[CASE STUDY] Building an Authority Website Using 100% BHW Services

STATISTICS

30-Day Traffic: 75 (+4)
Yesterday's Traffic: 4
Bounce Rate: 68.00% (-1.01%)
Twitter Followers: 227 (+4)
Facebook Fans: 594 (+54)
External Backlinks: 15 (+4)
Citation Flow: 2
Trust Flow: 0
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #90 (-12)

Total Spent: $623.71
Total Earned: $0
Total Revenue: -$623.71

HANDS-ON

This Google dance is killing me. I just want to break through the wall of the eighth and ninth pages already.

I started today by creating a spreadsheet with all the links in the first four pages of search results for my main keyword that allowed comments and were still enabled. This took a little bit of time, but also netted me some good quality articles that could be spun for new, better articles on my site. This took a little bit of time, but gave me a good idea of what kind of accounts I would need to set up to make my mark on some of the pages ranked higher than me, so I turn I could slowly pole vault past them in rankings over time.

There were 21 links total that had commenting abilities, whether through Facebook, Disqus, or their own platform. I am planning on hitting a couple each day with a couple paragraphs of insightful words until I've got a comment with link on each one. Then I'll pass them in the rankings and leave them in my dust, dammit.

I have a ridiculously busy day ahead of me, so I wasn't going to do anything else on the site. I've got a couple review copies in the works for content, links, etc as well. I also received a review copy of some expired Tumblr blogs with PR and PA from mindmaster, which I will review here:

Mindmaster PM'ed me a couple weeks ago offering some expired Tumblr and Over-Blog blogs that had some PR and page authority attached to them. I obliged and provided any information he needed, and he emailed me the blogs within three days. He probably would have sent them even earlier, but lazy me took three days to provide my email address. He sent me a dozen Tumblr blogs with pageranks between one and three, and page authority of 27 to 36. I also received two Over-Blog accounts with pageranks of 3 and page authorities of 29 and 30.

I logged into one of the Tumblr blogs and it worked without a single problem. I spot-checked a couple more and they worked like a charm as well. I plan on taking this one Tumblr blog and converting it to work with my sub-niche, dropping the occasional link to my site, as well as links to other articles and images in this sub-niche. I will also be using one of the Open-Blog accounts for the same purpose as well.

Communication with him was quick and easy, and the email and report I received were very professional. He did an awesome job, especially since it was a free review. 10/10, would recommend his services again.

I also checked my AdSense boxes by using an incognito tab on my Chrome browser and turning off my ad blockers. They look awesome and are very unobtrusive. Now we are cooking with gas.

PLANS

Throughout the rest of the week, I'm going to put some more effort into social media, some time into posting comments manually, order a few more articles from various sellers here on BHW, and another pack of 16 short articles from NatashaNixon to reserve for guest posting on other websites. I will continue from there as I see fit as well utilizing other services and ideas.

STATISTICS

30-Day Traffic: 81 (+6)
Yesterday's Traffic: 6 (+2)
Bounce Rate: 69.14% (+1.14%)
Twitter Followers: 232 (+5)
Facebook Fans: 673 (+77)
External Backlinks: 15
Citation Flow: 2
Trust Flow: 0
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #90

Total Spent: $623.71
Total Earned: $0
Total Revenue: -$623.71

HANDS-ON

After spending several hours typing up the 4,000-word http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/blackhat-lounge/820134-sherbert-hoovers-ultimate-efficiency-guide-working-100-productivity-making.html, and looking ahead at another 6,000 words of typing in my day job today, I'm not doing anything today. Expect a detailed update tomorrow. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

Following the thread closely already i am reducing sizes of images on my site

I'm following too.

Hey,

Are you targeting just adsense. Why not throw in some amazon keywords in the mix?

Nice updates, nice to see process this is going to be epic.

oblivion19 said:

Hey,

Are you targeting just adsense. Why not throw in some amazon keywords in the mix?

Click to expand...

I'm currently using AdSense ad sections and Amazon in-text links. I think I'm going to change up how I show the Amazon links, and maybe put a tower bar in there somewhere as well.

