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

Mr Positive said:

I’m surprised you’re using yoast, my adv move to a better plugin asap this plugin is known to have major issues and is bloated.

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As I've said, I use it only for the readability function and some basic settings. Hence for me it doesn't matter much if I use Yoast or other plugin. I can probably delete it altogether and nothing will happen...

reaaski said:

Everything is interconnected. We shall not shy away from admiring that. It is the reason life exists. Sometimes I feel like the most versatile person in the world. Maybe that's the nature of a dreamer?

I used to feel anxious about it. I started taking nootropics and caffeine. However, this only made the situation worse. Today I am already living with it without these caffeines.

If I want I can focus, for example, creating a content calendar, but I really need to create a real calendar first and then write. Otherwise everything falls down.

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100% agree with what you write. Everything relates to everything, and I can definitely admire that.

The most important thing is that you eventually get the core of the work done. If you need content calendar to be able to produce the content, then do the calendar first .

Ithetona said:

Are you currently using Adthrive?

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Yes, I've been using them for a long time. This year the RPM is disappointing from April onward, but I see the drop in all networks I use across different smaller sites, so it is not because Adthrive is doing something wrong. It is just that the entire ad industry is down...

Escehas said:

And I am back again . I am curious about how you managed to deal with something that I am currently seeing. I have started to release more content, rising from about 10 articles a month to almost one every day. But the problem is that I spook my main competitors and he went ahead and bought links. And they are phenomenal links, la crème de la crème. So Google in its infinite wisdom ogled at these new delicious offerings and went Hey! The hell with the content, this guy tickles my pickle. So, after months of gaining far more ground and getting closer to the 10K USD per month target (plagiarized it from you), I have started to drop, being overtaken by bob, the link builder. My plan is to continue my obsessive article creation and ramp it up even more, but did you deal with something like that since I don't remember reading something similar in this journey. And I read it all!

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Hey mate, first of all, glad to hear that you upped your publishing schedule so much!!! That's the way to go .

To your question: This is something that can happen, in any niche. And the answer to what you should do really depends on each individual scenario...

For example, how many search results do people typically check in your niche? If it is more results (like in my niche) I would not worry too much about one or two competitors buying links. If this is a type of a niche where really just the position no. 1 counts, then it is more of a concern.

Another question to consider is ROI--that's the most important one, always. I do not know how close your paraphrasing of $10K/month is to reality . If you're at $5K/month, and the competitor's move takes you down to $3K/month, it can be considered a wise strategy to go for some links. But if you're at $1K/month and your competitor is spending $3K/month on links, which brings him back extra $500/month, than he's probably really out of his mind (as you wrote), and trying to replicate what he's doing won't make any sense... Of course long term perspective of the niche also comes to play.

Another thing to consider is whether you won't just take the "war" to next level. If you start purchasing links maybe he will even up his expenditure on links, then you're both spending more than you are making, and at the end nobody wins--except of link sellers, of course .

At the end of the day, if your strategy with article creation is working (which means your traffic keeps growing, and new posts bring visitors), it is probably wise to continue following it, and sort of "ignore" what Bob is doing, even though he may take some of your traffic. You will still get more, keeping to publish new stuff all the time.

Dark Hat 007 said:

I'm currently at this, I put out an average of 1.5 articles per day, those with backlinks are soaring as usual, but I'm not concerned, I am a firm believer that the more the content the more your chances of ranking even higher than some backlink merchants. Nevertheless, I look forward to his reply.

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Hey mate, super glad that you managed to get to 1.5 articles/day! Just keep going, and let us know how your traffic is doing .

Honestly it does not matter much do an a/b test use TSF for a while, use it’s subject density feature see which performs better for you. On friends and client sites TSF performEd way better

Kikerinka said:

Hey mate, first of all, glad to hear that you upped your publishing schedule so much!!! That's the way to go .

To your question: This is something that can happen, in any niche. And the answer to what you should do really depends on each individual scenario...

