[Journey] Building Authority Sites with $5k or Less

interesting, hope you keep this updated into the future.

could you elaborate on what you consider a "authority site". besides the net profit figure.
how many unique visitors? ballpark CPC? how many pages? just a few popular keywords or hitting lots of long tails?

im also in the process of doing something like this

Plan looks solid. Good choice on only going after two sites. See how things go with those two, and you can always scale up later.

$5k is more than enough to get you up there. I haven't tried LinkPushing, but I've heard great things about it. If I were you, I'd look into buying a fair bit of high PR blog posts. That's a major part of what I've been using on my sites, and my rankings are shooting through the roof. But yeah, like I said, I think you're good to go with your plan and that much capital. I only started with $1,000 (about 2 months ago), and I currently have around $400 left. All three sites I started are on page 1 and 2.

AutoBlogger said:

Interesting journey. I am pretty much on the same boat but I am making 15 authority site and posting 300+ articles per month in total. Thing i like to make you concern- you are focusing offpage SEO for the main keyword only(so far i have noticed from your post). But to get proper authority value from G, you have to focus on sub keywords as well. And i would not recommend to start heavy backlinking from the 1st month. 1st -2nd month I am using only 50 manual social bookmarking for each post. And so far everything looks good.
Wish you good luck

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300 articles per site or across 15 domains, how has the traffic been without backlinking much?

I think authority sites are ones people find so useful that they share with other people with natural backlinking. They're in the first pages of relevant search results and stay there because people think they're useful. These sites have hundreds of relevant articles and Google updates only solidify their position as authority sites.

@Sleinad - sescout seems like a really useful tool. I'd like something that looks at kw rankings week over week or day over day. For instance, this week I'm up 2 spots at 3 instead of 5 last week. This month I'm up 10 spots for 100 keywords since last month. I want a low key reporting tool, and I'll review several before deciding. Regarding diversification, definitely agree. I'll start with Linkpushing which I think includes all of the diversity you're talking about and I'll play around with some other services as I find good service providers.

@eternalfrost - Since I'm outsourcing everything it should be easier for me to gain knowledge, do proper reporting, and keep updating this thread. The initial keywords I'm targeting were provided by the BTB team with the MNS+ product. I think their keyword filters include 800+ monthly searches and $1+ CPC. Think I answered your authority site question above.

@AutoBlogger - I don't know what you mean by main keyword vs subkeywords? Each article is currently focused on 1 kw and adding 60 articles per month, but I'm thinking of adding some articles with LSI mixed in too. I'm not doing anything crazy with my sites at all. I'll use linkpushes and IntensE's strategy of blog commenting on relevant blogs.

@thedon123 - awesome! The high PR blog posts, are those blogs relevant to your site niches? Makes sense that you get a good boost from it.

Update time

I got statscounter, google analytics for wp by yoast installed. Added 2 articles per blog, all pages for both sites indexed in google.

I got 50 of my 100 articles from ppcmaster. I thought I could put them on the site without reviewing them. I have read through 15 articles, and most of them are decent quality, but it's better to read through all articles when you initially start working with a writer to give them feedback. So there goes another 5 hours to review 50 articles. Josh and team are very responsive, pleasant, and professional to work with. I want to try out several more providers including places outside of BHW including freelancer and odesk. This time I'm assigning 3-5 articles per source to get a good test drive. I'll report back what I find.

So when I got my articles, I thought it'd be a quick 1 min copy/paste job to post to wordpress, but wow was I wrong, haha. After copy/paste I was showing measly 23% SEO with the Easy WP SEO plugin. So after 1 hour I finally got it up to 100%. The good thing is, I can take one afternoon, knock out a month's worth of posts on queue after figuring out my way around WP.

Competition:
Seems like big sites for my chosen niches only have 100k monthly visitors. This is discouraging because if I assume optimistically 50k visitors x 2 pageviews x 2% ctr x $1 cpc = $3,000.

Read this inspirational thread.
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...ublisher-here-ask-me-any-q-5.html#post3230093

Todo:
Drip all content to the blogs
Check ping list
Get linkpushes ready
Fix tagging
Change picture locations to the right, so then I can add AdSense box on the left side right under the title and still obey AdSense TOS.
Add About Us and Contact pages.
Truncate posts on the homepage, categories, tags.
Show 10 posts on the homepage.

Summary:
More work than I thought. Even if I outsource a lot, there are still details that I can't outsource.
$0 and 5 hours to read articles, 4 hours playing with WP and plugins, 10 hours reading more posts on authority sites and backlinking.
Running total: $834
Total time: 26 hours

In terms of tracking your keywords position in the SERPS check out http://www.rankcheckerreviews.com

What's your traffic looking like now that you've added some content?

Nice plan! I can't wait to see how it goes

The sites have no backlinks so the traffic is probably 0 right now. Also seems like the Google Analytics WP plugin by Yoast isn't working, so I'll need to manually add GA to the footer. Also I'm purposely not checking traffic too often because a) looking at traffic distracts me from finishing my todo list items b) not much to see anyways. This is the same reason why I don't have Adsense up on my blog yet, because there's no traffic to monetize just yet.

