My Biggest Journal Yet: Going 10x on SEO

SEOMadHatter

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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.
 
Day 1: Getting stuck in.

New projects are easy to be motivated about. Plus we had a good start.

Site 1 picked up a sale overnight from parasite traffic. It actually had 10 visitors between some organic (5), social (2) and parasite (3) traffic. Just a trickle but hopefully a taste of things to come.
  • Wrote a 760-word page for site 1 myself. Short, but it was a dry topic and it still beats the competition.
  • 1,500 words from a freelancer edited up to just over 2000 and posted to site 2.
  • Wrote and published another 1,500-word article to site 2.
  • Started trialing out a couple of new writers. I like to have a quick chat with them to see their writing skills when they're on the spot then I just give them work to do. Sent out 5,000 words due over the next couple of days.
  • Ordered a dozen outreach links for each site. Mixed between branded links to the homepage and pointing at deep info pages. Further down the line the links will be more targetted to pages worth pushing but to get things started I just want a base level of links.
  • Got a 1,000-word article from a writing service. Had to redo 90% of it and published at 1,500 words to site 2. Won't be using them again.
  • Sent another 4,500 words to another writer.
  • Edited and posted a 2,100-word article for site 2.
Spent today: $2,026.32

I would double that in a heartbeat if I had enough writers to give work to. I did consider giving some of the work to a content mill but it's sometimes quicker to write content from scratch than trying to edit some of the worse ones. Going slower to begin with and trying to find better writers is (hopefully) going to be worth it in the long run.

Today brought site 2 to almost 40,000 words with almost another 10,000 ordered. Pretty time consuming to edit through the lower quality content but hopefully, some of the new writers do well and can make up for that. It's good to get the ball rolling on the backlinks more and the sooner all the content is done the sooner I can move on to a new site which is more interesting to write about.


Good luck! What themes are you using?

I've always had a theory (with absolutely nothing to back it up) that a custom theme might look better to Google. Makes you stand out as a site really trying, rather than another generic affiliate blog.

Just now I'll use generic themes like Avada but this is in the back of my mind.

You care a champ to be able to manage such a huge number of sites. Good luck.

Well, it remains to be seen whether I can actually manage it so here's hoping. Cheers.
 
see you claim " automation SEO tools " you using the usual ranker x , GSA stuffs ??
 
Real-life got in the way a bit so I'm going to have to make up for that this weekend. A few days in and I'm already feeling frustrated with progress (I mentioned I was impatient, right?) not with rankings or traffic but just with being able to produce enough content.

I looked at a couple of 5 figure Amazon affiliate sites and their content is like:

"This article is about the best boats. If you're asking what are the best boats then it's very important you know all about the best boats you can use so I'm here to tell you what the best boats are. Boats float on water did you know that? I'm important to not that if you utilize a boat on the water it needs to float and the best boats do that. Boats."

They can go paragraphs without ever actually saying something a reader wants to know. Maybe that's enough for an Amazon site where nobody is looking beyond the AAWP table but I want to convert visitors to these info pages.

Then you get some belters who (sticking with the boats example) come out with shit like "Sometimes boats get bored of floating and grow wings for flying instead.".

I've worked with writers over $50k earnings who are either divorced from reality or must have lost a bet.

Dropped several writers. It's quicker to write the content myself than to try and edit some when they completely miss the mark or can't follow the content guideline. Going to trial a couple more and if that flops I'll up the rate and try to be stricter with the hiring.

Some good news:
  • Site 1 picked up a second sale last night from some social traffic.
  • Site 2 took a couple of early page 2 results. Most will likely dance around a bit but it's a good sign. Especially considering the competition of the niche.
  • I've started to see a spike of Pinterest traffic come in and I've done no work actually promoting the pins. Likely just Google spreading the pins all over the SERPS like they've been doing lately. Focus is still staying on pumping out the content but I'm going to need to make sure I keep up with the social for site 1.
Today:
  • 1,800-word article edited and posted to site 2.
  • 1,850-word article edited and posted to site 2.
  • Started trialing a new writer and gave some feedback to some of the existing ones.
  • Wrote a 1,300-word article myself for site 1.
  • Spent a little time on keyword research for both sites.
  • Outsourced some work for the parasites to support both sites. I've got two writers working on this at the moment who are great on delivery and good enough quality for the parasites. Not sure I'd use them on the money site but can produce dozens of pages a week to start bringing in some early traffic.
  • Started ramping up the social traffic setup for site 1. Planning to build something a bit more automated to handle more of this for me but I want to hit 100k on both sites before going further on social.
  • Edited and published 1,600 words to site 2.
  • Spent some time on the interlinking and added a couple of external links to big authorities for site 2.
  • Another 2000 words edited and published to site 2.
Spent: $292.70

I've been focusing on site 2 a lot. We're nearing the 50k words milestone with a lot of work going into the supporting parasites. I'm curious to see if the domain age speeds things along at all. I don't expect it to do much but we do have a couple of results on the first 2 pages which bodes well.

