The Authority Site Experiment

Hello BHW!

I recently stumbled upon a content goldmine. Tons of content, written really very well. Both in terms of writing style and the quality of information shared. It is spread over a bunch of different niches (20-30), ranging from finance to rockets. I had created a thread the other day to brainstorm about what I could possibly do with it (http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/843129-how-profit-tons-unique-content.html)

People suggested to sell the content. This seemed like a huge waste. I would obviously have to sell it off at a price which is much lower than its true value. So I decided to make an authority site instead. The content is not properly formatted, so I have to spend 1 minuter per 500 words correcting the formatting.

Here is a SWOT analysis of my whole plan.

Strengths:

1. Access to about 1000 articles. Each article is about 1000-1200 words in length.
2. Because the content is well written, it is highly possible to gain traffic by sharing it on social media, even if we don't rank in Google.
3. All the content is in evergreen niches, so even if I have to sit on this project for the next year, I don't mind.

Weaknesses:

1. Limited time, my work hours are already absorbed with my existing projects.
2. Every article has to be formatted + images added to it before it is published. Not exactly a turnkey solution.
3. Limited SEO budget. As almost all of the niches are evergreen, any of the keywords that are worth targetting will be high competition. Hence, ranking on Google is going to require substantial amount of budget to rank for these many keywords/niches.

Opportunities:

1. Because the content is high quality, there is the possibility of receiving good amount of traffic through social shares.
2. It is possible to gain natural links as the content is very informational, and some of the niches are very segmented.
3. If monetized through adsense, some niches (like finance, law etc) can yield very high per click income.

Threats:

1. Even though the content is not indexed in Google, I do not own it. There is a chance of the original owner filing DMCA complaint against the site. Although this seems very unlikely.
2. If the site does not gain social traction, there is little I can do to get traffic to it in the initial phase.
3. There is also a very rare chance of the original writer uploading his work somewhere. If that happens, I am worried that it might dilute my search rankings (if any).

How do I plan to make money off this experiment?
I am not really sure. My initial idea is to monetize it with adsense if it gets traffic. If not, I will just sit on it, curate it and then sell it on flippa. That would be my exit strategy. I know, it is not a good idea to flip a site that doesn't make money. But atleast I will get something to compensate the time I put in, plus there are not many website that have 1000+ pages.

What am I doing right now?
I had an old domain lying around. Setup WP + thesis theme on it. Have posted two articles already. I will continue doing so till have about about 100-200 posts live. Once I have uploaded all of the content, I would be willing to share the website URL here if anyone is interested.

Each post takes up about 10 minutes to post (formatting + including relevant images + optimizing titles/meta desc etc). If I can manage to work 4 hours on this everyday, I can put up about 24 posts everyday. I have done 2 already, 22 more to go for today.

hi5blast said:

best of luck for your journey

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Thanks. This is not my first foray into marketing though, I work full-time as an internet marketer. This is more of an experiment. I wouldn't mind even if it tanks, I could use it to build links or flip it if that happens.

Ok so you found a loophole to get quality content?

Anyways, hoping that your journey goes well enough.

When doing a SWOT Analysis, the Opportunity and Threat should address the whole industry and not your business.
Good luck with your journey

abhi007 said:

Ok so you found a loophole to get quality content?

Anyways, hoping that your journey goes well enough.

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Not exactly a loophole. I found content that is not indexed by Google, and there is a lot of it. I don't see it getting indexed in the future either. I would be fucking ecstatic if I could find quality content on a topic of my choice. Sadly that is not the case.

faithjhung said:

When doing a SWOT Analysis, the Opportunity and Threat should address the whole industry and not your business.
Good luck with your journey

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Thanks, I am taking up basic business development courses online and trying to get a hang of things. Even though my SWOT analysis fails in doing that, I am aware strengths and weaknesses focus on the internal factors, while opportunities and threats should focus on the external.

Update!

Instead of putting all the content and then worrying about monetization/marketing later, I will be doing small tests every now and then and adjust my sail according to the feedback.

Right now, the authority site has 5 HQ articles. I shared one of them on two subreddits. Already have 5 visitors in the first minute, let's see how this goes.

Haven't seen a SWOT analysis since high school.

Don't sell something that can bring you a passive income.

remember the one article that I shared on two subreddits?

satyawrat said:

Threats:

1. Even though the content is not indexed in Google, I do not own it. There is a chance of the original owner filing DMCA complaint against the site. Although this seems very unlikely.

