Hey everyone, I've been a member of BHW for a few months now. This is a short "how i did it" post.
If it is a little rambling do forgive me.
I set out to learn about how to live the IM dream.
The first few months were spent reading, alot of reading trying to figure out what works and what would work for me.
Following journeys in particular one by
@lunapt. It showed me resilience and patience was going to be required
The case studies by
@Ozzyzig were quite an eye opener for me. In particular the parasite ranking ones.
Then I came across this thread about ranking using tumblrs https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/case-study-tumblr-ranking-case-study-on-1st-page-in-3-5-months.1063206/
I read more of
@mindmaster threads and his medium opus https://medium.com/expired-tumblr-domains/the-ultimate-guide-to-get-high-pr-pa-tf-tumblr-blogs-b60e91dbcff and a plan began coming together.
I spent a week researching keywords and came up with a few, then went looking for recently expired on expireddomains.net
I found a 2 year oldish domain, with a few, nothing to write about, backlinks.
Setting up up site and on page seo took about 2 weeks to get right, optimising images, internal linking, reducing page load speed, trying to figure out if siloing was needed and so on.
For the content I did myself, occasionally popping over to archive.org to look for expired content for inspiration.
Now for the links, this is where the work was really.
I was lucky enough to get a free vpn for a year from one on the freebie threads, bhw has amazing resources.
I wanted to use high DA tumblrs as the main links. There are all the threads about scraping with site:.tumblr.com keyword etc.
I did try it a first. I did not have scrapebox so I use a free scraper from a freebie thread https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/get-turboware-scraper.760187/
It worked, though the going was slow. I invested $5 in some private proxies which was a bit better.
As this was happening I was creating the foundation diversity links from another thread https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/mega-thread-build-backlinks-together.1070265/
This bit of creating links was boring as hell, it was slow going, sometimes spending days without creating one.
A reply to a post I made by
@MisterF really gave me an impetus to continue.
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I decide to spend $10 on getting the foundation links done to get out of the slog.
So far money spent was
$10 domain
$10 Foundation links
$17 vps hosting for a year
For content, since I was doing tumblr posts I used this scraper form images https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/get-my-image-scraper-for-15-sources-passive-project.1076203/
Now the tumblr I was getting were few per day I was scraping using the turboware scraper and checking for 404 using xenu.
It can be really heart breaking testing 1000 tumblr urls and only coming up with one having good metrics.
I was using a script I found here https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/get-bulk-da-checker-using-free-moz-api-in-php.919041/ to check the Moz metrics
I went back and read the medium post about an alternate way to get expired tumblrs.
As I was browing bhw I came across a social scraper https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/get-bulk-da-checker-using-free-moz-api-in-php.919041/
That is when everything came together. Using the software I could now scrape 100,000 notes of tumblr posts and thus get some good expired tumblrs
An example this post
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The workflow was now
1 Scrape tumblr notes
2. Check 404 with xenu
3. Check Da PA
4. Register tumblr using vpn and add some content, like, reblog
5. Wait for it to index
6. Rinse & repeat
The scraping and 404 checking was running overnight so that in the morning I would spend 2 hours or so creating the tumblrs, checking index status and so on.
Now i know for anchors i need diversity, LSI to avoid penalties. What I did was to check the google search console for related words. I was using the rank math plugin which pulls the data into wp and made it easier to search and see how things were going overall.
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It had occurred to me from the
@Ozzyzig case studies that using url shorteners also gives a boost. I thought it can't hurt, so the way I used it was using a social poster wp plugin.
When I created a post it would auto post it to twitter and tumblr using *********** ,wp.me, bit.ly shortlinks
So then the link flow would be t.co ->wp.me -> url for twitter
or t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2F -> ***********/xxx -> url for Tumblr
Of course I could also use the shortened urls in creating links.
It occurred to me that I could use this on several twitter and tumblr accounts. So what i did was get 10 high da tumblrs 80 PA plus (took a few weeks to find them) and 5 expired twitter accounts (from a giveaway freebie thread)
And voila 15 social links every time I created a post.
Now everything was going swimmingly the only fly in my ointment was the time it was taking to index the tumblrs. Searching on BHW was only giving the paid services which had mixed results. There had to be a better way.
Much later I came across an youtube vid that was liked by
@BassTrackerBoats when I was viewing his video about using multi quotes. It is a simple way to index backlinks using search console
Simply it works. I bought a cheap domain and knocked myself out getting the links indexed
Now the workflow was
1 Scrape tumblr notes
2. Check 404 with xenu
3. Check Da PA
4. Register tumblr using vpn and add some content, like, reblog
5. Index through search console
6. Add link after indexed
6. Rinse & repeat
For rank tracking I was using serposcope
I just kept going building tumblr links, high da links and forum links
Then one day
The site started ranking
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The main keyword I was targeting popped in to serps around mid Feb and rose steadily to where it is now
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Other keywords I had used as LSI turnout out to have awesome searches as well popped into serps a few weeks later
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Another keyword
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The keyword difficulty according to keysearch
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The traffic
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Closing thoughts
When my site started getting 100 visitors a dayI was so excited I could not sleep I kept checking to see the stats every so often even waking up at 4am to see that it wasn't an error. Eventually I accepted that the site had ranked and I could focus on making it better.
Well has it been easy, no. There have been times i wanted to give up but i kept going. (This was the most difficult bit, just keeping slogging through)
I learnt several things along the way and I'm still learning. One thing is that there is more than one way to get backlinks and one backlink can be leveraged in different ways through syndication and aggregators.
Am I making money? Yes! Flow started after I passed 200 visitors a day, currently at mid $xxx a month
Am I an IM ninja? No, I still consider myself a noob with lots to learn. What I have learnt til today has gotten me this far.
My niche? No.
How am I monetising it? I'm using a subscription model
Why did i write this? So that other can see that by using BHW resources and more importantly Taking Action you can succeed. You do not necessarily need hundreds of dollars.
Now that i do have cash flow I have upgraded to paid tools where necessary and have bought some services for new projects.
What next for this project? I will keep pursing the number one spot for my keywords
TLDR I used bhw resources took action and ranked my first site
Hope this helps you in your IM journey! Cheers
