[Journey] A Software Engineer's Journey towards building an Authority website

[Zniper]

Mainly inspired by @Kikerinka 's and @Bloooop 's journey threads, I've decided to create this thread where I will be journaling my way towards building my first truly authoritative website. First, some background about me and my skillset.

Personal background:

• I'm a 28 years old software engineer with ~10 years of practical experience specialized in backend programming and cloud computing;
• Even though I haven't done content writing since 2015 - and, even then, I didn't do it seriously or held high standards of quality for the articles written for IM - my English is (IMO) way above average, especially for a non-native English speaking person;
• Based in Eastern Europe (no, not Ukraine);
• I did amateur level IM back in 2010 - 2015, on and off, but nothing major - mainly CPA/PPD (had a couple of websites at some point and drove traffic to them from SEO and YT);
• I work a 9-5 job from home. The biggest chunk of time I will spend working on this project will be during weekends, plus before/after my day job; even during, when the workload permits;
• Even though I earn a hefty paycheck every month, I'm motivated by the desire to escape the 9-5 rat race to make this work. You can think of this project as the biggest candidate to fulfill my life-long dream of financial independence.

Project context, history & technicalities:

• When the pandemic started, back in early 2020, I got the idea that I could leverage my analytical mind together with my software development skills to create a platform superior to WP as a basis for creating and launching websites with out-of-the-box on-page SEO (think in terms of near perfect CWV scores - more on this later);
• Worked for a whole year (2020 - 2021) designing and developing the platform that will be used to create websites (80% done at this point, nearly feature-complete);
• Tech stack for the platform:
  • CMS - React + Sanity.io
  • Public website - React + Gatsby (basically a statically built website)
  • Hosting - Azure
  • Resource provisioning - Terraform
• The platform implementation is 80% done at this point. However, due to other things in my life taking higher priority, I haven't worked on it for the past ~6 months. That's about to change though.
• I've got a design made by a digital artist friend for the authority website I plan to build and launch after the platform project is done. I'm generally happy with it, but about 20% of it is still prone to change.
• A few days ago I resumed working on this. This time, after reading @Kikerinka 's journey thread front to back, I was inspired to do KW research before finishing the technical implementation. Therefore, I've started a master spreadsheet, broken down the niche I've chosen into topics and subtopics, and I'm currently using the SEMRush free trial together with answerthepublic.com to compile the keywords list I plan to target.
• A few words about the niche: it's a highly competitive one, and broad as well. Even with quality content and well done KW research, it might be too broad for a one-man-show kind of project. Only time will tell, but even if that's the case, I've got several options I can pivot to if this turns out to be the case.
• Last year I bought 3 domain namesfor this project:
  • (1) Highly brandable name .com. I will use this one for the authority website. (BTW, GoDaddy values it at $1339 if I were to auction the domain name alone)
  • (2) Subniche of main niche, also brandable, .co.uk. I plan to defer to this one for a second project, if the initial one turns out unrealistic to build the authority website with due to high competitivity.
  • (3) Same niche as first one, but .co.uk. Will probably use this one for a future project with AI generated content, after the platform project matures and is stable enough (aka as few bugs as possible).

Why develop my own platform instead of going for WordPress?

• Biggest reason: Core Web Vitals. I know that some people think that CWV and on-page SEO in general are mostly a checklist to go through and, in general, people give way too much importance to the technical part of SEO (and I do generally agree with this - even with the limited SEO experience I have I do know that quality content is kind for an authority website). However, I'm a perfectionist, and developing a platform that provides better on-page SEO which I can reuse ad infinitum for all future money websites seemed like a good idea overall.
• For near-perfect CWV scores I needed a CMS that's (1) modular and extensible and (2) compatible with a static website. To understand this point you need to know the difference between a dynamically generated website (think WordPress) and a statically generated one. For dynamic websites, the data on any given page is provided on the fly, at the time of the request (when the user visits the page, in plain English), either from a CDN or from a database. In the base of databases, that adds latency > higher response times > lower CWV scores & lower UX. With static websites, each page is pre-generated at build/deploy time, thus the latency is as close to 1ms as it gets. Paired with a good CDN, static websites are blazing fast and provide near instant speeds (at least not limited by the technologies themselves).
• A good opportunity to learn front-end development.
• A major project to showcase on my software engineering portfolio. Will explain later, but the last substage of the technical implementation stage is to have a platform that can be reused for all future websites with minimum of development time needed. Which means that the code repository will eventually be turned into a templated one, which I will eventually make public. Yes, that means also for the (tech-savvy) BHW users to use as well.
• Minimal time-to-market for future websites, while still benefitting from out-of-the-box on-page SEO.
• Last, but not least: PHP is cancer. I'll cut my hands before I'll write a single line of PHP in this life.

