Hey there blackhatters.
Welcome to my first journy / case study. Before we start it should be made clear that I have no prior experience in IM or SEO. I have been reading about SEO for a little over a year but havn?t really done anything about it. Now I finally decided to pull the trigger and see if I can actually rank a small niche website and earn a few bucks. I know there are hundreds of ways to gain traffic to a niche website but since this is my first project I want to keep everything simple and clear. Most of you veterans won?t find anything new or useful in here but feel free to share tips and tricks.
From my life in the offline world, I?ve learned that the key to a succesful project is to have clear goals. The goals for this journey / case study is as follows:
1) Get a new micro niche site to the front page of Google for the main keyword
2) Have the site earn $1 a day corresponding to $30/month
3) Develop a procedure that can repeated in order to rank similar micro niche sites for low competition keywords.
4) Produce a case study useful for other newcomers
5) Learn a lot!
The focus will be on learning and trying out some basic SEO aswell as getting comfortable with the basics of wordpress. However, any real bussiness has to make money to justify its existence. That?s why the site must earn at least $30/month in order to be a succes.
Since the project can?t go on forever I?ll need some kind of dead line. I?ve decided to set this to the 31th of january 2015. At that point I will end all work on the project and review how far I got in relation to the goals. This gives me a little over 2 months to make content and rank the site in Google. I know 2 months might seem like a long time for a single micro niche site but the large time frame allows me to focus on learning along the way.
Now we have goals and a deadline, let?s get started!
The Keyword
While I?m not going to share the exact keyword that I?m trying to rank for, I will give an overview of the competition. I?m using the SEO tool Long Tail Platinum. According to Long Tail Platinum the keyword has:
- 3600 monthly US searches.
- Anverage CPC of 2,2 USD.
- Medium level of advertiser competition.
- Average KC of 23 (KC is a number used to descirbe how hard the keyword is to rank for. The scale goes from 0 to 100, 0 being super easy and 100 being very hard)
The strategy
My strategy is pretty straight forward. First I build the site with some articles about 500 to 1000 word each. These will all be manually written by me or outsourced to a professional article writing service. The idea is to have one big article on the home page that will introduce the visitors to the overall topic and get them interested. Then I will have 5 ? 10 articles each reviewing a product direcly related to the keyword. I will also make a ?top 5? or ?top 10? list where I rate each product so the viewer gets a quick overview of what product I think is the best.
Furthermore I will write 2 ? 3 informative articles about the general topic but without mentioning actual products. This should make the site look more legit and not like ?just another affiliate site?. I also hope to provide my readers with some information that is actually useful and not just some random ?buy this, buy that? BS.
After the homepage and the 2 ? 3 informative articles have been posted on the site I will slowly start adding reviews. The site will be monetized with the Amazon Associates Program, each review containing a call to action button linking directly to the Amazon product.
The products cost between $100 and $250 on Amazon. This is important as Amazon offers a pretty low advertising fee for general products. If you sell betweeen 1 and 6 products per month you only get 4 % of the product price!
Using $150 as an average this means I need to sell 5 products a month in order to meet my $30/month goal.
SEO
This is a low competition keyword with most of the sites on the front page of Google having less than 10 pagelinks and only one of them having more than 10 juice pagelinks. As a result, heavy SEO should not be needed but a few web 2.0 links can?t hurt.
I will create 3 free web 2.0 blogs using Wordpress, Blogger or some similar site. I will write 10 articles for each blog and post them slowly over 5 weeks. I will also add the blogs to GSA SEO Indexer at 5 links per day. This will be my Tier 1. When these have been indexed by Google I will link to my niche site once or twice from each blog.
For tier 2 i will create 5 free web 2.0 blogs for each tier 1 blog. I will post about 3 spun articles per week on each of these. I?ll also set them up with GSA SEO Indexer for 50 links/day. After a week or two I will begin linking from tier 2 to tier 1.
This should give me 3 - 6 good backlinks to my niche site and also pass some link juice. Hopefully it will be enough to get to the front page.
Tools I use
Long Tail Pro
GSA SEO Indexer
What I?ve done so far
15th of October: Bought a micro niche site from a service on BHW. The site came with custom logo and two 500 word articles. A week later the site ranked 51 in Google with no work done.
2nd of November: Tested the free version of GSA SEO Indexer giving my niche site 35 backlinks. This was probably a mistake but I havn?t seen any huge drop in rankings. I won?t use GSA directly on my niche site again, though, as I read that it can damage my rankings.
15th of November: Bought a 1000 words article for my home page from EpicWrite. Posted the article on my site a few days later. Currently ranking 60 in Google.
To be continued?
That?s it for now. I will keep posting updates here as I do more work. Aiming for at leas tone update every week, hopefully more.
Now get out there and earn some money!
