Respect My Authority! (Journey)

Hello all! I love reading the journey threads here. They always give me inspirations, laughs, and I sometimes get wrapped up in them. So I decided to make my own little journey thread to keep me on track, and to maybe pick up a few pointers along the way from you all.

In my full time job, I'm in the legal field. When my wife and kids let me, I play around in IM. I had a huge success online maybe 6 years ago or so with a forum (thank you goes to my buddy SweetnFunny!), but eventually Google spanked me and my $$$ per day dried up. I started cloaking for revenge, and had some minor success with it, but eventually I had to quit to focus on my real job.

I guess I never really truly quit. I have several professional sites to promote my real job/business, and they have led to me having way more business than I can handle. In fact, I'm tempted to point the phone numbers on those sites to a 900 # or something.

I've been lurking here for years. I lost my last profile here (gtull1, I think?) because of a lost email account. I created this one over a year ago, but I mainly just lurk. Maybe a week ago, a journey thread by Kinlee (spelling?) inspired me to try something again.

Goal: Build a true authority site that creates an honest to goodness community. After it has a sizable following, begin monetizing it.

A few weeks ago I bought a domain and set it on my hosting. A week ago I placed an order from a personal friend/writer for 40 articles a month, for at least the next 6 months. Each article has 1k-2k words, half a dozen pictures or so, and 1-2 videos. They are all extremely useful articles that provide true value.

I set the site up a few days ago. Yesterday and today I loaded up the first 20 articles. The primary site is a magazine style.

Today I set up the forum and got it ready to start adding content. In the next few days I want to hire maybe 10 people to start posting on it to get the forums started.

This weekend I plan on setting up my social profiles and linking them all together.

I need to hire someone to tweak my site a bit. I'm pretty happy with it, but it can definitely use a professional touch.

The site started getting indexed in G today, but I haven't created any links yet. My linking plan, if it works, is to build momentum though socials, and hopefully pick up some nice links along the way once the industry sees what is being made. I will stay out of any BH linking strategies for at least 6 months. I'm not in a hurry, and this thing should have a shot at making it without giving G a chance to hurt me.

In 6 months I will have at least 240 articles with 1k-2k words each, at least 1k forum posts, and hopefully a nice following due to the usefulness. That's the plan anyways.

What's my budget? I have none, but I'm not looking to throw money away either.

What's the niche? It's about a career that I know a ton about. There are many very high authority sites devoted to it, but there's room for one more.

Wish me luck, and I will try to post a little update every day for at least 6 months. Thanks for reading guys and gals!

good luck for it.

how much are you paying per article?

God luck. Is your domain brandable or it is EMD or soemthign mixed?
WHen will you place ads?
Why forum?

Good luck on your journey, seems like you have a good strategy. You should try and find other authoritative sites in your niche and look at ways of getting a link from them.

saadad said:

When will you place ads?

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No sense to start posting ads before you have at least some authority, aka content and traffic.

Good luck with the journey OP, hopefully you'll get there. I really like the sound of the articles you got, hang on to that friend!

Good luck on your journey. Hope you will reach your goal soon.

Good luck dude - subbed!

saadad said:

God luck. Is your domain brandable or it is EMD or soemthign mixed?
WHen will you place ads?
Why forum?

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Thank you. It's a mix. Let's pretend my niche is "trucks". So the domain may be "we love trucks .com". Or something like that. Makes sense?

Ads? I'm honestly not looking at monetizing anything for perhaps 6 months. The goal is to create a very long term community. I believe that eliminating any advertising for now will help to get me there quicker. Of course I will be collecting emails along the way, and laying down the path to bank later.

Why forum? I'm trying to create a true community. Why is bhw so successful? It's a community. People get to know each other, share information, and create a massive amount of information along the way that any search engine will love. Not to mention the backlinks that sprout up from people sharing threads on here. So the goal is to create a community, and I believe that nothing does that better than a forum with a backbone of information (the primary site) that shows authority. Plus I did great on a forum in the past, and it was a lot of fun.

Tom189 said:

Good luck on your journey, seems like you have a good strategy. You should try and find other authoritative sites in your niche and look at ways of getting a link from them.

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My way to get backlinks from them is by creating a site/forum that makes them want to link to me. If they do not do that, I haven't done my job right.

LostConnection said:

No sense to start posting ads before you have at least some authority, aka content and traffic.

Good luck with the journey OP, hopefully you'll get there. I really like the sound of the articles you got, hang on to that friend!