For example, how many search results do people typically check in your niche? If it is more results (like in my niche) I would not worry too much about one or two competitors buying links. If this is a type of a niche where really just the position no. 1 counts, then it is more of a concern.

Another question to consider is ROI--that's the most important one, always. I do not know how close your paraphrasing of $10K/month is to reality . If you're at $5K/month, and the competitor's move takes you down to $3K/month, it can be considered a wise strategy to go for some links. But if you're at $1K/month and your competitor is spending $3K/month on links, which brings him back extra $500/month, than he's probably really out of his mind (as you wrote), and trying to replicate what he's doing won't make any sense... Of course long term perspective of the niche also comes to play.

Another thing to consider is whether you won't just take the "war" to next level. If you start purchasing links maybe he will even up his expenditure on links, then you're both spending more than you are making, and at the end nobody wins--except of link sellers, of course .

At the end of the day, if your strategy with article creation is working (which means your traffic keeps growing, and new posts bring visitors), it is probably wise to continue following it, and sort of "ignore" what Bob is doing, even though he may take some of your traffic. You will still get more, keeping to publish new stuff all the time.

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Thank you for taking the time to reply. This is a very particular competitor since we're pretty much the last guys on the web to properly cover the topic and so far, we kind of stood out of each other's business. There is a large overlap of articles due to the nature of the niche, but he has gotten bolder lately. And so have I, with the posting intensity increase (I may have bitten some of its keywords as well, hehe). I am actually kind of disappointed that he went the link building route. And so far, it's all benign, but the monitoring instruments show a change in the wind (and as I said, Google got excited like a flea in a doghouse). You are right of course to not change strategies mid route, but I will keep an eye on this website for the next month.

Side projects update no. 9

Hello guys, not much is going on around here lately (probably everyone is on holiday ), but I want to stick to good routines of this journey. Which means that besides my main update I always try to update you on my side projects, once in a month, regardless of whether we saw any growth, decline, or no changes at all. So here we go:

Side project no. 1 - Semi-authority website in a specific sub-niche of my main niche, 60 content pages (for profit).


- Last 30 days vs previous 30 days. As you can see, we dropped about 20% of traffic. This is partially due to negative impact of Google May Core Update on this site, and partially due to seasonality (this sub-niche of my main niche does even worse during holidays and summer than my main niche overall).

I still see a lot of room for growth though, for many of the articles. We should not forget that the new articles are just 9-10 months old, the ten latest only 6 months old, so things can still happen, and I still believe this website will reach 30K PV/month in autumn this year, which is my goal for this site.

Stats for article ranking:

• 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.
• April 2022: I didn't monitor the stats.
• May 2022: 12 new articles had more than 10PV/day in average (or 310 PV/month), 40 articles had over 30PV during the month.
• June 2022: 11 new articles had more than 10 PV/day in average (or 300 PV/month), 39 articles had over 30PV during the month.

For the first time we can see a little drop here, but I do not see it as a big deal. I still feel we will gain ranking for many long tail keywords with different articles as the time passes, and believe that latest in September we'll be at pre-update levels, without me doing anything with the website (I may do something though).

Earning from the website in June 2022:

• Ads: $122
• Product sales: $114 (6 sales, so far the record )
• Total earnings for June: $236

What I did lately on the website & plans for coming weeks:

• I added PDF summaries/lists to some of the articles, following a successful strategy from my authority website. Let's see if it yields any results here.
• Improved the interlinking of the posts.
• I plan to add 3-5 new articles, based on data from Google Search Console. Haven't decided yet whether I publish them in one go or schedule with 1/week schedule.

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).


- analytics, last 30 days vs previous period.


- Daily traffic from the start

- Happy with how this one is doing. We'll already at 1K PV/month, which is honestly more than I expected, considering it is brand new site, and all 40 articles are for zero-searches keywords. I still consider this as early stage, just hoping to collect some data and understand what exactly we should write about in this niche.

