Imogen's [Journey], step by step to Authority.

Hi BHW,

Apologies for the long first post. I promise my updates will be much more concise.

I'm not entirely new to IM, but still a newbie. Two years ago, I spent an awful lot of time and money on building MNS that just didn't earn. At the time I had no idea what I was doing wrong. I'd read all kinds of WSO's and was comfortable with web development, so I figured I couldn't be failing due to lack of knowledge, right? I was so very wrong. I poured literally thousands of dollars into my sites and made barely a cent. I quit simply because I ran out of capital.


I wasn't smart about what I was doing. I just didn't have the knowledge to make the kinds of decisions that made money.


A few months ago I decided to dip my toes back in the IM pool and began creating several MNS, only to find that in the last two years, almost everything I thought I'd known about Internet Marketing and SEO had changed. Panda and Penguin and whatever else had almost remade the G00gle game. It was probably a good thing for me, as I'd had absolutely no idea what I was doing in the first place.


Learning again has been fun and rewarding. My three new MNS that I'd spent virtually nothing on have been earning almost a dollar a day. It doesn't sound like much, but I find it inspiring. It's my little success story, albeit a very small one.


It's fascinating, realising just how massive the information pool in regards to making money online really is and I've learnt my lesson in regards to stepping blindly. (I've also learnt that buying expensive software and reading a few WSOs doesn't make you an expert, despite what the authors might claim)


Although my MNS are earning a little with Adsense, I've realised that my MNS niches and keywords weren't particularly cleverly chosen. Although all my content is original, most isn't evergreen, my competition is massive and my keywords are worth virtually nothing. Bad combo.


While they might eventually be redeemed, I've decided that my new goal will be to build my first well written, highly optimised, evergreen Authority site.


This thread will chronicle my journey to Authority (and hopefully inspire me to keep moving forward.)

Any suggestions, tips or even flat out criticism along the way would be welcomed and appreciated.

Imogen

As I began this project two days ago, I'll fill you in now on what I've created so far.


I realised after the fact that I may well have gone about setting up the site in the wrong order. Bear with me, I assume it'll even out as it's still so early.


Day One and Two


So far I've chosen my niche, which is evergreen and massively expandable. It isn't a massively high paying niche in Adwords CPC but it's also not as over saturated as say, Insurance or Finance.


I have had an extremely brandable domain sitting unused in my account for nearly three years now, which I grabbed and setup on my Hostgator reseller account. I installed wordpress and grabbed the Themeforest Udesign theme from the downloads section. I installed it and made it look pretty, although I did swap out the image slider for something static.


I installed some of my favourite plugins, such as:


Auto Featured Image
ELI's Related Posts Footer Links and Widget
Get The Image
SEO Friendly Images
Slick Social Share Buttons
WordPress SEO
WP-PageNavi
WP Policies


and installed Google Analytics and Webmaster tools.


After giving up on Market Samurai due to the SEOT information being near useless to me, I downloaded the trial version of Longtail Pro and pulled a list of evergreen keywords with more than 1k exact global monthly searches, less than 10,000 SEOT matches (many are under 1k) and an average Adwords CPC of over $1.


Last night I wrote 8 unique, high quality articles of between 400-800 words and uploaded three of them with an image and a random related youtube video. I planned on uploading the rest but was too damn exhausted after all that writing and went to bed.


Today I plan on writing another 13 articles and scraping another set of keywords.


So far the site hasn't been indexed with G, but that's all fine with me. I have a long way to go with my onsite SEO as yet.

do you think that having the Google Analytics will be good?

I have G Analytics on all my sites. I find it invaluable for tracking.

Update:


Yesterday was relatively productive. I wrote, added and uploaded more blog posts to a total of 14.

I also added the plugin WP Super Cache, as per the instructions on the Host Gator website.

I did find myself making some mistakes as the day proceeded. I trawled through Longtail Pro and found some more great keywords that weren't strictly in my niche, yet like I always do, I got a bit out of control and began writing articles for them. I tend to get this idea with my websites that I can expand them way too fast, which seems to leave very thin looking sites that never get finished.

Can anyone tell me if an Authority site will suffer in the serps if the content isn't all strictly alinged to its niche?

For example:
Say my Authority site was about Dog Training and all my keywords focused around that niche. I'll then get bored and go hunting for keywords related to things that people that train dogs might possibly like. These new, awesome keywords could fit under a generic petcentric domain, but aren't necessarily useful, (like bird cages).

