My Second Well Documented Blog Affiliate Journey - Website in the Outdoor Niche to 5K per Month

My backstory

I am 35 years old, I have 2 kids (2 sons). I am currently separated from my STBXW (Just waiting to split assets and then finally divorce - taking forever)
My schedule is even busier than it was during my first Journey, and I would consider it a success.

Last time, having a thread similar to this one kept me on my toes and motivated to keep working on it.



Who Am I Hosted With?
I am currently with Cloudways (DigitalOcean server with WordPress). In the past, I've used WPEngine and Vultr+SpinupWP



Which plugins am I using?

• Kadence Theme Pro and Kadence Blocks Pro (Yearly License): If this becomes profitable, I will get the lifetime deal.
• SEOPress and SEOPress PRO
• FlyingPress with FlyingCDN - Caching plugin - (In the past, I used WP Rocket - I feel FlyingPress is just much better)
• Code Snippets plugin - to make any tweaks needed.

I don't use a security plugin, as those also affect your page's load times. The host should already be providing these types of services on the backend to protect the user (Cloudways told me they do)

My site is also set up with Cloudflare CDN (free) and proxied to FlyingCDN



What Tools am I using?

• Ahrefs
• SurferSEO
• ChatGPT 4 / OpenAI + Writing tools
• Grammarly

How Many Posts Do You Currently Have/Words?
I currently have 17 posts on my site. All of them are informational posts, likely averaging 2000-3000 words each. I am trying to get up to 30 blog posts this month to sign up for SurferSEO and optimize my content better.
I want to take advantage of the cheaper plan so I can use 30 content editors per month - this is why I want to get up to 30 posts before signing up so I don't waste time and money.

I try to do at least 1 post per day.



Do You Use Any Services From BHW?

I have used some services in the past that I might try to reuse again. But I am just trying to get content on the site right now.



When Did You Start This Site?

I started the whole process on March 17th, 2024. I started by getting my Domain and logo and then getting set up through hosting (Cloudways).
I then had to build out my site, which took a good two weeks. I only started writing content on April 2nd.
I picked an Outdoor Niche for this site.


I have done 0 SEO optimizations for any of my posts so far. I only made sure I was using my keywords in appropriate spots. That's it.
I also tried to align search intent as well before writing any of the posts. This is important.


Here are my current GSC results
My analytics show that users have already found my content:

Here is my Ahrefs dashboard:

Here are my Ahrefs Keywords and Organic Keyword Positions

That's it for now. Feel free to ask questions; I will answer them if possible.

I will try to keep this updated at least once per month.

Cheers!

please tell us about first blog. how much it was profitable

Good luck with the journey.

Good luck to your journey.

Good luck with the journey.

Good luck l. But doing link building will help you to get search engine traffic. Tj be safe you can create reddit subs,medium etc as foundational sites and you can then build tier one links with gsa , ranker x etc to it. It works and sometimes it stuck on top 5..if then then I would purchae more authority link..no matter what make sure they are indexing

Do you use any content generation framework or module to produce the content?

Why would you start an affiliate website relying on Google at these unstable times? Are you not caught up with what's happening?

korni said:

Why would you start an affiliate website relying on Google at these unstable times? Are you not caught up with what's happening?

Click to expand...

Maybe it brings traffic from another source. Nowadays almost no common site ranks in Google.

Best of luck and enjoy the journey

Good luck to your journey

the best good luck for u, l will stay tuned in your post.

I like that you started a blog without fearing the new google, or maybe you do not know about the update. Either way, keep going, this could become something good.

Amphoric said:

2000-3000 words each

Click to expand...

Word count is not as important anymore, you can rank fine with under 1k words nowadays.

Good luck!

hims.000 said:

please tell us about first blog. how much it was profitable

Click to expand...

I put the link in my opening post above; read a little, and you will find it.

WhimpyKid said:

Good luck l. But doing link building will help you to get search engine traffic. Tj be safe you can create reddit subs,medium etc as foundational sites and you can then build tier one links with gsa , ranker x etc to it. It works and sometimes it stuck on top 5..if then then I would purchae more authority link..no matter what make sure they are indexing

Click to expand...

