[First Journey] Content Site, Highly Competitive Niche, White Hat

[UPDATE]
I keep posting content, right now I have them scheduled until Tuesday. So far I am happy with the progress. Google ranking is still all over the place. But I now rank for 6 KW-s according to SEMRush.

My SEMRush trial will expire on the 14th. Pretty sad, I'll miss the tool. I'm thinking of picking up the lifetime deal for ubersuggest for KW Research. I know everyone loves Ahref, but for price-value ratio, ubersuggest seems like a good deal. Any opinion on it?

Also, I had my first organic click from google. :) :) Just one, but I'm super stoked about it. I expect progress to stay like this for at least until the end of March. Slow and steady is the plan.

I've picked up Nichesss lifetime deal also so that's + 60USD on my investment. I am in this for the long run now, and would really love to at least get my money back :D
 
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[UPDATE]
I got some KWs ranking. So far it's been pretty I've been pretty hit and miss with the KWs, but can also be due to Google Sandbox. I'll keep analyzing what works and what doesn't.

Got 3 clicks, yaay
1614702213996.png

Have to say the total impressions are a little bit skewed as I like to sheck "site:mysite.com" (I stopped with that for the past week or so). From my experience even that is counted as impression

Got 55 blog post published, with 5 more in schedule. It's a mix of content written 100% by me + content I have ordered from the marketplace. I usually order 500 words from marketplace, and buff it up to around 1000-1500 depending on KW SERP results. For me creating content this way is just quicker and worth the price (found a quite cheap resonable quality gig).

Got some nice growth, BUT slow growth both on Twitter and IG. Over the weekend I've used Nichesss AI to generate 'Inspirational' twitter posts, and I've got one image post scheduled until end of March every day for Twitter. For now I am handling my IG manually.

My goal now is to have Blog posts scheduled until end of March by end of this week. I'm cheating a little since I only publish Mon-Fri, hence I need 5 posts/week, on Twitter I scheduled posts Mon-Sat.

+ I've started an amazon affiliate side project with Expired articles. Will see how that goes. This one is based on my on research, and I think I've found a good KW. So far the site is quite thin on content due to my focus being on my main site.
 
paraztos said:
[UPDATE]

It's been around two weeks now with this journey for me. I have started ranking for one article, albeit quite low, but got some impressions:

View attachment 160442

I am still waiting for other articles to be picked up by Google, seems like it takes forever.

In the meantime, I am trying to build my social media following, with Twitter first. I find Twitter an easier platform than Instagram, hence I am pushing it first. Once I can build an audience on Twitter, I aim to bring some of them over to Insta.

Also, it does look like that with a 9-5, 1 article/day was a little over-ambitious. My new more realistic goal is 3-4 article/week. These are long-form articles targeting long-tail KWs. Apart from the long-form articles, I generate 1-2 filler content/week. This is for interlinking, and additional reading material to hopefully help with user retention.

E.g.: if my niche was Motorsport, and I the long tail KW I am aiming for somehow involves a Motorsport Team, I would throw together a quick 500ish word article about the history of the team, and link it in the main article for the readers.

I also got my first genuine visitors + I got traffic from Facebook and got 3 likes on my social media button. As I have no Facebook page this was genuine user engagement which I am pretty happy about.

For now, I will keep building content until more articles rank on google.
Click to expand...
Did you check if your audience is on Twitter?
 
xmneax said:
Did you check if your audience is on Twitter?
Click to expand...
Yes they are on both Twitter and Instagram.

[UPDATE]

Time for an update. As of today, I am caught up until two weeks. This means I have a content post scheduled for every day until next Friday. Happy about this one.

I have around 60 content articles published now. Still the KW research is hit and miss, but I rank on Page 2 for some of them. According to SEMRush I rank for a total of 23 KWs. I can see from GSC that I actually rank for more. Get around 20 impressions daily.

I think lately I've been finding some good KWs will see if I can increase the process. Got to say competition is fierce in Travel. Regardless got to keep on going, site is not even 4 months old yet.

[OTHER]

Got my hand on two expired domains. One is gaming niche, other is general magazine niche. Both have some backlinks, but not an awful lot.

