[Journey] Scaling an Authority website to 10K a month (and beyond)

Shwepps · Apr 2, 2022

Hi again, congratz on the achievement!

Have you ever had a problem when google puts your content (table in my example) in TOP-1 and it results in a terrible ctr, like 3-4%? What did you do to fix it, if you ever had this problem?

Kikerinka · Apr 3, 2022

Artz said:
this post encourages me to keep working harder and harder, congratulations it's an incredible journey

Thanks, keep working, as long as you have a good plan, your persistence will pay off no doubt!

Shwepps said:
Hi again, congratz on the achievement!

Have you ever had a problem when google puts your content (table in my example) in TOP-1 and it results in a terrible ctr, like 3-4%? What did you do to fix it, if you ever had this problem?

Hi Shwepps, nice to see you around

.
In my niche I cannot really have this problem, since the topics/keywords/questions I address with my content are of a rather complex character. That means that in order to find the answers (to satisfy their search intent) users really have to click on the result. They will never see enough information in the snippet.

If you face this issue, maybe try to include in the table something that entices readers to click on the url, so they want to know more and see the actual page. Of course this depends on the niche, but I believe with some creativity you can always find your way

.

hehe2444 · Apr 3, 2022

Kikerinka said:
Final Bonus: Closing thoughts

Perhaps everything important has already been said in my daily updates. And of course, also in the answers to questions of you guys. 66 pages and over 1,300 posts is no short journey thread after all .

But I will at least try to analyze a few things and share a few thoughts with you at the end (not a complete end, because I still plan to update the thread monthly), on how I see things from my perspective. Let me start with the thread itself.

To start this journey thread was the very best decision I made a year ago.

Instead of building some nice residual income and asset only for myself, it allowed me to inspire and help others to do the same thing. I tried to update the thread with utmost detail, explaining what I did, how I did it, and why I did it, and sincerely believe it can be a guide people can follow, while building some quality authority website in any niche, eventually reaching similar numbers as I did reach.

It allowed me to connect with members on BHW in a way I've never experienced before. Thank you all for posting here, contributing, sharing your own successes and struggles as you work on your own online projects. Maybe it is just a subconscious thing, but it definitely helps with motivation when you know others are also trying to build their online projects, and when we encourage each other in threads like this one. IM is a lonely ride at most times, but journey threads here on BHW do not make it feel that way

Your inputs helped me a lot over the year. Though I tried to stick to the original plan, I also made big changes to it, and sometimes minor changes, based on your replies here. For example @larcha helped me to understand that instead of writing eBooks for other three months it would be reasonable to do another content push, and I already see very promising results from that activity. Without running this thread and your questions, I would not make several data analyses, results of which helped me heavily to make the right decisions with the website, which eventually resulted in even a better income at the end.

Last but not least, I believe that it is important to create right habits and stick to them over the course of any endeavor. Posting an in-detail update to the journey each evening, and coming back to answer questions each morning, formed an important part of my daily structure, or daily schedule if you want. And it was something I was looking forward to, even though I sometimes did it very late and extremely tired .

Now, let's have a look at how successful this journey was. Looking at my initial post, we can identify a few goals:

I wanted to add at least 330 new articles to the website over the year. In fact, I added over 500 (345 in first content push + 28 scheduled, 108 in second content push, 23 in third small content push in April, and scheduled 20 in May, that's 524 articles added).

The goal was to earn $10K from the website in last 30 days of the journey. In fact, the website generated $18,847 in last 30 days, from 12th April 2021 to 11th May 2021.

I wanted to prove a few things with the journey as well:

That you can build a website with a lot of tier 1 traffic, with nice earning potential, without building a single link.

And also that you can generate some nice monthly residual income without spending substantial sums of money.

I believe that everyone who has followed the journey would agree I managed to prove these points . No links were built and I spent just over $700 over the 12 months period...

Now, the question is, why this journey ended with such a success? I believe it is the result of several things.

First of all, my mindset. Citing my original post in the thread:
“My main goal of this project is not making money, but building something of true value for people. When there is value, money will come. ”

I kept this on my mind always. While writing articles and improving them, while working on eBooks, while answering emails of customers and people who reached out to me from the website, while trying to improve the Core Web Vitals scores & eventual user experience, and of course while replying to this BHW thread.

Though I try to stay humble, and not be overly appreciative of my own efforts, I think I can say that I managed to build something of true value for others during those 365 days. And the reward eventually did come, because that's the law of action and reaction. It couldn't be any otherwise.

Second, I had a solid plan. Not only for the entire journey, but for individual months and also individual days when I was working.

