MrMoneyHat
Newbie
- Mar 31, 2018
- 19
- 23
Background
Keep it simple and light.
- Hi all, I have 4.5 years of SEO experience doing Affiliate SEO, in-house and client works. Sold a 68K Amz aff. site on Aug. 2018 (yes i did eventually https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/follow-along-taking-amazon-affiliate-from-usd-3-2k-mo-to-6-figure-flip.1019241/, but not 6-figure), left my day job on June 2019 for full time affiliate SEO, and have been servicing one SEO client. It's been 12 months since and I have not gotten much results from my affiliate sites - making only $1.5K last month after burning lots of money and time - it was a combination of bad decisions and bad luck. From poor niche selection to Amazon comm. cut and letting my outdoor niche hit by Covid. I'm expecting the sites would generate $2K this month and $3K+ months onward.
- I do have another site that I'm growing leveraging on multiple hyper relevant aged/expired domains strategy and expecting to make a few thousands dollar per month, but that will be outside the scope of this case study.
- I'm putting this case study out because I felt a little unmotivated and lost after a series of disappointing results over the past 12 months. I've been burning a lot of my capital i.e mid 5-figure, and this might be my last chance to recover my losses and turn a profit of say $10K - $30 monthly.
- I also wish to seek a creative outlet where I'm able to express my SEO thoughts and ideas that often time feel so trapped in my head. In part because SEO often has a very long feedback loop which takes months to know if what are you are doing is right, and people are very bad at maintaining their effort on things without clear, obvious effort and reward exchange - writing it out and explaining to an audience do help me to refine my thinking and gain better clarity of the ideas, and of course motivate me to work on the tasks. So that's a win-win
- Will be using brand new domain. Why don't start with aged/expired domains in case you wonder, actually, I did purchase 2 from auction and I rebuilt one and put out a few test articles and it's been 3 weeks since and the ranking position are like on page 8 and beyond. Bad signs. As for the other one I don't even bother testing it since its link profile is nothing worthy. Anyway, these two domains was pretty cheap like $10-$40 so there isn't much to lose.
- I considered the risk and reward and felt that the only benefit is getting out of Google sandbox a couple months earlier - those link profile was weak. However, the risk is the site can be jinxed which mean all my later investment of links, content, effort & time will all go down to drain. it's a bad trade-off.
- Outsource almost everything from content creation to link building. I will be doing onpage i.e internal linking, content uploading, keyword planning,, product selection, and some level of link building will done inhouse by myself.
- Targeting local affiliate terms, building a topically tight niche silo, and placing strong focus on quality links over content. Content quality would be 'good enough' and better than avg. top 3 ranking URLS, but won't be in anyway outstanding or at the level produce by English native copywriters.
- I'll be using a mix of greyhat and whitehat link building technique. It doesn't make much difference as later on as the site grows, I will be stripping those PBN links and replace it with whitehat outreach links.
- I'm expecting the niche to be highly profitable and ranking on local terms alone would already generate 5-figure monthly revenue. Global and US terms would take it to the next level.
- Starting budget : $5,000 USD over 3 months, and hopefully, I will start making money on month 3 onward to reinvest its earnings. It's likely I will increase the budget and tap into my capital and earnings from client works and other affiliate sites. But first I need to see proof of ranking and potential before committing more resources.
- Allocation : I'm expecting to spend 80% on links and 20% on content.
- Content cost : $0.03 per word on Upwork
- Link building : depending on the links and vendors.
- I won't disclose the niche for obvious reason. Let's just say it's in the finance niche and there are multiple affiliate offers of which my preliminary research also already shown more than 40 companies - growing traffic trend according to Google Trend since Covid - and high paying CPA of $250 from tier 3 countries to $800 from tier 1 countries.
- This will be my first venture into a greyhat niche as I really sick of the low commission Amazon affiliate associate is paying and the lacklustre attitude I got from some big brands. Ranking SEO in competitive niche in itself is already tough and the last thing I to deal with after all the hard work and investment is to find affiliate offers, negotiating, and trying to please affiliate managers just to have a 10% comm. if that's even possible. Sucks!