The gaming-related although have some backlinks show as 0 authority everywhere. Interestingly enough, I posted a review of a game that seemingly no-one else reviewed and BAM I'm on SERP 9. That's with these stats:
1616412655163.png

According to GSC I am also ranking for top10 in some other SERPS. I don't know if it's the 'expired domain' strenght or what, but there you have it. You can rank page 1 with a 13 days old website. Gaming related: I write the articles 100%, I am not planning to invest anything, so far I snatched up 3 review copies, so that's content for me.

The magazine site has 19 Authority score on SEMRush, and the following stats:
1616412760354.png

From this one I will create an 'entertainment' magazine, that haz a 'Quiz' page where I will post stupid quizes. Let's see where they will go. For the quiz part I will create them, however the entertainment part, I will use a mix of expired articles + spun and edited content (I mean some of it is news, it's the 100 different outlets with the same news anyway, so I don't think dupe content is THAT much of an issue in this space).


That's what's happening. As you can see from the sheer amount of scheduled posts, focus is on the Travel site. However it's good to write about some different topic every now and again.
 
[UPDATE]
Here is a small update for anyone who's interested. I'm steadily adding content to the site + started linkbuilding efforts. I guess that I can't say it's 100% whitehat anymore.

For links, I am doing a mix of free (manual outreach) + paid solutions. For paid I got some guest posts (mix qualities) + built some diversity links (web 2.0, profiles) Only adding a few links each month of the paid kind.

Manual outreach is OK, I am building my own guest posting list with pricing + I managed to score a free guest post already and found some promising sites to continue free efforts.

I also managed to score a link on a NON-spam directory kind of site. They don't have 'add your own' button, and only have a few links in each category. I noticed that in my niche they had 2 broken links, so I let the webmaster note this + I offered them that they might replace with my site and they did just that. --> I think if I didn't post content onto my site on daily basis they might have refused this. But I aim to make my site an authority in the niche, and provide actual value to readers, not just SEO

In any case, I have some (1-2) google traffic daily as per Google Analytics. Bing is yet to appear as a source. According to SEMrush I am 70+ KW-s now that are ranking. Unfortunately, all is out of the top 10 for now, but have been seeing positive movement since my link-building efforts. I think 2 months from now we will have real nice statistics.

1618212314978.png

Twitter is at 500+ followers and IG is at 250+ followers

Will keep on pushing out content and I think we'll pick up some good traffic. I also finally started to target some buyer intent KW-s, but competition is VERY fierce. We'll see how that settles.

I have around 90 blog posts as of today, still keeping up the one article / WD schedule
 
Yaay small milestone before the week ends:
1618500532785.png

I'm up on 100+ KW-s ranking on SEMRush. This makes me real happy.
 
Yaay now we are ranking for 200 KWs:

1619517277196.png

Slow, but steady progress :)
 
[UPDATE]

It does seem like there isn't an awful lot of action in here, just like on my website, so I think this is the last update for a while. I'm attaching the last 28 days' performance below. As you can see impressions are steadily increasing, this is thanks to the fact that I've started some light linkbuilding around 2 months ago. Also, I'm getting ranked for more and more KW-s which is nice and it all contributes. Looking to smash 1k impressions / day soon.

1620278279138.png

CTR is horrible, but as you can see, although I'm ranking, I'm not ranking very high. Travel is one hell of a competitive niche, however, I got some KWs already in top 10 for some low traffic searches.

I'm over 100 published articles and starting to feel the burnout. From 5 articles (Mon - Fri) a week, I'm slowing down to around 2-3. Apart from articles, these times I finally started to work on some buyer intent keywords. One of them is ranking top10 already in multiple searches, HOWEVER it's mainly a search for a competitor's name, so we'll see how much traffic it brings.

Also, I've made a permalink change (I know I know) to my moneypage structure, moved mysite.com/moneypage to mysite.com/submainpage/moneypage. After two months of no action, Google finally started to show some of these pages a little, so I expect them to rank soon.

I'll keep my head down and continue expanding on my site. We'll see how the google core vitals update affects my site, but most of the other pages in the niche have even worse stats then I do (don't know how they manage to). I'm on the simple shared plan on Namecheap, so if I need to, I can upgrade to something like VPS.

