noobs journey to a modest side income

How’s it going guys thought I’d start this thread for a bit of accountability as it’s something I want to venture into for the long term.

Some Background

I’m mid 20’s from the UK, left 2 years ago now to go backpacking to Australia. Unreal journey, met some great people and had some insane experiences!

I’m now sponsored to work here and a lot of my friends have had to leave after their holiday visas, meaning I find myself with more time and a bit less of a social life. I’ll aim to do something about that as the summer rolls in.

Wanted to start this as I’ve actually been into building websites since I was about 12/13. I used to make text based RPG games based on mccodes (anyone remember that shite?) and sell them off with them paying into my dads PayPal haha.

I gave up on that after a while though and it’s only since the corona that I’ve looked back towards trying to build some kind of online income. Recently I’ve dabbled a bit in dropshipping, ppc affiliate marketing, online poker (which I’ve always enjoyed), and probably a few other areas.

I’m really quite new to anything SEO and blogging/money site so this is a journey with a big emphasis on learning so I definitely encourage advice and constructive criticism! My goal is eventually to go into flipping websites so I thought best to build my own project and gain some experience first!

I’m going to concentrate on this solely for now and keep it as a personal background project for anything else I dabble in. Ideally I’d like it to become an authority blog down the road.

The site

the site I’m building has a personal blog kind of tone but is focused on a niche. The niche doesn’t exactly go hand in hand with amazon affiliate so I’ll have to work with some other programs, I also plan to put a lot of content on the site to cast a large net for ad revenue.

Up to now, the site is built and there’s around 18 articles I’ve written myself totalling around 30k words. The domain is fairly personally branded so isn’t really niche relative, it’s also completely fresh, with the site being about a month old. It’s running Avada theme but I spent a good week customising pretty much every aspect of it.

My plan in the short term is to order another 100k words with various writers here, I’ll also be reviewing them honestly and look for longer term writers. I’ll also be using high quality link services from here, nothing cheap and nasty, I’ve been researching them for a short while. You’ll also see them briefly reviewed here.

I’m not sure how much money people throw at these new projects but I’ll probably be spending low-mid 4 figures in the short term to try shorten the sandbox time and get the ball rolling

I also have Pinterest set up in an attempt to drive some early traffic, although my niche doesn’t fit Pinterest so much so I won’t be sinking a huge amount of time into it. I use a scheduler and it’s more or less set and forget every few weeks.

Later down the road when I’m happy with the foundations I’ll start doing a bit more of the writing myself and try and dabble in my own outreach for guest posts and niche edits to lower costs.

I think that’s about it for now, I appreciate any advice and constructive criticism along the way, I’m here to learn from this! I’ll try to update a few times a week if there’s a bit of interest. Feel free to fire any questions!

currently sat on the bog at work writing this out so best go and show a bit of willing eh?

cheers!

All the best buddy..

To add, over the next few months I expect I’ll be using my spare time outside of work predominantly to get posts on the site.

I’ll be trying out some of the cheapo content gigs here and expect I’ll have to spend some time editing them. I also make featured images myself to keep a branded feel and also make 7 pins or so for any post I want to add to Pinterest.

Gonna go through my already published posts too and update internal links and see if I can slide any affiliate program in anywhere before working on the new content.

I’ll also be spending a fair amount of time on the KW/article research and checking what I need to do to beat the competition

Sristy said:

All the best buddy..

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Thanks mate

Seems like you have everything in order and a firm plan, wish you good luck and with persistence, I am sure you are going to make it more than a modest side income!

Sounds great man. Do you think there might be any drawbacks to buying links this early on into your domain history?

rasbsal said:

Seems like you have everything in order and a firm plan, wish you good luck and with persistence, I am sure you are going to make it more than a modest side income!

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Cheers!

tipsavvy said:

Sounds great man. Do you think there might be any drawbacks to buying links this early on into your domain history?

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Well, you can never be sure when you're buying links. Saying that though, I don't see it being too risky as I'll only be looking to add social profiles, social signals, diversity, and maybe some forum links in these early stages. I don't think that looks too unnatural. I'm all ears if anyone thinks otherwise though!

I'll be focusing on getting plenty of quality content up before I go for high quality PBN's, niche edits or guest posts which I'll be looking to add a bit later down the line.

Good luck buddy. Happy Journey!

o

nifferr said:

How’s it going guys thought I’d start this thread for a bit of accountability as it’s something I want to venture into for the long term.

Some Background

I’m mid 20’s from the UK, left 2 years ago now to go backpacking to Australia. Unreal journey, met some great people and had some insane experiences!

