My Journey To Creating An Authority Site Bringing In $25/Day

Hey Guys,

I'm Luke (a.k.a. PChanger)

I have been reading stuff on BHW for a long time now, and I have finally decided to start something and try my best to stick with it.

First let me tell you a little bit about myself, I am 17 (turning 18 in 8 days) and I have been trying for the past 3 years to make money online. My real passion is film making, and I am really good at it. I have a comedy YouTube channel ( www.youtube.com/user/PChangerProductions if anyone wants to check it out ), and it has taken me a long long LONG time, but it is finally to the point where I am getting just under 1,000 views a day, around $30/month, and have almost 900 subscribers. If life was perfect, I would just get more people to watch my videos and make a living off of that, but sadly I don't think that is going to happen (at least not any time soon).

Last year I made around $400 online. $110 from YouTube (it was not doing as well back then as it is now), $75 by selling stock footage on Pond5, $60 from microworkers, $5 from adfly, around $100 from ebay, and the rest was just from a ton of other random stuff.

Anyway, I found Blue Matter's guide on how to make $100/day with AdSense and I figured I would give it a shot.

Why Make This Journey Thread?:
Firstly, because I want a way to document what I have done. Secondly, am new-ish to all of this and I want people to help give me advice on what to do next/keep me from forgetting any important steps/make sure I don't rush things.


My Keyword?:
Following Blue Matter's guide I picked out my keyword. Here is info on that:

Ad Competition: High
Suggested bid (Google Keyword Tool): $27
Suggested bid (Spyfu): $12
Exact Searches For Keyword: 49,500/month
Results for "Keyword" when typed into Google: 718,000
Exact Match Domains (EMD's) in the top 10 results: 2


1. PR 1 - Nov. 30, 2010 - Prefix + EMD
2. PR 2 - Nov. 28, 1996
3. PR 2 - DEC. 27, 2003
4. PR 1 - Nov. 05, 2002
5. PR 1 - July 05, 2009
6. PR 2 - Apr. 04, 2001 - EMD
7. PR 3 - Feb. 14, 2007 - sears
8. PR 3 - Feb. 14, 2007 - sears
9. PR 4 - Apr. 28, 2005 - youtube video
10. PR 5 - Nov. 27, 2002 - wikipedia

From what I have read this looks like a good keyword (Let me know if I am wrong!). The PR is really low on almost all of the top 10 sites, plus my keyword gets a TON of monthly searches and should have a really high CPC. The only thing I am concerned about is the domain age. The most recent site in the top 10 is from 2010 and that was 4 years ago. Hopefully I will still be able to make it into the top ten, but like I said, I am new to this and have never really done it before. One other concern I have about my keyword is that it is a bit specific and could be a bit hard to write about (also I have very little interest in the topic).


What Have I Done So Far?: I did a bunch of searching to try and find the best and cheapest hosting. Using the honey extension for chrome (which I HIGHLY recommend) I was able to get a code for godaddy that gave me my domain for free, and hosting for only $1/month. I also paid for "whois" protection or whatever.
Total spent: $20. So yeah, I got my domain www(dot)all****************s(dot)com with 1 yr of hosting for only 20 bucks.

Next, I proceeded to install wordpress on it. This is the first time I have ever used wordpress, and so far I am really liking it! The theme I am using is "Magazine Basic", which seems pretty nice. It looks very clean, and simple (which I know helps encourage ad clicks.)

I spent several hours messing with the design of the page, and finally think I have it how I want it.

Installed Plugins:
All In One Seo
WP Super Cache
GOOGLE XML SITEMAPS
WP-DB-Backup
Quick Adsense Plugin
WP POST RATINGS
Insert Headers and Footers
SOCIABLE FOR WORDPRESS
LOGIN LOCKDOWN
Contact Form 7

Next I made a few visitor pages. I made an "About Us" page (which I am not particularly happy with, but I think it will do), I used a website to generate myself a "Privacy Policy" Page, and I used a wordpress plugin to make a nice "Contact Us" Page.

Currently, the home page is in desperate need of content. If I am remembering correctly, Blue Matter said that the home page should be a 800-900 word article with 3% keyword density of your websites main keyword, but right now mine is more like half a paragraph with 50% keyword density. ...I need to fix that... XD

One of my article categories is "Common Problems". I went ahead and wrote 6 short (200-300 word) articles about some of the main problems that people have with my keyword and added relevant pictures to them (which I named appropriately). I know the articles are a bit short, but hopefully they will be ok. On-screen they look pretty good.

Also, I submitted my site to google and bing.

I did all of that over the course of about two days.

Last night I randomly got 2 comments on one of my "common problems" articles. They didn't quite seem "spammy", but it was kinda weird to get 2 comments on one article so quickly.

Today I made a new tumblr blog (to be one of my tier 1 blogs) and queued up 3 post about my keyword for it slowly post over the course of about a week and a half. The first was just a reblog of something that was related, the second was a 400 word article (that I copied from a site, spun, and then fixed the grammar on) with a link to Wikipedia's page about something related to my keyword, and the third was a short 75 word post with a link to my website. Not planning on doing to much else with this blog yet, I just wanted to go ahead and get started by making it.

