[follow along] starting an affiliate SEO site in the finance niche (CPA $250 - $800)

MrMoneyHat

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Background
  • 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 :)
Project Overview
  • 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.
Budget
  • 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.
Niche: Finance
  • 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.
Setup

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
Content strategy
  • 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)
Interlinking approach
  • 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.
Traffic / engagement
  • 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.
Link building (tentatively, may change anytime)
  • 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.
 
Sounds a well thought out plan, good luck with this.
 
That's a solid thought-out plan and I'm on the same boat with you about Matt Diggity's concept of traffic-engagement-backlink framework.

It's unnatural for a brand new site with no traffic to get backlinks so one should try to get some traffic from social media or Q&A sites before starting with link building.

From my personal experience, that helps in getting out of Sandbox faster and the links you build afterward have more power.

Good luck!
.
 
Domain

As mentioned above, I will be using a brand new domain and I'm looking for PMD to gain a little edge in ranking. I believe PMD carries some weights in term of relevance, can't remember exactly where I read it from exactly that somebody suggested that there was an update where Google somehow confuse between brand query vs term query on PMD, and end up giving ranking boost to the domain that has search query in it.

Suppose someone searches for "orange" and your domain is theorange.com, in certain niche where it isn't as clear cut between Topic and Brand, or without enough data for their Google M.L. to work out through, they may treat the "orange" search query as a Brand query thinking that people want to find out more about your Brand, hence ranking it highly. Theory aside as initiatively and/or based on observation, most affiliate SEO do think that PMD works, and that's good enough.

The niche I'm in is quite competitive, and almost all the PMD I can think of has been taken, and as I tried to play around with different prefix and variation I thought I could use 3 different board product term in a domain - which sounds like appleorangebanana.com. - although my silo is only focusing on Apple. By including the other two terms it gives me the flexibility to expand to those two topics later, and at the same time it is somehow brandable - which I will later use it as a brand anchor text, who knows Google may gives brand signal whenever someone searches for either of the above 3 terms, or the term + something else.

Links Plan

I did a quick research on the no. of links and types needed in order to rank for the keyword. One way is to look at the top ranking URLs from sites similar to yours i.e review site, and take the avg. Ref Dom. and its link types. Since most of my keywords have somewhat of a mixed results on SERP such as actual SaaS and content sties, I took only the highest Ref. Dom. site as my basis.

1600758169049.png
(This is based on the keyword pattern: Best {keyword} in {country})

Since link types are never straightforward i.e all and only guest post links, I'd classify them into 3 categories:

Guest post = Any links coming from inner pages from articles
PBN = Any links coming from homepage
Web 2.0/Others = Any links from subdomain, forums, low quality manually created links excluding profile links.

They are not meant to take it as face value, rather just an approximation of how many links I needed to build in order to compete, which also gives me a rough estimation of how much I need to spend on links.

The above approach I mentioned was not without flaw, and in many cases there are simply ranking sites that have ZERO ref. dom..

They are ranking it because of either their high domain authority or they are built out of highly topically and geographically silo i.e bestorange.com.UK. Since my starting domain have neither both, I won't be able to complete without link building.

The question is, how many links do I need to build without risk over-optimising it (i.e avg. have ZERO ref. dom.) where I have no good reference points?

A couple ways, 1st just guessing it: after all SEO is BOTH art and science, and when you have no data you make the data! Maybe let's start with 3 guest post / PBN links and see how the SERP reacts.

2nd, since I'm using a .com site competing for country terms in multiple countries, I may build links from sites that have country extension - i.e guestpostingsite.com.uk to appleorangebanana.com/UK/mymoneyreviewpage - this way I may gain strong country relevance from links instead of relying only on country-specific info articles.

3rd, I may also build links to the homepage or supporting pages, then interlinking them to the money pages. This way the link juice can be transferred without risking sending too many links to the target pages that have no Ref. Dom. on their top ranking URLs.

