which seemed to get a good retention rate and YT then really spiked my organic views over the weekend. Good deal.
• I found some great new sub-niches for sites 3, 4 and 5. Opens up a new category for each site and I'm starting to push out content for these categories to see how they do.
• Improved the inter-linking a bit on site 4. Nabbed a guest post for one of the big pillar posts as well.
• Pinterest traffic has been growing well and I've made a few changes to speed up the pin production as I put out content. I don't want to automate Pinterest through publically known tools in case Pinterest decides to take issue with them but I might try to put some time aside to automating the process more. I've worked with Pinterest automation in the past but I'd need some specific changes for this one. Site 1 makes sales through Pinterest traffic fairly often so I really should push it more.

There's a whole bunch of things I want to do at the moment. From working on the funnels for sites 3 and 4 to really revamping sites 1 and 5. I've decided to keep my focus on piling out the content for now. Content production is probably the biggest thing that moves the needle (in content marketing - who'd have thought?) and that $10k/month spanking has me on edge.

There's a little less published for site 3 lately because the VA has been focusing more on video production lately. I'm absolutely fine with this as both channels have been growing well. Both channels have brought in sales so (assuming no algo updates hit me) I'll see a return on them eventually and I see it as a potential trust factor for the search traffic. I have a writer on the wings I might get to take up some of the slack for this site over the next week or so.

Content and costs:

Site 3: 3,500
Site 4: 7,400
Site 5: 2,000
Parasites:: 12,000
Spent: $174

 

[Piss]

All the best - and good luck with writing that amount of articles. If you manage to hit that stride where everything kind of connects, and the words flow for hours throughout, it can be quite fun.

 

[ANewBeginning]

Going to keep it brief today. Getting back to the desk properly and really drilling into the content production.

Updates and news since Wednesday:

• The new YouTube channel is off to a great start. At this rate, it'll outgrow the first channel for sure and I want to try and put some time into more promotion for it this week. I pushed a bunch of traffic myself which seemed to get a good retention rate and YT then really spiked my organic views over the weekend. Good deal.
• I found some great new sub-niches for sites 3, 4 and 5. Opens up a new category for each site and I'm starting to push out content for these categories to see how they do.
• Improved the inter-linking a bit on site 4. Nabbed a guest post for one of the big pillar posts as well.
• Pinterest traffic has been growing well and I've made a few changes to speed up the pin production as I put out content. I don't want to automate Pinterest through publically known tools in case Pinterest decides to take issue with them but I might try to put some time aside to automating the process more. I've worked with Pinterest automation in the past but I'd need some specific changes for this one. Site 1 makes sales through Pinterest traffic fairly often so I really should push it more.

There's a whole bunch of things I want to do at the moment. From working on the funnels for sites 3 and 4 to really revamping sites 1 and 5. I've decided to keep my focus on piling out the content for now. Content production is probably the biggest thing that moves the needle (in content marketing - who'd have thought?) and that $10k/month spanking has me on edge.

There's a little less published for site 3 lately because the VA has been focusing more on video production lately. I'm absolutely fine with this as both channels have been growing well. Both channels have brought in sales so (assuming no algo updates hit me) I'll see a return on them eventually and I see it as a potential trust factor for the search traffic. I have a writer on the wings I might get to take up some of the slack for this site over the next week or so.

Content and costs:

Site 3: 3,500
Site 4: 7,400
Site 5: 2,000
Parasites:: 12,000
Spent: $174

That's a lot of content for only $174, great work!

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Making some fairly big changes this week.

I've been writing a lot of the content for site 4 myself. Traffic and revenue have grown and (assuming no major algo updates) I'll make a return on the time I'm putting in. It is frustrating to be working on something so limited but at least I know the content going up is good.

Spent some time setting up a spreadsheet to try and make sense of site metrics and work out which projects are worth my time. Looking at the # of posts on the site vs views and RPM. If a site has a high RPM but lower views - that's fine. If it has high views but low RPM that's also fine. If it took a lot of content to get low views and RPM... that's a dud project.

Starting batches of sites I want to get them to roughly 120 posts and leave them for 6 months+ and use these metrics to assess where I should spend more time. A data-driven way of picking projects and it gives me an ending point for each project. For sites that do well, I'll continue to post content but at least this way I know the time/money is well spent.

By these metrics, sites 1 and 2 suck. Not surprising since the traffic is low for the post count (poor content quality). RPM for site 2 is $31 which surprises me with that crappy funnel that could be improved but the traffic is dead low for the 120 posts it has. I don't plan to touch it at the moment.

Site 4 is the best performer from the set. RPM is only $22 at the moment but that's the rough first draft funnel. That can go much higher and the traffic is high enough to make it worthwhile.

Site 3 made it to $17.50 RPM. Again, with a shitty funnel and the traffic is starting to add up so it's making a few hundred bucks.

