My Journey From Nothing to Something - Writer Changing Lanes

Hey everyone,

I'm officially embarking on my journey in Internet marketing & SEO.

I have spent many years working as a robotic freelance writer. My content has made a lot of people a lot of money, which is frustrating. I've had a few people cash big off my work. One came back and thanked me with an extremely gracious $30,000 bonus. Still, knowing if I had the other pieces of the puzzle together, I would of had the opportunity to make a LOT more.

So, I have decided to plan out a few different immediate projects. I have the next nine days to just sit here and work. I can easily rip out 1,500 words of high quality content in an hour. It's the little things, like installing and editing themes, finding the right tools (I've been out of the loop for ~1.5 yrs), and all that sort.

MY GOAL

Right now, my goal is simple.

I am going to go from nothing to something

That's it!

I need something to materialize. I need the re-assurance of knowing the hard work pays off. I know that takes time -- my ventures are highly varied, some authority, affiliate, CPA, etc. I'll also be growing social media presence.

I will have anywhere from four to six projects launched and prepared to move forward by June 6th.

I will continue updating this journey thread until my success is great enough to create a large goal for one of my ventures.

I'm fine if most don't pay attention. I'll be using this thread as a way to keep track for myself, and so I can look back at it down the line. If anyone does feel like subscribing, and has the extra time, I would love to have someone to bounce quick questions to every now and again. Heck, I'd pay for it...

I know this is a bland post. I will provide an update on what I do as I go. I'm hitting way too many different areas to bundle it all together.

Thanks for reading and best of luck to all of you!

Good luck with your journey!

Captain_Crunch said:

Good luck with your journey!

Click to expand...

Thanks!

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My first effort involves setting up a website that will review the best models of a particular product. I am looking for a template with an easy CMS, so WordPress is what I've chosen. I need a theme that looks decent and can support minimal linking from the home page.

I found and it looks good. You can view the demo on their website. Go to ProReviewTheme [sea oh emm] and then check out the demo for Amazon affiliate websites.

I can only stretch about three categories when going through the unique ways to differentiate products.

Should I make a blog on this website? I wanted to provide an in-depth review on each product, although that may prove to be challenging. I can get traffic to the blog and reference on-site reviews, but at the end of the day, the goal is to improve rankings for the homepage as it's ranking for the main keyword.

I will be making the final decision on what theme to use over the next half an hour as I gather everything else I need. If anyone has input on this particular theme, and whether to incorporate a blog, please let me know.

Alright.

Since last post, I did my routine social media efforts, set up hosting, installed WordPress to domain, installed Yoast SEO plugin, and watched a video going over how to configure it. Some parts I didn't really understand, but they didn't seem to matter. I may run into an issue once I put the custom template up, but I made a note about what to check when it's up.

Went to Fiverr to find someone to quickly make a banner. Went for those with nothing in qeue and found a guy that's online. If it doesn't turn out perfect, I'll just update it later...just trying to paint the picture so I'm confident to move forward with writing & scraping for link building. I'll work on perfect graphics if I know the site naturally ranks well or is worth continuing on, as I don't want to go too far out of pocket.

Next, I need to get more in-depth keyword research. I want to map out my content intentions for this website. I've determined it's not too competitive for the main keyword.


My plan is to use the website's meta title as a source for keywords. My biggest keyword will be used as exact wording in the title. The other two keywords will be very close, but not exact, so they're still highly relevant. I plan to focus content (density-wise) on those non-exact keywords. Once the dust settles, I may optimize further for the main keyword and adjust based on SERP response.

I remember using Market Samurai before and it appeared to be the #1 choice for most on here at the time. I'm going to use the trial verison for now and make a final decision a bit later. Interestingly, keyword research (beyond Adwords Planner) isn't a big deal for most of my developments. 40 days to decide anyway.

Alright, so time to do some keyword research while simultaneously finalizing the theme and installing it onto the site. My website contains a keyword with 3,600 searches a month. These are people with buying intention.

Looking at my main keyword further:

170,000 pages in Google using exact term
6,850 pages using both (it's two words) in title
4% SEOCTR
$2.75 CPC

First page of Google shows strong websites, but nothing to worry about. It appears no one has tried to tap in. There are two competitors with slight variations to their products, who are currently ranking on the first page for an upgraded version of this keyword. That one gets 12,100 searches a month. This is one of the two I will be targeting, as mentioned earlier.

Let's make sure I'm looking at this right though.

Top 10 - notes

Pros

Backlinks to page will be easy to beat, five or six of them will be defeated in first month.

Cons

Newest website is six years old.
Citation/Trust flow doesn't exceed 30 for any

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I'll be honest and say I don't know how to place value and analyze properly. I know the basic statistics and competitive factors suggest it's worth making the effort.

So, let's just get past that part.