STATISTICS

30-Day Traffic: 87 (+6)
Yesterday's Traffic: 6
Bounce Rate: 71.26% (+2.12%)
Twitter Followers: 232
Facebook Fans: 674 (+1)
External Backlinks: 15
Citation Flow: 2
Trust Flow: 0
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #78 (+12)

Total Spent: $807.46
Total Earned: $0
Total Revenue: -$807.46

HANDS-ON

I spent $78.75 to order another 16 articles from NatashaNixon. Once they arrive, six will be stretched out to post weekly as blurbs, and the remaining ten will be used for guest posts or long-ass comments where I see fit. I'm getting four articles each with four different keywords. I also contacted Eternal1912 to spin seven related articles for $105. I requested a 14-day turnaround time, but I have a strong feeling that I will get them earlier.

I noticed my Twitter following back ratio was dwindling, so I fired up that Javascript trick mentioned a couple weeks earlier and followed 150 related accounts. After this, I had a couple maintenance tasks I needed to do.

I didn't like how the home page had a white background for both the header text and the article excerpts. Here is a blurred out screenshot of what I'm talking about:

[REMOVED]

So I went in and moved the heading text to its own section and changed the background color to match the blue you see up at the very top, and then removed the separator. I liked how that looked much better.

This next part is going to sound ridiculously meticulous, but out of the six articles showing up for the recent articles, one of the title was only one line while the rest were two lines. This was causing the image for that article to be slightly higher than the rest alignment-wise. I went into that article and added a word, bringing it to two lines total. Perfect.

Then I went to Pinterest and confirmed my email, which I guess I had forgotten to do before. Then I converted it to a business account per Pinterest's suggestions. Then I confirmed the website link with another meta tag in the header. Then I followed about 50 accounts and liked nine things in order to ensure that my account didn't look like spam. Tomorrow I'll add some of my blurbs as another "board".

PLANS

Tomorrow I am going to follow more Twitter accounts and Pinterest accounts, add a board for the 16 current blurbs, another for the six product review pages, and write out three to five 100-300 word comment responses to some blog posts. Ones that require a Facebook comment or a Disqus comment I will be making a Hire A Freelancer thread offering $3 to anyone with an aged and active account on these sites who will simply post what I send them to the link I request.

Friday I will write out three to five more comments, re-do my Amazon links (I used the wrong Amazon associate account for the links, go figure, and do some research into making an Amazon Web Store page for the site as well. That link will go on the header as "Store". I'll also continue to follow more Twitter and Pinterest accounts.

Saturday I am going to look into making a list of Facebook groups that relate to my niche for posting things in. I will also work on building up the subreddit I created with links to 20-30 places, putting up a link to my own site every five or so. I'll also continue to follow more Twitter and Pinterest accounts.

Sunday I am going to follow more Pinterest and Twitter accounts and begin writing out a full-fledged guide that I am going to offer for an email subscription signup. The email form will be through Aweber, as I already have a subscription there ($49 a quarter). It's going to be on the sidebar of every non-homepage page. I am going to try and figure out a way to put it on the home page as well without it being obtrusive or obnoxious.

The guide is my big hands-on task for next week. That plus scheduling posts, gathering more images, and a couple other tasks. I'm trying to cap my time spent at an hour or two a day, noting that this hour or two is spent working on this project about 60% and multitasking with other things for the other 40%.

I won't add a link to This May Work again until I get the log updated.

Great update!
Tho you are already heading into an area where you spend quite a lot..so i am guessing this will be a long term project.

Your traffic hm...well I guess you have to give it time. Btw is that true traffic minus referal spam? or did u set up filters anyhow.

STATISTICS

30-Day Traffic: 89 (+2)
Yesterday's Traffic: 4 (-2)
Bounce Rate: 69.66% (-1.60%)
Twitter Followers: 238 (+6)
Facebook Fans: 674
External Backlinks: 15
Citation Flow: 2
Trust Flow: 0
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #80 (+2)

Total Spent: $807.46
Total Earned: $0
Total Revenue: -$807.46

HANDS-ON

The plan today: Follow more Twitter accounts and Pinterest accounts, add a board for the 16 current blurbs, another for the six product review pages, and write out three to five 100-300 word comment responses to some blog posts. Ones that require a Facebook comment or a Disqus comment I will be making a Hire A Freelancer thread offering $3 to anyone with an aged and active account on these sites who will simply post what I send them to the link I request.

Account following: My account is at around 1,329 following and 238 followers. My Who To Follow was being strange and showing me local stuff, so I went manual on some search terms and followed around 60 more accounts. Not that big of a deal. In Pinterest, I followed another 50 pinners, and for some reason it only took me to 49 yesterday, so now I'm following 99. Again, not a huge deal, but I don't want to push my luck with Pinterest because my sub-niche is perfect for that site.