Links Vendors

I'm still at the phrase of sourcing good link vendors, here are a few I'm familiar with:

High Quality Guest Posts - ABC at $200 - $600+ per pop depending on stats; NOBS link which is about 20% cheaper than ABC with somewhat similar quality, but I have a friend who said their quality is lower which i have not had bad exp. so far.

Low-Mid Quality Guest Post - TrafficValley at $85 per pop

Link insert/niche edit: SERP Wolf at Legiit about $80 per pop for 500 Ref Dom. if im not wrong.

PBN rental (monthly) - Rank Club; I'm still looking for alternative vendors.

One-off - ArchSEO ; 6 for $89.

Here are a few that I may want to test:
  1. Art of SEO - guest post
  2. Wolf Network - pbn rental
I won't try getmelink as i don't trust the guys there. :smirk:

Content Brief

I used to depend on AH PRO (AuthorityHacker) content brief templates in the past, which was extremely detailed and informative with like 2,000+ words in it, from what sections to include to writing style, tone, and how they can do the research. But somehow writers always got it wrong or missed out certain important parts, prob. because it has too many things there.

Nowadays, I will just include basic editorial requirement like:

1600758205172.png

And the EXACT structure I want them to follow, where they could just copy and paste to a new Google doc.

1600758252641.png

Once I changed to this format, the number of issues I used to have with writers were greatly reduced. I also create screencast video reviewing their first few articles in case they missed out any important elements and letting them know what I considered as good and bad so they know my expectation.

Key lesson: Keep the brief as simple as possible.

Writer

I put out job ad on UpWork and hired a South African woman at $0.03 per word. She has experience writing review content and has written articles for my niche before. Again, I have cut down all the lengthy job description to just 100 words asking for exp. in the niche and product review, and live samples.
 
Initial investment around $5k seems like a great choice. Good luck!
 
Time flies! One week has passed, here is another update!

Domain

I purchased the domain and the site was officially live on Wed. In the end, I settled with Partial Match Domain for max. SEO benefit. The domain looks something like this appletoorange.com. I have also set up homepage and about page. I'm using GeneratePress and Elementor for anything custom.

Content

Published 6 low com info articles, each targeting a single keyword. My writer will be creating 3-4 articles or 5000-6000 words per week. So per month that will be at least 30,000 words. As mentioned in the early post, I will be targeting Geo-affiliate terms to narrow down my competition, and hopefully due to lower competition I'd be able to get out of sandbox quick.

Additionally, to create greater country-specific relevance, I designed by URL structure with country shorthand i.e https://www.blackhatworld.com/www.domain.com/SG/best-blue-apple

Writers

I fired S.A. writer due to style mismatch and lacks off=f subject matter expertise. It wasn't that obvious when working on the first batch of article, maybe back then the demand of niche knowledge wasn't that high. It's only when you start to pass her new topic group that she started to show strong her inadequacy is. As I know the niche well so I can tell pretty easily whether the article would perceived as quality by the readers - and if it is obvious to me by reading one line of the passage and knowing something is off, I bet the same is true for most readers.

Thinking about it i recall that on her first batch of articles I almost have to rewrite all her opening and closing, and her body content certain areas at times were quite sloppy that required me 20 mins or so to rewrite it.

So I renewed my job Ad. from upwork, and hired a writer from Pakistan. I was a little surprised that his test article turned out to be great. He is responsible, fast and the writing style is tight and conversational, and has 5-7 years of niche exp., and more importantly, he has editorial access to a few decent authority sites. The best part? I only pay him $0.03 per word :)

Since he has only submitted his first article and writing quality always seems to be the finest at the beginning and slowly deteriorate over times, it will be too early to judge now and we shall see if his quality can continue to hold.

I remember reading https://yeys.com that said that you probably need 2-3 writers to nail down the right writer. Sometimes the writers meet all your requirement yet have commitment issue. Other time they are fluent writers but just off in every aspect in terms of content structure and SEO req.


Link building

To get out of sandbox fast, I will be building a bunch of DR 50+, niche relevant, strong traffic guest post links to the homepage until a few of the money keywords show up on page 2-3. Then I would begin building direct links to money pages.