Roadmap:

• [site] Finish KW research and compile a list of 3k KWs. Once that's done, I will prune it and extract 1k article titles containing the targeted KW. The last step is to research top 10 articles for each KW and compile a list of H2 headings for each article, which I will use as inspiration when doing the content writing part.
• [platform] Finish the technical implementation. Features left to be implemented
  • Email capture / subscription module
  • Comments module
  • Contact form module
  • GAnalytics integration
  • Various bugfixes
• [site] CSS styling using the Figma design made by my friend
• [site] Write content for the auxiliary pages of the website (about, contact, disclaimers, etc)
• [site] Write first batch of 50 articles. Will use the KWs previously researched and will write for the less competitive ones first, to get some traction. The article length will be between 1000-2000 words, variating with user intent.
• [site] Second batch of content. Probably another 100 articles.
• [site] Third batch, also 100. This time, 10-20% of articles will be affiliate marketing sales pages. Yes, I will do some affiliate marketing to test the waters. If it turns out ads are more performant conversion-wise, so be it.
• [site] Write 1-3 digital products (ebooks) which I plan to sell once I get some traffic going.
• ...
• [site] Eventually have - from what I gather from the KW research made so far and from my competitors' websites - around 1000 money articles to establish authority in at least 2-3 subniches of this big niche.

Monetization:

1. Ads. After seeing what CPMs networks like AdThrive and Mediavine can get you with quality traffic, this is will be the main monetization target for this project.
2. Affiliate Marketing (not necessarily CB, since 99% of their products are shit and I want to keep this project "clean" for the most part). This was the initial plan (last year), but now I want to be more of an experiment once I start getting some traffic.
3. Digital products. Similar to @Kikerinka 's e-books.

General notes:

• The niche I picked is a broad one and my knowledge of it is rather limited. It would take years of study to be truly proficient in it. However, it's something I'm passionate about and which I've been researching for the past few years. However, I don't see this as an impediment, on the contrary - by having to do research for (most) of the articles I'm going to write for this website, I'll also learn a lot about it, which will translate into added benefits in other aspects of my life.
• During the first 2 content pushes I'll write 3-5 articles for every subtopic of the main 2-3 topics of this niche, plus 10 for each major one (or ones I feel like are less competitive). That means ~5 x ~20 = ~100 articles. The rest up to 150 will be in the subtopics I feel like I'll get most return for my effort.
• Once the platform behind this website matures, I'll turn it into a template which I will use to launch 2-3 other "experimental" websites:
  • (1) A website for the software consultancy company I've founded this year. It sounds more than it is, really, since I'm a one-man-army and this "company" will remain without employees for the foreseeable future. However, I want to have a branded website that I can showcase to attract future clients for my software development endeavours.
  • (2) Full Affiliate Marketing website (like a reviews website)
  • (3) AI generated content website (probably also monetized with for Affiliate marketing, we'll see)
• After the first 2-3 websites have been launched with this platform and it is truly mature, I plan to hire content writers to be able to scale further my future projects.

The content release plan described above is, of course, subject to change, as this is the first time I tackle a project of this gravity. My gut is telling me that, pragmatically speaking, I'm biting more than I can chew. However, I will give it a shot and fall back to one of the subniches if the broad one is too hard to do everything by myself and be competitive/have results. Plus, I'm especially happy with the domain I've got for this site, as I can pivot to any subniche and it will still be relevant/brandable.

Given my limited time, I will update this journey once per week. I'll also try to answer any questions you guys might have; after all, the other reason I'm keeping this "journal" is to help others as well as learn more myself from you guys (and girts - one can hope this is not a male exclusive forum, haha).

----

6/6/2022 Update:
- KW research for10/44 subtopics. Total subtopics researched: 26/44
- Started journey thread.

The rest of the week is pretty much packed for me, with the weekend being planned for as well., in the offline world. However, I hope to be able to shoot 10 more subtopics down this week, here and there. We'll see.

Once I finish compiling the full list of KWs, I'm going to consolidate it with some other techniques than what I'm using now (answerthepublic.com & SEMRush), like "stealing" low competition KWs my competitors rank for easily, plus some other methods I cannot mention because they would reveal too much about the niche.

Anyway, this is enough for now. Over and out.

 

[TRUSTTHEPROCESS]

I’m also a 28 year old software engineer working a 9/5. All my free time i have im trying to work on projects to escape this 9/5. Sometimes you fail, but you have to keep trying and one day it will be worth it!