- Thaqu
Welcome to my first journy / case study. Before we start it should be made clear that I have no prior experience in IM or SEO. I have been reading about SEO for a little over a year but havn?t really done anything about it. Now I finally decided to pull the trigger and see if I can actually rank a small niche website and earn a few bucks. I know there are hundreds of ways to gain traffic to a niche website but since this is my first project I want to keep everything simple and clear. Most of you veterans won?t find anything new or useful in here but feel free to share tips and tricks.
From my life in the offline world, I?ve learned that the key to a succesful project is to have clear goals. The goals for this journey / case study is as follows:
1) Get a new micro niche site to the front page of Google for the main keyword
2) Have the site earn $1 a day corresponding to $30/month
3) Develop a procedure that can repeated in order to rank similar micro niche sites for low competition keywords.
4) Produce a case study useful for other newcomers
5) Learn a lot!
The focus will be on learning and trying out some basic SEO aswell as getting comfortable with the basics of wordpress. However, any real bussiness has to make money to justify its existence. That?s why the site must earn at least $30/month in order to be a succes.
Since the project can?t go on forever I?ll need some kind of dead line. I?ve decided to set this to the 31th of january 2015. At that point I will end all work on the project and review how far I got in relation to the goals. This gives me a little over 2 months to make content and rank the site in Google. I know 2 months might seem like a long time for a single micro niche site but the large time frame allows me to focus on learning along the way.
Now we have goals and a deadline, let?s get started!
The Keyword
While I?m not going to share the exact keyword that I?m trying to rank for, I will give an overview of the competition. I?m using the SEO tool Long Tail Platinum. According to Long Tail Platinum the keyword has:
- 3600 monthly US searches.
- Anverage CPC of 2,2 USD.
- Medium level of advertiser competition.
- Average KC of 23 (KC is a number used to descirbe how hard the keyword is to rank for. The scale goes from 0 to 100, 0 being super easy and 100 being very hard)
The strategy
My strategy is pretty straight forward. First I build the site with some articles about 500 to 1000 word each. These will all be manually written by me or outsourced to a professional article writing service. The idea is to have one big article on the home page that will introduce the visitors to the overall topic and get them interested. Then I will have 5 ? 10 articles each reviewing a product direcly related to the keyword. I will also make a ?top 5? or ?top 10? list where I rate each product so the viewer gets a quick overview of what product I think is the best.
Furthermore I will write 2 ? 3 informative articles about the general topic but without mentioning actual products. This should make the site look more legit and not like ?just another affiliate site?. I also hope to provide my readers with some information that is actually useful and not just some random ?buy this, buy that? BS.
After the homepage and the 2 ? 3 informative articles have been posted on the site I will slowly start adding reviews. The site will be monetized with the Amazon Associates Program, each review containing a call to action button linking directly to the Amazon product.
The products cost between $100 and $250 on Amazon. This is important as Amazon offers a pretty low advertising fee for general products. If you sell betweeen 1 and 6 products per month you only get 4 % of the product price!
Using $150 as an average this means I need to sell 5 products a month in order to meet my $30/month goal.
SEO
This is a low competition keyword with most of the sites on the front page of Google having less than 10 pagelinks and only one of them having more than 10 juice pagelinks. As a result, heavy SEO should not be needed but a few web 2.0 links can?t hurt.
I will create 3 free web 2.0 blogs using Wordpress, Blogger or some similar site. I will write 10 articles for each blog and post them slowly over 5 weeks. I will also add the blogs to GSA SEO Indexer at 5 links per day. This will be my Tier 1. When these have been indexed by Google I will link to my niche site once or twice from each blog.
For tier 2 i will create 5 free web 2.0 blogs for each tier 1 blog. I will post about 3 spun articles per week on each of these. I?ll also set them up with GSA SEO Indexer for 50 links/day. After a week or two I will begin linking from tier 2 to tier 1.
This should give me 3 - 6 good backlinks to my niche site and also pass some link juice. Hopefully it will be enough to get to the front page.
Tools I use
Long Tail Pro
GSA SEO Indexer
What I?ve done so far
15th of October: Bought a micro niche site from a service on BHW. The site came with custom logo and two 500 word articles. A week later the site ranked 51 in Google with no work done.
2nd of November: Tested the free version of GSA SEO Indexer giving my niche site 35 backlinks. This was probably a mistake but I havn?t seen any huge drop in rankings. I won?t use GSA directly on my niche site again, though, as I read that it can damage my rankings.
15th of November: Bought a 1000 words article for my home page from EpicWrite. Posted the article on my site a few days later. Currently ranking 60 in Google.
To be continued?
That?s it for now. I will keep posting updates here as I do more work. Aiming for at leas tone update every week, hopefully more.
Now get out there and earn some money!
- Thaqu