I had the Pin It button installed on my computer in order to get the articles in there. I added a board for the Blurbs section and pinned all sixteen current blurbs there. One of them had already been pinned by someone in my niche. Awesome. Then I added a board for the product reviews and pinned all six current reviews there.

After this, I created a http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/hire-freelancer/820643-3-paypal-post-one-comment-your-aged-active-disqus-account.html#post8638786 in the Hire A Freelancer section looking for people with active Disqus accounts to post something via their profile for a cool $3 PayPal. In the meantime, I was going to write some comment responses by just spinning useful paragraphs from some of the articles. I wrote one around 150 words relating conversationally to the blog post, with a link to one of the product reviews and PM'ed it to the first person to message me with their Disqus information along with a link to the article. Within 45 minutes, the article was posted, and the member paid and iTrader'ed.

I'm going to save the remainder of some of the blog comment writing for when I have a backlog of a couple ready account suppliers for these Disqus comments.

REVIEWS

I received the report results from my review copy of seo_wpn's services (http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/seo-link-building/791852-70-off-happy-new-year-party-discount-complete-search-engine-optimization-solution-1000-sales-6.html). The report was well done and clear to read, albeit 80% of it was a banner for the service. It definitely could have been one small spreadsheet. The review came with the following:

5 High PR EDU backlinks
5 High PR profile backlinks (one of which happened to be an EDU)
5 high-PR bookmarks (from sites like Reddit, LiveJournal, etc)
3 Image Sharing links
3 Document Sharing lins
2 blog posts
2 Web 2.0 links

I spot-checked a couple of the links in each category and was overall pleased with the result. I did notice that the Reddit thread was removed automatically as it was posted to a subreddit that doesn't allow site links. Also, two of the EDU backlinks were to obscure Russian government websites. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

The two blog posts weren't directly linked, but I received a screenshot containing the post title, so I was easily about to Google the title and see the blog posts, and check the PR for myself of the sites. They both checked out.

Overall I'd give the service an 8/10. He provided what he said he would provide, but I'd shrink the spreadsheet advertising in the final report, and make sure that subreddit posts are to subreddits that stick. Thanks for the review!

PLANS

Tomorrow I will write out three to five more comments, re-do my Amazon links (I used the wrong Amazon associate account for the links, go figure) and do some research into making an Amazon Web Store page for the site as well. That link will go on the header as "Store". I'll also continue to follow more Twitter and Pinterest accounts.

Saturday I am going to look into making a list of Facebook groups that relate to my niche for posting things in. I will also work on building up the subreddit I created with links to 20-30 places, putting up a link to my own site every five or so. I'll also continue to follow more Twitter and Pinterest accounts.

Sunday I am going to follow more Pinterest and Twitter accounts and begin writing out a full-fledged guide that I am going to offer for an email subscription signup. The email form will be through Aweber, as I already have a subscription there ($49 a quarter). It's going to be on the sidebar of every non-homepage page. I am going to try and figure out a way to put it on the home page as well without it being obtrusive or obnoxious.

The guide is my big hands-on task for next week. That plus scheduling posts, gathering more images, and a couple other tasks. I'm trying to cap my time spent at an hour or two a day, noting that this hour or two is spent working on this project about 60% and multitasking with other things for the other 40%.

I won't add a link to This May Work again until I get the log updated.

A mid-day update:

I have five Amazon Associates accounts somehow. I got onto Amazon live chat and talked with Tricia, and she straightened the situation out and got the one account set up properly. Then I went into my account settings, added my authority site to my current Associates account, and checked the compliance section. Then I went in and validated my tax information, submitting whatever form was necessary electronically. It validated in fifteen seconds, no joke. Then I added my bank account for direct deposit, so I could get paid when the time came.

Since I was doing authority site related things, I went ahead and checked on the Pinterest account. Finally got two followers. I went ahead and joined the waitlist for Pinterest ads. I followed 101 more winners, bringing my total followings to 200. At this point, I realized that it was stupid to be following accounts that are in my niche in the hopes of a return follow, so I went to my only real competition site and followed 100 accounts that were following that person. I'll do another 100 tomorrow morning.

Then I got the bright idea to post a fake giveaway to Facebook and Twitter where all people had to do was comment on one of the articles. Interested to see if that brings me any traffic at all by morning. Then I decided to test a Facebook ad for website views. I set the parameters and changed up some of the demographic information, and set a budget of $5 a day for 28 days. It estimated me at 22 to 41 clicks per day. Fancy, I'll take it. I'm just experimenting with seeing how the site runs with at least a small amount of traffic going to it.