I’m currently working on an AI content creator that rephrases and checks for plagerism. if you need any help in that part just let me know

I believe you can do this, good luck!!

 

[GainTheImpossible]

Good luck to you. I'm sure that you will succeed with the right amount of ambition.

 

[jimbo-jump]

I've gone down the perfectionist path before and don't recommend it. Use the 80/20 rule and focus your effort and time on the 20% that will be most profitable. Think of how much content you could have right now if you weren't recreating WordPress.

 

[abdelhake]

I've gone down the perfectionist path before and don't recommend it. Use the 80/20 rule and focus your effort and time on the 20% that will be most profitable. Think of how much content you could have right now if you weren't recreating WordPress.

A lot of people are trying to do this, and I really don't why , is WordPress missing something? I don't think so... I can achieve maximum speed with WordPress, I can get 100-100 in the performance score, the speed is also not a ranking factore, also Core Web Vitals is not that picture, I have a site whose pages are all affected and not affected by the last update.

I don't think there is a better platform than WordPress if you want to work on SEO

 

[Xyox]

I've gone down the perfectionist path before and don't recommend it. Use the 80/20 rule and focus your effort and time on the 20% that will be most profitable. Think of how much content you could have right now if you weren't recreating WordPress.

I agree. You can get perfect scores with WordPress as well.

This is results for my WordPress website. Running on $40/year hosting and using a custom theme written from scratch. Now in my opinion even if I could shave off another 100ms or whatever by building my own platform, it wouldn't be worth it in terms of time spent and it probably wouldn't make any difference in terms of user experience or SEO.

 

[abdelhake]

You're going to crash the SERP, man.
Go ahead and try to focus on your website and don't reinvent the wheel.

I'm not an expert, but I've worked on large sites before. Here are some tips that might help you

- Try to extract keywords and cluster them (there are some tools that do this that, will shorten a lot of time)

- Try to prepare the structure and tree graph before starting the site

- Focus on 100 articles instead of 1000

Try to focus on 100 articles, and when you start ranking , you will see a lot of topics that you have to cover in GSC, it will be much easier to arrange quickly and have topical authority in those keywords.

- Make the structure of the site and make your site silos hard

When the site is big, it will be a bit messy, although you are doing a good job, so first try to chang your stucture from souft to hard silos , you can do it after get succed, but you will have a lot of internal 301redirecrion , which is not good .

- WordPress is good for large sites

There are some things that will take you months to do manually, you can do them with one click with a plugin in WordPress, internal linking for example, you can use an plugin that will do that automatically instead of doing that manually or programming a tool to do that.

(You can approach the Wikipedia style for internal linking, this style is very suitable for large sites)

good luck brother i am sure you will succeed, because with this number of articles it is impossible not to succeed if you do it right, I hope you will share with us the next updates

 

[blogmen]

I know an engineer has to engineer stuff, but you started a bit in the wrong direction. Building a new platform for a whole year is just so you can engineer something, it won't help with building the authority site, better use the time to write content.

Slapping a wp install with a simple free theme on day one and starting to write content is the best way to start.

You see, WordPress is fine, you can get it to run fast, even if it's not static, but that's not why everybody is using it, we use it cause of the plugin ecosystem, which is massive and with a new platform you'll have to recreate the plugins as well.

Having 100 speed score is not that important because when you'll monetize it with any ad network it'll turn from green to yellow no matter if it's static or dynamic and regardless of caching, it's just not worth it to squeeze the extra ms.

Some ppl here use headless wp with static frontend for super fast stuff if you're interested in that but that's usually for multiple autogenerated websites.

If you really need to engineer something while building the authority site maybe focus on a scraper + paraphraser that generates high quality content.

If not, then just write content, that's all you need mostly.

 

[Shaybib]

keywords and cluster them (there are some tools that

What tool cluster keywords?

 

[blogmen]

What tool cluster keywords?

A bunch of them around, cluster AI is popular but there's also free ones like cluster army.

 

[abdelhake]

A bunch of them around

I use https://keywordcupid.com And I'm happy with it, I know there are some other tools that might do a better job .

Also writerzen is doing a good job

 

[s4h1n1997]

I'm tryin to be a software engineer and you are running away I also will leave one day for sure. Good luck with your journey!

 

[Zniper]

I’m also a 28 year old software engineer working a 9/5. All my free time i have im trying to work on projects to escape this 9/5. Sometimes you fail, but you have to keep trying and one day it will be worth it!

I’m currently working on an AI content creator that rephrases and checks for plagerism. if you need any help in that part just let me know

I believe you can do this, good luck!!