The plan did not come from the blue. It came from the data I collected over the years in GA and Google Search Console, but also from the information I collected from other journey threads on BHW, and for a long pondering over the possibilities and what I could do with this website, and how I can do it.

Hard work (more to it later ) is essential, but the level of results one achieves ,with their hard work, is always a function to their plan. Let me give you an example: If 100 people start to dig the well in a desert, trying to find water, 99 of them will fail.

One will persist, really digging super deep, working more than others, and eventually after weeks or months of hard work and getting as deep as several hundred meters below the ground, maybe even cutting through the rock, he will find water. Because there is water everywhere, even in a desert.

But if the same man started to dig the well somewhere in Central Europe, for example, he may need just 5% of the effort to get the same results. Because the water would be just few meters below the surface, and in abundance.

And that's exactly the case with having a right plan. I've seen many journeys on BHW that were destined to fail right from the beginning, simply because people had a bad plan. They were either looking for water somewhere it is extremely hard to find it, or they were trying to achieve something they didn't have resources to achieve. It wasn't the case with my journey though. The plan was totally realistic.

Third, I patiently followed the plan, and did not care about the intermediate results.

The beauty of IM is that everything happens with some delay. First few months you barely see any results of your work. And that was the case with my journey as well! Just check the earnings for first five months:

May 2020: $4,514

June 2020: $5,004

July 2020: $5,139

August 2020: $5,441

September 2020: $6,134

I was working 200+ hours a month on the website, and my monthly income, over the first five months, has improved in average by only $324/month. That means I was getting barely $1.5 per hour. Flipping burgers at McDonald's I would earn more--in terms of relative income improvement ).

But I understood very well how it works in IM. I knew it takes time until articles start to rank, and eventually Google understands them better, collect enough data about user behavior, and as the result they establish themselves in SEPRs for many secondary and long tail keywords, and big things will happen.

And of course, I also knew that with an authority website, for a good work you do once, you will get paid repeatedly in months and years (in terms of recurring income from ads & sales), which isn't the case with McDonald's, or any other job for that matter .

So I just kept going and publishing, following the plan, not caring at all about the intermediate results. Eventually great results arrived, but with delay, as it is always the case in IM. Many people give up too early. Do not make the same mistake if you are just embarking on a similar journey like mine.

Forth, I did things my own way, not caring much about what my competitors do, or what is generally expected in the niche.

We live in a highly impersonal world, with a lot of repetition and uniformity. And it is something I really dislike, and I think I am not alone.

Like when you go to the shop, or to the gas station, or to the hotel. The employees always say the same thing, to every single customer. There is a process in place for everything, and they follow it, because that's what they are instructed to do. Most jobs in big corps monkeys could do, they would just have to train them like they do train the employees .

Or you listen to one of the top 100 modern songs in some chart, or read one of the bestsellers books nowadays, or visit one of the really BIG websites. It's always the same style of writing, same patterns of thinking, same emotions they try to appeal to.

Can one succeed in IM with such an approach?
For sure they can, if they can build the next 100K pages website for the masses... But if they try to imitate the big players while playing on a completely different playground, they can forget about succeeding.

You have to distinguish from the pack if you want to build some smaller brand in any niche. That's exactly what I did here.

My articles are personal, often thought provoking, many times including jokes, and often with unconventional sentence structure and style of writing. I would never ever use tools like Grammarly—because such tools make the text uniform and robotic, just like it is on all big websites, in all major magazines, etc..

Sure enough, not everyone likes such experiments .
But every visitor landing on my site will perceive (consciously or subconsciously) that this is something different than the content they find on any other major website in my niche, or on one of the biggest websites of the web, that are also active in my niche, just like they are in many others.

And those who like such an original approach will eventually spend longer time on my pages, come back, bookmark the content, share it, print the content, etc, and Google monitors all of that through Chrome, and will eventually give me an edge over my competitors, who just cannot achieve such user behavior metrics with their standard uniform content.

As someone rightly said:
“Sometimes it is hard to say what exactly quality means, but when you experience quality, you immediately know it.”

And the same principle applies to your plan for the project. You can go back in my thread, check the pages, one after one, and read how many people told me repeatedly I should build links, or that I could never succeed without links, or that I would achieve much better success with links etc.
Yet where are these people now?

Sure, I'm not saying that links are evil, or that you cannot succeed if you build links. Not at all!
I just say you do not need them, so do not build them just because everyone in IM says you need both content & links to rank, just because it is some “universally accepted dogma”.

