[SEO Case Study] Here We Fucking Go - $10,000 per Month

Origin Story: Been doing SEO since 2014 but was too young and insecure to go for it. Ended up working for small - large agencies, start ups, and corporations. They all had their ups and downs, but in the end it wasn't for me.

Where I Am Now:
Currently, I work for a small start up and handle an agencies SEO work. Both are part time too and done online. With this, I'm able to spend my time creating a website and looking to replace once of these two jobs within a year. Replacing both would be ideal.

The Goal:
$10,000 revenue per month with a 30% return ($3000 profit a month). I'll be breaking this down into micro steps:

1. $1000 per month
2. $2000 per month
3. $3000 per month

... and etc until $10,000 per month.

Tools Of The Trade:
AHREFS - Analyzing everything I need for backlinks and SEO tasks
CognitiveSEO - Optimizing my content
CORA - Breaking down the Top 100 and seeing what my content needs

Gameplan:
Find a niche, then find an expired domain in that niche, repurpose that domain, research keywords, get content written (maybe video and graphics too probably), optimize content, link out to a product, $$$.

Okay, that was a very simplified game plan, but that's really the gist of it. Of course, I'll be breaking this down further as the days progress. This will be a daily update. Stay tuned for a update tomorrow.

Good luck man! I've always wanted to start an IM agency, but always felt like there's too much I do not know yet to be able to advice people.

Headmaster Cid said:

Good luck man! I've always wanted to start an IM agency, but always felt like there's too much I do not know yet to be able to advice people.

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Thanks man! You'd be surprised to see how little some agencies really are. Most of them are scrambling around every update and just winging it based on posts from Moz or something. As long as you're in the trenches and constantly working in SEO, you'll be fine running an agency.

Good luck, do you have a max budget limit for this project?

Good luck and btw do companies allow employee to do their own work from home?

Just curious because people normally sign bonds right?

nadhull said:

Good luck, do you have a max budget limit for this project?

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Thanks nadhull. No lifetime budget but I'll be spending about $500 / month on this website? Will put more into it as revenue grows.

TheVigilante said:

Good luck and btw do companies allow employee to do their own work from home?

Just curious because people normally sign bonds right?

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Thanks TheVigilante. I've worked online for a few companies already. Just the usual contracts and NDA about releasing client information. For start ups, it's mostly not talking about their tech and algorithms. Nothing out of the ordinary from my experience.

9/10 companies really keep things white hat so there's really no secrets. And the ones that are more black hat / grey hat won't admit it (unless they have a few drinks in them lol).

LuckyGirl9334 said:

Hey Best wishes and I will be following your journey. If for nothing else you cuss like I do. LOL

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Thanks LuckyGirl9334! Us potty mouths have to stay together!

phoenix9 said:

Looks interesting..

Good luck mate!

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Thanks phoenix9. I'll try to keep this journal worth wild.

Lilith55 said:

Seems like you know how to spell the magic.
Congrats

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Thanks Lilith55. Been a while since I've casted this spell, but I don't think my wand and ingredients are out of date.

Where do you go & find those expired domains,how much you spend for those domains,do you recreate old pages on the newly launched site or just 301 them to the new pages?

I've decided on the niche that I'll be tackling for this journey. It's an ever green niche, lots of ways to get backlinks, and generate traffic. The first product is going to be a $39.99 product. The price has been consistent on Amazon and always in stock. It has a good amount of reviews, so I know this isn't going to be a shitty product.

Things to do for later today (after I wake up, it's midnight right now):

• Find an expired domain - Manual
• Find relevant buyer keywords (we're going straight for the kill) - Manual
• Start building the website - Manual
• Get content writer to start writing - Outsourced
• Get all the standard socials set up - Outsourced
• Get a logo and banner designed - Outsourced

That should be enough to get me through the day. The only bottle neck I see is finding an expired domain to work with. If I can't find an expired one, I may buy one that has a nice brandable name and already has traffic going to it. That most likely won't happen, this niche is so big, so I don't see a problem finding an expired domain.

The website will look presentable, but I won't spend too much time on the design.

webmasterbd said:

Where do you go & find those expired domains,how much you spend for those domains,do you recreate old pages on the newly launched site or just 301 them to the new pages?

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I scrape and find them myself with AHREF. I think someone smarter than me posted a guide here a few years(?) ago.

Honestly, I don't spend more than $10 - $15 per domain, the same as if you're buying a fresh domain.

For the money site, I'll be 301ing them to a new page. I set it up differently if it was a PBN though.

Things to do for later today (after I wake up, it's midnight right now):

• Find an expired domain - Manual
• Find relevant buyer keywords (we're going straight for the kill) - Manual
• Start building the website - Manual
• Get content writer to start writing - Outsourced
• Get all the standard socials set up - Outsourced
• Get a logo and banner designed - Outsourced

I couldn't help it but at least find an expired domain before going to bed. I was luckily enough to find one that was active from 2007 - 2012. Even looks like it's from that era. Passed all my checks and looks good to go for our purposes here.

I won't purchase the domain yet. I'll sleep on it and check it all again tomorrow. I'm confident people won't be using this domain so I'm not in a rush.

