[Journey] 2 x $100/day (and beyond) with 1 old and 1 new site (Amazon aff & info products)

Right, time to start a journey thread of my own. I'm mainly doing this to force myself to organise my thoughts and plans, and to keep myself honest and accountable. If someone finds it useful along the way, so much the better.

Quick Background

I've always shied away from SEO because 1) I hate the grunt work of linkbuilding, 2) I'm really bad at it, and 3) I don't like trying to 'game' the search engines.

This journey will involve attracting large amounts of search engine traffic, which I guess is SEO. So what changed?

Essentially the fact Google is going in what to me seems like the 'right' direction, in that they're rewarding quality content over and above spammy link building. I've always been disheartened after putting in a lot of effort to make a website, only to find I can't rank it above some shitty scraped site with a ton of spammed links. Maybe I'm saying that to the wrong crowd here, after all this is blackhat world But I do take a certain pride in my work, and if I can't make a quality product profitable, I quickly lose interest.

Recently the serps — and some excellent journey threads here on BHW — have convinced me that the big G is going the right way and that it will be worth putting in the effort to build a couple of decent authority sites.

The Goal

I'm keeping this simple with a very achievable goal of making a steady average of $100/day from my current site, and $100/day from a brand new site. I've done more than ten times that in the past (though never with an 'SEO' project), so I know it's possible.

Why so low then? Two reasons. 1) I'm coming at this as if I was a newbie because I'm essentially starting over. 2) Because I'm impatient and I know if I can't see realistic progress towards reaching my goal, I'll quit. I'd rather set a low goal then increase the target once I've reached it.

Why Now?

I was making a reasonable living online until a few years ago. Then I took my foot of the gas in a big way for about a year while I got busy with an offline opportunity. By the end of that year the neglect of my online business had taken its toll and revenue tanked. I let it die and cast around for a new idea. I started over, building a new project from scratch (site #1 discussed below), but my heart wasn't in it.

So for last couple of years I've been living off savings and pissing around trying to find a quick fix to make a buck. There are definitely quick ways to make cash online, and I've done it more than once. But those things are always short lived and then it's on to looking for a new idea. It's exhausting and demoralizing, and I'm done with that short term thinking.

It's time to settle down and build some proper, solid assets that can pay the bills and stem the bleeding from my savings account. I don't intend to reach the next new year and realize I've done little more than drain the bank account again. Shit, I don't believe in new years resolutions but that sounded suspiciously like I just made one.

Where I'm At Right Now

I have a couple of websites, but have done very little with them. Site #1 will be the initial focus of this journey. It's the new project I started about a year ago. Monetisation is through selling my own info product. It's a 'freemium' model - a free product with an optional paid upgrade. I've done the bare minimum of link building to this site, just some web 2.0s, profile links, that sort of thing.

It's spent the past few months lingering around page 2/3 (mostly 3) for the main keyword, but after the Google update a couple of days ago it popped up to page 1. This is bad timing because one of the first things on my action list is to change the site structure to silo the content and better prepare for an influx of new material. Now I'm worried I'm going to bugger up that nice new page one listing. (I've just looked again and it's already dropped back to page 2, so I'm not so concerned now!)

To give an idea of where I'm starting from, in December site #1 had 2.1k sessions from 1.2k users, generating $490.

Site #2 is in the same niche as #1. It's another info product and the site has virtually no content. There was a tiny amount of effort a few years ago to attract some traffic, but this was one of those projects where the serps were dominated by spam and I just couldn't muster the motivation to try to outrank them. I left the site to die, but it has taken on a second life because I'm able to refer leads to it from site #1. It brings in anywhere from $0 to $350 / month extra, which is why I've kept paying the hosting fees. December revenue was $340.

Although I don't plan to touch this site as part of this journey, I'm obviously hoping that any increase in traffic to site #1 will generate extra sales here, and help me reach my goal of $100/day.

Site #3

As part of this journey I'll start a brand new site. I haven't chosen a niche yet, but I have some ideas. Monetization will be Amazon associates and advertising. The goal is to hit $100/day by the end of the year with this site by putting up a shit ton of quality content.

The Plan

The outline plan is this:

Part 1: Get site #1 to the $100/day goal. This will take the pressure off my financial situation and allow me to to invest a modest sum in creating site #3. It will also be a kind of proof-of-concept. Any positive results I see here will spur me on to action in part 2.