Why guest post instead of link insert/niche edit? Because that is the most natural way of how sites acquire backlinks. Matt Diggity mentioned that the odd of someone updating their old articles with a new link vs linking you on a fresh article is 1/10. Hence, during the sandbox phrase, it is better to go conservative and natural - which means I will be getting links like PR, local/niche citation, and guest post links. And those links will be pointing to homepage.

I aim to acquire at least 20 DR 50+ and niche relevant with growing traffic (i.e avoid traffic collapse i.e Algo penalty) guest posts. Until when the site gets out of sandbox and go into Trustworthy phrase, I will build direct links to money pages.

So the question is how do I know which phrase I'm in? I have a clear definition (source: Matt Diggity's 3 site building phrases) - which is if the money terms are ranking at page 3 and beyond I would consider that as sandbox. And if it falls between page 1-3 I would consider that as Trustworthy phrase, which means the page is ready for direct links. Lastly, pages that rank on page 1 instantly, I would consider it as Authority phrase. You can take stock of the ranking around 2 weeks to have better accuracy.

To date, I have

Screenshot 2020-10-01 at 3.10.19 PM.png
  • Purchased $1,900 worth of guest posts from NOBS
  • Purchased $150 worth of PR (Fiverr), local citation (citationbuilderpro), niche citation (citationbuilderpro)at

Why You Can't Blindly Use Price As A Gauge of Links Quality

Screenshot 2020-10-03 at 10.13.09 AM.png


I almost bought a bunch of guest post links from ABC since they are known for quality. I knew they usually charge a premium for the higher quality they deliver and I thought paying a little bit more for the peace of mind is well worth it. Until one day when I was saw this one guest post when it has a DR of 46, niche relevant and traffic of 250K, and was wanting to know how relevant the site is to my niche. So I emailed them. When they replied with the URL revealed, I was shocked to find out that it is the same site in my favourite's list from NOBS.link - ABC charging at $655 and NOBS charging at $354 :cool:

What I Plan To Do For Oct.
  • Reach out to my database of niche relevant sites with DR 50+ and good traffic for guest posting.
  • Explore more link building techniques such as Adamen Froy's method (https://www.adamenfroy.com/guest-blogging) invite site owner to be part of your link building campaign where you will link their site back on other guest posting sites, influencer's outreach for link in exchange for a testimonial, and breaking into contributor from large publication.
  • Create 15 money articles (or 30,000 words)
Total spent: $2,050
Earnings: $0
Articles published: 6
Guest posts: 0 (not live yet)
 

Attachments

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Last edited:
Thanks for the detailed update. A lot of interesting insight over here.
Good luck with your journey!
 
I better follow this because it's finance niche
 
Some updates:
  • Secured a DR 65 biz site for $50
  • Secured another DR 60 tech site for 120 GPB, but negotiated down to 83 GPB by offering him to get a link insert in one of my guest posting articles.
  • Negotiating with another DR 71 & monthly traffic 52K site - they quoted me $450!
    • Counter offered $250 + 1 link insert from other DR 50 site, but no response.
  • Received another reply from a DR 79 site with also 50K M.S. - but they asked for $700, nofollow, sponsored tag. Shit as hell. I remember i used to get an link insert for only $50+ before. I'm suspecting the owner didn't like my persona and my site. Will get there some days :)
 
Very nice and detailed journey!
I wish you good luck with your project :) Will definitely follow you along and hopefully learn something new
 
All the best for your journey. I am curious if you'd be open to teaching SEO to noobs like me?
 
Key in building aff site is choosing right companies that will pay you and not try to stiff you, stop replying to you, delaying commission payment or adding new terms...

In finance niche there are a lot of scam companies offering even $1,000 commission but you can read on forums many of them not pay commission due to various fake reasons or they just lock your aff account.

Overall you have a great plan and hope you succeed.
 
Definitely an interesting journey.

Good luck and I'll be following this closely!
 