People seems to like the content as well, since we already got 25 visits to two different articles from Facebook, which means that someone shared the content on their social network. It may seem insignificant, but considering the overall traffic numbers the % of shares isn't bad, and maybe down the road this can help with building this website as a brand, or at least helping me with the goals I have with it (in connection with my offline plans in Spain).

Of course there is a seasonality to this niche, but I plan to devote some time to it down the road and cover more topics, hopefully we'll have some data until then .


- The indexing has improved somehow as well, but as I said before the charts do not reflect the reality (in reality almost all 40 posts are indexed now).

The only problem is that Google shows data in GSC only for pages they consider as indexed in GSC, which means that I am missing on data for many articles, including the articles with most visits (which logically would bring in the biggest quantity of data).


Things done & action plan for this website for next weeks:

• I added the sidebar with categories to the website, hoping for both better indexing, and also for people discovering more interesting content on the website in this way, and staying longer. In this niche, many people interested in article belonging to one category can find interesting also articles in other categories. Hence I did this and may work even more on better interlinking.
• Plan to publish a few new posts here as well. Since I do not have enough data in GSC yet (mostly due to the issue with indexing I mentioned earlier), I will likely try answering some questions from "People also ask" widget, for relevant queries. Let's see how they will do.

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


- Once again I have no growth to show for this website . It's been a constant struggle so far, despite all the effort I put into it. It was a penalized site before (as I mentioned here earlier), and despite everything I've done with it so far, I didn't succeed to reverse the fortunes of the site.

Anyway, I realized that since I have data in Analytics from the previous years as well, I can see how long it took new articles in average to gain some traction, for the previous owner. So I checked twenty most successful articles on this website so far (all of them written by a previous owner, and heavily edited by me earlier this year), some of which have dropped from their traffic peak after they reached it, and some of which still are on the peak levels.

From the data and short analysis I did, I came to a conclusion that it took about 7 months for the new articles to start getting some serious traction at Google. Of course there were outliers at both sides of the spectrum. Two articles started to rank as early as in month 2 after publication, and some as late as month 15. But 7 months was about the median average.

This isn't entirely bad news for me, considering I posted 59 new articles on this website (trying to give it another life) in April 2022, which means they are just 3 months old now. Considering the historic trends with the website, there's no reason to panic and I just have to patiently wait, hoping to finally reap some rewards from my efforts with this website .

I can see something going on already, with the stats for most successful 3 of the new articles so far:

• Article no. 1: 78 PV in last 30 days vs 24 in previous 30 days.
• Article no. 1: 74 PV in last 30 days vs 17 in previous 30 days.
• Article no. 3: 52 PV in last 30 days vs 12 in previous 30 days.

Though small numbers still (I hope for 500PV/month from each of these posts), it is some noticeable growth (in 100ths of % month over month), and though it doesn't show up on overall traffic numbers yet, I believe soon it will, once more new articles start to show some growth and these grow much more. We will see .



- Amazon earnings, not great but not bad either. At the start of July I worked on some tweaks, following the data I collected in April and May, and hopefully this will help me improve the CTR & conversions for Amazon. Of course the traffic is still low so I do not hope for some miracles, but even 20-30% growth would be nice. We will see.

Earnings for the website for June 2022:

• Amazon: $42
• Ads: $147
• Total earnings: $189

Work done & action plan for the website for coming weeks:

• I worked on Amazon CTR and Conversion optimization early in July. Not an expert in this field, but let's hope it helps somehow with the numbers. Mostly it went about adding short "sales pitches" to products on the site, and also adding more "long shot" product links to some articles with decent traffic. Long shot means that the product doesn't really correlate with the topic searched while the person found the article, but generally speaking for people interested in this niche it may be interesting... It won't bring massive clicks or conversions, but some of these products are on the expensive side for this niche (anything above $40 can be considered expensive in this niche), so even one conversion here and there and things can add up nicely...
• No plans for work for this website in coming weeks, now it is more for me to wait and see how the new articles are doing, collecting data and hopefully finally growing the traffic .