Part 2: Create site #3 and throw masses of quality content at it.

For part 1 I have the following top-level actions outlined:

- Figure out and implement a new structure to silo the existing content and give room to grow. Will this screw up the current ranking? Maybe. Probably. Can't make an omelette without breaking eggs though.

- Research and build a big f-off list of articles to be written.

- Write and publish a lot of content.

Part 2 will start once the above actions are done.

Updates

I'll try to update this thread on a daily basis, because it's obviously not going to keep me very accountable otherwise. Hopefully I can keep my updates more brief than this introductory post, because I've just bashed out nearly 1200 words and that could have been writing time for new site content!

SEO can be scary, I agree with you in that it may seem something not worth doing, but the reality is that we all need it if we have a website and want to scale it. You can focus on writing/developing the site while you outsource the link building. Just make sure you hire the right person. Good luck.

Quick update after day 1. Wednesdays are short working days for me because my kid only has half a day at school. By the time I've walked home from the school run and sorted out household chores, there are only a couple of hours before it's time to go back and fetch her.

Because site #1 is an info product site, there's some customer service email to attend to every morning as well, so not a lot of time left for moving ahead.

That said, I got the following done:

- Figured out the categories for the new site structure

- Came up with a list of titles for 50+ articles

- Wrote a 1936-word article.

- Managed to catch some time in the evening to read up more on how to set up the silo structure.

For me, that list of article titles is the most important. If I sit down at the computer and don't know immediately what I need to get done, I start procrastinating and before I know it the working day has gone. The list means there's no excuses and no "what should I do next" moment. Pick a title, write the article.

rafark said:

SEO can be scary, I agree with you in that it may seem something not worth doing, but the reality is that we all need it if we have a website and want to scale it. You can focus on writing/developing the site while you outsource the link building. Just make sure you hire the right person. Good luck.

Click to expand...

Thanks. I probably should have made this clearer in my rambling intro post, but I'm not going to be doing any link building (or outsourcing any) for the forseeable. Maybe some quality PBNs much further down the road. My strategy, based on Bloop’s excellent thread among other things, is to let the content do all the work. Aim for the long tail searches and let quality content and authority attract links naturally.

Update day 2:

- I wrote an article of about 1400 words, only to realize I already had an article on this exact topic. That one was 550 words, so I combined it with the new one and re-edited to end up with a more respectable 2184 words.

- Wrote another article of 2387 words.

- Finished editing and polishing yesterday's article ready for publication.

The site keeps hopping between the bottom of page 1 / top of page 2, so I'm going to minimise the restructuring. The number of leads has increased with the ranking (obviously) and I don't want to risk it tanking. I'll rename the smallest category, probably add one more, and rework the category pages.

I got curious, what did you do online before and how come you don't do the same thing now?

All the best in your journey.

Good luck OP with your journey! Following!

Update day 3.

Friday was one of those messy days where very little got done. I had a bunch of phone calls to make which took up all the morning, then in the afternoon my heating system broke down so I had to strip it down and repair it. That only left enough time to get a couple of minor things done:

- Posted one of the new articles to the site. It took longer than planned too because I wanted to set up my writing app to connect to Wordpress directly, but there were technical complications. Still, it was worth getting it fixed because it will make publishing articles much faster in the future.
- Bashed out a new article, 1555 words.

This week the word count is going to be lower because I have to work on an unrelated project which will take up all my afternoons, leaving mornings for admin and this project.

Hopefully I can get the unrelated stuff tied up by the end of the month, giving me some time to start on site #3 at the start of Feb. I have some more ideas for what that site is going to target.

Zbigniew said:

I got curious, what did you do online before and how come you don't do the same thing now?

All the best in your journey.

Click to expand...

Thanks. Before I did mostly paid traffic to my own info products. That was back around 2004ish when AdWords and Overture were new it was easy to dominate and make some decent money. It was good for a few years but my account got closed by Google (never found out why) and I couldn't find another way in, they always got me somehow. Overture went to the dogs over time. I dragged it out a bit longer with Bing, but it was a slow painful death so in the end I closed all that down.