I've almost had some almost empty (more like dummy) pages for super hard KWs, and I see from GSC that they sometimes show around 50-60 place. Not sure why, but in any case I started to populate them with content. Let's see if they move up some.

Now I'm gonna keep working and hopefully, when I'm back with a new update I'm already making money. As closing remarks one last screenshot from Semrush, as I've smashed through 300 KW-s just a few days after I did 200:
1620278995919.png


Take care and wish success to you all!
 
[UPDATE]
Time for a little update. We are heading into the off-season anyway for Travel websites, so I expect the winter to be quite low traffic. Regardless, I've been busy working on the site, building links slowly, and adding content. So far I am satisfied with the results.
I have around 130 articles on the website, some of them rank great, some of them are not even indexed. During the summer months adding content was slow. I was mostly with friends, on the beach, on vacation.
As such, my 'work time' was mostly my 9-5 and I didn't feel like pulling extra hours after work on most days. Now we are getting into the slow months, so I will be picking up the content generation velocity. Regardless, I've managed to add content during these months too and I feel like I've been successfully increasing the 'quality' of the content I'm adding to the site.

I am running travel affiliate (think flight booking etc) + some CJ as Display Ads right now. Didn't get approved for adsense. Traffic was around 1k/month during Sept, now it's decreasing steadily as less people travel. I've started seeing the first few 'buys' for my travel affiliate program, so I think I can say I started making money. Albeit it's not reliable yet just some click sprinkled here and there, the total earnings are around $10. CJ had some clicks, but no conversion.

Soon the site will be 1 years old :) I'll keep updating with new content during winter and hopefully will see a nice Spring/Summer season for the upcoming year.

KW Stats from SemRush:
1634628168548.png
 
[UPDATE]
Crossed 2K Keywords ranking on semrush, Yaay.

1636703303060.png


I also have some converting traffic averaging on $5/month now. I mean it's still pretty bad, BUT I am happy. When I started this site in February I could not even fathom to have any meaningful conversions before the site even gets a year old. Yet here we are. I'll continue adding articles, money pages etc.

Next target is to have 3K ranking keywords by the end of the year, with at least 250 ranking in top10.

I'll probably provide the next update sometime in January.
 
One last update before year-end and next year once the site is officially 1 year old :)

[UPDATE]
No screenshots this time, but I am continuing to improve my ranking. Now have 50+ kw in Top3 which I find amusing. Looking back at how I started earlier this year without any knowledge of SEO makes me feel a bit proud inside. Of course, I am in the Travel niche which means infinite keywords, but let's face it: most of them will contribute nothing to your earnings.

My site is full of informational articles as well, and supporting articles, but it's very hard to make money. I made $1.75 in November :anyway: That being said, I mostly focus on content that's popular during summer, so I am VERY eager for next summer. Have some great expectations.

What I am happy about is the fact that Google seems to like my website. At least for now. Usually, I am indexed within 12 hours (-or not at all, I guess those articles G thinks are not good enough). When my KW Research is spot-on then I am usually starting on the bottom of the first page around 7-10 spots. If I find a really good one I can even start around spot 5. I am very happy about this, I think it means G agrees that my site contributes great info to the internet.

I've learned a lot about writing content. Comparing my pieces from early this year to anything I write now it's a huge difference. Both from an article flow and SEO standpoint. I think I got the grasp on how to make a good SEO article that's great to read and answers the user intent. Regardless, I am afraid to touch and rewrite old content. They rank well and I've heard horror stories of content disappearing after a rewrite.

I am settled at 1 to 2 articles released each week. I feel like this is a good amount. I can produce high quality for this schedule. Also, my article production time has improved massively. Still, it takes quite a while to finish them. The problem is that I care about my users :D I don't copy my competitors I write my own ideas and own impressions. Of course, I am 'inspired' by my competitor's content but I always try to one-up them with my posts.

I am also trying out some different affiliate programs to make sure I have a good mix and earning potential. That's all for now. Great holidays to everyone! Let's cling our glasses for a successful 2022 :)
 
paraztos said:
One last update before year-end and next year once the site is officially 1 year old :)

[UPDATE]
No screenshots this time, but I am continuing to improve my ranking. Now have 50+ kw in Top3 which I find amusing. Looking back at how I started earlier this year without any knowledge of SEO makes me feel a bit proud inside. Of course, I am in the Travel niche which means infinite keywords, but let's face it: most of them will contribute nothing to your earnings.