- Also ironically it's a niche I'm familiar with as I used to blog about its side niche 5 years ago, and my SEO client is also in the same board niche and I do know people in the space. That said I don't think it helps a lot in term of link building, I may be able to get 3 free links from those sites and that's about it. It does help a bit in the keyword research, and the outreach database I have built for my client which will help me acquire a few paid guest post links later.
Keep it simple and light.
- Generatepress premium
- All in one SEO - remove index from category, archive, tag, and create XML sitemap
- Managed hosting - I'm using Cloudways and Google Cloud as I already have a plan with them.
- WP default text editor (Gutenberg) - avoid page builder at the start
- My approach is to start out as topically tight as possible to build strong relevance and makes it easy for Google to see me as the authority in the space.
- I'll start off by building Best Of articles targeting each countries excluding US & Global to limit my competition and gain locality relevance for max. ranking benefit. Once the Best articles are out, I start building country-specific info articles and review articles following the interlinking strategy I laid out below to solidify my relevance both topically and locally.
- Content plans (Likely to change as I progress):
- 13x country-specific Best of articles
- 5x Best of articles
- 17x country-specific info articles
- 25x Product review articles
- Total: 60 articles (first phrase will likely have about 20-30 articles)
- Best x articles will be crossed linked via 'you may also be interested in reading:' style with bullet listing.
- X review will be crossed linked to other x review, but will not be linked to Best X articles if the specific x review is not been featured there. This may change in the future depending on ranking and how the content plan progresses as I just want to keep the interlinking as topically tight as possible at the early stage of site building.
- Country-specific info articles will be linked to its respective Best x articles.
- Following Matt Diggity concept of traffic-engagement-backlink framework which says traffic and engagement are what justified backlinks. A normal site with zero traffic and engagement would be highly unnatural if it had links coming to it in whatever pace.
- Traffic / engagement (user signals) is also what BrainRank was created years ago to better access the quality and relevance of the pages besides their over reliance on backlinks and their ability to 'read' content. Hence, in addition to using it to justify link building it's also an important ranking factor by itself - the question is then: how do you get authentic traffic to bypass Google Algo. which has anti-fraud technology that is so well developed to protect their multi-million dollars Adword business against click fraud?
- I don't have a clear answer to that but I do think that direct / social traffic is safer vs search traffic, and search traffic must be coming from different IP Geo addresses at the traffic level relative to the avg M.S. and CTR of the keywords.
- I will be buying traffic from microworkers.
- The goal is to get out of Google sandbox ASAP and to do that I will be sending links that have trust and relevance such as guest posts on DR 50+ sites and high Ref. Dom. Niche Edit to non-money pages like homepage and info articles with mostly branded / URL anchor text in the first 2-3 months.
- Afterward, depending how the site progresses, I will start sending a mixture of PBN, GP and/or link inserts to money articles with target anchor text to rank the money terms. You can tell if the site is progressing well when you have money articles starting to appear on page 2 - 3 with only internal links linking from the homepage or info's, and with no direct links pointing at the money articles. As this means that Google sees your overall domain being relevant and trustworthy to the terms you want to rank, but because the page has no backlinks it still won't go far. Hence, you will still need to send links to your money articles.
- You may wonder why don't you send links to the money articles right off the bat? Because your site is brand new, without any traffic / engagement, content hasn't aged, and no trust gained from Google - any links send to money pages are likely to risk triggering anti-spam Algo. which may prolong your sandbox period.
- Additionally, I will also be building local citation, PR and social profile (may boost it with T2 one-off PBNs), expired niche-relevant web 2.0 (if I mange to find good vendors) to build Trust.
- Until now I have not talked about Power (authority) which is an concept about the links you acquired must be in a page that has links pointing to it. A DR 65 backlink coming from an orphan page with no internal or external links won't give you much ranking boost as compared to a lower DR pages that have backlinks, of course, we are speaking purely from Power standpoint.
- Link building plans (Likely to change as I progress):
- Local citation
- Social profiles + one-off PBN tier 2 boosting
- 10x ABC Guest Post - home & info. [DR 50+ Guest posts] + one-off PBN tier 2 boosting
- 10x Niche Edit
- 10x TV Guest Post
- In-house outreach.