Good luck on your path as well, sir! Indeed, the endless meetings get to you sooner or later, together with all the other BS of working in a corporate environment. But you can use that as motivational fuel to find a way out.

And I'll keep in mind the offer regarding AI content creation, I might even take you up on it. As a matter of fact, since I've written the OP I've read a very successful journey here of another developer here doing AI content writing. Certainly something I want to dab into after I get this website running and a first batch of content published.

Good luck to you. I'm sure that you will succeed with the right amount of ambition.

Thank you!

I've gone down the perfectionist path before and don't recommend it. Use the 80/20 rule and focus your effort and time on the 20% that will be most profitable. Think of how much content you could have right now if you weren't recreating WordPress.

You're most certainly right. I was even worse a few years back, perfectionism-wise. However, as stated in the original post, perfectionism is not the only reason I chose to do down this path. Developing a project of this gravity gives me inner satisfaction on top of everything, plus all the other reasons I enumerated. Plus, I can always switch out the CMS I developed for a headless WordPress with minimal code changes on the public website generator, although I'm very reluctant to do so because that means I'd have to get into PHP.

A lot of people are trying to do this, and I really don't why , is WordPress missing something? I don't think so... I can achieve maximum speed with WordPress, I can get 100-100 in the performance score, the speed is also not a ranking factore, also Core Web Vitals is not that picture, I have a site whose pages are all affected and not affected by the last update.

I don't think there is a better platform than WordPress if you want to work on SEO

Any platform can be good for SEO. Certainly, with a lot of tweaking plus a CDN (which I'm using anyway BTW, even though it's in front of a static website, just for that extra oomph), WordPress can achieve perfect CWV scores too. But I preferred to stay away from WP and leverage my existent skills (.NET, JS/TS, cloud computing) and have fun along the way instead of defaulting to having to learn PHP and WP.

This was a subjective decision above all else, being aware of the drawbacks of going down this path.

I agree. You can get perfect scores with WordPress as well.

This is results for my WordPress website. Running on $40/year hosting and using a custom theme written from scratch. Now in my opinion even if I could shave off another 100ms or whatever by building my own platform, it wouldn't be worth it in terms of time spent and it probably wouldn't make any difference in terms of user experience or SEO.

View attachment 213858
View attachment 213859

Awesome numbers! Can you please share the combination of WP plugins you're using to achieve these scores?

About the hosting, there's something I forgot to mention. The monthly cost for 5 websites (with potentially endless traffic, because they're just static files and the only bottleneck is the CDN) is around 1 euro. I know that $40/year isn't a lot either and the small amount money I'm saving yearly doesn't justify the path I chose - even though I'm not exactly reinventing the wheel either - it's still a minor advantage.

You're going to crash the SERP, man.
Go ahead and try to focus on your website and don't reinvent the wheel.

I'm not an expert, but I've worked on large sites before. Here are some tips that might help you

- Try to extract keywords and cluster them (there are some tools that do this that, will shorten a lot of time)

- Try to prepare the structure and tree graph before starting the site

- Focus on 100 articles instead of 1000

Try to focus on 100 articles, and when you start ranking , you will see a lot of topics that you have to cover in GSC, it will be much easier to arrange quickly and have topical authority in those keywords.

- Make the structure of the site and make your site silos hard

When the site is big, it will be a bit messy, although you are doing a good job, so first try to chang your stucture from souft to hard silos , you can do it after get succed, but you will have a lot of internal 301redirecrion , which is not good .

- WordPress is good for large sites

There are some things that will take you months to do manually, you can do them with one click with a plugin in WordPress, internal linking for example, you can use an plugin that will do that automatically instead of doing that manually or programming a tool to do that.

(You can approach the Wikipedia style for internal linking, this style is very suitable for large sites)

good luck brother i am sure you will succeed, because with this number of articles it is impossible not to succeed if you do it right, I hope you will share with us the next updates

Thank you for sharing these tips, sir.
- Yep, I'm basically done with KW research and got like 3k KWs with reasonable competitivity and traffic. The next step is to cluster them and draft the article titles (or subject, if you may). Once that's done as well, I'll plan the entire site content structure: categories, auxiliary pages, container pages, and so on.
- Indeed, now that I'm 95% done with KW research, I've got a clearer picture of what to write for first and how to realistically split my content pushes. And 100 articles in the fist one seems reasonable.
- If by silos you mean topical categories, yes, I plan to do that. However, can you please elaborate on hard vs soft silos? I think I've heard this terminology around the forum here and there, but I'm not sure I get it. To me, it makes sense to split the content logically, by niche topic/subtopic, and interlink pages where they make sense to be linked. Anything besides that sounds like overdoing it.