Another update from me for the week, looks like we are half way though Oct.. I felt a little lost over the past few days as some issues were holding me back. Fortunately, after taking more walks and talking to friends, I was starting to feel better. Sometime to talk myself out I would tell myself that 'you don't have to work if you don't want to, no one is forcing you. You can give up anytime. You can rest a couple days if you want. You can actually not working you know?' Then after awhile, your body and your mind sort of want to do the work. Maybe it is because you do actually want to do the work just that your state of mind at that moment isn't prepared for it.

I want to talk about a couple things here namely link building since that is what I have been focusing almost every day.

Let's begin with the links that have gone live:

1602989347155.png

3 out of 5 guest post links from the vendor have gone live. I originally ordered 7 links, but two got cancelled.

1602993066724.png

1 link from my manual outreach has gone live, I still have remaining six waiting for articles.

GP links live: 4
GP links pending: 8

My Link Building Approach

Since my site is new I am only sending links to homepage at the moment, and my goal is to build 15 or so high quality, high DR, and good traffic guest post links to my homepage as it is the most natural way of how links are created on the web. I'm monitoring the ranking of money keyword to determine which stages I'm at, and will adjust my link plans accordingly.

I will start sending links to money pages directly, when a bunch of keyword start appearing on page 2-3 of which I think would take 1-2 months or shorter depending on the quality of links I'm able to build.

A Case On Title Relevance: Why Multi-Niche Sites Are Okay For Guest Posting

Relevance is one of the thing most people talk about but have little understanding about it. In part it is highly subjective and one person opinion can be wildly different from the other person, and in part, what we think as relevant may not be how Google thinks is relevant - I'm pointing to the case of 301-ing expired / aged domain which requires strict relevance. You may argue all you like but if Google doesn't think so it isn't.

Let's get back to finding relevant guest posting sites.

Suppose I have a site that covers Orange, does it mean a link from a Banana' site is considered relevant? After all, both are fruits isn't it? Or only a site that talks about Orange is considered relevant. How about a site that covers Cars, Computers, and Orange? You may argue that it is still relevant because it covers Orange after all. But what if it has only 3 articles on Orange and remaining thousands of articles are about Cars and Computer?

I ask that question because for a topic as board as Finance the possibilities are endless. Here are some question to consider:
  • Is a personal finance site that talks about savings and budgeting relevant to option / stock trading?
  • Is a stock trading site relevant to the site that covers digital currencies like Crypto?
  • Is a crypto site relevant to a site that covers commodity trading in South Africa?
  • Is either of the above relevant to a local news site that cover anything and everything of importance for its people?
Intuitively, we would think that if you have site that talks about oil trading, then the best links you can get is from site that also talks about oil trading, ideally, trade journals and the sort of oil institutions. You may expend a bit to sites that cover trading in general i.e stock, option, FX., since the topic trading is there.

I would argue that this is not realistic and may not be the most natural way of how links are acquired in the building of authority website. Imagine you run a site that talks solely about mouse trap, and if you only take in links from sites that talk only mouse trap then you would not be able to acquire much links since there aren't that many sites out there. Of course you may argue that you don't need much links since your competition won't have much as well, but will put this aside now.

Also, what makes us assume that getting links only from sites that are directly the same as ours in term of topical relevance is the most natural way of link building?

Back in the days, people were spamming links and they would see ranking increases. Then after a series of Google updates and penalisation, industry started preaching the importance of quality and relevant links. The community loved idea because it made sense, and vendors who have niche-relevant links could command a high premium, and it is still the same to these days.

But the question still remains, what is the basis to determine relevance? And how much of relevance should it be enough?

To the folks who used PBN or whatever Greyhat link building practices that caused them penalised by Google, I would think that it has got a lot to do with low quality and unnatural links, rather than lacks of relevance i.e domain.