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Yeah, not even sweating any advertising until I am getting a lot of traffic. My guess is 6 months or so. I definitely won't monetize until there is a solid community.

Roserosie said:

Good luck on your journey. Hope you will reach your goal soon.

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Thank you!

MrBeastsOnToast said:

Good luck dude - subbed!

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Thank you very much!

watchthisspace said:

good luck for it.

how much are you paying per article?

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Thank you. I'm getting a friendship deal. It averages out to $25 an article. The writer knows his stuff in this industry and has actually profesionaly written on the subject. He knows nothing about seo, which is exactly what I want. I give him general topics and bulletins that I would like to be addressed, and he cranks it out. The result is a natural conversation from an expert in the field, and not some spammy crap that you get from the vast majority of IM sites.

I'll call this day #2 in the journey.

What did I get done today? Not very much. My wife suckered me into car shopping with her, and that was pretty much a nightmare that took all day. Then we met friends at a casino and ate, played and listened to a band while drinking. It was fun, but I was thinking about my little site the whole time.

I was able to spend a little bit of time creating some social accounts. The plan tomorrow is to finish setting them up and to link my site to them. I'm golfing in the morning and doing Christmas stuff with the wife later, so I'll try to find a couple of hours to play with the site.

I'm hoping to have another batch of articles next week to add. Next week I also want to finish the seo on the forum, hire someone to tweak my site a bit, and start finding posters to hire. I'm looking for people in the industry to help me jump start the forum, so I may need to come up with some goodies to bribe them.

I also want to look into a few promotions to get started with. I'm thinking about some sweepstakes for things that people in this field would go nuts for. We'll see.

I'm also thinking about hiring another person for some highly technical writing. It would be really geeky stuff that the vast majority of users won't know much about, but it could be interesting. I need to think more about that.

Thanks for reading guys and gals!

what a huge work, i'm building my Authority niche site too, but it's smaller,waiting for your update

Cant believe it!

Actually im working on a site with EXTREMELY CLOSE features!

Im also building a site which i like to call "Community" Site as the main goal is to get as many people interested in my niche to create a community in the form of a forum, fb pages, youtube videos, email news and other stuff!

The same thing i have in mind - i will first build a community then start monetizing!

Ill follow bro!

a different approach, that's nice.

kidwudang said:

what a huge work, i'm building my Authority niche site too, but it's smaller,waiting for your update

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Thanks. That brings me to a question I was thinking about- "What is an authority site?" I guess we all have different answers. You could say it's the site that receives the majority of traffic on a set of kw's. You could say it is the site that is the most respected or followed in a niche. Maybe it's the site in a niche with the greatest ability to rank any related terms? To me it's the site that you would automatically want to go to to learn something in a field. For instance, for non-illegal seo/traffic strategies, I guess BHW is the authority.

royserpa said:

Cant believe it!

Actually im working on a site with EXTREMELY CLOSE features!

Im also building a site which i like to call "Community" Site as the main goal is to get as many people interested in my niche to create a community in the form of a forum, fb pages, youtube videos, email news and other stuff!

The same thing i have in mind - i will first build a community then start monetizing!

Ill follow bro!

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Thank you. Yep, it sounds like we have a similar approach. Build the backbone with a shit ton of high content, gain a traction, encourage others to build our pages/content (forum). I wish you luck!

ostrich said:

a different approach, that's nice.

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Different? I guess so. It's the same strategy that most very large sites use really. But thanks.

Day #3 Journey Update

I went golfing with my son and a friend this morning. Played like crap for the most part, particularly my putting, but I had 3 absolutely killer sand shots! All 3 ended up within 2 feet of the hole and had a legit shot at going in. That made the whole game worth it!

The rest of my day, for the most part, involved getting a Christmas tree, getting all the crap out of the attic, moving furniture around, and setting the tree up. I still have to decorate it and decorate the outside, but I got out of that for today.

On the site front, I linked my site to the socials. I played around a bit on the socials, but there's still a lot to do. I also decided on a Sweepstakes strategy to start with, but I haven't done anything to make it happen yet. I also noticed that G has most of my pages indexed already. Pretty cool with zero linking and only a few days old (not that it matters, but...).

Goals for this coming week:

1- Finish all social accounts.
2- Get my next batch of 10 articles uploaded.
3- Finish forum seo.
4- Hire a designer for site tweaking.
5- Hire 10 forum posters.
6- Set up sweepstakes promotion.
7- Hire a second writer for technical writings.

I also want to think about a white hat high quality press release for maybe a month from now. I need to wait until I have a significant amount of content on the site, the forums have a good bit of content to make it look popular, and my sweepstakes are going well.

