[Journey] Building a Large Authority Site by 2024

[wolfman1]

Thanks for the tip! I'm not sure this website would work with as a members site but I will look into different alternatives. I definitely need a pop-up for my email signups.

Which one have you seen work the best? A pop-up that shows after a few moments when they land or an exit pop-up? Gonna have to split test a lot of things to learn what works and what doesn't.

It really depends if you’re allowed to run pop ups alongside your current paid ads setup.

I can’t remember the specific details, but some companies that let you run their paid ads on your website, may prohibit the use of popups.

The plug-ins I’ve tried in the past, that seems to work best … appear as a thin banner across the top (header) of your site - a sort of announcement banner … and when a visitor clicks it intentionally, it opens a modal window above the page.

Ask for their email address only as this will massively improve conversion rate. Also useful if you can validate their email is real, right inside the modal also, to stop people using disposable or fake emails.

Personally, I hate the timed popup idea. I never subscribe and just feel annoyed because timed popups always seem to open just when I’m reading something important. Haha

In my opinion … the perfect popup would, only when a visitor loses interest in your content, and starts mindlessly scrolling.

So - it’s not really about how far down the page they’ve scrolled, but rather … how fast they are scrolling.

If they are skim reading and scrolling super fast, then I would like to introduce a pattern interrupt, and forcefully show them a popup.

Using a headline like “Woah, slow down partner!” or “Hey! Not so fast!” …

Those type of hard hitting popups that interrupt their behaviour work really well if you can address their top pain point instantly.

Unfortunately I’m not really sure if the scroll speed/distance trigger feature is found in popup programs of late. I know the scroll % distance is … but not so much the distance vs speed.

Suffice to say - your main goal should be to rotate a header announcement and split test different pain points to find out which one gets the best click through rates.

And that’s ultimately the best thing about pop ups … you can heavily split test ideas, to find out what will appeal to your audience, and then you can make a product that specifically addresses their needs.

 

[Pharex ID]

When you say "large authority site", do you mean a site that covers lots of different topics in a niche or a site that just have an insane amount of contents???

 

[Bring On Top]

good luck for the next journey

 

[John Willusa]

I believe it will be a potential journey .
You mean you will promote/build many niches/products on a site bro ?
Have you any update on your journey : content quantity , traffic and income ?
Is it growing well ?
BTW , try your best and best of luck on this journey bro .

 

[Mr. Blackhat]

Small update

I have now had 4 days in a row with $5+, let's see if I can get to $10/day in a couple of months. Visitors seem to be steady just above 400/day.

Started writing articles myself, just with a little help of AI to speed the process up a bit. We'll see how they perform but so far they seem to be doing alright.

I believe it will be a potential journey .
You mean you will promote/build many niches/products on a site bro ?
Have you any update on your journey : content quantity , traffic and income ?
Is it growing well ?
BTW , try your best and best of luck on this journey bro .

When you say "large authority site", do you mean a site that covers lots of different topics in a niche or a site that just have an insane amount of contents???

Originally, I wanted to build a site with a lot of content, but I soon realized it's not that easy. The site is going to be bigger than regular niche sites but not as big as Techcrunch or something like that. Should have worded the title differently but it's ok.

The site currently has 265 articles, working on getting it to 280 in July but we'll see how many articles I can publish. Still have not found any good writer so decided to write the majority myself for now.

I think I have 5 different categories within the main niche but one category is outperforming the others by a lot.

 

[John Willusa]

Small update

I have now had 4 days in a row with $5+, let's see if I can get to $10/day in a couple of months. Visitors seem to be steady just above 400/day.

Started writing articles myself, just with a little help of AI to speed the process up a bit. We'll see how they perform but so far they seem to be doing alright.



Originally, I wanted to build a site with a lot of content, but I soon realized it's not that easy. The site is going to be bigger than regular niche sites but not as big as Techcrunch or something like that. Should have worded the title differently but it's ok.

The site currently has 265 articles, working on getting it to 280 in July but we'll see how many articles I can publish. Still have not found any good writer so decided to write the majority myself for now.