I will be doing link-building soon. As I said, I want to put some content on the site first and see how it ranks. I will then use SurferSEO to optimize the posts, and then I can focus on the posts that are already ranking well and give them an easy boost.

Vivek Chandel said:

Do you use any content generation framework or module to produce the content?

Click to expand...

I use an SEO tool that grabs all the H1/H2/H3/H4's from the top 10 links on the first pages for the keyword I am targeting; then, I can filter out everything and give me a good working outline for my post. I then see if I can add anything missed and start writing.

korni said:

Why would you start an affiliate website relying on Google at these unstable times? Are you not caught up with what's happening?

Click to expand...

blogmen said:

I like that you started a blog without fearing the new google, or maybe you do not know about the update. Either way, keep going, this could become something good.


Word count is not as important anymore, you can rank fine with under 1k words nowadays.

Good luck!

Click to expand...

Why would I not start a website? Google has been updating for ages, and people have been saying SEO is dead every month for years.
I am already getting traffic to my site, so I am not worried. I've always been able to rank my content. If this deters people from doing websites and SEO work, it'll be easier for me in the long run.

I get that we can rank with lesser word counts, but I like to ensure that people reading my content have all the information they need without needing to go elsewhere.
However, I usually try to keep the average word count of my posts similar to the average of the top 10 pages.

I am looking forward to learning more about your journey. I have worked as a SEO writer for a few years and I am skeptical of Surfer and other tools that claim to boost your rankings. I think that backlinks are 99% of SEO but I am open to other perspectives. I don't pretend to be an expert, however, so I will keep tabs on your journey and see how you do!

Amphoric said:

ensure that people reading my content have all the information they need

Click to expand...

Yes, this is ok, some articles require more words, but I meant that trying to match a competitor's wordcount by adding fluff doesn't help with ranking like before.

Ofc a lot of new unknown rules are also running in the background for us to discover, so your journey will be an interesting case study.

Following the journey

I use an SEO tool that grabs all the H1/H2/H3/H4's from the top 10 links on the first pages for the keyword I am targeting; then, I can filter out everything and give me a good working outline for my post. I then see if I can add anything missed and start writing.

What tool do you use to grab all the H1/H2/H3/H4?
is it an english blog? thanks

Following, Good Lu ck On This Journey.
Keep Us Updated.

DonKong said:

I am looking forward to learning more about your journey. I have worked as a SEO writer for a few years and I am skeptical of Surfer and other tools that claim to boost your rankings. I think that backlinks are 99% of SEO but I am open to other perspectives. I don't pretend to be an expert, however, so I will keep tabs on your journey and see how you do!

Click to expand...

I used it before for my previous affiliate site that I sold, which certainly helped me. It would point me in the right direction of what I should include in my posts that other sites have.

Granted, you can do this now with AI thought, but this is easier as I can punch in what I already have, run the report, pick and choose what to add if needed, and then add extra stuff I possibly missed the first time.

I don't stuff the keywords as much as they recommend as I try to make it easier to read. But if I can add missing little words here and there, that might help; why not?

blogmen said:

Yes, this is ok, some articles require more words, but I meant that trying to match a competitor's wordcount by adding fluff doesn't help with ranking like before.

Ofc a lot of new unknown rules are also running in the background for us to discover, so your journey will be an interesting case study.

Click to expand...

When I proofread what the AI tries to write for me, I remove a lot of fluff that doesn't make sense. I also rewrite a lot of sections just based on how weird they sometimes sound (sometimes a little too much). But it does do a decent job for informational posts.

dlyhai said:

I use an SEO tool that grabs all the H1/H2/H3/H4's from the top 10 links on the first pages for the keyword I am targeting; then, I can filter out everything and give me a good working outline for my post. I then see if I can add anything missed and start writing.

What tool do you use to grab all the H1/H2/H3/H4?
is it an english blog? thanks

Click to expand...

I use CopySpace. Years ago, I got a lifetime license, and they have a scraping tool that grabs Headings and lets me choose how to build an outline when searching for keywords.

It's not the best, but I can't complain since it's free now and does what I want it to. Then, I can get AI to write what I need and tweak it from there.