Site 5 made it to $50+ RPM. Again could push that funnel higher but very little of this is from the organic traffic on the site. I'll be pushing content harder to this one trying to get to that 120 posts and hopefully the organic traffic picks up for this one.

So this gives me a clear roadmap on where to focus. I actually got some work done this week too and we're making some moves.

Work This Week

First up. We have a new site. I did start a site 6 already but quickly dropped the niche so we're calling this one site 6. Some big changes with this project:

• We're using an older domain with some juicy links in the niche. Not planning to do any further link building for this one but I'm curious to see how this goes. I read a case study on a juicy domain with some simple rewritten content dominating a niche quickly.
• It's a niche I know nothing about and I'm not going to feel the urge to rewrite content (I assume). It should be a niche for writers to handle fairly easily themselves but I guess I'll see.
• We should have the site up with 120~ posts in a couple of weeks. I've already got the writers lined up so we're just doing a big content push quickly and then I'll see how it's doing in 6 months.
• The plan for this site probably isn't digital (which I always prefer). I might try out display ads, Amazon reviews or maybe drop shipping. I'll see how it goes.

Also finished the revamp of site 5. I've been slowly pushing some new content to it and now planning to make a bigger push for both site and parasite content. The RPM is too good to say no to.

Site 3 growth has been a little slower. We've been making a bigger push on the YouTube channels at the moment with that VA focusing more on the videos so less time available for writing content. No biggy.

Content and Expenses

I have a bit of a backlog of content to get published properly. Most of site 4 has been my own content which is time-consuming but worthwhile.

Site 3: 3,000
Site 4: 13,000
Site 5: 1,000
Parasites: 10,000

The expenses are high. Bit of a backlog saved up + the cost of pushing site 6 out so quickly. There's actually another chunk for one of the YouTube channels and maybe some improvements to the products so that's maybe another $1k for this week.

Spent: $10,854 (yikes).

An expensive week but site 6 serves a couple of tests (juicy domains and trusting writers with some niches) and I've ordered a bunch of content for sites 3, 5 and both YouTube channels.

All the best - and good luck with writing that amount of articles. If you manage to hit that stride where everything kind of connects, and the words flow for hours throughout, it can be quite fun.

Cheers. It depends. Sometimes I enjoy writing but most of the time I'm frustrated about the lack of scaling. I prefer working on the CRM or tasks which involve the overall scaling.,

That's a lot of content for only $174, great work!

Hah, I wish. A chunk of the content I've been doing myself and some gets rolled into a previous/future expense depending on when I'm paying the writer.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Have a couple of updates for the week. The content was a little slower this week as I took a few days off and spent some time working on the conversion side of things.

I was listening to the Work Energy book. It's by one of the guys from Income School and there's a chapter on focusing on the thing which is bringing in 90% of your results. For this, it's producing content. Without doubt. Funnily enough, while I reached this chapter I was working on the YouTube channels, publishing Pinterest pins and working on the conversion funnel for one of the sites.

The funnels are arguably worth doing. Improving the conversion of a site is a multiplier of all the traffic we do get and that extra revenue can be put back into more content/links but it's harder to justify spending time on YouTube or Pinterest. They do bring in sales and the YouTube channels have their own revenue on top of that but they don't compare directly to just publishing written articles.

On the other hand, I see having some social media presence and traffic as some ring-fencing for the organic traffic but that's a tough metric to judge. Most of the YouTube work is outsourced so all I'm really doing is double checking it and hitting publish. Pinterest is taking a little more work since I'm writing titles and alt tags for the pins but it might not be worth it.

I've also been expanding the spreadsheet I use to judge websites. It's got a scoring system which is basically the results vs the cost and it's helping to remove bias and emotion from my decision making.

• Site 1: Might have performed better if I'd made a better job of quality control with the content. As it stands, one of the poorest performers. Not planning to return to it at the moment.
• Site 2: Complete flop. It's a competitive niche with mediocre content. It picks up some sales but cost way too much for the return it gets.
• Site 3: Total cost so far was about $4.5k and I'd probably get around $6k if I flipped it today + the profit it made so far. Not the best project I've ever worked on but there's plenty of room to grow in this niche, it's got a lot of content still growing in the SERPS, plenty of potential conversion work to improve the earnings and now it's almost entirely handled by a VA. I'm happy with this one but wouldn't put a lot of time into it at the moment.
• Site 4: Good performer. Around $7k sunk into it but that'll break even soon. Strong growth for this one so I'm going to finish up the content myself and roll its earnings into other sites.
• Site 5: The odd one. Most of the traffic is from parasites and it struggles in the organic results but the RPM is easily one of the highest. With probably less than $1k invested in it so far, it's easily in the green. Definitely the next focus for a content push.
• Site 6: No revenue yet as it's just started. Probably one of the most expensive in the batch but a good experiment in investing in a domain with juicy links and a niche I'd have no interest in writing myself.