I think I have 5 different categories within the main niche but one category is outperforming the others by a lot.

Thank you for the information .
Good luck to you bro .

 

[banto123]

Thank you for your detailed answer. How do you cope with algorithm updates that affect your site?
I have worked on other sites that had some initial success, but after reaching certain milestones, such as 10,000 views per month, they started to plateau or decline. This was very discouraging for me.
Since I do this in my spare time, I can’t post many articles every month. It took me a long time, maybe a year, to get from 0 to 10,000 views. But during that year, I followed the same strategy and posted articles consistently. After the downturn, I kept posting articles for a while, but the traffic didn’t bounce back or increase. I have read many stories from other people on the forum, and many of them said that once a website is hit or penalized by algorithm updates, it’s hard to recover. They suggested creating a new website instead.
But do I really have to start over? That’s very frustrating for me. My goal is to get 50,000 or even 100,000 views per month or more. But I can’t get past 10,000, and most of the advice I get is about going from 0 to 10,000 again (which might take another year)… I feel like I will never achieve monthly visits of 50,000 or 100,000, because I’m stuck at 10,000. I became a failure.
Right now, your site’s traffic chart looks amazing. It’s steadily growing and trending upward. It’s very stable and hopeful, which is great. I’m very envious of that.

Hi I am no expert but I have had my fair share of bruises from Google algo. Those advising to start a new website are using old strategies that worked way back in 2014. What I have noticed recently is that if you continue posting even after an algo slap and vigorous cover all loops that could have caused the Google slap, you will surely recover in the next update, this might some time take as long as a year. The key thing is to find out what algo slapped you and make corrections as you continue adding more content. In the recent past most algo issues have been related to EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust) signals. Make sure you cover all bases of EEAT and of course produce quality content and you will recover. Another thing you can do is to buy a domain in your niche with a few backlinks and redirect your slapped website there but you must clean up your act by making corrections otherwise the algorithm slap will follow you there.

 

[Matta28]

Small update

I have now had 4 days in a row with $5+, let's see if I can get to $10/day in a couple of months. Visitors seem to be steady just above 400/day.

Started writing articles myself, just with a little help of AI to speed the process up a bit. We'll see how they perform but so far they seem to be doing alright.



Originally, I wanted to build a site with a lot of content, but I soon realized it's not that easy. The site is going to be bigger than regular niche sites but not as big as Techcrunch or something like that. Should have worded the title differently but it's ok.

The site currently has 265 articles, working on getting it to 280 in July but we'll see how many articles I can publish. Still have not found any good writer so decided to write the majority myself for now.

I think I have 5 different categories within the main niche but one category is outperforming the others by a lot.

Seems good, I bet you can achieve it!

 

[Mr. Blackhat]

Seems like a lot of volatility in search lately. A few days ago I reached record high traffic of just over 520 organic visitors. Yesterday the impressions and clicks dropped to 258, that's about a 50% drop in traffic over night.

The weird thing is that more articles than ever are ranking #1. Maybe it's just a fluke, or Google is working on an update and the traffic will bounce around for a while. We'll have to wait and see what happens.

Anyone else experiencing this?

 

[jeremycate]

Websites are a though business model. There's always something that has the potential to screw you over, commission fees getting cut, Google algorithm, some spammer destroying your site, etc. I'm actually terrified that my sites will get hit as well, I've just been lucky so far.

The reason I'm building this website to sell is that I know I won't be able to personally grow the site to 100k+ visitors per month. To consistently do this you would need a marketing team, unless you get lucky and get in at the right place and the right time. (I know, spam blogs, PAAs, etc can do this but it will cost a whole lot more to setup properly.)

Building websites to 10k or 20k visitors is not very hard though, and it's my belief that we have to work on bettering the monetization. Don't get me wrong, I'm still working on getting the monthly visits up, but I'm most excited about my RPM increasing right now. 10k visitors with $10 RPM is $100, getting to $20 RPM is easier than getting to 20k visitors. Besides, there are other options like affiliate, digital products, e-commerce and so on that you could try to increase that number.

