Hey everyone.
Been lurking on BHW for years and I'm always amazed how friendly and informative everyone here is. So while I'm usually not that type of person, I figured why not document my little journey here. Who knows, maybe I'm able to offer some insights that might help some of you. And I think it's a fun project for myself as well. Never did such a thing.
My background:
I've been working online for quite some years with big break in between. So I'm certainly not new to this. However the project I'm starting right now is new territory so I'm excited to see if I can get something out of it.
My GF and I are in a position that we already make enough money from other sites to be able to experiment a bit with sites that are out of our comfort zone. If it fails, no harm done.
The niche and style of site is quite different than our usual stuff so I will have to adjust and learn as I go. But again, I'm far from new in the online marketing business so I know my basics, no matter the niche.
What will I be building:
Well, don't expect super exciting stuff from me. It's "just" a tech blog.
What makes it a bit different than usual I guess is that I will be working mainly with translated content.
I consider this a white hat project when it comes to marketing, backlinks, SEO but the content will be stolen to put it bluntly.
We write our own content for our other sites and TBH it's not something I really enjoy doing. I'm not a writer. I do it when needed and I pretty much know how to write a good site text that the reader and Google likes. But I'm not going to spend hours a day writing for this new site.
So after quite some evenings-in-bed-research I'm confident I can build this site using translated content
So what will the site be like:
First of all, I'm going for quality. It will be a well known tech niche. Nothing special here. But it's a tech that I love and use. I think that's important. If you sell something that means nothing to you, your surfers will notice. That's how I see it. Certainly with blog style sites.
The same goes with buying content.
There are many great writers who sell great text but it always lacks a certain feeling. You just know it's a paid job without any feeling for the product. So that's also a reason why I will work with translated content instead of paying another writer.
The site will be in English. And I will be using text from 2 or 3 other languages. First I will be looking for sites in my own country which will be the easiest to read for me. (I'm in Europe).
And when I run out of content I will check other languages that I can read a bit but will take me more time to search for as it's not my first language.
To quickly fill up the site a bit I will use high quality, general info articles. Like reviews of products in my niche.
Each article will be neatly placed as a blog and enhanced as much as I can. I will make absolutely sure the text is readable in English after translating.
I will change some words and paragraphs around. Change some titles and headings.
It will look like an original, hand written article.
I will never use the images from the original article. I will use as much as possible from free stock sites like Pexel. This is something I need to figure out still. I never really used these sites.
Every picture will be mirrored and/or changed in some way. I will use Canva to add texts and what not on the images. I hope in the end Google will consider them original.
So my goal is basically to make everything look as original and high quality as possible. It should in no way be obvious that this is translated content from other sites.
Once the site is filled with general articles in my niche I will go more for more detailed articles and long tail keywords.
SEO, backlinks, socials:
This is the part that quite excites me. While I of course know my why around Facebook, Twitter and similar sites, I want to go full social with this new project. Not really in my comfort zone so It will be nice to document it here and again, learn as I go. Hopefully we can share some tips and tricks.
So far I created a new Facebook account (personal and business), a Twitter account and I signed up for Youtube. The Youtube account won't get any use anytime soon though. Oh and created a subreddit with one of my many Reddit accounts. An aged, clean account.
I will be slowly adding profiles to other sites like Medium, Behance, you know the drill.
As I mentioned at the start, I will be pretty much going white hat. I'm not using much black hat in general in the first place. I sometimes buy a few links if I think our sites are lacking in some areas. I use some high DA's as tier 2's to push indexation and other small stuff like that. But I'm usually already 95% white hat. It's what I'm most comfortable with. I believe in quality and being informative to the surfer (and Google). It will take longer but the results usually justify waiting a bit and working the way we do.
Backlinks wise I will not be focusing on this at all the first months. My focus is 100% quality articles and designing the site. I hope to get organic backlinks eventually but also realize that nowadays this is not easy and I'm probably at some point forced to help things speed up a bit. Maybe I'll buy some quality links or reach out for link exchanges. We'll see. Not a priority now.
For now I will get the articles up and link them on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Manually at first and when I'm happy with how everything looks this will probably be automated to save time.
Software, server:
We have a very fast VPS which we pay quite a lot for. As we're not doing anything shady It will be hosted with our other sites on the this server. Not worried about any footprint. Well, I mean translating content is a bit shady but again, it will be changed in a way that I can't imagine Google will pick up on it and flag me.
Like all our sites it will go through Cloudflare.
We typically use Wordpress and are pretty good at it.
I've got a nice theme from one of the giveaways here on BHW. I paid specific attention to the speed of the theme. With the upcoming Core Web Vitals update from Google I want to be prepared.
I've bought themes in the past that were too old and horribly optimized. I spent hours to this day getting them green in Pagespeed Insights.
The theme I'm using now seems very good optimized so that will save me from a huge headache in the near future. I'm very OCD when it comes to that stuff.
I'll be using WP Rocket as the cache plugin. I like what it does. Yoast SEO pro for the SEO part,
I have a keyword suggestion plugin but not yet confident about it. I will probably be using other tools to search for content gaps and long tails. I'll get back to that in future posts.
Not using anything special here. And I prefer to use as little plugins as possible to reduce loading times.
Monetization:
Not much to write here. No priority at the moment. I have no idea where this will be going. My goal is text and more text and getting ranked. So I won't be worrying about making money for at least several months to come. As this is a different way of working and outside my usual style of sites I'll slowly have to look into this and see what's right for the site.
That's about it so far...
The design is up. The first translated text has been added yesterday.
Today I will optimize it, add pictures. The design itself will need lots of changes. Categories, colors, logo, etc. So this will keep me busy for a while.
The first text is a general review but a very high quality one. 2100 words and a great start to my site.
That's it for now
Don't expect too much fireworks here guys. I won't be updating a lot and I'm not re-inventing the wheel here. The only thing that's different from the tons of other blog journeys is that it's my way of doing it and as I'm coming from other styles of sites and other niches I might be doing things slightly different than others. Maybe there is something we can learn from it. We shall see.
I'll add to this post when I have something interesting to mention. I'm not going to bother anyone with a daily update that I added new piece of text.
Once I see movement in Analytics or Search Console I will give an update for sure. And other than that when I will feel like it.
I'm open to questions but not sure I have much to add that hasn't already been discussed before here. I'm not using any secret software or tricks. It will simply be quality texts, a great design and a lot of work.
Thanks for reading.
