Authority Site Journey to $10k/month

Hey everyone.

This thread will be documenting my journey to $10,000/month (hopefully) building an authority site. This thread will hopefully keep my accountable to do my daily/weekly/monthly goals, as well as share the knowledge I gain.

About Me
---
I’m 19 years old and in college for business/marketing. However, my ultimate goal is to be able to work for myself., either through my own projects or as a freelance consultant. I’ve built a few successful businesses online (the best of which was making me $6k/month) but those have since dried up. The reason I want to build an authority site is to build a consistent, scalable revenue stream that can also be outsourced when it starts making money.

Authority Site Info
---
I won’t reveal the URL (obviously) but will say it is in the health/beauty niche. The site/brand is general enough that I can expand and add new categories as I see fit. To start, however, I am focusing on a very niche keyword section. For example, an outdoors based authority site could be called NatureHunter, but chooses to focus on mountain biking for their first few months. It is much easier to grow if you pick a very specific niche part of an existing market, then slowly expand as you see fit.

Monetization
---
I’m using Amazon Affiliate and Adsense. I had an Amazon Affiliate site before and really like the simplicity of the platform. I have never monetized a site with Adsense but based on what I’ve read from authority site gurus (mainly Chris Lee of RankXL) say that Adsense is too good to pass up. Plus, I can do both without an detriment to my site. In the future maybe I'll look into making my own products.

Content Strategy
---
I’m mainly planning on doing product review posts for keywords I find (using Google Keyword Planner and KWFinder), as well as ‘informational posts’ that are built to be shareable, linkable content to help build authority.

Traffic Strategy
---
I have never done ‘real’ SEO before, i.e. outreach, link building, etc. as all of my previous projects have mainly leveraged social networks and message boards for traffic. However, in order to build consistent, scalable revenue, nothing beats SEO. Plus I 've started enjoying finding high traffic, low competition keywords. It’s kind of like a game.

I’m planning on staying as whitehat as possible, meaning no PBN links or anything of the sort. All link building will be done through outreach and building relationships within my niche.

Current plan:

• Post 3 pieces of new content a week
• Start building relationships through email outreach
• Continue researching and finding good keywords to rank for within my niche

I’m also planning on starting a blog to keep track of larger updates (monthly, most likely) but that’s for later. For now I’ll just be using this thread.

Wish me luck!

I have been building the site and posted my first piece of content yesterday. The post was a product review roundup of a solid keyword I found (~20k searches/month, #1 SERP has a difficulty rank of 8 with KWFinder).
The post contained 5 different companies products so I sent all of the companies I linked to an email. The email is as follows…

--

Subject line: We love you guys!!
Body:
Hey [company name] team,

We recently referenced your product, the [product name]l, in our blog post [blog post title]. We absolutely love the product and the [company name] brand and think more people should know about you guys.
Keep up the great work!

Best,
[my name]

--

Already I have gotten 3 responses, 2 of which have been fairly good as far as building a relationship (they asked about the blog and what my plans were). The other response just said thanks for the link lol.

I think the probability of getting links from them is low, since none of them have blogs or any sort of media/PR pages. However establishing this relationship early could prove to be profitable down the line. If they see we are growing they may be interested in advertising opportunities.

Another thing I realized is that product review posts aren’t exactly linkable for other bloggers. So, my next goal is to create informational-type content that is much more share and backlink friendly. I already have a document of potential contacts, I just need to get the content up.

So current plan is to write first informational post, then start outreach for it.

Wait, you can use affiliate and Adsense marketing on the same site. Do the respective companies like that?

Looking forward to your journey, bro.

Instead of asking for a link from these companies, you can try to sell their products on your website. I think you'd be getting a much bigger cut than from Amazon.

good luck in your journey

Fluxics said:

Wait, you can use affiliate and Adsense marketing on the same site. Do the respective companies like that?

Looking forward to your journey, bro.

Click to expand...

Maybe, maybe not, but if it's your site you can do whatever you want with it

Thanks!

masta2133 said:

Instead of asking for a link from these companies, you can try to sell their products on your website. I think you'd be getting a much bigger cut than from Amazon.

good luck in your journey

Click to expand...

I thought of doing that, a few of the suppliers I emailed had affiliate programs on their website. I might consider it later down the line when I have built up traffic and see what products are doing best for me.

--

Today, just published a new piece of content and sent 3 outreach emails to sites that have a 'best resources' blog post, asking them if they'd be interested in including our site.

Slow, steady work so far. Looked through competitor's backlinks and found a lot of them were using PBNs. Hopefully will be able to outrank them naturally, or when they get penalized. Which seems inevitable since they did not a good job at all of covering their tracks...

Good luck mate!

Interesting journey to follow.
Good luck mate

Following your journey mate. Hope this will be helpful for my Amazon affiliate research (I'm planning to start an affiliate site but I don't have enough money, I'm researching the things while saving money so that I can start working on the site once I get enough money to start). Good luck!

Blackboltz said:

Good luck mate!

Click to expand...

destinywakes said:

Interesting journey to follow.
Good luck mate

Click to expand...

LandCruiserMan said:

Following your journey mate. Hope this will be helpful for my Amazon affiliate research (I'm planning to start an affiliate site but I don't have enough money, I'm researching the things while saving money so that I can start working on the site once I get enough money to start). Good luck!

Click to expand...

Thanks to all of you for the encouragement

--

Realizing now that my best bet to get high quality backlinks is to just do guestposting. Sent out about 5 emails, will come back tomorrow with some good replies hopefully.

Following the journey. Hopefully i can learn from your success/mistakes! I'm thinking of starting with Amazon affiliates aswell and wanted to ask a quick question: where did you buy hosting and domain?

Keep it up man! Following your journey. It's been 6 month since i launched my first authority niche site as well.