Most people who make substantial money online does not have just 1 website, they have 20-50 and a team behind them.

How many posts do you have and when did you last update any of them? While you keep working on keyword research for new articles, some other player has found your previous keywords and is now competing with you in the SERPs. Maybe you could search all your old keywords and see if some articles (especially the ones that used to give you a lot of traffic) can be improved upon and updated. Google loves fresh content.

Yes, I think one possible reason for the changes in the traffic curve is the frequency and quality of article publications. These factors can influence how fast and how much the traffic grows.

A desirable curve is an exponential curve, where the traffic increases rapidly over time. For example, it may take 15 months to reach 50,000 monthly traffic from zero, but only one month to reach 100,000 from 50,000, and another month to reach 300,000. The income earned in the 16th month may be more than the total income of the first 15 months. This is a transformation from 0 to 1.

I think, If we cannot achieve this, we are only earning "hard-earned money" from our traffic. Only with exponential change can we earn the "real money" in the digital world, the premium money. I'm stuck at 10,000 traffic and only earning hard-earned money. Of course, I hope you succeed and earn real money.

However, the returns from traffic are not as good as they used to be.

In 2018, I started a website that had 3,000 monthly traffic and could earn $1,000 per month.

In 2019, I built another website that had 10,000 monthly traffic and could earn $1,500 per month.

These were not even the one of most profitable niches, such as finance.

Last year, I started a website that had 10,000 monthly traffic and could only earn $100 per month. I invested over $3,000 in it, which means it may take three years to break even.

Now it is also necessary to consider the proportion of commercial product articles, which has led to lower returns than before. You are experimenting with e-books and other methods to increase your income, and I will keep following your progress.

 

[jeremycate]

Hi I am no expert but I have had my fair share of bruises from Google algo. Those advising to start a new website are using old strategies that worked way back in 2014. What I have noticed recently is that if you continue posting even after an algo slap and vigorous cover all loops that could have caused the Google slap, you will surely recover in the next update, this might some time take as long as a year. The key thing is to find out what algo slapped you and make corrections as you continue adding more content. In the recent past most algo issues have been related to EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust) signals. Make sure you cover all bases of EEAT and of course produce quality content and you will recover. Another thing you can do is to buy a domain in your niche with a few backlinks and redirect your slapped website there but you must clean up your act by making corrections otherwise the algorithm slap will follow you there.

Thank you for sharing your insights.

I think that the most difficult part is not knowing where we went wrong and how to improve. For instance, a product review website that hires professional experts and focuses on user experience. However, in the last two years, this type of website has suffered a lot from Google’s algorithm changes. Even though they keep investing and adding high-quality articles, their traffic keeps dropping.

I read a thread where someone tried to add many AI-generated articles to recover their traffic, but they eventually announced that it didn’t work.

Sometimes, I feel like we are walking in the dark without any guidance. It is indeed important for us to stay alert and adaptable.

 

[Ryleydigitals786]

Let's hope for the best!
Amazing, wish you Good luck!

 

[naszapasza]

Seems like a lot of volatility in search lately. A few days ago I reached record high traffic of just over 520 organic visitors. Yesterday the impressions and clicks dropped to 258, that's about a 50% drop in traffic over night.

The weird thing is that more articles than ever are ranking #1. Maybe it's just a fluke, or Google is working on an update and the traffic will bounce around for a while. We'll have to wait and see what happens.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Did you check if it wasn't because of "Discovery" feature in GSC. 50% is a lot. Maybe just spend few minutes in GSC and check what caused the drop. Did your average ranking dropped as well? Maybe it was just one article..

 

[Mr. Blackhat]

Did you check if it wasn't because of "Discovery" feature in GSC. 50% is a lot. Maybe just spend few minutes in GSC and check what caused the drop. Did your average ranking dropped as well? Maybe it was just one article..

Thanks, didn't even think about checking GSC for individual articles. I have not been featured on discover.

My top 10 articles seem to all have drastically dropped in both impressions and clicks yesterday. However, most of them have improved in average position according to GSC. This seems weird, shouldn't there be more clicks, not less?

