I've been a full-time internet marketer for over 10 years and have had experience in about all branches of internet marketing. For the past 8 years I've had an interest in a particular niche, but it was such a large and competitive niche that I could only find success targeting its smaller sub-niches. Three years ago I decided to focus on SEO and wanted to go after this monster niche, so I purchased two domains and let them age while I studied SEO.
Last year I made my first attempt in this niche using one of the domains I purchased and failed (the black-hat link building techniques I used at the time were targeted by one of Google's updates and my site got penalized). Since then I decided I could only do this using white-hat/grey-hat techniques so I spent all my time studying and testing these tactics until I found one that I thought would work for this niche. Not wanting to ruin my other aged domain, I tested these strategies on two other (similar) niches with brand new domains and was able to get those sites to rank within a few months.
Those sites are still ranking today so I feel confident that I am ready to target this monster niche again. I normally stick to the Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO threads on BHW, but recently found the My Journey thread and decided it would be the perfect place for me to record my efforts in dominating this niche.
What My Quest Is
I'm going to build a 1,200+ page authority site to target 322 sub-niches covering a total of 7,326 keywords. I will then rank the site in the search engines using grey-hat SEO techniques that I've personally developed over the past two years in preparation for this specific project. Upon completion of this product I expect the site to receive an average of 100,000 visits per day from organic searches (this is not unique visitors).
The Numbers
Keywords I'm targeting: 7,326
Local Exact Match Search Volume: 9,397,852/month
Local Broad Match Search Volume: 40,950,710/month
Estimated Daily Traffic for Pos #1-3: 93,979 ? 278,507/day
Average CPC: $1.24
Estimated Links to be Built: Currently 5,167+ (will update soon)
Estimated Hours to Build Site/Write Content: 1,355
Estimated Hours to Build Links: Currently 1,389+ (will update soon)
Estimated Total Hours to Finish Project: Currently 2,744+ (will update soon)
What I've Done in Preparation for This Project
The Challenges
Time and Effort
This is by far the largest project I've ever attempted and will most likely take me well over 12 months to complete. I have the unfortunate habit of getting too excited about a project and will work 70/hours a week on it causing me to burn out fairly quickly. I'm going to have to pace myself with this so that doesn't happen. I'm hoping that recording this journey on BHW will give me motivation to follow this project through to the end.
My Ranking Strategy
This site is not a burn-and-churn type site and because of this I cannot risk any Google penalties. I'm actually not going to build any links myself and will instead have other sites link to my site naturally in the search engines. Fortunately, I have developed a strategy that increases the speed of getting natural links. Normally it would take most sites 1-2 years to get 50 natural links, but with this strategy I can get 50 links from relevant pages built to my site in a week.
So what's the challenge? Well, in order to get people to link to my site, they have to be WOWED by it and think it is the best resource on the subject as possible. But an uncompleted site is not impressive and appears abandoned. So I'm going to have to build at least 10% of the site before I can even start building links. That's around 150 hours of work (nearly a month's worth). This is extremely discouraging because during that month I don't see any traffic or increase in rankings, which I use for motivation.
Motivation
Many of the keywords I'm targeting are fairly competitive and the competitive (money making) keywords won't start ranking until I'm nearly 60-80% completed with my project. This means it won't see the fruit of my labor until I'm nearly done with my project which is discouraging. Again, I'm hoping that logging my efforts in this thread will keep me motivated.
The Rewards
So why exactly am I targeting this niche? Well first off, I have an interest in it and all of the website(s) currently dominating the niche are fairly pathetic and look like they were originally designed with Geocities web-builder. So having a website in this niche that I know helps others is a reward itself.
But there are other reasons?
Besides owning a site that could potentially generate 2.85 Million to 8.47 Million visits each month, the site would also produce enough income that I would be able to retire after two years.
Monetization
I'm going to monetize the site using Amazon, ClickBank, CJ, Sharebuilder, and other affiliate networks. I would use AdSense, but I got banned from it 5 years ago and personally feel that you can earn more money by combining multiple earning networks. I may also decide to add an email marketing newsletter to the site for additional income opportunity, but will wait until the site is receiving a good amount of traffic before spending time doing this.
Other Information
Who is Doing the Work?
Me. I have graphic design skills, coding skills, and writing skills. So I will do all of the work myself. I may change my mind later on and hire some writers, but I find that when I do everything myself I know it's done right.
What is Your Budget?