That's it for today's "side projects" update. Any questions guys, as always, do not hesitate to ask. I wish you all a nice summer & hopefully we all manage to get some work done as well

@Kikerinka hi, thanks for the journey updates! one question, please. how do you define sub-niche ? when you say for example food niche what defines it's sub-niche? Thanks in advance

senoucihamid said:

@Kikerinka hi, thanks for the journey updates! one question, please. how do you define sub-niche ? when you say for example food niche what defines it's sub-niche? Thanks in advance

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Hi mate,
Food niche is a super big niche, much bigger than the niche of my authority website. Hence I do not want to confuse you here . But let's say the main niche is food recipes (which is just a small part of food niche, but still a huge niche with hundreds of millions of searches per month probably worldwide).

If food recipes is the main niche, sub niches can be vegan recipes, Indian recipes, breakfast recipes, potato recipes, recipes for foods from cabbage, etc. These sub-niches are all of different sizes (vegan recipes is still a huge niche, much bigger than foods from cabbage recipes niche), but we can call all of them "sub-niches" of recipes niche.

Of course, we can always go more and more down the niche. For example, a sub-niche of "cabbage food recipes" is recipes from white cabbage, recipes from red cabbage, vegetarian cabbage recipes, etc.

When choosing a niche for your website, you have to consider the search volume potential, having on mind the goals you have with the website. As an example, if your goal is to get to Mediavine (needing 50K sessions/month), you should choose a sub-niche of one of the big niches that has such a search potential. Ideally at least 4 times as much, because you're not going to rank no. 1 for all the topics you will cover .

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions!

Those are some great updates. I don't know how you can keep up with this heat. I am melting and eventually will fuse with the desk and keyboard.

Kikerinka said:

Hi mate,
Food niche is a super big niche, much bigger than the niche of my authority website. Hence I do not want to confuse you here . But let's say the main niche is food recipes (which is just a small part of food niche, but still a huge niche with hundreds of millions of searches per month probably worldwide).

If food recipes is the main niche, sub niches can be vegan recipes, Indian recipes, breakfast recipes, potato recipes, recipes for foods from cabbage, etc. These sub-niches are all of different sizes (vegan recipes is still a huge niche, much bigger than foods from cabbage recipes niche), but we can call all of them "sub-niches" of recipes niche.

Of course, we can always go more and more down the niche. For example, a sub-niche of "cabbage food recipes" is recipes from white cabbage, recipes from red cabbage, vegetarian cabbage recipes, etc.

When choosing a niche for your website, you have to consider the search volume potential, having on mind the goals you have with the website. As an example, if your goal is to get to Mediavine (needing 50K sessions/month), you should choose a sub-niche of one of the big niches that has such a search potential. Ideally at least 4 times as much, because you're not going to rank no. 1 for all the topics you will cover .

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions!

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This is very accurate and something I'll need starting next year. My goal next year is to build at least three sub-niche sites to diversify my income flow, Google could be a bitch sometimes. My main site has about 200+ posts, with an average visit of 100 per day.

I started a content push on April 25th, that's what got me to 200+ that is an additional 90+ posts or so.

It's pretty seasonal and works best during the winter, I'm preparing for that aggressively, I need to earn as much as I can.

It's income from this site that'll use to prepare the 2 - 3 sub niche sites.

What I don't know is, should I prepare one in the first month, dish out as much content as possible, schedule all to post in two - three months, then I start the 2nd the next month, do same, and the third the next month....

Or I just create all three and write on one site per week.

I have a laser focus and can focus on just one thing at a time.

What do you suggest?

Hi, @Kikerinka. What are your thoughts on the flight niche? Can one make a blog about flights? Maybe add airports as a secondary niche. Airports, aviation, flights, piloting maybe, etc. Could one find enough keywords to write articles about? As long as you're in the travel niche, I like to assume you have come across this subniche multiple times.

Escehas said:

Those are some great updates. I don't know how you can keep up with this heat. I am melting and eventually will fuse with the desk and keyboard.