Will have to get a closer look later to see what's really going on. Maybe Google is pulling my pants down and serving ads or some new snippet or something in the top of the SERP. I'll give it a few days to see what happens before I do anything to try and improve.

 

[naszapasza]

Thanks, didn't even think about checking GSC for individual articles. I have not been featured on discover.

My top 10 articles seem to all have drastically dropped in both impressions and clicks yesterday. However, most of them have improved in average position according to GSC. This seems weird, shouldn't there be more clicks, not less?

Will have to get a closer look later to see what's really going on. Maybe Google is pulling my pants down and serving ads or some new snippet or something in the top of the SERP. I'll give it a few days to see what happens before I do anything to try and improve.

Impressions down, clicks down and AVG up may also mean that google decreased the number of keywords served for those articles. Statisticaly, the more keywords you participate in, the lower global AVG position (I mean the number is bigger and we are lower in SERPs, ). In order to investigate that, you may check for how many KW each articles showed up in GSC in the past vs today. Globally you may not be able to check that because GSC shows only first 1000. Anyway, lets just hope it will soon improve.

 

[Mr. Blackhat]

Impressions down, clicks down and AVG up may also mean that google decreased the number of keywords served for those articles. Statisticaly, the more keywords you participate in, the lower global AVG position (I mean the number is bigger and we are lower in SERPs, ). In order to investigate that, you may check for how many KW each articles showed up in GSC in the past vs today. Globally you may not be able to check that because GSC shows only first 1000. Anyway, lets just hope it will soon improve.

I just had the time to investigate this in more detail. It seems that my top traffic articles have dropped in the total amount of keywords they rank for, not by much but still. I did find something strange though. One of my top 10 performing pages can not be found on Google at all, and there are only 60-something results for that keyword. GSC says the page is indexed and getting hits but I can't find it. Anyways, I requested a new crawl for that page and a few others, let's hope it corrects itself soon.

I also double-checked to see there were no other signs of a penalty, and everything seems fine. The crawl budget is even increasing, so should only be a temporary dip.

Looking at my overall traffic and earnings for July, I'm still up a good bit from June, so I'm not too worried. Visitors and impressions are slowly increasing again, let's see what happens in a week when it's time for the July update.

 

[Mr. Blackhat]

Seeing as I have 1-2k visitors every month to affiliate posts, and my Amazon earnings are very low, I'm looking into improving my ctr. I know for a fact that some competitors are earning $100+ per month from Amazon.

What's the best converting template for an Amazon affiliate post? Tried searching but not even the so-called gurus have anything about this topic. I know I need a table up top for each comparison post, and maybe an "In a hurry?" type of CTA for the best x lists. But there has to be someone who has done a lot of A/B testing to find out the best click through rate? Would love to see some affiliate site that is doing really well while still not being an authority site.

 

[cidon]

Stat looks nice. Good luck

 

[naszapasza]

I just had the time to investigate this in more detail. It seems that my top traffic articles have dropped in the total amount of keywords they rank for, not by much but still. I did find something strange though. One of my top 10 performing pages can not be found on Google at all, and there are only 60-something results for that keyword. GSC says the page is indexed and getting hits but I can't find it. Anyways, I requested a new crawl for that page and a few others, let's hope it corrects itself soon.

I also double-checked to see there were no other signs of a penalty, and everything seems fine. The crawl budget is even increasing, so should only be a temporary dip.

Looking at my overall traffic and earnings for July, I'm still up a good bit from June, so I'm not too worried. Visitors and impressions are slowly increasing again, let's see what happens in a week when it's time for the July update.

Perhaps this is due to high volatility that is taking place right now in serps. Some say it is unofficial update rolling in. I heard on youtube people saying serps changing even few times a day for their pages.

 

[Mr. Blackhat]

Perhaps this is due to high volatility that is taking place right now in serps. Some say it is unofficial update rolling in. I heard on youtube people saying serps changing even few times a day for their pages.

Yeah that's just crazy. Let's just hope it calms down and nothing bad happens haha. How's your site doing?