Do things your own way, add some personality to both your plan & content creation, look at tyhe topics you write about from a new angle, one others don't look at it from.
Not only it is the best way to stand out and eventually find your audience. You will also enjoy the process much more, because when you give your heart & personality to something, it is always in part a work of art, and not only some mundane repetitive job .

Fifth, discipline and persistence played a major part on the success of this journey.

I know that what I did here might look easy for some observer:
" Okay, another day, Kikerinka published another three-four articles, or added 6K words to new eBook .”

The truth is though that I found it easy and enjoyed it on some days, and hard or even extremely difficult on other days. But plan was the plan, and so I kept going on. If I planned to publish at least 50 new articles in a month, I would do it no matter what.

It isn't an easy thing to do—and it is important to have realistic goals, and also see a meaningful purpose in your activity. But I always knew why I was doing this, and didn't aim for some crazy numbers like 10 articles/day, and so I managed to see it through over the course of the journey.

Last but not least, I sincerely believe having a good balance helped me a lot to succeed with this journey.

I've talked about this several times over the duration of the journey. Spending long hours in front of a computer screen (or TV, or mobile phone) is not particularly healthy (it isn't healthy at all in fact ), and it is not natural for human beings.

Yet spending long hours in front of a screen of my laptop was necessary to get the daily work done for the website & the journey...

That's why I limited my screen time outside of this to bare minimum. I haven't played any computer game for even 1 second over these 365 days. I'm not on any social network, and I haven't watched a single episode of some series during the journey.

The only things I did outside of work on my laptop (or mobile phone) was replying to personal emails, and sometimes watching a documentary on YouTube, or occasionally a live streaming of a biathlon competition, or of a tennis match .

In general I tried to spend a lot of time outside while not working. Ideally in the nature, far away from any screens & noises, giving my body some exercise and my brain some relax. Either with friends or alone. It worked like a charm, and gave me the balance I needed.

I honestly cannot imagine producing quality content in this volume day after day, if I lacked the balance, if I just spent all days in front of a computer--sometimes working and sometimes not. If that was a case, I would for sure experience a burnout and would not be able to finish the journey.
The lesson to take here is this one:

Working more hours per day, or per week, doesn't necessarily mean that you will do more work, or see something through to the end. Life-work balance is essential for quality work. Find it, and you will not only produce much better quality, but you will also enjoy the process much more.

So that's it for the closing thoughts.
From now on (once I am finally done with the giveaway ) I won't be replying to messages here daily. I will still try to reply if someone posts, but the regularity won't be there anymore.

I already have another schedule in place for the next 45 days, and a LOT of tasks on the big whiteboard in my room to take care of, almost all of them outside of IM. And then, if situation allows it, I will travel to Spain, this time not only for some hiking holiday

Looking forward to what's ahead, and wishing you best of luck in your journeys, both on BHW and outside of it. Those on BHW I will definitely try to follow!

Ah, and one last thing.
I was extremely lucky in life to meet people I could learn a lot from, be it in real life, or though books and recordings.

Actually the very first recording on motivation/success/attitude to life I've heard changed a lot for me, and I have not heard or read a better one since, though I heard/read dozens if not hundreds of motivational recordings/books and biographies of successful people, sometimes even attending live events when they spoke. But nothing beat the first one...

It is an old material, no fancy cars, girls, big houses and stuff you'd see in today's motivational videos & talks .
But many lessons I've talked about in this journey I've originally heard there. Then I tested them in my life and saw that they worked, 100%. I have probably heard it over twenty times, and can recite some passages word to word. It is the following recording:

Do yourself a favor and listen to it with real focus. It can be the best 30 minutes you've invested into something in a very long time, maybe ever

Great, you're definitely in . Will update you soon.

So far you're in, but @alexxsapce still has 24 hours to show up here . But I am glad that things look promising now to finalize the giveaway soon. Tomorrow we should finalize it and then I will contact the support immediately with my request.

Thank you mate, I really enjoyed seeing you in the thread, and I know you've done a lot of work over the course of it as well.. Keep it up, everything is possible with the right mindset & plan. And I think you have both

Thanks man, appreciate it, and nice to hear that I motivated some people to register on BHW
With the home page: not necessarily. It depends on the structure of your website. In my case, latest posts would not make much sense on the homepage. But on many other websites, especially websites deigned for returning visitors, ten latest posts is a great choice .

The recording your talking about is set to private. Could you share it again please?

Kikerinka · Apr 4, 2022

hehe2444 said:
The recording your talking about is set to private. Could you share it again please?