I’m now sponsored to work here and a lot of my friends have had to leave after their holiday visas, meaning I find myself with more time and a bit less of a social life. I’ll aim to do something about that as the summer rolls in.

Wanted to start this as I’ve actually been into building websites since I was about 12/13. I used to make text based RPG games based on mccodes (anyone remember that shite?) and sell them off with them paying into my dads PayPal haha.

I gave up on that after a while though and it’s only since the corona that I’ve looked back towards trying to build some kind of online income. Recently I’ve dabbled a bit in dropshipping, ppc affiliate marketing, online poker (which I’ve always enjoyed), and probably a few other areas.

I’m really quite new to anything SEO and blogging/money site so this is a journey with a big emphasis on learning so I definitely encourage advice and constructive criticism! My goal is eventually to go into flipping websites so I thought best to build my own project and gain some experience first!

I’m going to concentrate on this solely for now and keep it as a personal background project for anything else I dabble in. Ideally I’d like it to become an authority blog down the road.

The site

the site I’m building has a personal blog kind of tone but is focused on a niche. The niche doesn’t exactly go hand in hand with amazon affiliate so I’ll have to work with some other programs, I also plan to put a lot of content on the site to cast a large net for ad revenue.

Up to now, the site is built and there’s around 18 articles I’ve written myself totalling around 30k words. The domain is fairly personally branded so isn’t really niche relative, it’s also completely fresh, with the site being about a month old. It’s running Avada theme but I spent a good week customising pretty much every aspect of it.

My plan in the short term is to order another 100k words with various writers here, I’ll also be reviewing them honestly and look for longer term writers. I’ll also be using high quality link services from here, nothing cheap and nasty, I’ve been researching them for a short while. You’ll also see them briefly reviewed here.

I’m not sure how much money people throw at these new projects but I’ll probably be spending low-mid 4 figures in the short term to try shorten the sandbox time and get the ball rolling

I also have Pinterest set up in an attempt to drive some early traffic, although my niche doesn’t fit Pinterest so much so I won’t be sinking a huge amount of time into it. I use a scheduler and it’s more or less set and forget every few weeks.

Later down the road when I’m happy with the foundations I’ll start doing a bit more of the writing myself and try and dabble in my own outreach for guest posts and niche edits to lower costs.

I think that’s about it for now, I appreciate any advice and constructive criticism along the way, I’m here to learn from this! I’ll try to update a few times a week if there’s a bit of interest. Feel free to fire any questions!

currently sat on the bog at work writing this out so best go and show a bit of willing eh?

cheers!

Click to expand...

Out of context, but how did you enjoy Australia? I went on a working holiday visa for 1 year and now in NZ. I absolutely loved heading doen the outback and west coast.

Ice Geek said:

Good luck buddy. Happy Journey!

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Thanks!

Revilo123 said:

o
Out of context, but how did you enjoy Australia? I went on a working holiday visa for 1 year and now in NZ. I absolutely loved heading doen the outback and west coast.

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I've loved it, some insane experiences and people. As awful as the work was, and all the shit you hear people say about it, the farm work was probably the highlight just for the memories.

I've not ventured much into the outback yet, but I did do a road trip down the west coast which was incredible! Probably enjoyed it more than the east coast

How are you finding NZ? It's definitely on my list

nifferr said:

Thanks!



I've loved it, some insane experiences and people. As awful as the work was, and all the shit you hear people say about it, the farm work was probably the highlight just for the memories.

I've not ventured much into the outback yet, but I did do a road trip down the west coast which was incredible! Probably enjoyed it more than the east coast

How are you finding NZ? It's definitely on my list

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Spent most of my time working or in lockdown, so only seen North island. Making my way around the south island tomorrow!!

I've loved my time here and met an amazing girl, so its all positive really haha

itsme9459 said:

All the best mate

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cheers!

Revilo123 said:

Spent most of my time working or in lockdown, so only seen North island. Making my way around the south island tomorrow!!

I've loved my time here and met an amazing girl, so its all positive really haha

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How's the south been so far? Yeah It's been shitty but I've managed to work all through lockdown so that's good and hopefully I'll be able to get out on another trip soon enough.

Sounds good mate

SMALL UPDATE

Haven't done a fat lot on-site in the last week, I have a few articles scheduled that have kept the site ticking over while I've been doing other things.

I spent a good chunk of time last weekend finding sites in my niche that could be good outreach opportunities, hopefully I'll be able to do a fair amount of link building for niche edits and guest posts in house to keep costs down. Will have to see how much of a drain that is but that would leave me just paying for a few decent web 2.0's, forum links and the odd quality PBN.

