SEOMadHatter
Elite Member
- Aug 15, 2015
- 1,808
- 2,467
The Missed Opportunity
I have a story I'm sure more than a few of you can relate to. A story of wasted opportunity.
Back before the days of Panda and Penguin, I ranked for some pretty big keywords. Some made for good anecdotes, others made for good money. And I completely squandered this opportunity. I stopped pushing, wasted the money I did make and when Google slapped public blog networks I lost most of my income overnight. I'd failed to scale, failed to diversify and just generally failed to take advantage of the opportunity.
Since I've been riding the pandemic out back in my home country with nothing much else to do but work, I've built myself up a couple of new income streams and have made some more free time to focus on this. I have more time and money to put into something than I have in a while.
Why SEO?
I actually work on SEO less these days than my username would imply. I swapped heavily to building automation tools about 3 years ago and while that's been fun, I want diversity.
I'd briefly looked at buying websites or investing in brick and mortar but the potential returns from SEO are just so much more appealing. Sure, there's some extra risk involved but overall it's just a no brainer if you're not in a rush for revenue.
Plus, I have a soft spot for checking a rank tracker in the morning.
What Am I Actually Doing?
Building a network of niche sites. No more than one or two at a time to make sure they actually get finished.
50-100 long-form pages on each site (depending on the niche) with some supporting parasites, social traffic and YouTube channels. Ideally, I want to hit about 100,000 words on each site and give it a few months. Will scale the winners from there.
Written Content
This is the main goal of the entire project. Produce and rank good quality content.
I can write some content for a site but it's not a scalable model for me to try and write 100,000 words repeatedly. I've tried a bunch of content services and churned through dozens of writers lately.
There's a problem with the freelance writer industry. They're financially incentivized by word count which means you wind up with blocky word salad. Most affiliate blogs end up reading like the same blocky, boring stuff over and over again.
The only way around that is going to be hiring full-time writers and honestly, that's at the top of my to-do list if I can prove to myself that this model is going to work and be scalable.
For now, I'm paying roughly $60-80 for 2,000 words and editing all the content myself. It creates a bottleneck and it's a slow and painful process but at the end of the day, a freelance writer isn't going to care about the quality of content nearly as much as I am. For now, I'm going to do it but it'll be the first thing I want to replace.
I currently have a couple of writers who can roughly match what I'm looking for. One or two are really good but with limited availability but I'm working on getting a couple more in to help pick up the slack.
Video Content
I've been playing with YouTube a little lately. From my early results, I think it's more open to black hat tactics than standard SEO is and the organic traffic comes in a lot faster. Who knows, maybe SEO will be that good I'll fall in love with video and switch over entirely.
I mention it here because it's going to take some of my time and budget to have produced and promoted. If it's something I get further into I'll maybe do a separate journal breaking down what I'm actually doing with a channel but the main purpose here is to improve the domains E-A-T score with its own channel, improve the dwell time on the site by embedding and any traffic from YouTube will just be a bonus.
Some videos I'll produce myself, others I'll pay for. Haven't entirely decided how to handle the promotion but I'll probably stay away from the blackhat methods and just outsource some social traffic to get them started.
Social and Parasite Content/Traffic
I've worked on automation projects for probably most social sites at this point. Like the video content, this isn't going to be a major focus of the journal but it will take maybe 10% of my time and budget for a site just to get some traffic coming in. It's just here to help support the organic rankings.
I've seen some case studies on traffic helping a site's rankings but nothing that I'd call definitive. However, it can't hurt. Worst case it's a little diversity, a couple of backlinks and any revenue from the social traffic can be rolled back into promoting the written content.
Pinterest is an obvious winner at the moment with the way Google treats it. Easy to automate, easy to outsource content but it's some of the worst for actually converting on anything. I've worked on Pinterest a couple of times before and I've traffic that which was built up like 2+ years ago. Not quite sure how long it would take to rank pins in Google these days but it's tempting to try and take advantage of this recent update while it lasts.
Other than that, I'll have freelancers handle parasite and social content. I have some automation scripts which can mostly handle it for me, I just need to spend a little time editing to filter out any shitty content but this is mostly just an afterthought to help promote the main content.
Backlinking
This used to be where I spent 99% of my SEO time just blasting links to a handful of pages on a site. If I had more than 10 pages on a blog I was trying hard.
I was working on a scaled outreach project a few months back and it did net a couple of links. Ideally, I want to handle the backlinking in-house because it would reduce the costs but for the short term, I just want to get started and focus on producing the content.