You're right, they somehow deleted it. Anyway, you can listen to the very original here:

The original is always the best, but if the sound quality is too bad for you or you struggle to understand the voice (it is an old recording), you can just search on YouTube for "Earl Nightingale Strangest Secret in the World" and find also other versions where someone else narrates the message with the use of modern recording technology...

Hope it helps, it is definitely worth listening to (more than once)

Kikerinka · Apr 5, 2022

Side projects update no. 7

As every month, except of my main update I also try to update you guys on my three side projects (that I am working on presently). Let's dive right into it:

1. Side project no. 1 - Semi-authority website in a specific sub-niche of my main niche, with an initial goal of 50 money pages, which I later extended to 60 content pages (for profit).

- As you can see, things are really moving in the right direction. For the first time we broke 20K page views, and are now less than 9K PV from Adthrive threshold (for a second website with the network). Also the year over year growth is the biggest so far, 140% when it comes to visits (it was 80% last month).

- Page views in last 12 months, the red circle marks the date when I decided to do something with this old website, and started publishing new content, trying to make from it a small authority website in a very specific sub-niche of my main niche.

Vast majority of new articles were published between 27th august 2021 and 20th October 2021, but as you can see some noticeable growth started just in January, so that's another proof that Google Sandbox is a real thing

.

- My biggest problem with this website (and a reason why Adthrive may reject it) is traffic distribution by country. As you can see on a year over year comparison, I improved the percentage of US traffic drastically, from 13% to 26%, but it is still way too low for having any chance with Adthrive. Bearing my good standings with the network, I believe I'd have a chance of getting in with 38%-40%, so let's see if we can get to such numbers in coming months.

- GSC for the website for last 6 months, another reason for optimism when it comes to the future of this website...

Growth of new articles in numbers:

December 2021: 5 of the 46 new articles had over 10PV/day in average,13 articles from the newly published 46 got at least 30 page views during the month.
January 2022: 5 new articles had over 10PV/day in average, 17 got at least 30 page views during the month.
February 2022: 7 new articles had more than 10PV/day in average, 20 new articles had over 30PV during the month.
March 2022: 9 new articles had more than 10PV/day in average (or over 300PV/month), 27 new articles had over 30PV during the month.

As you can see the growth is there, it doesn't happen with some crazy mind-blowing pace, but I didn't expect that anyway (and neither should you with your websites

). As long as every month most of the new articles grow in traffic (some from 1 hit to 10 hits/ month, some from 1K to 2K hits/month), I know we are moving in a right direction.

Work & Earnings for the website:

I haven't done any work on this website in March 2022.
Ad earnings: $62
eBook sales: $57 (just like dgital product sales sucked on my authority website in March, so did they suck on this small website)
Total earnings: $119

* Important note: From this month on, I won't say which ad network I am on with any of my smaller websites, due to the JSON issue we discussed here earlier. I may or not move this website to Adthrive in the future, or even to other ad network, I may intensify the ad layout with Ezoic (which is super conservative now, and no doubt intensifying will easily double the ad earnings), but I won't disclose these things here. I will only disclose the ad income.

2. Side project no. 2: Intended authority website in a specific sub-niche of travel niche, somehow related to my offline plans in Spain (non-profit).

- Positive development even here, it is still early days, but as I've said many times in early stages of building anything, what matters is the relative growth, and not the absolute numbers, hence I am super happy with what I see here.

I have also dashed GA4 in the middle of the month and installed universal Analytics, since I couldn't find my way in the GA4 interface... Things look even better on GA:

- We got 13 organics in just half of the month (since installing Universal Analytics), which is really more than I hoped for at this stage of the project and this season of the year.

As I thought, the traffic to this project is going to be extremely international:

- Since this is a non-profit project though, and my goals here have nothing to do with money, I do not care at all about the traffic by country distribution.

Work done on the project in March 2022:

My goal was to publish 15 new articles on the website in March, but I really gave this on my best shot and published 25 new articles, taking the tally to 40 (+ homepage, which can also rank for certain keywords). Some of these are 1K words, some 3K, and it took me quite along time to get them done (often over 2 hours/article), so really happy getting 25 high quality posts online for this one.

- Next plan is letting those 40 articles sit and rank, and hopefully collect a lot of data in GSC over the next 3-4 months. Then I will decide what to do next with this website, how to proceed next.

Side project no. 3: Content website I bought at the end of December 2021

- There was a minor Google update in March, and I sort of hoped it would remove the page experience algorithm penalty this domain got last year (since I improved so many things on the website), but it didn't happen, as you can see on the chart. We'll have to wait for some bigger update

.