I tried to set up google analytics earlier, but I just realized that I did it wrong before (never done it in wordpress before). Anyway, I think I have it fixed now. That is about all that I have done so far. I will post here whenever I do anything new related to my site. Please give me suggestions if you have any (Sorry for the giant wall of text).

~Luke

Note: I am note going to put AdSense on my website until it is getting at least 30 views/day. I hear that Google likes sites without ads, so I am going to leave the ads off until I start getting a bit of traffic.

I'm with you buddy, following blue matter method, too
good luck, man

Best of luck in your journey man, hope you reach your goal!

Good luck on your journey mate You've done plenty of research, looks like you'll do fine. Hope you reach your goal soon.

Just a quick heads up: maybe you shouldn't include your home page article in this thread. I found your site within a matter of seconds from simply googling your text. But hey, the site looks good Good luck!

White Night said:

I'm with you buddy, following blue matter method, too
good luck, man

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innozemec said:

Best of luck in your journey man, hope you reach your goal!

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Thanks guys!

xxsaumitraxx said:

Good luck on your journey mate You've done plenty of research, looks like you'll do fine. Hope you reach your goal soon.

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I hope so. :/ I am a bit skeptical about it working well, because everything else I have ever tried has not worked well, but hey! I know a bit more now, so maybe it will out! I really hope it does!

Farcast said:

Just a quick heads up: maybe you shouldn't include your home page article in this thread. I found your site within a matter of seconds from simply googling your text. But hey, the site looks good Good luck!

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Haha! Thanks dude, that is a good point. I'm an idiot! XD Just fixed it.

Wrote two more 300-ish word articles (with 2 relevant pictures per article) and set them up to post one tomorrow, and one the next day. Is it going to hurt my SEO that all of my articles are around 300 words or less? I know Blue Matter was recommending 500 words per article, but after I have written around 300 I run out of things to say. It will be enough content for my sites visitors, but will it make Google unhappy with me?

~Luke

P.S. I can now confirm that Google Analytics is working, because my Website got 4 visits today! Not very many I know, but still really good for a website that is only a few days old. Right?

Just finished making my second tier 1 weebly website/blog and queued up a few posts for the next few weeks. No actual backlinks to my site yet, but they should auto-post in a bit. My girlfriend wants me to stop typing nowwwwwwwwwwwfkskd wplywj]o, vcxdt.p/'\'\

you are on the right track my friend, but I think 3% is a bit high. Dont forget to factor in meta tags, titles, urls, alt tags, category names. Basically anything that has your keyword in it. It will inflate your keyword and will make it really hard for you to rank !

goodluck

Really nice, good luck to you. I'm thinking of doing something similar soon as well.

Sounds like an interesting journey. I'm curious about your link building plan, as the keyword isn't really low on competition.

great start really a competitive keyword will see how it goes

Seems like you are going on a Right Track till now, Best of luck with your journey and i wish you reach your goal Soon.

Just keep updating...

jass11 said:

great start really a competitive keyword will see how it goes

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Do you think it is going to be too competitive? :/ Like I said, I am new to this.

Good luck Op with your journey,keep us posted with your progress!

Looks like my site has been indexed by Google and Bing. Hoping to write a few more articles for it later today.

(Also, I just realized that I now show up as a "registered member" on here, rather than a "newbie" ...yay!)

Dude,
Just one thing to say. Raise your goal ($25/Day)! I can guarantee that you are going to achieve it. Everybody hit there target, no matter how high or LOW they set it. This IS a FACT. So now, knowing that you raise it now or you'll regret later!

I'll be following this just to check in when a site officially becomes "authority"

vampire12 said:

Dude,
Just one thing to say. Raise your goal ($25/Day)! I can guarantee that you are going to achieve it. Everybody hit there target, no matter how high or LOW they set it. This IS a FACT. So now, knowing that you raise it now or you'll regret later!

Click to expand...

I don't want to set it too unrealistically high. I am making $1/day with YouTube, and now my goal is to make $25/day with this new website. If I am actually able to do it, Maybe I will increase it to $100/day, but honestly I would be happy with $25/day. Besides, later I can just make 3 more sites like this one and Tada! $100/day. ^_^

Good luck with your journey, my friend!
I'm very interested in film-making too, and have been since I was just a little kid and watched Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers for the first time. I'm mainly interested in the VFX/CGI aspect as it is something I feel like most countries without Hollywood budgets are really lacking. 7-8-9-10 years ago I had a dream of becoming the first movie-maker in my country to make state-of-the-art motion pictures with high quality graphics and effects, and that dream is still in the back of my head. I see you use stock footage as your effect like explosions. I highly suggest you to try out 3Ds MAX, Rayfire and FumeFX. The quality you can achieve here is just incredible.

If you are serious about film-making, start a blog of discussions and tutorials on various aspects of film-making like camera movement/angles, sound, setting etc. I would love to create some tutorials on HQ 3D effects when you have settled. There are of course loads of such blogs, but I'm thinking a blog for indie film-makers to get references to serious HQ content to make then compete with even the most hardcore studios. I think this Niche could potentially pay off big-time if someone focused on giving indies the resources to make the movie of their dreams. This could of course also spawn a paid monthly membership for access to your own stock footage and effects files (3D suits, editing software, photoshop etc.).