Another long term thing to think about is that it would make sense to have someone managing the social accounts. I need to think about that. I wish I could hire my kids for some things like that.

That's it for today. Thanks for reading everyone!

i think authority site is a site that extremely useful with reader, focus on large keyword and clean, that's why i use white hat seo, no more black hat. I need to be more serious

kidwudang said:

i think authority site is a site that extremely useful with reader, focus on large keyword and clean, that's why i use white hat seo, no more black hat. I need to be more serious

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That means a one page/extremely useful site that deals with a large keyword that is "clean" is an authority site? I think we need to think about that some more? (sorry for all of the thinking, but I'm, stuck on that word for some reason, I think)

Here are the 2 main reasons
- All page on website, not just 1 page, make it becomes a most valuable site.
- Your site must clean coz you don't want your site down, just imagine you're making a thousand $ each month, then suddenly your site get banned by Google.

Day #4 Journey Update

On the site front, I didn't have much time today to work on it.

I did create 6 short news stories for it. I decided that I want to be included in G News, so I will be writing up some newsworthy articles when I can. When I get enough going to look respectable, I will apply to be submitted. They actually work well with the site.

I also worked some more on the socials. I should have just focused on finishing that today, but I got carried away with the news articles.

I also worked on the forum seo. I think it's almost ready. When I get some help on tweaking the main site, I will get them to double check the forum's setup.


On the personal front, it was a long work day. Boring, as usual.


Question: Can any of you recommend a very high quality ($$$ to $$$$) press release service? I'm not ready to deploy it yet (maybe a month away?), but it would be a good idea to have things set up now.

Thank you for reading!

P.S. I didn't realize how many authority journeys are running right now. lol

Day #5 Journey Update

I really had no idea how many great authority journeys are up and running right now! Jesus, BassTrackerBoats is the man! I'm really loving his. I sure hope he keeps it going for a year or so. It will be great to hear his results after he is up for a year. I think his traffic projections are on the low side. It will be neat to see.

Speaking of BTB, I learned the greatest thing on his journey today. I have built so many freaking WP sites, but I just never realized that you can add information into the categories. Doh! I fixed that up today right after I read him talking about it. Ty BTB!

Even though there are a ton of way better journeys going, I'm going to post on this one every day if I can. In my business world, I have people to keep me focused and on track. They say, "Do this next", and I do that next. In IM, I am all alone. So this will be a great way to keep focused on what I need to be doing. That's my excuse for continuing anyways.

I had a good bit of time to focus on my site today.

Accomplished:

1- Finished socials. I have all of my social sites up and linked to the site. I need to study up on spreading the word on socials. I may end up hiring some help, but I don't want anything spammy or automated. I'm not in a hurry to do much there right now anyways, at least not until I have some 150k+ words, but I'm ready when the time comes now.

2- Hired a tweaker. I set up someone to help me customize some things on the site. I need it to be unique and to look good. Like most old farts, I suck at the technical side of things.

3- Hired a second writer. He will oly be doing very technical/geeky writings. This is one thing that well distinguish my site from everything out there. We're talking about grad school writings. I've ordered a few articles from him and will evaluate after he's done with those. I like it!

4- Wrote 4 short product review articles. I'm not advertising on them yet, but I'm setting up the structure now.

5- Wrote 2 more news articles. I want to get to around 100 news articles before I submit to G News.

I still need to:

A- Hire forum posters.

B- Get 10 more premium articles up. I'm still waiting on my main writer.

C- Look into my promotion strategy more. I have a really great sweepstakes/promotion strategy in mind to kick off with a Press Release service. I just want to talk to a PR guru before I implement anything. Speaking of which, are any of you that person???

D- Write more news and product review articles.

So I think I have around 8 news articles, 4 product reviews, 20 premium articles, and of course all of the primary pages written. I'm guessing I'm at around 38k words or so. I have a long way to go!! At the 6 month mark I'm expecting to have at least 500k words on the site. If I'm not seeing nice traffic at that point I will have to think about getting into some link building, but I really don't want to go there.

Thanks for reading my ramblings.

Day # 6 Journey Update

Today's Results: I spoke with both writers. That's it.

Today was all about my offline business. I started at 6:30 AM and I won't be home until around 2:00 AM. That's almost a 20 hour work day, which included around 10 hours of driving all over the state. F me!! Profitable? Yes. Fun? Absolutely not.

I don't know if I will have any time tomorrow to work online as well. Friday is looking the same. Sigh...