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Hopefully, the juice is worth the squeeze.

What I have done so far:

1. Started another blog, in the gaming niche.
2. Bought 10 domains (TLD: .online ; .site etc.) from namecheap as they were selling them for just 80 cents. Not a bad deal. All these domains are related to my gaming blog. Will be used to build backlinks to gaming blog. These dummy blogs will be spammed to death with GSA SER.
3. Posted more finance related content on the authority blog (5 articles).
4. Updated the design from Thesis to Newspaper theme to get a more premium feel.
5. Scraping shit tons of URLs to find non spammy link sources for GSA SER.

Earnings: 40 Cents (two clicks on adsense on the gaming blog, very little traffic as of now)

Have you done some SEO? I'm very curious how do you get 1000 articles.
I think it's ok to post maximum 10 articles/day...in 100 days you will finish

MrAndrei said:

Have you done some SEO? I'm very curious how do you get 1000 articles.
I think it's ok to post maximum 10 articles/day...in 100 days you will finish

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Mr.Andrei, it would be extremely naive on my part if I discussed where I am getting my content from, don't you think?

It will still take me 100ish days. Am pretty slow as of now, because am also working on other projects. But I will pickup speed later on.

you can send me a pm with your website? or with skype adress. I want to open a site like you but with content in Romanian.

MrAndrei said:

you can send me a pm with your website? or with skype adress. I want to open a site like you but with content in Romanian.

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And how exactly is my website going to help you start a Romanian authority site? No, I am not going to share my URL... Not until I have completely dried up my content sources which should take atleast three months from now.

As a journey, why don't you discuss about our SEO/Marketing tactics Mate?. I understand that you should refrain yourself from telling about your content source, but I feel that you can open up on the marketing front so that people can get value out of this thread.

IMholic said:

As a journey, why don't you discuss about our SEO/Marketing tactics Mate?. I understand that you should refrain yourself from telling about your content source, but I feel that you can open up on the marketing front so that people can get value out of this thread.

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Thanks for your feedback. Yes, I will be covering my SEO tactics and social media marketing strategy too in the coming days. As of now things are a bit slow, and am not doing much apart from adding content regularly to both of my sites, the gaming blog and the authority site.

1.) Built 10 blogs related to the gaming niche. These will be part of my tier #1 backlinks towards my Gaming blog. 3 of these are on old domains, 7 on new domains. Namecheap was selling new TLDs (.online/.site etc.) for jsut 80 cents so I got a bunch of them
2.) Wanted to build tier #2 links using GSA SER, but I did not have any fresh & targeted SER list to do it. Started scraping sites using ScrapeBox. I had just 19 private proxies, all of which got banned on Google pretty soon even when I was running just one thread with 19 second delay. I was able to scrape only 50k results from Google. Did a lot of experimenting, and finally found a day to scrape even with banned proxies . I will include a brief guide how to go about it soon. I have about 200k Keywords that am scraping. As of now, I have about 500k URLs (dup removed) from just 5% of they keywords. By the time am done with scraping every keyword, I will have atleast a million URLs in GSA SER (hopefully).

3.) Researching a lot into how to go about building high quality links with GSA SER, once am done experimenting I will again include a brief guide for anyone who is interested.

4.) Gaming Blog's rank has fallen below 50 for every keyword that am after . Am not worried though, as my off-page SEO has not even started completely.

5.) Curated 10-15 new articles for the authority site. Each article is 1000+ words long. Will slowly drip feed the content.

Could not edit my previous post, but had to share this with you guys. Remember the gaming blog I was working on along with the authority site? Someone just offered to pay $500 for that domain. I only have like 7-8 articles on that blog and it is not even ranking for the target keywords. The transaction will happen through DomainAgents.

And my ScrapeBox setup is even more finetuned now. I am crunching some serious numbers. Because am scraping all search engines, I end up with 60-70% duplicates. But 30% is still a huge number when you are working with this: (660 urls per second and it's still rising, IDK where it will stabilize.)

What's Next?
I am still going to go after the gaming niche blog. Just on a different domain. A better one maybe. I am still scraping all the links I can find in this niche for GSA SER.

Earnings till date: $500 minus the escrow fees etc. So more like $450ish.

What do you use along with scrapebox gsa snd 20 private proxies?
Definetly subscribing to your journey

Congratz on the sale! Can't wait to see how successful this site becomes, hopefully it doesn't fail.. either way, hope I can learn something from you.