I don't spend money to rank my sites. When I started internet marketing I would spend over a thousand bucks to rank a site, only to have it be slapped by Google before I could recover my costs. Since then I've made a rule that I only spend money on the site after its put money into my bank account. This rule caused me to use my brain more than my wallet, with the end result being many out-of-the-box strategies that I use to rank my sites at zero cost. Don't ask me to share my strategies. I'm not going to.
Ok, that's not entirely true. I do/did pay for the following:
Don't Ask What My Niche Is
I'm not going to share my website, domain, sister sites, niche, or link building strategies. I'm not going to drop hints or give away any details so people can find my website. BHW is the starting point for all of my strategies so use the valuable resources here to find strategies, test them, modify them, and repeat this process until you have your own strategy that works.
I will however, answer questions and give my opinion on things. I just don't want multiple posts asking for my site's URL or my link building strategy.
My Plan
Ok, I've spent a lot of time planning for this, so I have some ideas of what may happen if everything goes well. The authority site I'm targeting is composed of 322 sub-niches, with each sub niche having an average of 22 keywords to target.
I'm going to start off by adding the most popular content that people in this niche search for. This way my site will seem completed (from the visitor's perspective) because most of the basic topics are covered. It is nothing special for a site in this niche to have these pages so I'm not going to start my link building campaign yet.
Once all of the basic "required" pages are built, I will start targeting the least competitive sub-niches. I will create the content for a sub-niche and will then run a link building campaign to spread awareness and get links to my site.
I will gradually start targeting more and more competitive sub-niches as I work though this project. I will update this thread whenever I have and update or news regarding this project.
I plan on sharing images that will show my traffic/income calculations so others can get an idea of everything I'm doing. But I've got to finish my link and time estimates before I continue. I'll update this tread with that information as well as my goals for this week when I finish these calculations.
I'm sure I left something out so feel free to ask any questions. Below are screenshots of the domain I'm going to rank (so you know I'm starting with zero links).
P.S. ? All in all, this project will likely take me 3,000-4,000 hours to finish. While I do normally overestimate the time needed and underestimate traffic/earnings, I am aware of the workload ahead of me. I feel I need to state this so people don't think I'm an idiot who doesn't know what I'm getting into.
Last year I made my first attempt in this niche using one of the domains I purchased and failed (the black-hat link building techniques I used at the time were targeted by one of Google's updates and my site got penalized). Since then I decided I could only do this using white-hat/grey-hat techniques so I spent all my time studying and testing these tactics until I found one that I thought would work for this niche. Not wanting to ruin my other aged domain, I tested these strategies on two other (similar) niches with brand new domains and was able to get those sites to rank within a few months.
Those sites are still ranking today so I feel confident that I am ready to target this monster niche again. I normally stick to the Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO threads on BHW, but recently found the My Journey thread and decided it would be the perfect place for me to record my efforts in dominating this niche.
What My Quest Is
I'm going to build a 1,200+ page authority site to target 322 sub-niches covering a total of 7,326 keywords. I will then rank the site in the search engines using grey-hat SEO techniques that I've personally developed over the past two years in preparation for this specific project. Upon completion of this product I expect the site to receive an average of 100,000 visits per day from organic searches (this is not unique visitors).
The Numbers
Keywords I'm targeting: 7,326
Local Exact Match Search Volume: 9,397,852/month
Local Broad Match Search Volume: 40,950,710/month
Estimated Daily Traffic for Pos #1-3: 93,979 ? 278,507/day
Average CPC: $1.24
Estimated Links to be Built: Currently 5,167+ (will update soon)
Estimated Hours to Build Site/Write Content: 1,355
Estimated Hours to Build Links: Currently 1,389+ (will update soon)
Estimated Total Hours to Finish Project: Currently 2,744+ (will update soon)
What I've Done in Preparation for This Project
- I purchased a domain specifically for this project 3 years ago and have let it age. No links have been built to this domain.
- Built and ranked two authority sites in sister niches to get income estimates for this project as well as to test my ranking strategy.
- Started and failed this same project 1 year ago because a lack of planning and experience. I have learned from my mistakes and spent another year preparing.
- 40+ hours of planning my website's blueprint, keywords to target, and everything else so I always know what to do next. Pursuing a project this large without a website-blueprint and plan of attack would result in a lot of wasted time and confusion. I know exactly what I'm targeting, how much effort each page will take, and have an idea of how much work it will take me to reach my goal.
The Challenges
Time and Effort
This is by far the largest project I've ever attempted and will most likely take me well over 12 months to complete. I have the unfortunate habit of getting too excited about a project and will work 70/hours a week on it causing me to burn out fairly quickly. I'm going to have to pace myself with this so that doesn't happen. I'm hoping that recording this journey on BHW will give me motivation to follow this project through to the end.