- Amazon earnings were really strange to say the least, with a very dry period of virtually no earnings from 7th to 14th March (I have no idea why

), but things somehow picked up from then on, and we will see what happens in April in this niche, which has a factor of seasonality to it, and should do better from mid April to October.

Work & earnings on the project in March 2022:

Amazon: $41
Ads: $83
Total: $124 (far less than I should be earning considering how much I paid for the domain, but I still keep ad layout on a very safe side, trying to keep a bigger picture on my mind, instead of some instant earnings).

- When it comes to work, I spent 5 days in a row working on a keyword research for this domain, always for 3-4 hours a day. I used only free methods (such as alphabet soup, wildcards, logic, etc) with the help of free plugins like MOZ bar or KW surfer for Chrome,

I am not sure if I mentioned it with my updates for the authority website, but I really like to do KW research in batches, simply focusing for a certain time (in this case 5 days) on KW research only, not jumping to work on other projects. This is because once you really dive into the topic, ideas start to pop up, you discover a certain keyword here and there and eventually connect the dots together, and bang, in few minutes you have 10 great keywords on your list.

This is how it always works, at least for me with KW research. Sometimes for hours you may not find a single good keyword, but then you discover something or got an idea, try it out, and easily add 10 great low comp keywords to the list. The result of my KW research in numbers:

174 new keywords, 46 out of them are 0 search, the searches for the rest range from 10 reported US monthly searches to 1,200 reported US monthly searches.
Estimated monthly global traffic these KW can bring (my internal calculation): 40K-80K visits.
Vast majority of these KW is low comp, with websites like reddit and niche-related forums in top 5 positions.

- Doing this KW research, and really diving into it (which means also checking numbers of different websites I discovered covering the niche), I came to a conclusion that this niche is really big, and if I gave this website an honest effort for a year (let's say 60% of the effort I gave to my authority website, but in this case focusing only on content creation, no eBooks or stuff), I would get it to 200K-300K monthly visits, and at least $4-5K/month.

Obviously I do not plan to do so, since I have no motivation for such efforts whatsoever, and the plans for the year ahead are completely different. But it still nice having such a website and knowing the potential the niche has, should something unexpected happen....

However, I will do one content push to it in April, that means now

, aiming for 50 new articles.

It seems a lot considering I am not an expert in the niche but I want to be ambitious here, since I believe the 50 new articles is needed at least to get this website to numbers high enough for one of the premium ad networks. It will also in time give me valuable data in Google Search Console, for even better keywords than I discovered with free methods on google search.

I have already started writing and so far do not find it as hard as I expected (managed to do some of the articles in under 60 minutes), but we will see how it goes with other topics, and if I reach the goal. This content push will be my main IM focus in April, so let's see if I can recall the productivity from the first year of this journey and get 50 HQ articles done and online

.

Final thoughts & important information:

- So far satisfied with how things are going. Obviously we have to be patient, because all three side projects will experience effects of Google Sandbox, and we'll see the full rewards of the efforts with the delay of many months.

- I found my productivity super good in March and will try to keep it up in April, trying to publish those 50 new articles on SP no. 3. It's been a while since I've last published so many in a month, but will give it my best shot and we will see what number we will end up with

.

Important information: I will leave for a trip to Spain towards the end of April. Do not have a ticket yet, but I will likely leave anytime between 26th and 30th April. As always, I will fly for a trip with a one way ticket, not putting any pressure on my return date.

Plan to hike and relax a lot and turn myself off from everything (especially any technology), but I will also do some work related to my offline plans in the country, which I will hopefully start materializing later in autumn this year

.

Until I leave, I will continue monitoring this thread and updating you on any milestones we reach with my authority website. But logically I won't post my monthly update for April 2022 on 1st May 2022, since I (most likely) won't be here, and won't travel with my laptop.
The chances are I won't be back by 1st June 2022 either (maybe I will, maybe not).
In any case, I will post updates for the month(s) I missed as soon as I return from the trip.

That's it for now guys, thank you for following, and any questions do not hesitate to ask

BabyJoker · Apr 5, 2022

Kikerinka said:
I have also dashed GA4 in the middle of the month and installed universal Analytics, since I couldn't find my way in the GA4 interface... Things look even better on GA:

I absolutely agree with this. I fucking hate GA4

unitedplaydj · Apr 6, 2022

Kikerinka said:
Estimated monthly global traffic these KW can bring (my internal calculation): 40K-80K visits.

1) Can you elaborate on how you made this calculation with keywords with 0 searches (knowing that they are not really 0 searches, but I am intrigued by your calculation after all)?

2) Can you elaborate on the content for affiliates? If you have found any flaws, and the new content outline. Or just some advice to follow on such content?