Things to do for Tuesday, September 10, 2019:

• Find an expired domain - Manual
• Find relevant buyer keywords (we're going straight for the kill) - Manual
• Start building the website - Manual
• Get content writer to start writing - Outsourced
• Get all the standard socials set up - Outsourced
• Get a logo and banner designed - Outsourced

I found the first keyword to tackle. It's a long tailed keyword but has high buyer intent behind it. Running it through CORA right now to get the supporting keywords for it.
Once that's done, I'll be assigning it to my content writer. She is already researching the keyword and planning a content piece around it. She should be able to get the outline done soon and get started writing when I give her the support keywords. This piece should will finished by the end of the day or tomorrow morning.
This means I'll have to get started on the website and outsource the graphics soon.

Things to do for Tuesday, September 10, 2019:

• Find an expired domain - Manual
• Find relevant buyer keywords (we're going straight for the kill) - Manual
• Start building the website - Manual
• Get content writer to start writing - Outsourced
• Get all the standard socials set up - Outsourced
• Get a logo and banner designed - Outsourced

Almost done all the initial grunt work for this website.

The base website is complete. All I need is the content and logos to put it all together. I'll be spending the rest of the day researching secondary topics that I can use to interlink to this one. That'll also help give the website some meat on it's bones so it's not so plain. Social Profiles are being created and I'm about to find a graphic designer on Fiverr to create me a logo.

We're about to get started on the main part of this journey: Ranking this fucking website.

This is amazing! Keep us up to date with this.

If you don't mind me asking, why do you outsource SM setup? Is it to save time?

CanuckSEO said:

This is amazing! Keep us up to date with this.

If you don't mind me asking, why do you outsource SM setup? Is it to save time?

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Thanks CanuckSEO.

Yeah, it's to save time. I also get them to interlink everything and set it up like an IFTTT network. They're trained to do it a certain way though and not like the other IFTTT stacks you see.

Update - September 12, 2019

The content was delivered and I've added it to the website. Logo is also done. I forgot that I needed the logo before I could have the socials be built, so that's being done now. I'm going to have to optimize this content piece today with CORA and quickly create some graphics for it as well just to give it a finishing touch.

Will be adding in the graphics and finishing up the website tonight as well.

Keyword has been added into my keyword tracking and I'll be researching supporting keywords for it today as well to add into the content piece.

To-Do:

• Optimize content piece with CORA
• Add graphics to the piece
• Research supporting keywords

Update

Hi guys, sorry about going MIA for a little bit. I was at a crossroad where I had an opportunity to work on an older project of mine that I forgot about. It's a eCommerce + Membership website I started 2 years ago. The niche was tough to create content in but it's at a point where I can start to hire someone to create content.

This website has a lot of brand and work done on it, but it's nowhere near where it should be after 2 years. The website itself makes anywhere from $400 - $600 profit a month.

A lot of it's traffic source is coming from social, referral, and direct. Organic traffic is it's weakest but there is traffic coming onto the website.



Looking at the stats above in the screenshot:

• No actual SEO was done on the website - on page or off page
• No outreach or link acquisition was done - these are all natty

So what's the plan?
I'll be spending next few days and weeks doing on-page SEO for all the websites. This is going to be a completely overhaul. There's a lot of keywords that are already in the Top 5/10/20. With some good on-page changes, these should move upwards, and a nice traffic increase should be expected.

Here are some stats for the month of September:


Nothing crazy. As you can see, organic search has super low conversion rate. I'll be working on ranking more buyer intent words as well as long tailed.

Long tailed keywords is really driving our email opt in and that's were we're killing it on conversion.

Email stats for September:

The darker bars on the graph are customers who purchased something while the lighter bars are people who opted in on a blog posts for a freebie.

Everything in the emails are set up automatically so it's really be taking care of itself without me doing anything.

Here's the first batch of keywords I'll be optimizing for:

Steph Curry Jr. said:

Besta luck bro. Following.

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Thanks Steph Curry Jr. Hope you stick around until I reach my goal!

Editing my original update posts.

Included Analytics screen shot and email screen shots. I wanted to be fully transparent on the starting point of this website. From here on out, we'll be focusing on this project to reach my goal of $10,000 per month.

We're back on track!

Update

From the screenshot of the keyword list above, I've optimized it for a single question phrase. It's the one in position 16. I'm trying to rank it for a keyword that it's suited for while linking to the product page which is the buyer intent keyword. I'm hoping the rankings will start to transfer over. I'm going to have to optimize the product page better for that keyword.

Will be spending the day optimizing a couple of pages for this set of keywords and start getting some movement going. Best case scenario will be have them all improve and be in the Top 10.

Update

I started scraping the first batch of expired domains to build out this PBN. I found 11 domains today (+5 for a client), it's bee a busy day at looking through profiles and archives.

Will continue to find more domains and optimize the other pages to see where the on-page stuff lands the keywords. If they start ranking, I'll use this set of domains for another cluster of keywords. I'll start building these set either Sunday or Monday.

The PBN building process is straight forward and will be done in a day. Finding the domains is the grind of this whole thing. The first thing I'll be hiring is a VA to handle this part of it so I can just check in and make sure the domains are good to go. That's for later down the road..



There has been some movement in the keywords, but it's been only 24 hours. I'll be checking daily on these to make sure they're moving forward while working on other clusters of keywords too.

Good luck clockhouse and i hope you reach your goal soon.
Its always nice to see member's journey and follow up them.
Oh btw i want to ask how many articles do you have when starting building the website?
but if this is a secret you don't need to answer hehe

Hello,

Which site, plugin do you use for opt-in and e-mail?

Good luck. You are really keeping things in check and very detailed.