My site is full of informational articles as well, and supporting articles, but it's very hard to make money. I made $1.75 in November :anyway: That being said, I mostly focus on content that's popular during summer, so I am VERY eager for next summer. Have some great expectations.

What I am happy about is the fact that Google seems to like my website. At least for now. Usually, I am indexed within 12 hours (-or not at all, I guess those articles G thinks are not good enough). When my KW Research is spot-on then I am usually starting on the bottom of the first page around 7-10 spots. If I find a really good one I can even start around spot 5. I am very happy about this, I think it means G agrees that my site contributes great info to the internet.

I've learned a lot about writing content. Comparing my pieces from early this year to anything I write now it's a huge difference. Both from an article flow and SEO standpoint. I think I got the grasp on how to make a good SEO article that's great to read and answers the user intent. Regardless, I am afraid to touch and rewrite old content. They rank well and I've heard horror stories of content disappearing after a rewrite.

I am settled at 1 to 2 articles released each week. I feel like this is a good amount. I can produce high quality for this schedule. Also, my article production time has improved massively. Still, it takes quite a while to finish them. The problem is that I care about my users :D I don't copy my competitors I write my own ideas and own impressions. Of course, I am 'inspired' by my competitor's content but I always try to one-up them with my posts.

I am also trying out some different affiliate programs to make sure I have a good mix and earning potential. That's all for now. Great holidays to everyone! Let's cling our glasses for a successful 2022 :)
Click to expand...
how can you be ranking for 2k keywords but barely earning $1.75 ?!?!
 
AnotherShot said:
how can you be ranking for 2k keywords but barely earning $1.75 ?!?!
Click to expand...
Most of what I rank for is informational and low traffic. I really have to pick up the low-traffic keywords to build a foundation that I can expand upon.

Nov-Dec-Jan is not a good month for my content. I made $10 in Sept and Oct respectively. Before that, I was still ranking low.

Also, I only have my travel affiliate programs as monetization, unfortunately, Adsense or Media.net doesn't want to approve my site.
 
blogmen said:
Try Ezoic.
Click to expand...
I was considering Ezoic but I've heard if Adsense doesn't accept you then neither they will. Also I don't like that I have to point my DNS at them and everyone's story on slowing the site down a ton. Probably will try if I can't get any real income at around 10K users a month, but until then decided to stay away.
 
paraztos said:
I was considering Ezoic but I've heard if Adsense doesn't accept you then neither they will. Also I don't like that I have to point my DNS at them and everyone's story on slowing the site down a ton. Probably will try if I can't get any real income at around 10K users a month, but until then decided to stay away.
Click to expand...
All ad networks slow you down. It's not that bad. Though, onboarding can be annoying. But on the flip side they come with free CDN, cache and you can also add cloudflare in 1 click.

They accept even if adsense rejected. And you can apply at 0 traffic, the 10k requirement was removed.
 
[NEW YEAR'S UPDATE]
New Year New Hopes.

I've got great hopes for the website this upcoming year. As I've already highlighted most of my content is centered around summer trends so I'm expecting traffic to pick up towards Feb and March. We are vegetating in a 500-600 monthly traffic this winter.

In the meantime, I'm adding new content to the website. Staring the new year with an aggressive plan of 3 articles/week. (okay maybe not THAT aggressive, but it's ok for an authority site)

Semrush traffic is pretty similar to last year but I've seen great movements in some keywords in GSC. Here's a screenshot for fun and I know some people are only interested in pictures anyway:
1641398832863.png

I'm particularly happy about one thing which is time spent on site. It's graudally going up, now over 1 minute. As I'm building an authority website this is extremely important for me.
1641398896723.png


Goal for this year: 10k monthly users by end of Summer. Let's see how it will go.


Happy New Year Everyone! Cheers to a successful year ahead!
 
You can purchase keyword research tools from group buy. It is cheap and it will belp you to reasearch faster.
 
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