I did popup traffic for a few years too, made some good money doing CPA offers. I got fed up spending a fortune to test campaigns and find something that worked well only to have hundreds of copycats using spy tools come and rip off the hard work and ruin it for everyone.

Yogesh1998 said:

Good luck OP with your journey! Following!

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Thanks!

Good luck with the journey. I will definitely be keeping up with your updates.

Update - Monday

I spent the morning putting the new site structure in place for site #1. It's basically a silo structure based on Splishsplash's excellent threads (I can't post links yet, sorry. Been here for ten years but barely posted.) The site is very niche so the structure is quite flat, but from a usability point of view alone it looks better now there are category pages with intro text and all the articles listed. It gives me a much firmer foundation to build on.

I took the opportunity to clean up a few things on the site while I was at it. I found a plugin that automatically monitors permalinks and puts 301 redirects in if you change anything. It works well and means I shouldn't lose any links or visitors due to my mucking around with categories.

Over the weekend the site dropped back to page 3 on Google, but it's up to at the top of page 2 for the time being. Goodness knows what will happen now I've changed the structure, and I'll try not to sweat it, just keep bashing out new content and hope it gets indexed quickly.

I finished a final edit on an article from last week and posted it to the site. Maybe that will bring the bots and they'll notice the changes.

After spending the afternoon on my unrelated project, I managed to bash out a quick 1700 word article in the evening. Feels good to know there's more content in the pot. Little steps every day bring the goal ever closer.

Dbangelo said:

Good luck with the journey. I will definitely be keeping up with your updates.

Click to expand...

Thanks!

Update - Tuesday

• Wrote and published an 1800 word article. Did some inter-linking with other content and the new piece.
• Re-wrote an existing 350-word article, bumping it to 1100 (much better!) words.
• I installed the WP Word Count plugin so I can keep an eye on progress, just for my own interest really. The site is up to 55k words.

According to the plugin I've only added 7k words this month, but as that's all been in the last week it's not too bad. It's the most content that's gone on there in a single month. Plus I've got more than 6k words 'in the bank' ready to be published after a final spit and polish. And plenty more to be written. Back to the grindstone...I mean keyboard.

Update — Wednesday

Wednesday, so a short day again (half-day at school, kid at home the rest of the time). Also feeling very tired this week. Probably eating too much sugar, I need to cut that out.

• Article 1, 1000 words (written and first edit)
• Article 2, 1100 words (written, edited, final edit and published)
• Article 3, 1700 words (very rough draft)

Not a great word count, but I found it hard going. I also had to take some time to work on admin stuff. It's boring and unproductive, but it has to be done.

Update — Thursday

• Rewrote an existing 450-word article as a much better 1450 word article and republished it. This should better hit some long-tail keywords.
• Did another edit then a final polish on a 1700 word article from the other day, and published it.

After that I had to get back to the other non-related project, which I still hope I can finish by the end of this month.

A pretty shabby day all round. I don't want to make excuses, but a total lack of sleep the night before knackered me for the day. It was virtually impossible to get any motivation to write, and hard to concentrate.

Probably doesn't help that traffic on the site is down (perhaps due to my messing with the structure, don't know). Pumping out words for zero revenue is always hard. Still, this is a long game and I'm trying not to think about short-term results because those are meaningless. Onwards and upwards!

Update — Friday / Weekend

• Wrote a first-draft article, 3,100 words. I wasn't planning on it being that long but it kind of got away from me a bit.

That took most of the morning on Friday. In the afternoon I had to get back to the other project.

The weekend was family time, apart from the bare minimum of admin work, mostly replying to customer emails which I usually do twice a day.

It wasn't a great week last week. I got some content done, but sales dropped off so that was demotivating. Still, things picked up over the weekend, I made some sales, and dollars in the bank always helps. Traffic is steady at around 120ish visitors a day, half of which are coming from the search engines.

I've also been thinking a lot about site #3 and what that's going to be about.

My plan this week is much the same. More content. I also want to try to get the other project tied up so I can start on site #3 (though realistically it's unlikely I'll finish completely this week, too much else going on). The quicker site 3 gets going, the sooner it will clamber out of the sandbox. We're already a month gone in 2020 and I don't even have a domain name yet!

Onwards...

Update — Monday

• Wrote a new article of 2500 words, and did the first edit.
• Did the final polishing edit on a 1k word article and published it.