No Hat said:

I have built an authority site also.

One thing I would suggest is to check what keywords your traffic is actually typing into the search engine. Then build pages for the biggest one. I found that I had gotten 3000 visitors over the last 3 months for a keyword the page wasn't targeting.

I do all the writing on the site too. It's a pain but it improves user experience and makes Panda happy. My average visitor goes to over 3 pages. I recently realized there was a gold mine in low profit non-commercial keywords. I found some with lots of traffic but little competition. Then when they hit my site I know they will visit a couple high profit pages before leaving.

Good luck with your project.

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How did you pick the topic for the authority site?
What niche?
What amount of traffic and CPC were you targetting when you started?

How are you going to promote your new KWs? So your two sites will be optimized on-site yet how will you do SEO for 50 additional KWs? I think BTB's linkpushing can push out 3 KWs at a time.

yubrew said:

The sites have no backlinks so the traffic is probably 0 right now. Also seems like the Google Analytics WP plugin by Yoast isn't working, so I'll need to manually add GA to the footer. Also I'm purposely not checking traffic too often because a) looking at traffic distracts me from finishing my todo list items b) not much to see anyways. This is the same reason why I don't have Adsense up on my blog yet, because there's no traffic to monetize just yet.

Click to expand...

To put Google Analytics on ClickBump 4 theme you place the code at

Clickbump Engine -> Code Settings -> Custom Hidden <head> Code field

Good look with the journey, I'll be watching ya

I'm not sure if you wouldn't get out better with providing and setting couple of free blog hosts and...

$6 cost / article
outsorce on script lance or other writing services, article can be there as low as $1... if no pay someone for good translation. anyway paying $6 unless it's extreme technical and subject specific writing is crashing yourself with costs.


60 articles / mo
as above... if you pay just $3 or $2 then this could be 120/180... or... 360?

$97 linkpushing service
you want to spend nearly $400 for articles and just $100 for linkpushing/seo ?


rethink it and diversify A LITTLE. I mean do one part with your plan, set up some small hosting for free blogs, you can always have a script that checks for unique content and delte spam link once it's running and filled by other ppl.

So for picking niches and main keywords, I picked two niches that I am very familiar with, real estate and dental. I finally got around to looking at my potential keyword traffic:

main kw for real estate:
5400 exact local monthly
27,100 phrase local monthly

main kw for dentistry:
1300 exact local monthly
27,100 phrase local monthly

If I'm slow to respond, it's probably because I am super noob and takes me a while to figure things out.

I'm working on my keyword research and On-site SEO first, mainly figuring out how to upload the content in an efficient manner to outsource later, and testing out different article writers. For backlinking I'll do link pushes until I have more time to research and plan a backlinking strategy. The suggestions you guys have for me is awesome so far. Keep 'em coming.

Question: A bunch of keywords are local business names and nonsensical phrases. I'm having trouble thinking of good types of articles for these types of keywords. Any suggestions?

yubrew said:

Question: A bunch of keywords are local business names and nonsensical phrases.

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For local businesses, write an article about some topical news either about the business sector or the actual business. If you're sure that the nonsense phrases are the right keywords to target, them just include them in generic articles.

IMO if you want to put $5k in this project,you will get to $100/day in 2 to 4 months,assuming that you monetize the site in every way possible!
I am planning to do something similar;6-10 authority authority sites developed in the course of an entire year can bring some freaking good money almost on auto-pilot and the good thing is that it can be done with 10k or less if you plan out the things carefully.Some things must be done by myself,however...
Anyway,good luck with your journey!

You're a guy who actually has cash and thus can start up far quicker. That also means you're gonna make some mistakes and lose some cash. In my opinion I prefer to start small and fail small and then take the lessons and scale up.

Then again, your financial situation is probably better than mine. You'll start earning way faster even if you do lose more cash in the start.

installed akismet, analytics. added about us, contact us pages. fixed tagging and picture locations. uploaded a lot more content on drip, 1 article / day while i test out more article writers.

modified ping list, which should increase indexing speed
finished cleaning up the 500 kw research list down to 350. removed local company names after talking to BTB. Eliminated the nonsense keywords, this can also be eliminated by using the MarketSamurai phrasetobroad ratio to at least 5%.
Got 50 more articles to review.

I still need to do some things to improve on-site SEO, such as truncating posts, showing more than 1 article on the homepage. After this I'll move onto off-site SEO. I wrote some general guidelines for how I'm outsourcing article writing in the future. I'll put it in a separate post because it's pretty long.

Summary:
$0, 5 hours reading articles, 2 hours playing with WP, 6 hours modifying kw list, 3 hours reading reviews on article writers.
$0 and 5 hours to read articles, 4 hours playing with WP and plugins, 10 hours reading more posts on authority sites and backlinking.
Running total: $834
Total time: 43 hours