The current plan is to build sites to 100-120 posts, giving them a few months and then comparing them to the other sites. By this setup sites 1 and 2 can be ignored, site 3 is good enough to be handled by the VA for now, I'll push some more content to site 4 and maybe some to site 5 which warrants its own writer and site 6 is a fresh one which should be finished in a couple of weeks.

Going to take a long weekend this coming bank holiday but I'll make up for it in productivity beforehand. I want to make a solid push on sites 4 and 5 and get on to something new in a couple of weeks.

Published and Spent:

Site 3: 1,500 words
Site 4: 4,500 words
Parasites: 17,000 words

No expenses this week. Published a couple of videos but haven't been invoiced for them yet.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Alright, going to draw this journal to a close. Most of the sites from this project are basically done and I'm probably going to swap things up going forward. I'll wrap up how things finished and we'll probably do a new journal for something new.

Wrapping Up

I've made a real push over the last fortnight or so to finish things up.

• Published roughly 40,000 words between the sites.
• Added a new product and a rough funnel to sell it.
• Worked a bunch with inter-linking and got the onsite time to 5+ minutes on several sites.
• Pushed the YouTube channels a little harder. Ads adding a new revenue stream plus the traffic coming in is generating more and more sales on the site.

The last of the content (roughly 200,000 words) is dripping out over the next couple of weeks between the sites and then I'll be able to slow down the publishing schedule.

End Results

Sites like 1 and 2 underperformed. I pushed the scaling too quickly there and the content quality suffered. They convert and will break even down the line or I might just flip them in a while to someone who can fix them up.

The others are profitable and still growing. Going by a pretty modest 25x value the project is well into the green and the cash flow will catch up soon enough.

More than the money, I've learned a lot about building sites and the strategies which seem to work. I'm rolling all the income from these sites into a new project and taking what I've learned so far into that project.

Moving Forward With Lessons Learned

Assuming I don't get completely wiped out by a Google update (how much would that suck right as I finish?) I'm rolling everything from this project into further scaling.

At the end of everything, my current strategy is to push a site to 100(ish) posts and leave it to sit a few months. Ideally with writers who know the niche well enough to provide some real value to the reader.

I compare RPM and traffic vs the cost of content and links and scale the winners from there. If not actively pushing the site, I want to at least be publishing 2-4 articles a month just to keep it active.

For the sites that perform I intend to continue running social media for them. Partly as some proof to Google that it's not an overnight affiliate site and partly because that social traffic does slowly build up.

The rest of my time I'm focusing on either CRO for the sites with underperforming RPM or writing content for a new site. Given the budget from this project, I'll be able to launch at least one decent quality site a month while spending some of the time writing content myself and outsourcing everything else.

Focusing on one site at a time allows me to get it (mostly) finished. Keeping it active with a few posts here is easy enough but dragging out the initial content grind for months on end was a mistake. Motivation to deal with a niche for that long is tough if you don't care about the niche.

I'm going to avoid spreading myself too thin between working on content for multiple sites, settling for bad writers just to get content out and I'm hoping to get more into buying existing and underperforming sites.

Already Scaling

I've made a couple of offers on existing sites and picked up a new one for May. Spent about $2k to buy a site in a niche I'd never have expected. It has beefy links but wasn't chasing the proper money keywords so I'll throw another $2-3k into it while writing some content myself and then move on to the next one.

Thanks to anyone who read, contributed or asked questions. I'm probably going to take a break for a while and finish getting everything finished up here this month. Hopefully, the update doesn't change things too much and we'll maybe start a journal on improving and/or flipping existing sites which will be more interesting to follow.

Cheers folks.

 

[ANewBeginning]

Alright, going to draw this journal to a close. Most of the sites from this project are basically done and I'm probably going to swap things up going forward. I'll wrap up how things finished and we'll probably do a new journal for something new.

Wrapping Up

I've made a real push over the last fortnight or so to finish things up.

• Published roughly 40,000 words between the sites.
• Added a new product and a rough funnel to sell it.
• Worked a bunch with inter-linking and got the onsite time to 5+ minutes on several sites.
• Pushed the YouTube channels a little harder. Ads adding a new revenue stream plus the traffic coming in is generating more and more sales on the site.

The last of the content (roughly 200,000 words) is dripping out over the next couple of weeks between the sites and then I'll be able to slow down the publishing schedule.

End Results

Sites like 1 and 2 underperformed. I pushed the scaling too quickly there and the content quality suffered. They convert and will break even down the line or I might just flip them in a while to someone who can fix them up.

The others are profitable and still growing. Going by a pretty modest 25x value the project is well into the green and the cash flow will catch up soon enough.

More than the money, I've learned a lot about building sites and the strategies which seem to work. I'm rolling all the income from these sites into a new project and taking what I've learned so far into that project.

