Building Something Legitimate Journey

Hey Guys

So this is my Journey Thread to making a large scale legitimate blog style site that makes a good amount of income.

Background
I am currently a web developer / designer that works freelance from home doing various design projects making ends meat but not nearly enough as i would like. 3 Year's ago i ran a pretty busy website that focused on hot girls, tech and fashion for guys. I did pretty good getting several connections with playboy models and got into a good content network with Maxim and Playboy and a few dozen other reputable sites. Long story short i was not able to monetize it as good as i should of been able to and the website name was awkward and not easy to market so i hit the a ceiling and slowly lost interest in the site and got involved in a tech startup thinking i could make more money with that.

Project / Journey
One of the big issues with my last site was focusing on to many category when i should of picked a niche. This time i picked one that has a lot of money and potential for ad revenue and a good amount of amazon products. My goal for this project is to create a great brand that will bring in a large CPM rate and lots of amazon affiliate revenue in the process.

Website Goals : The design of this site is very critical to its success so iv modeled it after a very popular men's gadget site that brings in thousands in revenue every month. My hope is that the familiar design will help drive traffic and gain trust. My goal is to get to 100k visitors within the first 6 month's

Social Media Goals: This site needs a strong social media presence in order to attract small time advertisers that will help me get by for the first 6 months. I will be utilizing old contacts from my past site to start gaining traction on social media. My goal is to hit 50k on Facebook within the next 3 month's using some campaigns and promoted post's from other popular pages. Id like to get twitter to around 10-20k but i am not as experienced on this.

Revenue Goals: Early on my goal is to get $200-300 from small companies in the niche wanting to advertise combined with amazon affiliate money. By 6 month's i hope to get enough traffic to start setting a $6-8 CPM and bring in closer to $1000 in revenue monthly in 6 months

SEO Goal: My SEO skills are pretty weak but i plan to keep it very white hat and start link trading with smaller blogs in the same niche then have small companies we write about include follow links into their press section. Would love some good advice on easy white hat methods to get more back links then doing it this way .

Twitter Update: My goal is to make this legitimate and not buy followers but getting past your initial few thousand twitter followers is really difficult. I noticed the industry i picked is very vein and will gladly retweet you if you have a lot of followers so to start i added 30k fake followers to my account. Within the last 3 day's iv gotten several retweets and shoutouts by a lot of brands in the niche and several inquiries about future advertisement. Hopefully i can match my 30k fake for 10k real sooner than i expected.

Journey Paused for 2 month's Back at it.
Due to increasing work load as a freelancer i had not been able to mess with this project for 2 month's. I plan to get started on it again.

Twitter Update #2
The twitter continues to trickle in follows and i have gotten 2 interested advertisers for the site through twitter. They ad offers were mainly free products plus $30-$50 for the month. I declined and said i would contact them once traffic increases.
Facebook Update #1
Iv used a facebook like jacking program that has been installed on the site to convert visitors over to fans. Because of the type of site it is this will hardly be noticeable. I have done about 80 likes so far which is not impressive but trying to take it slow as to stay off the radar.

Mailing List Update
I found a creative little way to build up a mailing list AND get user preferences within the niche ( example favorite color , product types etc ) . Iv gotten 80 people signed up for the mailing list already with about 15 minutes of work. I plan to duplicate this to get 400-600 on the next run through. I need to figure a way to get double opt-in's so the list stays solid. I will eventually download the list and advertise directly to these people on facebook for amazon products.

Website Update
The website is about 90% finished all i have left is to figure out ad placements and to incorporate a sub page style for longer page articles. The current setup resembles a very popular site . I had to spend a lot of time modifying it to get the best conversion rates down for amazon while keeping traffic active on the site.