Kikerinka · Apr 6, 2022

SpezzNacci said:
I absolutely agree with this. I fucking hate GA4

Yeah, it's an absolute pain, but we will eventually have to make a switch, since Google will discontinue Universal Analytics from July 2023 (if they do not eventually postpone it like they did many times with such announcements).

Anyway, let's hope they improve it by then.

unitedplaydj said:
1) Can you elaborate on how you made this calculation with keywords with 0 searches (knowing that they are not really 0 searches, but I am intrigued by your calculation after all)?

2) Can you elaborate on the content for affiliates? If you have found any flaws, and the new content outline. Or just some advice to follow on such content?

Question 1: This differs from niche to niche, but I go mostly by existing data. I checked the reported search volume for keywords (always just the main one) this website is already ranking for, and compared it with the actual traffic each article gets.

Let me give you a (very simplified) example: Free tool I use report 20 monthly searches for a KW. But the article (with all secondary KWs and longtail KWs) get in fact 150 PV/month in average. At the same time, the article ranks no. 2 for the main KW.

Hence the simplified Math says the real traffic can be 5-7 times more than what the tools say. Of course, you need to do this with more KW/articles, ideally at least 20, because one article can be a statistical outlier. The key to have a batch big enough that you come to decent averages.

Of course, it also depends on the way you write the articles. Person who had this website before (I bought it from him at the end of Dec 2021) wasn't a good writer, and had terrible English. He was more of an old-school keyword stuffer, if you know what I mean

. Hence if I came to an average multiple of 4 (real traffic vs traffic/search volume estimated by tools), I believe that if I wrote those articles the number would easily jump to 6 or even 8, simply beacue I would in my writing naturally cover all those secondary/LT keywords and search intents, whereas he did not do it...

You can do this calculation independently for a batch of 0 search keywords as well, or give them a low-estimate default value, such as 100 PV/month per article.

Once you have the multiple (can be a single number, or a range) and the estimated value for 0 search keywords, the Math is simple. Let me again give you an example:

1. You have found 100 KW, 20 of them are 0 search, and the rest of 80 have cumulative reported search volume of 10,000 monthly searches (all of them together)/

2. Based on historical data, you came up with a multiple range (real traffic vs estimated monthly search volume) of 5-7. And, at the same time, based on historical data you came to a conclusion that in average the zero search KW can bring 50-100 PV/month.

3. You do the Math: 10,000 * 5 + 20 * 50 is a low estimate, 10,000 * 7 + 20 *100 is a high estimate. That means the estimated traffic potential is 51,000 to 72,000 monthly visitors, if you publish new content for all 100 KW from the list, and eventually achieve similar rankings as you did with older posts.

I simplified this a bit for explanation here, and it is always just an estimate, but in my experience it is quite accurate and what you can expect

.

Question 2: I am not sure what you are asking about here. Are you asking about flaws in content on that website I bough? On review articles? Because there aren't really any review articles on that website - the affiliate links are in info articles.

Teeto · Apr 6, 2022

Kikerinka said:
working on a keyword research for this domain, always for 3-4 hours a day. I used only free methods (such as alphabet soup, wildcards, logic, etc) with the help of free plugins like MOZ bar or KW surfer for Chrome,

Hey man, how do you get search volume and difficulty using this approach?
I use a similar method, but really on paid tools for SV and difficulty.

unitedplaydj · Apr 6, 2022

Kikerinka said:
Question 2: I am not sure what you are asking about here. Are you asking about flaws in content on that website I bough? On review articles? Because there aren't really any review articles on that website - the affiliate links are in info articles.

Exactly, I was referring to the reviews. So if there are no reviews, how do you win on amazon? I left a point for you to extend some advice on how to funnel users to buy on amazon without using reviews. Sorry, my English seems to be not very good.

Kikerinka · Apr 7, 2022

Teeto said:
Hey man, how do you get search volume and difficulty using this approach?
I use a similar method, but really on paid tools for SV and difficulty.

Hi mate,
1. Search Volume - There are free (or almost free, with some ridiculously low fee) extensions for Google Chrome. The two I use are Keyword Surfer (free) and Keywords Everywhere (lot of credits for $10). Once you have any of them them installed, you will see the estimated monthly search volume next to any keyword you enter to Google search box in Chrome.

2. Kw Difficulty - I always check the top 5 results, that's what matters. If there's Reddit or niche related Forum, it is a clear sign you can rank high. I have also MOZ bar installed (free extension again), which shows MOZ DA for each result in the SERP, number of referring domains, etc. Not that I place too much value on these metrics, but they give you some picture on the strength & age of the domains ranking in top 5.