Also spent a bit of time building a picture of the link building strategy I want to take when I start getting content on the site and the domain is a few months aged. Bookmarked some sales threads here I want to try out.

Spent most of my time doing keyword research though and this week sent out around 35 articles to be written by 9 or so different writers. Still waiting for any of them to come back but hopefully this will help me start to find a few that I want to use for the long term.

Should be starting to throw up a decent amount of articles from next week

All the best!

Omega254 said:

All the best!

Click to expand...

Thanks mate!

Few things to update on here so far

CONTENT

I sent out a bunch of articles to be written over 2 weeks ago to around 10 different writers here and I'm still waiting for a few of them.
My idea with this was to just test what the cheap writing services are like, I don't mind so much having to rewrite large parts of them at this stage because I have the time and I won't be doing much else with it at the moment. By the looks of it, a few of the writers completely missed the mark so I'll have a fair bit of that to do.

That being said, I was really quite impressed with a couple of the services even at around $10/1000, so there is hope! Definitely not worthy of just copy & pasting but they'll take far less of my time to spruce up. There is one writer that's seriously good value that I've already probably put around 70k words through, I'll go into more detail about that later, for now, I don't want too many people taking the availability from me!

I haven't actually posted anything that I've outsourced yet, I still have a few articles scheduled so there has been content going up. I'm going to start a big push on churning out the content from tomorrow. I expect it'll be a big push of over 200k words in the next few months.

I estimate there are around 25k words on site currently.

RESEARCH

I've spent a lot more time researching linking strategies and keyword and content stuff, and affiliate programs. I've a pretty good idea now on the route I want to take with affiliate programs and such in the future when it starts gaining a bit of traction.

I've started using @Shaunm strategy for keyword research, involving using Surfer SEO & Keywords Everywhere chrome extensions, and resources like Keyword Shitter and Answer The Public. Not only is this much cheaper than using a paid tool, but it's just going to be more effective IMO. Paid tools make you lazy if you're not careful, just check for a low difficulty score and job done, get the kettle on. Using this method forces you to manually check the SERP's, you get a better look at what you're up against, the competition, their word counts, SERP layout (YT carousel, ads, snippets, etc). This makes it much easier to tell if you actually stand a chance of getting on the first page, and what you need to do to get there.
Much more reliable than a difficulty metric that no one really knows the basis of.

Something else that was really eye-opening to me, to the point of changing my entire content strategy, was manually analysing the word counts on SERP's with Surfer SEO. I'm in a somewhat competitive niche, but it's rare to find results on page 1 that have less than 2000-2500 words. Not only that, but there's DA14's clearly outranking multiple DA70+ such as Forbes, based on not much more than publishing a comprehensive 5000 word article I'm sure.

This isn't an argument that content > linking for rankings, but I do believe it's massively beneficial to publish cornerstone, authoritative content. Linking is still probably the biggest factor, but I don't believe this will always be the case. Besides, publishing informative, authoritative 5000 word articles are much more likely to attract natural links, so it's a win-win in my eyes.

Another theory I have (based on nothing really so feel free to weigh in) is that you'd be better off rolling your smaller 'question' posts into larger more comprehensive pillar posts, the idea being that it'd be easier to rank high with a 5000 word article for 50 long tails than it would be to rank 5x 1000 word articles for 10 long tails each. Again this is just my feeling so feel free to debate.

So with all this said, I'm changing my content strategy to roll smaller posts into bigger ones and have plenty of cornerstone posts that are 4000+ words. I suppose I'll be a case study for this theory, but that's alright. I want to get the desire to hit completely arbitrary post count numbers out of my head and build an authority site by publishing informative, authority content that sites WANT to link back to. Of course, there'll be topics that only require 1500 word posts, but this isn't going to be my focus for now.

I believe doing this could also be beneficial for link building, in that rolling smaller posts into one means you'll have fewer posts to throw links at, meaning these monster posts are also getting a lot more link juice. Another win eh? This leads me nicely onto...

LINK BUILDING

I'm planning on giving myself a half decent budget for link building slowly over the next 6 months or so, to get a feel of whether this project is going to pick up any traction. I haven't really started this yet, other than a few profile links and such. I'll start out with more diversity links to the homepage in the next few weeks.

I think this will set a good foundation with the anchor text profile too which will allow me to be more aggressive with quality links to inner pages with more focussed anchor text. When I'm happy with the foundations I'll slowly build quality links to the posts that look to have potential over the coming months. This will be in the form of guest posts and niche edits mainly (which I hope to do at least some outreach in-house for).