So I'm paying someone to build forum and comment links to the homepage and a couple of inner pages to get things started then I'll pay for some outreach for edits and guest posts for the pages I want to rank. The focus here is definitely going to be on the content but building no links at all is just too slow.
Not quite sure who I'll do this with so far. I've had some pretty underwhelming guest posts from some pricey Hoth packages and some of the niche edit services dropped me next to links for fake Nike shit. I'll have to take a look around and find someone I like the look of. I do know a freelancer who has done some outreach for me, the results aren't great but it's probably enough to start with for now.
The Sites so Far
SEO is slow enough so I wanted to hit the ground running a bit. Started two new sites up over the last couple of weeks which should keep me busy. Haven't properly focused on them just doing bits and pieces when I had a spare moment. Now the goal is to focus on them so we can move on to setting up more.
Site 1
A fresh domain promoting rev-share CPA. I know this niche well enough to put some money into it because it could be a decent return but I genuinely don't know if Google is going to consider it YMYL. Tested it with a little AdWords and social traffic for a couple of early sales and I've prepared a list of keywords to target.
Currently at 43,000 words with another 20,000 unpublished but at least 3/4 of this is still to be edited so that's going to take a day or two at least. It's got one or two results on page 1-2 with a couple more parasites slowly starting to rank.
A dribble of early traffic which is a good sign but there's still a lot to do for this one.
Site 2
2-3-year-old domain but with mostly fresh content promoting digital affiliate sales. I've also tested this one with some AdWords and social traffic and the sales were good.
This is a high competition niche I normally wouldn't touch with a barge pole. I'm mostly punting a few thousand dollars on this site to see how effective it is targeting a bunch of relatively low competition keywords in a niche like this. I wouldn't be surprised if it flops but I'm curious enough to invest the time and money to find out.
32,000 words on this one so far. Again, one or two results on page 1-2 between the site and the parasites. It's actually getting about 10 hits a day pretty early on which is a good start but this could be as good as that site ever gets.
The Journal
It's an SEO journal so it'll probably be 8 months+ before anything interesting happens and that's if we're lucky.
I'm pretty used to working with paid and automation traffic lately which responds much faster to time and money being invested so this is actually a little scary to me. Maybe you'll get to see a huge burst of productivity, SEO testing and a big network of niche sites built.
Maybe you'll get to watch me piss away a shit load of time and money.
Either way, I'll aim to update what I've done and what I'm testing at least a couple of times a week.
I have a story I'm sure more than a few of you can relate to. A story of wasted opportunity.
Back before the days of Panda and Penguin, I ranked for some pretty big keywords. Some made for good anecdotes, others made for good money. And I completely squandered this opportunity. I stopped pushing, wasted the money I did make and when Google slapped public blog networks I lost most of my income overnight. I'd failed to scale, failed to diversify and just generally failed to take advantage of the opportunity.
Since I've been riding the pandemic out back in my home country with nothing much else to do but work, I've built myself up a couple of new income streams and have made some more free time to focus on this. I have more time and money to put into something than I have in a while.
Why SEO?
I actually work on SEO less these days than my username would imply. I swapped heavily to building automation tools about 3 years ago and while that's been fun, I want diversity.
I'd briefly looked at buying websites or investing in brick and mortar but the potential returns from SEO are just so much more appealing. Sure, there's some extra risk involved but overall it's just a no brainer if you're not in a rush for revenue.
Plus, I have a soft spot for checking a rank tracker in the morning.
What Am I Actually Doing?
Building a network of niche sites. No more than one or two at a time to make sure they actually get finished.
50-100 long-form pages on each site (depending on the niche) with some supporting parasites, social traffic and YouTube channels. Ideally, I want to hit about 100,000 words on each site and give it a few months. Will scale the winners from there.
Written Content
This is the main goal of the entire project. Produce and rank good quality content.
I can write some content for a site but it's not a scalable model for me to try and write 100,000 words repeatedly. I've tried a bunch of content services and churned through dozens of writers lately.
There's a problem with the freelance writer industry. They're financially incentivized by word count which means you wind up with blocky word salad. Most affiliate blogs end up reading like the same blocky, boring stuff over and over again.
The only way around that is going to be hiring full-time writers and honestly, that's at the top of my to-do list if I can prove to myself that this model is going to work and be scalable.
For now, I'm paying roughly $60-80 for 2,000 words and editing all the content myself. It creates a bottleneck and it's a slow and painful process but at the end of the day, a freelance writer isn't going to care about the quality of content nearly as much as I am. For now, I'm going to do it but it'll be the first thing I want to replace.
I currently have a couple of writers who can roughly match what I'm looking for. One or two are really good but with limited availability but I'm working on getting a couple more in to help pick up the slack.