My Ranking Strategy
This site is not a burn-and-churn type site and because of this I cannot risk any Google penalties. I'm actually not going to build any links myself and will instead have other sites link to my site naturally in the search engines. Fortunately, I have developed a strategy that increases the speed of getting natural links. Normally it would take most sites 1-2 years to get 50 natural links, but with this strategy I can get 50 links from relevant pages built to my site in a week.
So what's the challenge? Well, in order to get people to link to my site, they have to be WOWED by it and think it is the best resource on the subject as possible. But an uncompleted site is not impressive and appears abandoned. So I'm going to have to build at least 10% of the site before I can even start building links. That's around 150 hours of work (nearly a month's worth). This is extremely discouraging because during that month I don't see any traffic or increase in rankings, which I use for motivation.
Motivation
Many of the keywords I'm targeting are fairly competitive and the competitive (money making) keywords won't start ranking until I'm nearly 60-80% completed with my project. This means it won't see the fruit of my labor until I'm nearly done with my project which is discouraging. Again, I'm hoping that logging my efforts in this thread will keep me motivated.
The Rewards
So why exactly am I targeting this niche? Well first off, I have an interest in it and all of the website(s) currently dominating the niche are fairly pathetic and look like they were originally designed with Geocities web-builder. So having a website in this niche that I know helps others is a reward itself.
But there are other reasons?
Besides owning a site that could potentially generate 2.85 Million to 8.47 Million visits each month, the site would also produce enough income that I would be able to retire after two years.
Monetization
I'm going to monetize the site using Amazon, ClickBank, CJ, Sharebuilder, and other affiliate networks. I would use AdSense, but I got banned from it 5 years ago and personally feel that you can earn more money by combining multiple earning networks. I may also decide to add an email marketing newsletter to the site for additional income opportunity, but will wait until the site is receiving a good amount of traffic before spending time doing this.
Other Information
Who is Doing the Work?
Me. I have graphic design skills, coding skills, and writing skills. So I will do all of the work myself. I may change my mind later on and hire some writers, but I find that when I do everything myself I know it's done right.
What is Your Budget?
I don't spend money to rank my sites. When I started internet marketing I would spend over a thousand bucks to rank a site, only to have it be slapped by Google before I could recover my costs. Since then I've made a rule that I only spend money on the site after its put money into my bank account. This rule caused me to use my brain more than my wallet, with the end result being many out-of-the-box strategies that I use to rank my sites at zero cost. Don't ask me to share my strategies. I'm not going to.
Ok, that's not entirely true. I do/did pay for the following:
- Scrapebox
- Proxies
- Microsite Masters - I only use this to see when my pages break the top 100, I use Google Webmaster Tools to see my average rankings.
- Majestic SEO
- VPS ? for my website to be hosted on
- Domain Name
Don't Ask What My Niche Is
I'm not going to share my website, domain, sister sites, niche, or link building strategies. I'm not going to drop hints or give away any details so people can find my website. BHW is the starting point for all of my strategies so use the valuable resources here to find strategies, test them, modify them, and repeat this process until you have your own strategy that works.
I will however, answer questions and give my opinion on things. I just don't want multiple posts asking for my site's URL or my link building strategy.
My Plan
Ok, I've spent a lot of time planning for this, so I have some ideas of what may happen if everything goes well. The authority site I'm targeting is composed of 322 sub-niches, with each sub niche having an average of 22 keywords to target.
I'm going to start off by adding the most popular content that people in this niche search for. This way my site will seem completed (from the visitor's perspective) because most of the basic topics are covered. It is nothing special for a site in this niche to have these pages so I'm not going to start my link building campaign yet.
Once all of the basic "required" pages are built, I will start targeting the least competitive sub-niches. I will create the content for a sub-niche and will then run a link building campaign to spread awareness and get links to my site.
I will gradually start targeting more and more competitive sub-niches as I work though this project. I will update this thread whenever I have and update or news regarding this project.
I plan on sharing images that will show my traffic/income calculations so others can get an idea of everything I'm doing. But I've got to finish my link and time estimates before I continue. I'll update this tread with that information as well as my goals for this week when I finish these calculations.
I'm sure I left something out so feel free to ask any questions. Below are screenshots of the domain I'm going to rank (so you know I'm starting with zero links).
P.S. ? All in all, this project will likely take me 3,000-4,000 hours to finish. While I do normally overestimate the time needed and underestimate traffic/earnings, I am aware of the workload ahead of me. I feel I need to state this so people don't think I'm an idiot who doesn't know what I'm getting into.