Find content feature is nice. I'll be gathering a list of subjects to cover soon and it may come in handy.

Found a free template.

Virus total, check.

Getting it up on the website now.

Installed.

Found my last juicy keyword.

Got hosting provider to remove page (in development).

Time to play with the template...

An hour later...really hate this part.


Okay, I'll build around it and try to fill in the blanks.

Signed up for Amazon Affiliates.

Will take me a while to nail down the template. Building social media accounts, gathered link codes, and fiddling with it until things click into place.

I'll report back after I get through this hurdle as I'll have many little things to update then.

Sorry for the repetitive posting, I'm just trying to keep a record for myself and if I run into a big problem, I can always ask someone while referencing the steps I took.

Good luck mate! As I can see, you're working hard and you will be rewarded with the money

Good luck with your journey mate. I wish you luck.

Wonderful! Best of luck on your journey. I'm suscribed to this thread.
I also started my journey about personal blogging, and it's quite a challenge to monetize with it but I just have to be creative.
Hoping to read more of your updates in this thread.

Thanks for the support guys.

Had a short break and went to grab coffee. Very excited to get started on my first of many long nights. I'm a stay at home parent, but my SO works a lot, so I'm usually fighting for time. I made enough to stop working for two months if I wanted, but I plan to make my minimum (for bills) and dedicate the rest of my time to ranking and monetizing these sites, or dropping them and replacing with new ones if it makes sense.

I wish the best of luck to all of you as well. The hardest part is just doing it and letting yourself deal with the consequences when they come. I usually think about posting stuff like this, then avoid doing so, because I don't like exposing weakness...but overcoming my personal hurdles is what matters.

As would anyone, I hope for my own success, but I don't expect it. I'm keeping active with this thread in case I do see success. Then, others can see it's not about the magic methods, it's not about getting lucky, it's about learning from mistakes, tweaking things, etc. I know I can relate to some of you, I've given up on the idea of making micro niche sites before after getting discouraged by the overwhelming amount of things to cover (WP, SEO, backlinks, template changes, writing, research, etc.), but I'm in a clearer place now.

I will disclose more details on the sites I develop once they either flop or succeed. If they flop, maybe someone can pick out what I did wrong. If they succeed, people get to see the steps I took to succeed.

I'll try to formulate my posts better once I get further in and I may recreate my initial posts in a better organized format later on, as it's currently just a lot of blah blah blah

Time to learn more about how I can best customize the template.

I do think the biggest hurdle for me will be getting the websites from an empty page to ready for visitors to view, without a high bounce rate. I'm a perfectionist and I can't ever find the 'perfect' template or theme when looking for that purpose, but I get sucked in to some other people's blogs when I visit them through search engines.

I expect most other things to just be time consuming. The writing will be the easiest part for me. I have a few ideas for link building and I'm focusing on quality. I'll have some software to use as well. I'm going to be a minimalist with building links, as I'd rather be able to notice what each change does to my SERPs.

I'll have to do the hosting battle soon. Currently with iPage, but it's just a temporary fix. I'll be switching to an offshore VPS as I have a plan for a website using CPA and non-favorable practices. I know nothing about hosting, here's the package I'm looking at:

1x Intel E3 3.3GHz Core
1GB DDR3 RAM
75GB HDD Storage (RAID10)
5TB monthly bandwidth
10Gbps shared uplink

Is this good? I'm battling how I can avoid hosting videos on one of my websites. It's a website that Google may penalize, so I also don't want it to connect with my whitehat sites. Will Google see the connection, do I need to get an additional IP from the host, or what?

Alright, back to work!

Looks Good Target.. Good Luck With Your Journey..

I would like to just throw out a suggestion that you crank out a few words of content each day and put them on a site for a niche that you truly enjoy instead of just reviews of products. For that site do not build links, just fresh content each day.

Feel free to hit me up anytime you have questions. For someone who is new to this forum, it is nice to see long in detail posts instead of bullshit $5 a day journeys. Cheers!

Good luck with the journey, looks like you know exactly what you're doing.

I'll be following

Yup. The website I'm currently working on is actually the only affiliate website in queue right now. I'm trying to sway towards dropshipping for websites built purely on selling. The margins are higher and, at least in the main one I'm hitting, Adwords is almost untapped for a few strong keywords, which are buying-oriented, one is even "buy a -keyword-" with just one competing ad and 15k+ searches a month.

I will be building a fitness authority website. I'll be posting for a few months without building link, then taking on guest posting opportunities whenever I can. I have a lot of clients with health-related blogs/websites, so I should be able to work my way into a few opportunities.

I'm still not sure how to go about separating pages and posts though. A lot of topics are post-worthy, but also standardized information. So, how would we differentiate content as being a staple piece, a static topic that people must read, versus a random post people may stumble on. I know search engines will pick it up, but I'm having trouble picturing an entire, organized, super authority site, at least under WordPress.