I know an engineer has to engineer stuff, but you started a bit in the wrong direction. Building a new platform for a whole year is just so you can engineer something, it won't help with building the authority site, better use the time to write content.

Slapping a wp install with a simple free theme on day one and starting to write content is the best way to start.

You see, WordPress is fine, you can get it to run fast, even if it's not static, but that's not why everybody is using it, we use it cause of the plugin ecosystem, which is massive and with a new platform you'll have to recreate the plugins as well.

Having 100 speed score is not that important because when you'll monetize it with any ad network it'll turn from green to yellow no matter if it's static or dynamic and regardless of caching, it's just not worth it to squeeze the extra ms.

Some ppl here use headless wp with static frontend for super fast stuff if you're interested in that but that's usually for multiple autogenerated websites.

If you really need to engineer something while building the authority site maybe focus on a scraper + paraphraser that generates high quality content.

If not, then just write content, that's all you need mostly.

Building a paraphraser is not something that sounds very tempting to me at the moment, no matter how much sense it would make to develop. And I do get your points, same as everybody else's; but working with WP is not something I would enjoy and I don't want to make this into something I'm not looking forward to work on when I start every day.

Plus, fun story. I showcased in an interview this project last year, while it was 60% done. I shared my screen and presented everything in 15 minutes tops (right after the technical discussion part of the interview) and it really made an impression upon the interviewer, because in 24h afterwards I got the contract with the exact rate I asked for in the beginning. Having something to work on that I'm passionate about really showed across to the interviewer and, even though I could have landed that contract without showcasing this project, I'm sure it contributed. This is an example of the kind of benefits something like this can have. Plus, it finally pushed me towards finally learning frontend development, which was something I had been postponing for years.

Could I have done the same project using WordPress, and faster? Certainly. But I wouldn't have done it with the same passion. And, if you ask me, work without passion is for robots.

I'm tryin to be a software engineer and you are running away I also will leave one day for sure. Good luck with your journey!

Best of luck to you as well! Devise a plan, take action and have fun along the way.

---

6/6/2022 Update:
- Finished topical KW research: 44/44 topics. Total KWs: ~3.000
- Did competitor research and got an extra ~1000 KWs. This is a list I'm particularly excited about because they are very low competition and most of them can be monetized with Affiliate Marketing products in this niche.

Next on the agenda:
- Consolidate the KWs into clusters
- Pick lowest competition 500 KWs draft article titles for them
- Plan website structure (categories, container pages, auxiliaries)

 

[Xyox]

Awesome numbers! Can you please share the combination of WP plugins you're using to achieve these scores?

I use LiteSpeed Web Server (used by the hosting i use) + LiteSpeed Cache plugin. Put together they've always worked very well for me.
I also use Cloudflare free just to cache static stuff.

 

[Kikerinka]

Hello mate, thanks a lot for the mention!

I know the engineering mindset well, and can understand the passion you felt while "trying to create a better WordPress" as someone nicely put it here .

This mindset can help you a lot on your way to your goal, but the key is to use it selectively, for example when working on data analysis, or KW research, or templates & processes for your work (that can save you a lot of time in the process, and help people you outsource writing to as well--if you ever decide to do so, of course).

For the most part you'll need the mindset of a manager (to keep going, dong the necessary repetitive tasks day after day, managing your own time well) and the one of the entrepreneur (being able to see the bigger picture, don't getting discouraged by lack of results in first 6-12 months, dreaming big).

I wish you all the best and hope you'll manage to benefit from all your strengths, and won't give up on this. Will follow for sure!

 

[welie]

Hey man, good luck with the journey.

I'm a software engineer too, albeit its core C++ so I know very little about the latest and greatest JS framework. I understand the adrenaline rush you get from creating something that's truly yours.

I don't want to demotivate you, and a lot of people in this thread have already commented on why a custom solution isn't they way forward. I have one more important point to add.
Imagine one or two years down the line you are making steady income from the site, and want to go ahead and sell it at a premium. You'll run into a lot of problems then because you can't really expect all the buyers to be familiar with react. This will definitely diminish your multiples.

My advice is to not mix two different ventures (creating something new + a content website). I'm not asking you to stop working on your CMS, that can still happen parallelly whenever you need some timeoff from the website (and believe me, you will need some days off to recover from the burnout). You can still commit to your github/lab, showcase it to interviewees/colleages.

One-man SEO game is already demanding enough and has enough traps to get suckered into, your are just adding one more to your list.

Again, my intention is not to demotivate you; I apologize if that's how this is coming across.