First I need to say how I am quite literally blown away with the help I am getting. As soon as I am in a position to do so, I will repay the favors in kind.
For your suggestion Rush,
1. pick an industry that you know your writers can write good content about, preferably something that you enjoy and care about also so that you don't loose interest in a month or two.
Step 1. Pick niches/industries that the interns will be good at. Since they encompass a lot of majors, this should be relatively easy.
2. do some keyword research into your industry using the google keyword tool to start, if you are more advanced you can use wordtracker and market samurai also. Identify keywords with high search volume. With this sort of content power you need not worry if there is too much competition, even millions of competing sites can be outranked with this much original quality content and some black hat link building.
Step 2. Finding the right keywords. Exactly like you suggested start with Google and get more aggressive from there. That comment about competition really helps.
Step 3. Black Hat Link building.
How would I go about doing this?
3. go to godaddy domain auctions and buy a couple aged domain names with high page rank, preferably with titles relevant to your industry. Buy as many domain names as you want to have sites. I would go with 3-5
4. build wordpress sites on these domain names, add all the fancy link building and seo plugins that you can find here. There are lots of threads on this here.
Step 4. Pick domain names that already exsited to help with rankings. Brilliant! It might be the norm, but I would never have thought of it myself. If and when the directory starts getting closer to being an authority,
does it make sense to invest some money and buy more expensive auctions for your best authority sites?
5. give your article writers basic seo instructions such as keyword density, title keywords, tags, image names, blah blah etc. Send them basic wordpress tutorials so that they will post all the content for you.
Step 5: Once I have the keywords and the website and the SEO work in place, get the articles written.
6. set up social media around your market, add facebook features to your blog such as fb comments, like buttons, logins etc. Syndicate all blogs with a twitter account also.
Step 6. Social Networks.
I am confused how this would help. Can you please elaborate a little?
7. let this whole thing run for about a month, don't link out from these sites unless it's to each other.
Step 7.
Why would I not link out for a month? Actually why would I link out in the first place? I am sorry if I am asking some basic questions. But I did not have to worry about any of this for my email marketing campaigns.
8. once you've got some content and are starting to pick up momentum, begin your link building, I would simply drip xrumer and scrapebox links into these sites.
Step 8. Link building once momentum picks up.
Xrumer is in Russian. But I'll figure that out. ScrapeBox I can barely understand any of the lingo. But I'll spend more time on that and then get back to you'll.
9. three months from now you will be getting decent traffic, keep evaluating your targeted keywords and adjusting and adapting as necessary.
10. figure out a way to monetize all this, your own products would be best, if you don't have any or don't have time to make them then choose some relevant affiliate products from clickbank or what not. Worst comes to worst you can slap on some adsense.
From here on out it's just a numbers game, the more traffic you get, the more money you make. Your traffic depends on quality and consistency of your articles and quality and consistency of your link building.
With these resources and this model there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to do really well if not take over almost any market on line.
Best of luck and feel free to ask any other questions.
Step 9: Find good products.
E-books my own or clickbank's work the best. Worst case scenario Adsense or other Affiliate programs. Right?
Step 10: Tweek things around to make the system more efficient. Better keyword search and better link building.
Once again, I need to figure out what link building is all about.
Seems like this is the second option. Calling this OPTION B. Its a lot more complicated with a very high learning curve, but from what I gather its the path I will need to take if I want to squeeze the maximum juice out of my resources.
Scaling up will need to go through this second option correct?
Thank you Rush for the time you put in to helping me out.