Here are a few factors when it comes to relevance:
  • Anchor text - if it has your target keyword, you get the benefit. Misc., branded, and URL anchor text don't pass as much SEO benefit like the way target and exact do, but they play an important role to achieve natural anchor text ratio..
  • Surrounding text / Content - Google is getting better at determining context, which means the area where the link is inserted has to make sense and look natural. Here is where you have to be careful with certain hacked links where your links are often forcefully and unnaturally inserted in areas that do not make sense or look natural. If you are doing manual guest posts, this is easy to achieve.
  • Article Title / topic - this is intuitive and align with how the natural way of links are created on the internet, which is though on pages that talk about the same topic that you are linking to.
  • Domain - this is where most people get confused about and myself included. We can either decide a link from: 1. a site that talks only about your niche, 2. a site that talks about everything including yours i.e multi-niche sites, 3. a site that does not cover anything about your topic at all.
I would say first and second ones are the best and should make up the majority of your link profile. As for the third one, it is still okay if it only represents a small fraction of your link profile. After all the most important thing here is quality and looking natural.

Which also means that beside going after guest posting sites that within your niche, you can also go after general or multi-niche websites so long they are quality such as high DR (non-inflated), trending traffic, good editorial maintenance, no sponsored label, write for us section (not a hard filter), and avoid linking to spammy niche sites. If you are skeptical about what I said on multi-niche, let me tell you I feel the same as well until I received a private case study from ABC that showed multi-niche guest posts led to ranking increase across their client sites. Additionally, I also seen a few SEOs who claimed that general niche does increase ranking.

Personally, I think the question of relevance have to be answered with naturality. If it is natural, it is fine. And if it is really natural and it should have some relevance in it.

A short story on my link building journey

If you refer to my original posts, you would see I talked a lot about trying various vendors on top of my manual outreach.

Then over time after vetting through countless of websites and spreadsheets after spreadsheets given to me by some site owners / marketers - I saw way too many sites that have sexy SEO stats but in deed are rubbish from quality standpoint. For one DR can be manipulated and imagine seeing a DR 75 sites with only 1K monthly organic traffic and has NO traffic result from similar web. Tell me what is the change that this is a genuine site?

Another is sites that built out of aged domains with good DR, yet their content is auto-generated / scrapped from other blogs.

If the goal is just to find sites that MEET DR and traffic stats, I can tell you there is an abundant in the sea of internet - you just have use ahref content explorer, set your filter, export, and fire up your mailshake account and offering $50-$80 to web owners.

Unfortunately, vetting quality guest posts are lot more complicated than that, and any credible link vendors who know that would charge a very high premium. Hence, I know I have to figure something out on my own if i want to build high quality links with limited budget at scale.

Offer your target a link mention and link forward

After that I found that I could invite target prospects to my link building by offering them a brand mention in exchange for guest post on their site. That would lower your link building cost since you don't have to pay them. Also I could link to my future link prospect in my guest posts and use it as an opener when I do reach out to them in future.

Expert persona

Then I remembered someone mentioned to me using fake expert persona to land highly authoritative, DR 70 -80 b2b guest posts, and so happened that I managed to discover some of these 'expert' personas whose guest posts always link to a few VPN sites. And I know for sure that it is belong to the same owners. Knowing that gives me a lot of inspiration and ideas how I should conduct my link building going forward.

Currently, I'm creating fake linkedin profile and I have faced a serious stoppage. I keep getting flagged out for ID verification and it's super annoying. Later I learned that I need a dedicated IP / proxy for 1 account with the same browser. Using normal VPN isn't enough esp. most VPN tend to randomised its IP every time you login which creates inconsistency that would flag out as spam by the system. I will update you guys on this again.

HARO

I also know that people are having good success with HARO link building to acquire DR 60 - 80 links, which I tried a for a few day, but it's not the best exp. since it takes me about 1 hr to get one query answered. But I would still see myself doing it in future.
 
I was so happy yesterday as I got my first highest DR 86 guest post approved with a ******** link - while many other SEO-lish articles got nofollow!

An important lesson here: when you are posting on high DR sites, never cut corners on your guest articles quality. :)

Screenshot 2020-10-22 at 7.16.38 PM.png
 
Wow, there is some fantastic information in here. Very inspiring. Watching & hoping for your success!
 
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