If idling in the index actually makes any difference here then buying underperforming sites and loading them with fresh content becomes a much more attractive model.

From a profit standpoint, site 1 stands to be much better performing. I'd like to start the YouTube channel for that one next week and try and get another writer on board to get that growing at a better pace. It seems to be struggling with indexing but as a longer-term project, I'm not too concerned. Google will figure it out eventually.
 
Oops forgot to answer these.

see you claim " automation SEO tools " you using the usual ranker x , GSA stuffs ??

I'm not using any tools for SEO automation. I'd like to have the time to expand my own outreach setup and bring the outreach for links in-house because I could get more bang for my buck but right now I'm just outsourcing everything. Costs more but I'm getting started.

I don't use either GSA or RankerX. I think maybe they work in tiers but I don't see a lot of evidence for that. The cases where I do links being supported but this type of link might have ranked there without them as well. At some point, I'd like to do some proper testing but overall I'm getting better results with outreach links and focusing on content.

How old are the sites?

Site 1 is a few months old and site 2 is 2-3 years old. Both sat in the index doing nothing in that time, however. The actual content and links are all new so I'm expecting it to be many months before we're seeing any real traffic.
 
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I follow your KGR to do a website, no ranking now. Do you still do KGR websites?
 
This looks well organized. No doubt you will make it.

Good luck!
 
I'm mostly taking today off just popped on for 30 minutes to catch up on some customer service for a different project and happened to spot some really good news for this one.

One of the new freelance writers turned in a stunning piece of work. I'll probably beef it up a bit just because I like the keyword and I didn't give him a big order to start with but damn. This is exactly what I was looking for it'll actually convert visitors. Booked them for a couple of articles each week and if they get any more availability I'll be taking that as well. Renewed my faith that this could be scalable as even 2-3 writers like that would free up so much of my time from editing crappy content.

Spent today: $185.40

While setting up the keywords for this writer I did have to laugh. Why the fuck am I in this niche? Do you ever look at a decision you made a few weeks ago and wonder what the fuck you were thinking? Still we're in it now. We'll get to 100k words and see what happens. We do have a dozen results on page 2-3 which bodes well this early on but way too early to really pay much attention to the rankings.

Anyway. Going to try this 'taking a day off' thing I've heard so much about. The weathers pretty crap but I blew a bunch of money on a VR headset I might as well make use of it.

I follow your KGR to do a website, no ranking now. Do you still do KGR websites?

My KGR traffic from that project is still growing consistently and the sites earn around $4-5k revenue each month but it's no longer something I'm actively working on. I have a couple of projects which I consider relatively short term and I'm swapping to larger niche sites to diversify a bit.

I'll still look for KGR terms for these sites, if I see easy traffic I'm going to take it but it's not the focus.

Very interesting journey just a suggestion don’t do blog comment, build more links to your homepage, and then move to inner pages

I don't think you're going to rank a competitive keyword with blog comments but I have ran across one or two surprising sites heavily using manual blog comments with good results. I'm not going heavy on them but they don't hurt and I like them for diversity.

As for links to the homepage vs inner pages, I'd like to make the time and budget to test this properly but I'm not convinced homepages links are the way to go. Based on my competitors and projects outside of this journal I'm probably about 70% to inner pages. Maybe homepage links would be more effective but I'd need to see some data on it.

This looks well organized. No doubt you will make it.

Good luck!

That's because you guys can't see my wall of post-it notes and half used notepads. It's actually a complete mess of 'just get something done today'.

I didn't expect it to be smooth sailing to begin with. Hopefully as I nail down a few more writers like this one I'll have more time to scale things properly.
 
That's because you guys can't see my wall of post-it notes and half used notepads. It's actually a complete mess of 'just get something done today'.

I didn't expect it to be smooth sailing to begin with. Hopefully as I nail down a few more writers like this one I'll have more time to scale things properly.

I'm using only Trello and Todoist just after @yakuzaemme remind me of it and must admit I'm finishing more tasks because of Todoist.

You should try it out. The free version is enough.

I have been writing down on real paper but since I moved digitally, everything became easier... even the small everyday-life tasks.
 
I'm mostly taking today off just popped on for 30 minutes to catch up on some customer service for a different project and happened to spot some really good news for this one.

One of the new freelance writers turned in a stunning piece of work. I'll probably beef it up a bit just because I like the keyword and I didn't give him a big order to start with but damn. This is exactly what I was looking for it'll actually convert visitors. Booked them for a couple of articles each week and if they get any more availability I'll be taking that as well. Renewed my faith that this could be scalable as even 2-3 writers like that would free up so much of my time from editing crappy content.

Spent today: $185.40

While setting up the keywords for this writer I did have to laugh. Why the fuck am I in this niche? Do you ever look at a decision you made a few weeks ago and wonder what the fuck you were thinking? Still we're in it now. We'll get to 100k words and see what happens. We do have a dozen results on page 2-3 which bodes well this early on but way too early to really pay much attention to the rankings.