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Heat is not my thing, and the concentration drops as the temperature rises . The key is to do some quality work in the morning when temperature is still tolerable. Going to air-conditioned coffee shops or hotel lounges and working there is another option.

We have now a strong heatwave predicted. I may book a good air-conditioned hotel for a few nights just to stay there and work during the hottest days. Another option is doing a few days hike in higher altitudes, where the temperature is always more pleasant. I will decide what of the two I do. Of course I am more inclined towards the hike, but feeling a bit strange health-wise the last couple of days. So I will see.

Dark Hat 007 said:

This is very accurate and something I'll need starting next year. My goal next year is to build at least three sub-niche sites to diversify my income flow, Google could be a bitch sometimes. My main site has about 200+ posts, with an average visit of 100 per day.

I started a content push on April 25th, that's what got me to 200+ that is an additional 90+ posts or so.

It's pretty seasonal and works best during the winter, I'm preparing for that aggressively, I need to earn as much as I can.

It's income from this site that'll use to prepare the 2 - 3 sub niche sites.

What I don't know is, should I prepare one in the first month, dish out as much content as possible, schedule all to post in two - three months, then I start the 2nd the next month, do same, and the third the next month....

Or I just create all three and write on one site per week.

I have a laser focus and can focus on just one thing at a time.

What do you suggest?

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My suggestion to you is the following one: Start with the website (sub-niche) for which you find it most difficult to write content for from the three. At the start of any endeavor the enthusiasm is highest, and you should use it to get the most difficult/dreaded content out.

Then continue with the second most difficult website, and leave the last month for the least difficult one (in terms of content writing).

BTW a nice plan you have, and I am glad I found your journey last time I was lurking in the journey section here .

notNewB said:

Hi, @Kikerinka. What are your thoughts on the flight niche? Can one make a blog about flights? Maybe add airports as a secondary niche. Airports, aviation, flights, piloting maybe, etc. Could one find enough keywords to write articles about? As long as you're in the travel niche, I like to assume you have come across this subniche multiple times.

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I honestly think there is interesting search volume in almost any niche, when you know what you are doing. Check this website as an example: www.sleepinginairports.net .

I used this website in a past, when I didn't have that much money but still traveled even more than I do today . Was in that period when I didn't work at all for a few years, and just focused on traveling and some my non-profit ventures. Back in the day I used to buy cheapest flights, and that typically meant arriving to one airport late in the evening, and leaving for my final destination (or another airport on the way) early next morning. Hence I often slept on the airport floor in the terminal, or looked for some chairs that made it at least a bit comfortable for sleeping .

One would think that few people do that. At the end of the day normal traveler won't sleep on the floor at the airport. Or will they???
In fact though, many do sleep in the airports. This website I shared with you had over 1 million visits last month. That's more than my authority website. And it is just one specific sub-niche of flights/airports niche .

Hope this gives you a good idea about the potential of this niche, once you do a good KW research.

Kikerinka said:

I honestly think there is interesting search volume in almost any niche, when you know what you are doing. Check this website as an example: www.sleepinginairports.net .

~

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Wow, this is very helpful. Thank you. A friend of mine recently bought a website in this niche with a few pages but a very strong backlink profile. We were thinking of making its niche broader and turning it into a big traveling blog. But now, I see there is enough search volume in the flights niche too.

Kikerinka said:

In fact though, many do sleep in the airports. This website I shared with you had over 1 million visits last month. That's more than my authority website. And it is just one specific sub-niche of flights/airports niche .

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Wait, where do you get your umber from? Semrush says it has about 80k visits.

Shwepps said:

Wait, where do you get your umber from? Semrush says it has about 80k visits.

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Maybe similarweb

wiwapi53 said:

Maybe similarweb

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similarweb data isn't accurate

I'm really interested in this. All the best!

Kikerinka said:

At the start of any endeavor the enthusiasm is highest, and you should use it to get the most difficult/dreaded content out.

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This is apt, I'll do exactly this.

Kikerinka said:

I am glad I found your journey last time I was lurking in the journey section here .

