My Journey To A 1k Visitor A Day Authority

Hi Everyone!

I wanted to do a journey thread because I plan on launching a platform in a year or two and I want to practice documenting my work. A little about me I am a real estate pro turned web business owner. I gross between 10-15k a month in sales netting about 7-8k. I have a plan for this project and if it executes correctly it will exceed 1k visitors a day in the beauty niche.

I started this project yesterday when I found a site with just under 200k a month in traffic that had horrible content no link building and a small social presence. I was going to put in an offer to buy then I realized I would have to redo all the content from scratch anyway so I am starting over with a keyword list 1k long off 5 similar websites on Semrush.

What role will I play:
Strategy, social advertising, picking up slack from team members.

My Team
A trained Esthetician and Cosmologist from Chicago hired of Odesk - $8.20 per 1k word article.
My wife doing doing videos for every article on youtube.
Myself picking up the slack wherever needed, monotization and advertising.
Potentially two additional employees doing VA work and Keyword research

I will be outsourcing 90% of the work to a team so I can still devote time to my thriving ecommerce business and marketing consultancy. The budget for this project is 6k over the first year. I expect a lot of upfront cost that I will be completing for under 2k then I intend to move forward at a $2-300 a month.

I intend to update this thread at least once a week.

Best of Luck Nick.. Keep us posted..

good luck mate... hope you will get the target...

This is actually day 2 for the project this is what I did today.

Started a to-do list and checked a couple boxes.

Locked in the contract for the first 6 months of daily articles. Delivered article list all targeting low comp long-tails with traffic ranging from 50-3k per article. Writer will start producing content tomorrow.

Also found a domain broker with a 1999 beauty domain with 120 backlinks including links from about 20 DA 60+ sites in the niche. That will cost $300 but considering I am not going to do and SEO style link building on this project it is a necessary investment

I intend to forward this domain onto a brand domain after 4-8 weeks of daily content updates.

Exploring brand names blew out a list of 50 and now have it zeroed down to two options. When I pick a brand this weekend I will start registering social media accounts early next week.

Also started my way down the Alexa top 100 in my niche to catalog guest posting opportunities and websites that have a write for us feature for month 3 so I can start commenting on their blogs and reading their top stories to build relationships and learn what people want. (Matt Cutts would love this project it kinda annoys me a little bit )

After I get the rest of the way through Alexa I will catalog beauty pages with lots of follows and start to analyze their following to see what I need to be putting on my social pages to actually drive engagement.

Getting as much planning done now while I have the time.

nickeberle said:

Also found a domain broker with a 1999 beauty domain with 120 backlinks including links from about 20 DA 60+ sites in the niche. That will cost $300 but considering I am not going to do and SEO style link building on this project it is a necessary investment

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Be careful with that, consult with a professional before buying that domain, those metrics can be easily manipulated, except the domain age. 120 backlinks from 60+ DA don't really tell anything. $300 seems pricy to me.

Interesting journey, will definitely follow, and yea like brad said get the domain checked by someone good at it

Thanks for the input I will run it by a friend just in case but it's the right niche and pretty much all the links are quality, ny post, tean vogue, usatoday.com etc.

I know I'm paying a hefty price tag but I'm not trying to spend two weeks domain shopping so my broker is going to make 100-150 off me and I'm going to save myself doing a part of this project I'm really bad at.

Try your best to keep it rolling, best of luck...

I'm going to break off this project for the day. Been productive, got the feel for how I want this to look, got 25 niche related authorities that allow contributions to reach out to in the future, got my writer going full bore on content, figured out how I can get the stock photos easily to make it look clean and professional.

Gonna sleep on the name and decide on that when I wake up in the morning.
Then I will register social accounts
Register branded domain that I will move onto in 2 months or so
Install wordpress
Pick out color palettes and templates
Start work on a brand identity

Realized I made the title 1k visitors a day laughing about that I meant to write 10k a day.