I also like to manually check the first few results, to see the quality of the content, and of the website in general. After a while (doing this for 50 keywords for example) I get a good idea of all players in the niche, and do not have to click the results anymore. Looking at the domain name is enough for me than, since I already know what kind and quality of content they produce....

There was a guy here, @Shaunm , who had excellent tutorials for KW research (with the tools I mention), but some of his threads got closed and I sadly haven't seen him around the forum in last three months.

unitedplaydj said:
Exactly, I was referring to the reviews. So if there are no reviews, how do you win on amazon? I left a point for you to extend some advice on how to funnel users to buy on amazon without using reviews. Sorry, my English seems to be not very good.

First of all, I am far from being an expert on Amazon

. There are members here (some with journeys) making thousands a month on Amazon, and I made $41 last month. So I am not sure if I am the right guy to consult on issues related to Amazon affiliate...

At the time being, I set up tracking for all outbound links on the domain, trying to gather some data, what links people click and what they do not. But I will look into it probably just much later.

To me, converting someone on Amazon doesn't seem a big deal though. As long as you link on a product with good description and 5 star reviews, the Amazon interface (and information shared there) will take care of the conversion.

Hence on our side of things, what we should focus on is linking to the right product, in the right way (somehow motivating the person to click), and in the right spot of the article.

As I said though, I am just in the stage of gathering data, and the traffic on the domain isn't sufficient now for me to invest time into this and do some experiments.
Once I grow this website to at least 50K monthly page views (let's hope it will happen with the content push I am working on in April), and I've collected enough data, I will try to improve the CTR to Amazon and eventual conversions

moonshoolu · Apr 8, 2022

Kikerinka said:
Update, May 12, 2020.

- Published 2 new articles, one 1,499 words, another one 1,747 words.
- Mark, the only writer I cooperate with for this project, published 1 new article on the domain, 1253 words.

- Special Tip: Today I signed up for Ahrefs 7 days trail, to do some additional keyword research. I am using only one tool from their arsenal, called Content Gap. See screenshot below:

View attachment 134948

If you do not know this tool, you should definitely check it out. What it does is showing keywords your domain is not ranking for, but some of your competitors are...

I purposely chose weak domains as my competitors (either weak metrics or weak content or both), and as you can see, just for search volume 300-500 monthy US searches, there are 43 keywords my website is not ranking for, but these websites are. Most of them have KW difficulty 0... so easy target.
Certainly not all of them can be used for my site, or have any decent monetization potential, but many of them do have some potential.

Will be doing this research with Content Gap tool for the next few days, with different competitors of mine (mostly weak websites). After few days I hope to have close to 1K new keyword ideas, and I will simply cancel my subscription. Not a bad deal, to find 1K keywords for $7...

If I need more KW in the future, I will simply start another trial with my other PayPal account, or with a credit card.

That's it for today. 3 new articles and about 60 new keyword ideas isn't a bad start to this journey, considering that there were times when I didn't publish anything on this domain for 2 years ). See you tomorrow guys.

how does one find weaker websites? im a noob to this online hustle

Kikerinka · Apr 8, 2022

moonshoolu said:
how does one find weaker websites? im a noob to this online hustle

Don't be sad mate, everyone was a noob one day, including myself

.
The learning curve can be steep at the beginning (had my fair share of headaches too), but once you get into it things will click to together and you won't find it hard understanding stuff. You will still need to work hard and persistently to build some nice passive income source, but the headaches will be gone

.

You can identify weak websites in several ways:

1. Install a free plugin like Mozbar to Chrome.

Then is search results (you can search for a domain name, or for any keywords in your niche), you will see next to each search result things like "DA (domain authority)", or RD (number of referring domains).

These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, but gives an estimate of how old or strong the domain is. Any DA below 15 you can consider a "weaker website", and include in the content gap analysis in Ahrefs.

2. Do a manual check of the website (by far the best way). Visit the homepage, check the oldest articles (you can typically navigate to them from the homepage), total number of articles, quality of content etc. If you see that the oldest article is just 1 year old, this can be considered a fairly new domain and definitely something you can compete with, and again include in your analysis.

Also if the site has little number of articles published (relative to the niche), such as anything below 100, it's good for the analysis. If the content quality is poor or you even see it is AI generated content, the website is great to add to content gap tool of ahrefs, regardless of age or number of posts.

3. You can also use domain analysis tool by Ahrefs (once you already have the free trial), but I haven't worked with their interface for a while and don't remember how exactly it works. There are tutorials on YT though, just seek and you shall find

.