Moving Forward With Lessons Learned

Assuming I don't get completely wiped out by a Google update (how much would that suck right as I finish?) I'm rolling everything from this project into further scaling.

At the end of everything, my current strategy is to push a site to 100(ish) posts and leave it to sit a few months. Ideally with writers who know the niche well enough to provide some real value to the reader.

I compare RPM and traffic vs the cost of content and links and scale the winners from there. If not actively pushing the site, I want to at least be publishing 2-4 articles a month just to keep it active.

For the sites that perform I intend to continue running social media for them. Partly as some proof to Google that it's not an overnight affiliate site and partly because that social traffic does slowly build up.

The rest of my time I'm focusing on either CRO for the sites with underperforming RPM or writing content for a new site. Given the budget from this project, I'll be able to launch at least one decent quality site a month while spending some of the time writing content myself and outsourcing everything else.

Focusing on one site at a time allows me to get it (mostly) finished. Keeping it active with a few posts here is easy enough but dragging out the initial content grind for months on end was a mistake. Motivation to deal with a niche for that long is tough if you don't care about the niche.

I'm going to avoid spreading myself too thin between working on content for multiple sites, settling for bad writers just to get content out and I'm hoping to get more into buying existing and underperforming sites.

Already Scaling

I've made a couple of offers on existing sites and picked up a new one for May. Spent about $2k to buy a site in a niche I'd never have expected. It has beefy links but wasn't chasing the proper money keywords so I'll throw another $2-3k into it while writing some content myself and then move on to the next one.

Thanks to anyone who read, contributed or asked questions. I'm probably going to take a break for a while and finish getting everything finished up here this month. Hopefully, the update doesn't change things too much and we'll maybe start a journal on improving and/or flipping existing sites which will be more interesting to follow.

Cheers folks.

Way to go mate!!! Congrats on your journey!

What will the next journey be about?

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Way to go mate!!! Congrats on your journey!

What will the next journey be about?

Cheers.

Still working that one out. I've just bought two sites and I think that's something I want to get more into.

 

[yogib34r]

Great journey! Would it be possible for you to do a final summary of each of the sites in a similar way to how you introduced them, but now including the amount spent, the income etc like a before and after

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Great journey! Would it be possible for you to do a final summary of each of the sites in a similar way to how you introduced them, but now including the amount spent, the income etc like a before and after

Honestly, since my original plan was never to flip any of these sites (and I'm not that bright) I didn't keep great records.

As rough numbers:

Site 1: Roughly $3.5k invested. Currently earning $100/month. It's one of the flops which I might get around to fixing at some point. I actually like the niche but I don't blame Google for not ranking the site with the quality of the content.

Site 2: Roughly $6.5k invested. The other flop and is maybe getting $100/month. To be honest with this niche I could improve that with some proper CRO but the SEO competition is too high to bother. Might just slap on some display ads and wait for it to break even.

Site 3: Roughly $4.3k currently making $2-300/month and growing. This site has slower growth and in serious need of CRO but it's building up monthly recurring subscriptions and the traffic is still growing. I've no doubt this one will keep growing and break $1k/month this year.

Site 4: Roughly $6.5k in. Earns about $5,000/month. I've more work I want to do on the CRO here too but I'd rather spend my time on growing the portfolio at the moment.

Site 5: Roughly $1k in. Earns about $500/month.

YouTube itself is also pushing around $100/day in revenue (mostly from ads) which surprises me. Originally I thought this would only be a bit of support for the organic rankings but there you have it.

Some wins, some losses (though they're not as bad as they look given the average multiples) and a whole lot of learning in the process. In the last couple of weeks, I've refined some of my processes by looking at what did work and I've started to scale my content production back up with writers. Should have two new sites at that 'wait and see' stage within 2-3 weeks.

 

[dlyhai]

Your sites 4 does very well, it is adsense? and how may articles on it?

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Your sites 4 does very well, it is adsense? and how may articles on it?

About 100 or so at the moment. There's another couple of dozen keywords lined up to keep activity up on the site but it's a small niche so I'm about done with it.

Partly Adsense. I want to try to shift a couple of projects to a decent display network but I don't normally use ads so I need to figure out which ones I can get on and all that jazz. If nothing else I should at least slap something on sites 1 and 2 to go alongside the affiliate sales.

 

[dlyhai]

About 100 or so at the moment. There's another couple of dozen keywords lined up to keep activity up on the site but it's a small niche so I'm about done with it.

Partly Adsense. I want to try to shift a couple of projects to a decent display network but I don't normally use ads so I need to figure out which ones I can get on and all that jazz. If nothing else I should at least slap something on sites 1 and 2 to go alongside the affiliate sales.

Nice, 100 articles generate so much money is very well. It is mainly for CPS? what network do you use for this site?