At this point I drove home from the office. When I got there, I had already accrued another three Pinterest followers from that run of 100 that I had done. Nice. My Facebook ad was also approved for the website. Tomorrow morning, back to Twitter and Pinterest followings and changing all the Amazon affiliate links in-text to the current Associates account. Still can't believe I did that.

Be careful with the fake giveaways given the fact that they are forbidden by Facebook's TOS which may hurt your page Good luck!

Sherbert Hoover said:

I'm currently using AdSense ad sections and Amazon in-text links. I think I'm going to change up how I show the Amazon links, and maybe put a tower bar in there somewhere as well.

Click to expand...

In my little experience, that wouldn't really work well. It's not a great idea to put amazon and adsense together. If you are doing that, either the keyword is not amazon targeted (and you won't get any sales on Amazon)or you are losing money on amazon by earning pennies on adsense. Also, the amazon banner ads suck anyways as they are not very targeted.

What you need are amazon targeted keywords. The guy you got your keywords done from Andres is pretty good for amazon targeted keywords. You could order a few amazon keywords from him and target them on your site. So, when you finally start ranking keywords, you can evaluate whether amazon or adsense is monetizing better. And then steer the direction of your site to what is performing better.

Just a curiosity question, what is the number of impressions for you website on 30 day period for January in Google Webmaster Tools.

STATISTICS

30-Day Traffic: 108 (+19)
Yesterday's Traffic: 19 (+15)
Bounce Rate: 67.59% (-2.07%)
Twitter Followers: 252 (+14)
Facebook Fans: 675 (+1)
Pinterest Followers: 11 (+9)
External Backlinks: 15
Citation Flow: 12 (+10)
Trust Flow: 0
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #80

Total Spent: $810.46
Total Earned: $0.01
Total Revenue: -$810.45

NOTES

The Pinterest concept of following those who follow the people related to your niche versus the niche people themselves is paying off well. Also, citation flow exploded overnight. And somehow, even though I'm doing Facebook advertising for site visitors, the bounce rate has decreased with an increase in traffic. Cool. After reading through oblivion19's post and doing some digging of my own as well, I'm not adding a store link or sidebar ad from Amazon, but I will be fixing the in-text Amazon links, as they are unobtrusive and shouldn't affect AdSense income capacity. Also, made a penny in AdSense, big baller right here. Also, as per Eternal's advice above, I removed the giveaway posts. And dgusic, my impressions for January were 675.

HANDS-ON

Continued expansion of social media to start. I followed 154 Twitter accounts who follow another account in my niche (154 was when they capped my followings for the day). Then I went to Pinterest, and since I didn't have any method of auto-following, I went to my competitor's account again and followed another 204 of their followers. The clicking took a couple minutes, and when I was done I already had two more followers. Cool stuff.

Then I went into the review pages on the website and changed the Amazon links to the accurate Amazon Associates account. Luckily, in any of the articles or blurbs, any mention of the products were linked to the review page, and not to the Amazon product itself, so it was only a matter of changing two links on each of the six pages.

I had several messages from my Disqus Hire a Freelancer thread, so I spent some time writing comments out and sending them to the interested parties. I am paying $3 each. I feel as is they are well worth it for 100% custom hand written and relevant comments. My process was as follows:

Go to the link from my Excel file
Scan the article quickly
Find a relevant article on my own site
Write 50 to 100 words or so about the article I am commenting on
Push a link in the comment somewhere naturally
Send the commenter via PM the link, comment, and a request for an email to send the PayPal money

I sent three messages to three people who contacted me, and called it a day.

PLANS

Saturday I am going to look into making a list of Facebook groups that relate to my niche for posting things in. I will also work on building up the subreddit I created with links to 20-30 places, putting up a link to my own site every five or so. I'll also continue to follow more Twitter and Pinterest accounts.

Sunday I am going to follow more Pinterest and Twitter accounts and begin writing out a full-fledged guide that I am going to offer for an email subscription signup. The email form will be through Aweber, as I already have a subscription there ($49 a quarter). It's going to be on the sidebar of every non-homepage page. I am going to try and figure out a way to put it on the home page as well without it being obtrusive or obnoxious.