I decided to do the review website first as my previous experience was limited to creating similar sites. I figured it would be best to do that first as it will help me refresh my mind on some of the simpler things.

Once I get this one done, I'm setting up a CPA site. I have some scripts, like grabbers, but I need to get them all configured, get the locker up, etc. I'm sure the hardest part is to be determined, but it involves YouTube traffic, so downloading and uploading will probably consume the most time. This one should be mostly autopilot after it's set up.

I'm still on the template work for the review site right now. I made a cheesy header to use for the moment. I'll hire out in the coming days after I get everything else in place, content up, etc.

It's mostly set up how I want it now, so just back-end tweaking and SEO left to do. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to get my homepage to have a lot of content, maybe a full post "Why -product type- works" or a buying guide type post...but I'm not sure how to make a post be static on the homepage, without actually making the entire homepage static. All I've found so far is how to 'sticky' it to the homepage, but that's just the description, I don't want Google to think my homepage is saturated with affiliate links.

I'm satisfied with the current state of the template. It will look better when I get all the products up with details.

Are there any case studies involving the use of the year in meta titles? I'm thinking about adding 2014 at the end, but I'm hesitant to do blind testing as I have no way to compare it.

I'm sure there will be little tweaks with the template as I go. I'll be here all night accomplishing little if I don't move on to the next step.

First review written. It's just a little over 600 words. I'm going to do 600+ for each review and 1,000-1,500+ for each blog post. The posts will be buying guides. My product can be broken down to 'for kids' 'for women' 'for men' 'for different purpose' and then I can have another post with scientific proof, citations, etc., to back that the product works. I'll be internally linking from the buying guide pieces as I can reference the best product 'for women' 'for kids' and etc.

So, spending my time between writing and gathering links, inserting details, doing on-page SEO.

My authority social media page is coming along nicely. People are interacting with me. I find it hard to consider them as buyers. Most seem to be hyping something too. But people sell stuff on Warrior Forum and all people do is hype there, so I guess it'll work lol

Still not sure how I can have content on the home page, minus the review/post descriptions. I'll save that for last though.

Good luck with your journey OP

Thanks!

I'm happy with how things are with the first site now. I still need to finish writing reviews and posts. I'm going to select all the specific products and insert placeholder text where it's needed.

After that, I'll be turning in for the night. I'll do a bit of writing for the site tomorrow. I can dedicate myself to maintenance more than developing, my family is just away on vacation, so I can finally concentrate. To prevent lesser productivity, I'll be shifting my priority tomorrow to another website. I still hope to have all the content up within a week and I'll start link building in a few weeks.

No guarantees on what site I'll do next. I need to finalize negotiations with suppliers before moving forward with the eCommerce site, so I'll keep that one closer to the end. I think it will be the CPA site.

Not enjoying all the little technicals. I will definitely be happy to start the link building phase. The climax I'm waiting for is when I can actually see my SERPs shifting. The only other time I made any attempt, I had the wife put the foot down before I had the chance to really build links.

I may buy a premium theme for the authority site. I know I'll be a huge perfectionist on that one, so rather not get my head in a spin.

Is WordPress still recommended for authority sites if there are a lot of sections and an eCommerce store (possible/down the road)?

You guys shall hear from me again in the next 12 hours. I'll be up a bit longer preparing this site so I can just write & go from here. Will be back at it first thing when I wake up. I do have to take a few hours to work on paid assignments, but no big deal.

Good night guys and thanks a lot for all the support!

I ended up staying up later than I should have. My productivity was knocked back quite a bit.

Here's how today looks:

5,000 words of writing for paid clients
Product selection + link/image insertion for review site
Purchase offshore VPS hosting package

Now, I may run into problems with the VPS hosting package when I try to transfer site #1. To get rid of the in development front page, I had to live chat with support (iPage). They did it. I asked about whether there's a FTP to use for this site, as I could only find it for the domain I reg'd through them, and the question was avoided with an explanation on how to avoid the development page next time.

Hopefully it's not too difficult. Their shoddy ways makes me think otherwise. They charge something like $150 for a security certificate...for a year! I tried getting mine activated and they don't access third-party certificates lol, I shut them down and they lowered the price to $19.95 a year...

So, will have to get the site transferred. I'll back up all the content and the code before attempting to do so. I'll wait to transfer it until it's 100% ready for link building. Don't want to spin my head around something when I have so little done overall.

Then, I need to install the script for the CPA website. It deals with video grabbers and such, so I'm sure I'll have some headaches.

That's far enough into my day that I'll likely run into some issues that make for delays.

I'll update when I get more done. It may be spotty or quiet for a little bit as I have to get my paid writing work done as well.

Thanks again for following guys, see you at the top!