Small update to the journey: It seems digital product sales are waking up to life with the spring coming. Yesterday we had one of the best days ever in this regard:

- For the reporting period of 7th April 2022 California time, the website delivered 14 sales worth $412.

I do not track records for DP sales only, and cannot remember the best day we had in the journey, but this may as well be the one

. We likely won't reach overall earnings record though (I will know only in the afternoon when Adthrive earnings dashboard refreshes), since ad RPM dropped a lot with the start of new quarter.

Anyway, the numbers are encouraging and maybe the $30K/month isn't a complete utopia for May or June this year. We will see

unitedplaydj · Apr 11, 2022

Kikerinka said:
If there's Reddit or niche related Forum, it is a clear sign you can rank high

Does this apply to all social networks? Because I have problems with pinterest and fandom, it beats me post 1 and its content is of low quality.

Kikerinka · Apr 11, 2022

unitedplaydj said:
Does this apply to all social networks? Because I have problems with pinterest and fandom, it beats me post 1 and its content is of low quality.

To be honest I do not have much experience with Fandom, perhaps never searched for anything that would trigger that website to pop up in search results

.

Pinterest I definitely consider one of those sites that you can beat, but I also feel in certain niches it can have quite a strong presence--especially in niches where many people actually seek a picture with their query, or they are basically interested to "see it rather than read it". Google understands this better than we think, and in such cases it may place Pinterest very high, if not no. 1.

Generally speaking though, in my opinion, a good niche website can always beat any website with user-generated content (except of wikipedia perhaps) in the results. Maybe your content isn't old enough, and you just have to wait a bit. It never works in a way that you suddenly appear on position no. 1 for your KW. It always climbs over time, so maybe now Pinterest is beating you but in two months it won't be anymore...

Kikerinka · Apr 18, 2022

Hello all, just a quick update. I got my ticket to Spain today, and will fly there a few days later than I originally expected, which means I will still be here on the 1st of May, and will post a regular monthly update.

There hasn't been any milestone to report on lately. Things have been rather slow the last week or so due to Easter. Just like any other holiday, it isn't good for my niche

.

In any case, the Easter ends today and things should pick up quickly. If we reach any milestone until the end of April I will update you, if we do not, you can expect the update on the 1st May

. Enjoy your time meanwhile

.

unitedplaydj · Apr 19, 2022

I forgot to ask, if after some time of improving the GM there was an improvement in terms of positions, if you could see it.
And if so, how long did he see it

Kikerinka · Apr 20, 2022

unitedplaydj said:
I forgot to ask, if after some time of improving the GM there was an improvement in terms of positions, if you could see it.
And if so, how long did he see it

I think the translator did not do a best job here

, but I guess I got your point.

To be honest, I didn't see any particular jump in positions/traffic with improving Google Core Web Vitals scores (I think you were referring to them in your question) on any of my websites.

I lately added many smaller sites to Ezoic, and with the right setup, in contrary to what other people are saying, it actually improved Core Web Vitals score on almost all of them, from orange to green.

You should always think about SEO as a sort of a puzzle, or a pyramid is even a better example... The foundation stones, the most important part, is good keyword research and excellent content.
Once you have such a foundation, you can build upon it with things like better site speed, better user experience, acquiring some links, building a brand recognition, improving EAT, better interlinking of your content, adding YT channel to the site, etc.

Sure enough, each of these it will help in a long run, but I do not think that changing/improving just one thing will result in some major improvement in positions (as a rule of a thumb at least, since some exceptions always prove the rule

).

If you worked on core web vitals, great! Just continue "building your pyramid" on solid foundations, with patience. If you do so, no doubt good results will eventually come.
Buena suerte amigo!

Escehas · Apr 22, 2022

Alright, I finally managed to finish reading the entire thread (took about three months

). First of all, congratulations on not only achieving your goal, but also surpassing it in the predicted time. Secondly, I had expressed my curiosity in how you manage to create three articles a day (at the beginning of your journey) and I can say that I understood a few months back. If you know your niche inside and out, words will essentially pour out. I managed to create two articles that rank high in about 3-4 hours, so it's doable. But it's still awesome how you can also do such an excellent keywords analysis. Congrats again and I will stick around more, maybe I can learn a few new tricks.

Rufin jazz · Apr 23, 2022

This was a fascinating and lengthy read.

OP, I'd like to ask a couple of questions.

What do you plan to do with the money you earn from this site, and what are your goals now? what motivates you to keep going despite a satisfactory outcome?

[Journey] Scaling an Authority website to 10K a month (and beyond)

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