The guide is my big hands-on task for next week. That plus scheduling posts, gathering more images, and a couple other tasks. I'm trying to cap my time spent at an hour or two a day, noting that this hour or two is spent working on this project about 60% and multitasking with other things for the other 40%.

I won't add a link to This May Work again until I get the log updated.

How about a social media update?

I had accrued another sixteen Twitter followers since this morning, and felt like it was a good time to follow some more accounts. So I found another niche-related Twitter account, checked their followers, scrolled down to load a few hundred, set up the Javascript trick, and went from 1,544 followed to 1,762 before Twitter made me stop. Let's see if that helps me out overnight.

Remember how I followed a butt-load of one of my competition's Pinterest followers? That's netted me a total of 20 followers. I decided to take care of following the rest of them. Gave it a shot, and got this message "You've reached your following limit. Your limit will increase if more people follow you. For now, if you'd like to follow this Pinner/board, you'll need to unfollow one you're currently following." Fuck. Here's hoping I get some follows back. If not, I'll be buying some fake Pinterest followers to artificially inflate my number.

Hekke delivered 2,000 words of high-quality content in the form of two 1,000-word posts. Tomorrow I was going to do some social media following and some Facebook-related work, plus some subreddit work. Now, I'm planning on axeing the Pinterest and Twitter work tomorrow to cool down the accounts some, and scratching the Facebook groups gathering for now. I'll do the subreddit work, and edit and post one of the 1,000-word articles. Stay tuned!

Nice post! I suscribed this for track your journey. Good luck budy.

Sherbert Hoover said:

Remember how I followed a butt-load of one of my competition's Pinterest followers? That's netted me a total of 20 followers. I decided to take care of following the rest of them. Gave it a shot, and got this message "You've reached your following limit. Your limit will increase if more people follow you. For now, if you'd like to follow this Pinner/board, you'll need to unfollow one you're currently following." Fuck. Here's hoping I get some follows back. If not, I'll be buying some fake Pinterest followers to artificially inflate my number.

Click to expand...

Good to see you figured out how to get followers on pinterest.
I can tell you that you will definitely see results from this.

When i had around 600 followers i was already seeing a lot of extra daily visitors coming to my website.
The click through on pinterest was around 10% and that was in the adult niche of which everybody is saying it's a waste of time on pinty.

Although i was putting my link on 80% of my posts, so keep that in mind.
AFAIK if your website is legit, there is no problem in putting your link all over the place.

wait for your good news.

Sherbert Hoover said:

How about a social media update?
Remember how I followed a butt-load of one of my competition's Pinterest followers? That's netted me a total of 20 followers. I decided to take care of following the rest of them. Gave it a shot, and got this message "You've reached your following limit. Your limit will increase if more people follow you. For now, if you'd like to follow this Pinner/board, you'll need to unfollow one you're currently following." Fuck. Here's hoping I get some follows back. If not, I'll be buying some fake Pinterest followers to artificially inflate my number.

Click to expand...

hm...the follow back rate on pinterest should be around 10 to 20 percent (after 48 hours). If it is lower than that you got either a niche that is not active on pinterest or you are following the wrong accounts.
I have been experimenting with pinterest lately:
The best way to get followers would be to find pinners in your niche and follow manually all the interesting accounts (meaning less than 500 followers, very low following, pins around 100 to 1000 and profile pic).
This takes time, however. So just following the active (meaning most recent) followers of other pinners will add you a lot of trash (ppl using bots and empty profiles). You should be able to follower OR unfollow 200 people per hour. As long as you got a decent amount of pins you can more or less shamelessly exploit that limit.

On a test account I am running I got 912 followers for following 2621 on 221 pins. (test only 1 week old tho)

Also you might consider broading up your account a bit to the general macro niche. Might get your more followers. Maybe not as super targeted, but since pinterest is about discovering stuff, it might pay off.

And don't be afraid of spamming your websit if its your own. Pinterest will expect that...as long as the urls are not funny (like redirecting a lot, etc) you should be safe. Hope you already got rich pins set up.

Also do remember to create pins with a CTA. Pretty pictures won't get you clicks on most niches. For every 1.000 Impressions you should get 1 percent CTRR on a viral pin (so 100.000 impressions per month +) if it is less, then you did something wrong. I got some pins with 3 one even with 5 Percent CTRR. But i guess, again, that depends on the niche.

Some people are inserting an extra CTA in the description and a link to the website as well. Personally I think it is ugly, but it might be worth a consideration.