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Ohh! Yeah, I noticed this, and I was happy, been telling those around me about your story, "$20k a month" that's crazy and a mad motivation.

notNewB said:

Wow, this is very helpful. Thank you. A friend of mine recently bought a website in this niche with a few pages but a very strong backlink profile. We were thinking of making its niche broader and turning it into a big traveling blog. But now, I see there is enough search volume in the flights niche too.

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Good luck with this one. Just make sure to do a good KW research before starting to write . You already have some experience, so maybe this can be the one project you manage to grow really big!

Shwepps said:

Wait, where do you get your umber from? Semrush says it has about 80k visits.

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wiwapi53 said:

Maybe similarweb

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Shwepps said:

similarweb data isn't accurate

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In my experience, especially for bigger websites, Similarweb is much more accurate than any other tool out there. For example, for my authority website in June, the number of visits it shows is just 4% different than the real number of visits I can see in Analytics.

Of course, people prefer different tools and I respect that. Some tools may be more precise for some niches than others. In any case, even if Similarweb exaggerated 4 times with the website about sleeping in airports (which is super unlikely), it would still mean the website had over 250K visits/month in June, and that's in my opinion still a clear sign that airports/flight niche as a whole is really big, and worth pursueing.

re004 said:

I'm really interested in this. All the best!

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Thanks, I hope to see you around here, not banned .

Dark Hat 007 said:

This is apt, I'll do exactly this.


Ohh! Yeah, I noticed this, and I was happy, been telling those around me about your story, "$20k a month" that's crazy and a mad motivation.

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It is crazy, but at the end of the day, $20K is just a number (one which can undoubtedly make one's head spin). What matters is the substance behind the number--the actual website, the work put in, the value for visitors... for me it is always important to remember this.

Anyway, good luck and I'll keep my eye on your weekly updates

Kikerinka said:

Heat is not my thing, and the concentration drops as the temperature rises . The key is to do some quality work in the morning when temperature is still tolerable. Going to air-conditioned coffee shops or hotel lounges and working there is another option.

We have now a strong heatwave predicted. I may book a good air-conditioned hotel for a few nights just to stay there and work during the hottest days. Another option is doing a few days hike in higher altitudes, where the temperature is always more pleasant. I will decide what of the two I do. Of course I am more inclined towards the hike, but feeling a bit strange health-wise the last couple of days. So I will see.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I am also a mountain-guy. Actually last year, I went away from the crazy Mediterranean summer for three months since it was too hot, imagine this year. Unfortunately, due to some projects, I am stuck in the middle of this insane heat dome. It's tempting to just go in the nearby mountains and live as a goat for the next months.
By the way, you said that you only use one laptop for your work, so I assume your niche doesn't involve any type of physical, in-person testing. Or am I wrong and when you need to work from another place, you need to take the entire office with you?

Dark Hat 007 said:

This is apt, I'll do exactly this.


Ohh! Yeah, I noticed this, and I was happy, been telling those around me about your story, "$20k a month" that's crazy and a mad motivation.

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Yeah, it's a lot of money in naija

Escehas said:

Yeah, I am also a mountain-guy. Actually last year, I went away from the crazy Mediterranean summer for three months since it was too hot, imagine this year. Unfortunately, due to some projects, I am stuck in the middle of this insane heat dome. It's tempting to just go in the nearby mountains and live as a goat for the next months.
By the way, you said that you only use one laptop for your work, so I assume your niche doesn't involve any type of physical, in-person testing. Or am I wrong and when you need to work from another place, you need to take the entire office with you?

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The heat is crazy indeed. During winter months I often forget about climate change problems and everything, but during summer months the thoughts always come back to my mind...

I'd love things to change, but understanding a bit the complex labyrinth of human society & thinking, I do not see this trend reversing, and we'll have to bear with even higher temperatures down the road (if we are lucky to live by that time).

Anyway, to your question: There's no physical in-person testing involved in my main niche. I can just take the laptop and go. Of course though, if you go to live to the mountains for some weeks or months you need to take more than just your laptop .