All the best with your journey OP

Following each of your marketing strategy. And look at the statistics that you have achieved

it's look good. Good luck to your Journey

Good luck with the journey OP

Day 3 now

Quick recap this is what I have done/in motion:
1. I have 25 Blogs to outreach for guest posts
2. Have an Esthetician/Cosmologist writer writing 183 (half a year) articles for $1500
3. Have a former cosmetic brand from 1999 as initial aged domain I am launching on
4. 25 High Traffic high authority communities to reach out to once I have established a small foothold
5. Have my wife that isn't working currently doing videos she reads the articles the writer writes and talks about the same information for a minute or two, we will plug a stock intro and comment like subscribe ending onto these videos then use them four youtube etc.

What I did today
1. I picked out a name. It is 9 characters two words memorably, brandable, slightly descriptive, totally unused. Score!
2. Registered all the social profiles in it's name and registered the domain
3. Created a brand identity packet. It describes the tone and style of communication, the value proposition and a couple things that will make this different from any existing beauty sites.
4. Started a style packet with fonts color pallet look and feel of site, logo. I will update it later with image guidelines.

As someone who outsources almost all the "labor" of a project those last two steps are probably the most important step that people miss. I can give my hires a 4 page brand document and they can know exactly what they can do that will get auto signed off by me. It saves countless hours training while producing more and higher quality work from my team.

Another random team building thing. Trust your people, hire people you are confident about and tell them you are confident in their abilities, tell them they are going to do awesome work. Instill pride in what they do by saying things like "wow I love it what you did with x and y!". Positive reinforcement prevents the need for damage control and prevents stale work.

That's it for today. Any of you have specific advice you can suggest this is only my second project like this.

PS. Just to reiterate the goal is 10k visitors a day not 1k.

Good luck on your journey. That's great that you have a cosmologist on board with you and your wife who will be making YT videos.

Who will be editing your YT videos?

Star Anise said:

Good luck on your journey. That's great that you have a cosmologist on board with you and your wife who will be making YT videos.

Who will be editing your YT videos?

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I will probably do the initial editing to create a template. I want a cute and entertaining intro nothing long probably will do 3-5 seconds and a stock sign off with those classic like follow subscribe. Then I will create a overlay for the first 4 seconds of footage where the article/video title will be shown and create a watermark with the logo. My wife has used final cut a little so once we have that done she is going to be able to plug in the videos and give them some style in about 1-2min then upload straight to YouTube.

The goal is quantity of quality not perfection here.

Random update: It looks like my budget was way to high. So I am either going to lower it or spend $5 a day advertising my facebook and youtube channels. Right now I am comited to $1800 and the only cost before advertising is going to be 200-300 stock photos which should be $50-75.

Today I took the time to figure out the social syndication thing. I almost bought FCS Networker to do it for me but I felt like for the limited posting I was going to do (8 share locations not 55) I could probably figure out a way to automate it for free. So I decided to set it up on another authority site I have been working on and this is what I got.

For facebook, twitter, google+ and tumblr I set up jetpacks publicize feature to auto share but that isn't enough publication for me.
Next I turned to IFTTT and that got me youtube videos published to all my social profiles and blog posts also published to my subreddit and Delicious.
The final thing I was lookign for was Stumbleupon I figured out I could use a plugin called Next Scripts: Social Networks Auto Poster to post there. So now my other authority site auto syndicates everything it does.

It's nice to know I have things automated so if my team does their part right I won't even need to log into my social accounts for anything but managing ad campaigns.

Well things are cruising along now and I am chilling I will update you all in about 2 weeks when I am dripping content steady onto the new site. Looking like a success of a project cause my writer will post straight to the site and my wife (read as skilled VA) will come through later embed videos and add a featured image. I am going to be stepping back from this project in a week and chill until it gets enough traffic to work with.

How many months for you to break even considering the money and time you and your team have invested?