Video Content
I've been playing with YouTube a little lately. From my early results, I think it's more open to black hat tactics than standard SEO is and the organic traffic comes in a lot faster. Who knows, maybe SEO will be that good I'll fall in love with video and switch over entirely.
I mention it here because it's going to take some of my time and budget to have produced and promoted. If it's something I get further into I'll maybe do a separate journal breaking down what I'm actually doing with a channel but the main purpose here is to improve the domains E-A-T score with its own channel, improve the dwell time on the site by embedding and any traffic from YouTube will just be a bonus.
Some videos I'll produce myself, others I'll pay for. Haven't entirely decided how to handle the promotion but I'll probably stay away from the blackhat methods and just outsource some social traffic to get them started.
Social and Parasite Content/Traffic
I've worked on automation projects for probably most social sites at this point. Like the video content, this isn't going to be a major focus of the journal but it will take maybe 10% of my time and budget for a site just to get some traffic coming in. It's just here to help support the organic rankings.
I've seen some case studies on traffic helping a site's rankings but nothing that I'd call definitive. However, it can't hurt. Worst case it's a little diversity, a couple of backlinks and any revenue from the social traffic can be rolled back into promoting the written content.
Pinterest is an obvious winner at the moment with the way Google treats it. Easy to automate, easy to outsource content but it's some of the worst for actually converting on anything. I've worked on Pinterest a couple of times before and I've traffic that which was built up like 2+ years ago. Not quite sure how long it would take to rank pins in Google these days but it's tempting to try and take advantage of this recent update while it lasts.
Other than that, I'll have freelancers handle parasite and social content. I have some automation scripts which can mostly handle it for me, I just need to spend a little time editing to filter out any shitty content but this is mostly just an afterthought to help promote the main content.
Backlinking
This used to be where I spent 99% of my SEO time just blasting links to a handful of pages on a site. If I had more than 10 pages on a blog I was trying hard.
I was working on a scaled outreach project a few months back and it did net a couple of links. Ideally, I want to handle the backlinking in-house because it would reduce the costs but for the short term, I just want to get started and focus on producing the content.
So I'm paying someone to build forum and comment links to the homepage and a couple of inner pages to get things started then I'll pay for some outreach for edits and guest posts for the pages I want to rank. The focus here is definitely going to be on the content but building no links at all is just too slow.
Not quite sure who I'll do this with so far. I've had some pretty underwhelming guest posts from some pricey Hoth packages and some of the niche edit services dropped me next to links for fake Nike shit. I'll have to take a look around and find someone I like the look of. I do know a freelancer who has done some outreach for me, the results aren't great but it's probably enough to start with for now.
The Sites so Far
SEO is slow enough so I wanted to hit the ground running a bit. Started two new sites up over the last couple of weeks which should keep me busy. Haven't properly focused on them just doing bits and pieces when I had a spare moment. Now the goal is to focus on them so we can move on to setting up more.
Site 1
A fresh domain promoting rev-share CPA. I know this niche well enough to put some money into it because it could be a decent return but I genuinely don't know if Google is going to consider it YMYL. Tested it with a little AdWords and social traffic for a couple of early sales and I've prepared a list of keywords to target.
Currently at 43,000 words with another 20,000 unpublished but at least 3/4 of this is still to be edited so that's going to take a day or two at least. It's got one or two results on page 1-2 with a couple more parasites slowly starting to rank.
A dribble of early traffic which is a good sign but there's still a lot to do for this one.
Site 2
2-3-year-old domain but with mostly fresh content promoting digital affiliate sales. I've also tested this one with some AdWords and social traffic and the sales were good.
This is a high competition niche I normally wouldn't touch with a barge pole. I'm mostly punting a few thousand dollars on this site to see how effective it is targeting a bunch of relatively low competition keywords in a niche like this. I wouldn't be surprised if it flops but I'm curious enough to invest the time and money to find out.
32,000 words on this one so far. Again, one or two results on page 1-2 between the site and the parasites. It's actually getting about 10 hits a day pretty early on which is a good start but this could be as good as that site ever gets.
The Journal
It's an SEO journal so it'll probably be 8 months+ before anything interesting happens and that's if we're lucky.
I'm pretty used to working with paid and automation traffic lately which responds much faster to time and money being invested so this is actually a little scary to me. Maybe you'll get to see a huge burst of productivity, SEO testing and a big network of niche sites built.
Maybe you'll get to watch me piss away a shit load of time and money.
Either way, I'll aim to update what I've done and what I'm testing at least a couple of times a week.