Anyway. Going to try this 'taking a day off' thing I've heard so much about. The weathers pretty crap but I blew a bunch of money on a VR headset I might as well make use of it.



My KGR traffic from that project is still growing consistently and the sites earn around $4-5k revenue each month but it's no longer something I'm actively working on. I have a couple of projects which I consider relatively short term and I'm swapping to larger niche sites to diversify a bit.

I'll still look for KGR terms for these sites, if I see easy traffic I'm going to take it but it's not the focus.

How many websites bring so much money?
Does your $4-5k revenue mainly from Clickbank?
thanks very much.
 
I'm using only Trello and Todoist just after @yakuzaemme remind me of it and must admit I'm finishing more tasks because of Todoist.

You should try it out. The free version is enough.

I have been writing down on real paper but since I moved digitally, everything became easier... even the small everyday-life tasks.

I've used their paid version for a while as well. I tend to alternate between digital and hardcopy but it becomes a mess each way.

How many websites bring so much money?
Does your $4-5k revenue mainly from Clickbank?
thanks very much.

I've got a whole thread on this in the journal section. The main focus of that project was in parasite ranking.
 
I've always had a theory (with absolutely nothing to back it up) that a custom theme might look better to Google. Makes you stand out as a site really trying, rather than another generic affiliate blog.

Just now I'll use generic themes like Avada but this is in the back of my mind.

Well, it remains to be seen whether I can actually manage it so here's hoping. Cheers.

I don't think Google takes that into consideration. Maybe only the usability and performance of a site but not how unique it looks. In fact, if anything, I think Google likes people to use standardized themes since they usually provide a much better framework than custom-made designs by non-experienced designers.
 
curious, following. I am in a similar position, try to scale my monthly visitors.
 
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.

Probably, the best read I've ever come across on this forum... Definitely, one of the best for me.
I can only wish you all the best.
 
With the COVID spike in the UK again it looks like my recent plans to move back to a city are probably going to be on hold for a bit. Got myself an office for the week just for a break of scenery I've been sitting at the same desk since February now. It's productive to have a new desk and a decent office chair again but I have a lot of work for other projects to do this week as well.

The potential upside of site 1 is growing on me. It's lower competition, a wider niche so I can probably get more traffic and based on the little traffic converting so far - it's probably a better ROI. I've been focusing on site 2 because it's easier to get writers to work with the niche, it's an older domain and (honestly) I need to redo about 30-35k words on-site 1 because the original writer was *really* bad.

I'm putting more time into now though because it's worth growing.
  • Rewrote a crappy 800-word article on-site 1 to a decent 1,800 words.
  • Rewrote another on-site 1 around the 1k mark.
  • Edited and posted 1,400 words to site 2. Took longer than it should have done because a writer couldn't follow a simple direction. Offered some direction which seems as obvious as "don't eat paste" but I'll give them another shot because their writing itself is good if they'd just write about the right topic.
  • Trialing a $0.08/word writer to see if there's any difference at all. Watch my complete lack of surprise when they still ignore the brief and write the wrong thing.
  • Edited and published 2,000 words to site 2.
  • Wrote a short 850 words for site 1. Pretty dry topic.
  • Added a pile of new keywords to my list for both sites. Some of these are great looking and have very little competition going directly for them.
  • Spent a little bit of time on site 1's Pinterest setup. I'm not planning to actively promote the pins or anything at the moment I really just want to see how quickly Google puts them in the SERP since a whole lot of niches have too much of that right now.
  • Wrote 1,200 words for site 2.
I want to try and get a couple of new writers trialing this week. I feel very ineffective editing some of this content when I could be doing other things or even just writing myself but with enough writers, I can rely on I can scale a bigger network in the slightly longer term.

Checked in on one of my newer YouTube channels and I'm surprised at the growth. There's quite a lot I'd like to do to experiment with it because I suspect you could grow a channel much quicker than a blog and that extra traffic wouldn't hurt the blog. I might try and dedicate a day a week to building channel and just get the ball rolling there at least.

I don't think Google takes that into consideration. Maybe only the usability and performance of a site but not how unique it looks. In fact, if anything, I think Google likes people to use standardized themes since they usually provide a much better framework than custom-made designs by non-experienced designers.

I'm not saying they do but I think it's a possibility. I certainly don't think standard themes help over a custom one unless your custom theme has some really shitty SEO principles involved.

These two niches, like most, the big authority sites which use WordPress do not use public themes.

Now we have a causality issue here. The sites who spend time and money on building their own theme are also the sites likely to spend time and money on their content and promotion so I'm not saying a custom theme will jump you to #1 overnight.

But there's a possibility it signals to Google that you're invested enough in the site to not use the same theme as 100,000 other sites.

It's something I'd like to test in the near future.

curious, following. I am in a similar position, try to scale my monthly visitors.

Are you scaling with a single site or a network?

Probably, the best read I've ever come across on this forum... Definitely, one of the best for me.
I can only wish you all the best.

Well shit now I can't slack off. Much appreciated.
 
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