Going to backtrack today and focus more directly on my niche. I'm considering building a second site alongside this one... mostly because I'm getting very tired of writing about one particular niche and would like some variation!

This morning so far I've noticed that G still hasn't reindexed my site and it's sitting there as it has been for a couple of years, with its SEDO parked page. I used Pingomatic to ping the main URL and the RSS feed. I haven't done this before and wondering what kind of results it'll give, if any.

Obviously still no traffic, but I'm focused on the goal.

I'll be watching this thread with interest Imogen.
Good luck.

Gerry

I'm going to follow this thread too. I'm a 'newbie' myself and have a plan similar to yours that I have been debating on jumpstarting these past few weeks. I've been busy enhancing my larger authority site with recently learned SEO tactics (which seem to be working). As for the traffic, it will come over time.

clothears60 & Rsto9: Thank you for following my journey. I think one of the best things about BHW is that people here seem genuinely interested in working alongside eachother, not only in opposition. I look forward to getting to know you and your projects!

Update:
In an attempt to get G to recrawl my site and pick up my new pages, (G currently thinks the main url is still sitting with sedo and the others don't exist), I've done a little tiny bit of bookmarking and updated a few statuses with the main URL of my website included. Also pinged list of my 13 post URLS with pingfarm.com and added four "manual" social bookmarking links to the main URL itself using Onlywire.

I wanted to let the first posts "rest" and avoid touching anything at all that vaguely resembled a backlink for a while, as per SyZygy's wonderful Authority site how-to post:
[FAQ] How I build, rank and monetize Authority Sites (sorry guys, I can't link yet) I do tend to get a bit off track though and am not particularly organised, so we'll see how long my self-imposed embargo lasts. I don't see a great deal of harm in doing a little manual backlinking in the hopes of getting listed a bit quicker. I guess we'll see how it goes. I've decided I don't much like social bookmarking and will be paying others to do this for me manually. I feel uncomfortable about using software myself to automate the process as I want to be particularly delicate with this new site. I'm much more comfortable writing good content than messing around with programs and logins and IP addresses and so on.

Currently looking for a good Fiverr gig that will bookmark multiple URLS. Fingers crossed! Will also write another six articles tonight to bring the total to 20.

In other news, I've begun scraping keywords for a second authority website that I'm quite excited about. It'll be interesting to compare the two sites as they grow and are monetised.

Update:

Last two days have been productive. Have cleaned up the site a lot and now have 19 unique 400-800 word articles. 17 of these are strongly related to my niche and two are "test" articles of a sort which while they may have some interest to my readers, aren't strictly relevant. I'm interested in seeing how they rank compared to the more relevant content.

Now that my main URL has been re-indexed, I'm building a few (around two per URL) very slow, very manual good quality backlinks to the internal pages and main domain. At this point, none of the internal pages are indexed.

I've found a Fiverr social bookmarking gig that will social bookmark up to 100 URLs to 200 directories (with specific keywords for each internal page), accepts spintax keyword and description and then lindexes them for $5. As I only want a few bookmarks to start with, this is perfect for me. Dividing the 200 bookmarks amongst my 21 pages in odd numbers and all with different anchor text will give me about 10 bookmarks per page. It might seem stupid-cautious, but I'm very nervous about backlinking this early on. I want to take it very slow as I'm still not 100% sure what I'm doing. I'm hoping the bookmarks and manual backlinking will drag my internal pages out of the bowels of the internet and into the serps.

I've purchased 25 poor quality unique articles for next to nothing in my niche which I'll rewrite to make near perfect over the next couple of days and use to create web 2.0 properties. One linking to each internal page of my money site.

In other news, I've signed up with a decent CPA network and waiting for my approval interview phone call, (which has been a bitch to organise since we're in totally opposite time zones!) Looking forward to seeing how I can integrate the offers into my new site and hopefully bring in some revenue alongside my Adsense plans.

Very good topic.
I will watch your topic with great interest.
Good luck man

Update: I've been absent for a few days as there hasn't been much to report. I submitted my main URL to a small handful of free high PR directories, including DMOZ. Other than that I've been sitting back and letting it rest, as per SyZygy's excellent post.

I've purchased a subscription to SerpBook which is just fabulous. Three of my 19 keywords are ranking. 98, 102 and 196 respectively. They're doing a bit of a dance right now though and obviously, have no backlinks to speak of. Will keep you posted.

In other news:

I'm getting a bit bored sitting and watching this site so have decided to start another. This time I'd like to employ a silo structure from the beginning. Will keep you updated.