I'll also give some of the more expensive PBN's a go and see where they take me. What's the consensus on the power of homepage links vs regular posts with these?

I plan to have quality forum links built to posts to boost them up too, I've heard these do well. I'll also probably have a smattering of social signals, web 2.0's, and other stuff to posts too randomly.

Like I've said before, I'm fairly inexperienced with this so feel free to drop in with any advice.

Congratulations if you read this far, got a bit carried away but I'd love to hear other people's opinions on these thoughts and theories.

Few other bits to note:

Spent a lot of my day yesterday improving site speed, or trying to. Turns out Smush Pro is pretty useless at compressing images! I switched to Shortpixel which further compressed the already smush'd images by a further 75%, lol. Also didn't realise that CloudFlare CDN was free to use, so I've jumped on that now too. Sites still on the slow side though, but that's probably down to a customised bulky Avada theme and custom CSS. Not really sure where to go with that from here.

I also realised that I messed up my whole Pinterest shindig, it not once occurred to me that I completely forgot to set a URL on ANY of my pins, so all 400 or so of them were just linking to the homepage, LMAO. Spent a few hours scrolling down my Tailwind publisher manually changing the links. Wasn't so chuffed about it, needless to say.

This is probably the most I've written in a month, so here's hoping this gets me warmed up for a big content push!

Cheers for taking the time to read! I look forward to hearing some other's opinions as there's a lot up for debate.

Paid keyword research tools seem to be made by coders who get their information from Moz blog too rather than bloggers who are actually ranking keywords and know what to look for. I have tried a bunch of paid keyword tools on the market and I always go back to my own method.

Best Of Luck to you ! Hence working as an freelancer !

nifferr said:

How’s it going guys thought I’d start this thread for a bit of accountability as it’s something I want to venture into for the long term.

Some Background

I’m mid 20’s from the UK, left 2 years ago now to go backpacking to Australia. Unreal journey, met some great people and had some insane experiences!

I’m now sponsored to work here and a lot of my friends have had to leave after their holiday visas, meaning I find myself with more time and a bit less of a social life. I’ll aim to do something about that as the summer rolls in.

Wanted to start this as I’ve actually been into building websites since I was about 12/13. I used to make text based RPG games based on mccodes (anyone remember that shite?) and sell them off with them paying into my dads PayPal haha.

I gave up on that after a while though and it’s only since the corona that I’ve looked back towards trying to build some kind of online income. Recently I’ve dabbled a bit in dropshipping, ppc affiliate marketing, online poker (which I’ve always enjoyed), and probably a few other areas.

I’m really quite new to anything SEO and blogging/money site so this is a journey with a big emphasis on learning so I definitely encourage advice and constructive criticism! My goal is eventually to go into flipping websites so I thought best to build my own project and gain some experience first!

I’m going to concentrate on this solely for now and keep it as a personal background project for anything else I dabble in. Ideally I’d like it to become an authority blog down the road.

The site

the site I’m building has a personal blog kind of tone but is focused on a niche. The niche doesn’t exactly go hand in hand with amazon affiliate so I’ll have to work with some other programs, I also plan to put a lot of content on the site to cast a large net for ad revenue.

Up to now, the site is built and there’s around 18 articles I’ve written myself totalling around 30k words. The domain is fairly personally branded so isn’t really niche relative, it’s also completely fresh, with the site being about a month old. It’s running Avada theme but I spent a good week customising pretty much every aspect of it.

My plan in the short term is to order another 100k words with various writers here, I’ll also be reviewing them honestly and look for longer term writers. I’ll also be using high quality link services from here, nothing cheap and nasty, I’ve been researching them for a short while. You’ll also see them briefly reviewed here.

I’m not sure how much money people throw at these new projects but I’ll probably be spending low-mid 4 figures in the short term to try shorten the sandbox time and get the ball rolling

I also have Pinterest set up in an attempt to drive some early traffic, although my niche doesn’t fit Pinterest so much so I won’t be sinking a huge amount of time into it. I use a scheduler and it’s more or less set and forget every few weeks.

Later down the road when I’m happy with the foundations I’ll start doing a bit more of the writing myself and try and dabble in my own outreach for guest posts and niche edits to lower costs.

I think that’s about it for now, I appreciate any advice and constructive criticism along the way, I’m here to learn from this! I’ll try to update a few times a week if there’s a bit of interest. Feel free to fire any questions!

currently sat on the bog at work writing this out so best go and show a bit of willing eh?

cheers!

Click to expand...

in what part of australia now? i lived in gold coast and sydney, really want to visit perth and the west coast

good luck

Good luck on your journey! You have it planned and you're having good progress. Keep them coming!