After that it was back to the other project. I'm three-quarters of the way through that. Won't finish this week, but I will hit a milestone on it today, which is motivation to get the last bit done and then move on to getting site #3 started as part of this project.

As for site #1, it's still knocking around on the top of page 2 for the main keyword. When I get some time I'll check webmaster tools (or whatever Google are calling it today) and see if the new content is getting indexed. Really I want to get an ahrefs subscription, but I need the income to increase first.

Onwards...

polishedturd said:

Update — Monday

• Wrote a new article of 2500 words, and did the first edit.
• Did the final polishing edit on a 1k word article and published it.

After that it was back to the other project. I'm three-quarters of the way through that. Won't finish this week, but I will hit a milestone on it today, which is motivation to get the last bit done and then move on to getting site #3 started as part of this project.

As for site #1, it's still knocking around on the top of page 2 for the main keyword. When I get some time I'll check webmaster tools (or whatever Google are calling it today) and see if the new content is getting indexed. Really I want to get an ahrefs subscription, but I need the income to increase first.

Onwards...

Click to expand...

You can always try the 7 day trial for $7. Just write down all the searches you want to do. Use up everything you're given and save all the files they let you download. You can get a couple months of research done in a few days.

Welcome to your journey.

Update — Tuesday

• Did a final polish edit and published a 1700-word article.
• Another final polish edit and published a 3100-word article.
• Had a look at GSC. Picked up some extra keywords to hit.
• Wrote a 1150-word article to hit the keywords that came up in GSC.
• Wrote another 1100-word article and did the first edit.

While I was in GSC I saw that within 48 hours of changing the site structure the number of indexed pages more than doubled, so that was worth doing.

I also discovered that GSC is reporting site speed as 'moderate', so that's something I need to take a look at fixing. The site is light on images, but there are no other optimisations yet so surely plenty of scope for improvement.

Jokull said:

You can always try the 7 day trial for $7. Just write down all the searches you want to do. Use up everything you're given and save all the files they let you download. You can get a couple months of research done in a few days.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I think I’ll try that. I had an account last year so I don't think it's as easy to get another trial. My company credit card expires this month so I'm just waiting for the replacement. Hopefully with a new cc number I can get another trial.

Yong Sung said:

Welcome to your journey.

Click to expand...

Thanks.

Nice journey mate.
Keep grinding.

Update — Wednesday

• Wrote a first draft article, 1500 words
• Final polishing edit and publish 2500-word article

Wednesday's are short, but even so this was a poor showing. Really need to do better.

Onwards...

ziko12345 said:

Nice journey mate.
Keep grinding.

Click to expand...

Thanks man.

Update — Thursday

• Wrote a 3100-word article for a big keyword.
• Did a baseline speed test, then installed Autoptimize (thanks to @shaunm's excellent journey thread for this idea).
• Tweaked the nginx compression settings on the advice of gtmetrix (using the info from this article but with a lower threshold)
• Dumped AdSense for performance reasons

The big article is one I'd been putting it off because it needed a bit of research and I was going for the low-hanging fruit first. I've done double the word count of the top-five results for this kw, so I'm hopeful I can get a page 1 ranking. It still needs a couple of rounds of editing and a polish before it's ready to publish.

I spent the afternoon (when I should have been working on my other project) looking into optimising the site speed. I naively thought installing the Autoptimize plugin would do everything for me - ha! Gtmetrix and Google Page Insights showed up a lot of crap that needed to be dealt with.

Dumping Adsense was a big performance win. Ironically AdSense was the single biggest thing slowing down the page loads. As it makes barely a dollar a day anyway, it was a no brainer. I'd been considering taking it off already because having people click away from my site is hardly the best way to get them to sign up as a lead.

I'm still working through the PSI suggestions and playing around with Chrome Dev tools which has helped me test and tweak the Autoptimize settings. It looks like the next biggest win will come from getting rid of the 95.4% of CSS that's going unused. I think a theme change is the way forward, but that's a bigger job than just swapping it out. I have custom (non-wordpress) pages on this site that are used for signing up leads, and they've been made to look like the theme, so a theme change requires careful consideration and testing.

The afternoon's efforts got the Google PSI score up from 56 to 89, so not quite in the green yet. These are the gtmetrix before and after speeds: