[Journey] Growing An Informational Intent Site To $10,000 A Month From Scratch!
- Thread starter shaunm
- Start date
shaunm
Well-Known Member
Update
Are they just for online forums or so they work for Pinterest?
- Had a ton of offline stuff on today so only managed to do some research on Pinterest optimization and started implemented some of the stuff.
Are they just for online forums or so they work for Pinterest?
shaunm
Well-Known Member
Update
- Article 1 - 1511 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 2 - 1011 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 3 - 3109 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 4 - 1024 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 5 - 2013 Words
- Adsense ads showing up on the domain now, might turn the ratio down a little but other than that they look fine.
Strickland
Well-Known Member
Great Vlog Shaunm, you just got a new subscriber. To be honest I had no idea the volume of work needed to get and maintain that amount of organic traffic. Can't beleive you made me wait until the last 2mins for my moment of fame.
Great work Shaun kept it coming
shaunm
Well-Known Member
Yea I had a domain hit by the medic update too, its a pain, just got to roll with the punches.
Great Vlog Shaunm, you just got a new subscriber. To be honest I had no idea the volume of work needed to get and maintain that amount of organic traffic.
Can't beleive you made me wait until the last 2mins for my moment of fame.
Great work Shaun kept it coming
haha cheers dude
.
did you manage to recover it or just made a new domain and change niche?
shaunm
Well-Known Member
Update
I just left it, it was still making $300-$400 a month after being hit by medic but it also got hit by the Amazon commission change last month so it will likely drop to $100-$150 a month now. I talk more about that specific domain in the video below if you are interested.
- Article 1 - 1982 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 2 - 1512 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 3 - 1072 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 4 - 2136 Words.
I just left it, it was still making $300-$400 a month after being hit by medic but it also got hit by the Amazon commission change last month so it will likely drop to $100-$150 a month now. I talk more about that specific domain in the video below if you are interested.
shaunm
Well-Known Member
Update
- Article 1 - 1485 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 2 - 1504 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 3 - 1028 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 4 - 2181 Words.
- Article 5 - 1940 Words.
- Decided to manually force index some pages for this new domain in search console as its showing a bunch of them in the excluded, not crawled category. I can remember this happening on one of my other domains previously but I can't remember what I did to fix the issue.
shaunm
Well-Known Member
Update
- Article 1 - 1479 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 2 - 1143 Words.
- Not sure if it was due to the forced indexing or just a coincidence but pages on the new domain are jumping into the SERPs now so hoping more and more will do the same over the coming days and start to climb the SERPs.
shaunm
Well-Known Member
This is actually a reply I made to a question over on Quora a few days back but I wanted to share it here too as it might be helpful to some people. I have only copy and pasted my replay over from Quora and then readded the relevant images/videos. Due to this, some parts may seem a little off or have me referring to stuff as if this post is on Quora. Also, the images are from the other domains in my money site network, NOT from the new domain I am logging the progress of in this journey thread.
Organic Search Traffic
The above screenshot is from my Google Analytics account for my latest domain that I started in August 2019, the dip in traffic at the end of March/start of April 2020 is due to the virus lockdown and people not searching as much but as you can see, the traffic picked up and recovered shortly after. In addition to this, the traffic may not look like much when it comes to volume but this is an affiliate site targeting buyer intent terms and usually makes me over $100 per 1000 hits to the domain, sometimes its as high as $130 per 1000 hits too.
To promote your blog via search engine optimization to pull traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing, you have to start with that goal in mind from the very start of the process with your keyword research. You goal is to find low competition keywords that your domain should easily be able to rank for and pull traffic to your domain from the search engines.
Although there are a number of keyword research tools out there that promise to make this process quick and easy, in my experience, they are a waste of money and deliver a large number of false positives and can potentially waste you a ton of time by publishing articles you will never rank for. Although there are a few different methods that you can use for your keyword acquisition, the main one that I have been using for my latest project is a tool called Answer The Public.
Although it is a freemium tool, you get a few free searches per day that should be plenty for anyone just starting out and trying to get ideas for potential keywords. Simply head over to Answer The Public, put some initial seed keywords into the tool and let it do its thing. At this stage of the process, the broader the initial keyword the better as you want Answer The Public to pull as many potential keywords as it can.
The image below shows an example of what Answer The Public will deliver for an example keyword search for the term “best pens” and ask you scroll down the page, it shows you many more ideas.
Once the tool has finished coming up with keyword ideas for you, click the download to CSV button and it will download all of the ideas in a spreadsheet for you. You can save your time a bunch of time and effort at this stage if you use the Keywords Everywhere plugin for Chrome to get the predicted search volumes for your keywords to allow you to try and only target the ones that are getting monthly searches in Google so you can choose your potential articles better.
The image below is an example of how using the Keywords Everywhere plugin will show the predicted search volume for a term from the “best pens” example pull from Answer The Public in the Google Search Results page shown by the Red arrow but you can also import keywords into the plugin for bulk searching too.
If you do opt to run the keywords from Answer The Public through Keywords Everywhere, delete all of the keywords that remain that are under the search volume limit that you feel is fit for you. Keep in mind though, this search volume is only a prediction and once ranked, your page will also be pulling traffic from secondary keywords, LSI phrases, and one time searches too meaning that even something with a predicted search volume of 10 can end up pulling over 100 hits per month to your domain.
Next comes the long and boring task of manually checking the search engines for the competition for the list of keywords you have. Although this can initially take you a ton of time, as you get better at it, you can usually spend a few seconds looking at a search engine results page for a keyword and work out if it's worth targeting or not.
Although the effectiveness of this first tip is becoming less and less relevant with each new update to the Google algorithm, one thing that you can look for when manually checking your keywords is predicted total results shown above. As you can see, in descending order from top to bottom for four example keywords from the Answer The Public pull for “best pens” have drastically different total results for the keywords as shown by the Red arrows.
As I mentioned, this is becoming less and less effective with each new update to the Google algorithm as they are getting better at understanding searcher intent but at the time of writing this answer, the “About xx,xxx” result count is still helpful. The lower the count the better but you still have to check the actual websites ranking on the first page of Google for your terms.
Although Moz definitely does have its flaws, the free Moz Bar plugin for Chrome can save you a ton of time for this stage of the process. Unfortunately, the Moz crawler is not as good as some of its competitors but its domain authority score (DA) can still be helpful with an example shown in the image below.
Again, it is from a search from one of the keywords for the example batch from Answer The Public but as you can see, the top domain has a DA of 17 while the second domain has a DA of 40. The higher the DA, the stronger that domain will be and the harder it is going to be for you to beat it usually. The more compeating domains with a low DA rating on the first page of Google the better the chances you have for your domain to rank.
Go through all of the keywords in your spreadsheet from your Answer The Public pull for the niche that you have chosen. You can add two new columns to your spreadsheet and manually add the “About xx,xxx comparing pages” number as well as the number of low DA domains on the first page for each keyword to work out what the lowest competition pages are.
Next you have to write your content for these keywords and this can take you hours of time depending on the type of content you are writing. The majority of my articles are at least 2000 words with some being over 5000 words depending on what I am targeting so each article will likely take you a few hours to publish. Thankfully though, I have shared 11 tips and tricks that you are able to implement in your own article writing journey in the video below that are well worth implementing. They can help you save a large amount of time on each article you publish allowing you to publish more and more content in a shorter period of time.
Another thing that I commonly see people make mistakes with is how they actually format their articles too. I have also published the video below where I go over how I format both my informational intent and buyer intent content with examples to try and show people how they should be trying to format their articles for optimal income generation too, if you are planning on publishing content for a large amount of buyer intent keywords then it is well worth watching.
Another thing that I would like to share is that if you are planning on publishing a large amount of content based around buyer intent keywords then in my experience, having comparison tables in your articles can help to increase your click-through rate to help increase your income potential. Unfortunately though, a large amount of the tools and plugins out there that allow you to quickly and easily make these comparison tables cost money but I have the video below where I go over how you are able to make your own comparison tables quickly with free tools.
Once you have published your article, you will still likely have to wait between four and eight months if your domain is brand new to see any traffic due to the Google sandbox effect. In my experience, this is unavoidable and something all new blogs have to deal with in Google these days.
Even once your domain is out of this initial sandbox period though, any new articles that you do publish will still likley take around three months to get out of their own mini sandbox period too. This is totally normal and out of everyone I know who does this, there is not one single person who does not experience this effect. Try not to get down and give up before you have gave your content plenty of time to get out of the sandbox and start to pull traffic from Google.
This is basically the process for how I am building my new domain but this new project is based around informational content with its income coming from display ads. Most of my older domains are based around buyer intent keywords and the Amazon Affiliate program and if you keep on scaling it up, you can earn a nice amount of income. The screenshot below is from my Amazon One Link dashboard and as you can see, the highest income day I have had to date from doing this is almost $345!
I will now be quickly going over some of the other ways that you are able to promote your blog but to date, I have primarily focused on getting traffic from organic sources such as search engines like Google and Bing.
Social Media
Social media can be a minefield, a few years back Facebook reduced their organic reach for your content that you share meaning that even if someone follows your page, very few people will actually see it unless you pay for the Facebook ads to promote your content. Due to this, most people have moved away from Facebook that I know to use other platforms.
Twitter and Instagram can potentially be solid sources of traffic depending on your niche but traffic leaking via hashtag search is becoming harder and harder to do. A common black hat technique for these two platforms was to use the mother and child system with your main account acting as the mother and a large number of automated accounts acting as the child account to promote the mother account but this does not work anywhere near as well as it used to.
Pinterest is kind of a mix between a social media platform, a social bookmarking platform, and a image search engine. I am actually trying to for my new domain as I have seen some people pulling massive amounts of traffic from Pinterest but the niche of your blog will definitely play a large part in the amount of traffic you will b able to get.
Social Bookmarking
Unfortunately, in 2020, the majority of the popular social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon have all gone under. The main one with solid traffic is Reddit and depending on the sub-reddit admins, it can be a nightmare to traffic leak and promote your blog on there.
I promote some of my content on Reddit with decent success but I have been a member of the communities I post in for years and have a good reputation and only promote high-quality content in there. Depending on your niche and the amount of time that you are willing to put into Reddit, it can be a decent traffic source but it is usually a one-hit wonder rather than long term traffic.
You will likley want some form of email opt in or browser notification plugin running to try and let you keep remarketing your content to the hits you can pull from Reddit. You can try to get your content ranking in the top section of the subreddit with the most upvotes as many people new to a niche and familiar with Reddit will organic the posts by top/all and result in residual traffic but this is niche dependent.
Forums
Niche relevant forums can potentially be an excellent source of traffic but again, this will depend on your niche and your reputation on the forum. I have managed to do some excellent promotion in a number of forums relevant to some of my niches whereas in other niches for other projects it has failed massively.
If you are an established member of some niche relevant forums then you can try to promote your blog there but again, it is often short term traffic similar to Reddit. You goal is to try and share some content that is so good that the admin team of the forum will pin it and result in residual long term traffic for years to come.
Q&A Sites
As you have seen throughout this answer, I have shared some of my own content for my YouTube channel that goes into some specific aspects of some parts of the organic traffic process in more detail. This is essentially me promoting my content and although I am promoting YouTube videos, you can use sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers to promote your blog too.
Depending on how well your answer does, you can sometimes get some solid traffic back to your own projects but again, this is going to be niche dependent as some niches will likley not do too well on Q&A sites whereas others can sometimes pull large amounts of traffic.
Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is an older method of promoting your blog that is nowhere near as effective as it used to be. The idea was that you would go to other blogs covering similar content to your own and publish a comment on their content with a link back to your own niche-related content. I have never actually tried this one myself but I have seen some blogs getting over 10,000 hits a month that friends who using this method on a large number of other blogs.
Organic Search Traffic
To promote your blog via search engine optimization to pull traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing, you have to start with that goal in mind from the very start of the process with your keyword research. You goal is to find low competition keywords that your domain should easily be able to rank for and pull traffic to your domain from the search engines.
Although there are a number of keyword research tools out there that promise to make this process quick and easy, in my experience, they are a waste of money and deliver a large number of false positives and can potentially waste you a ton of time by publishing articles you will never rank for. Although there are a few different methods that you can use for your keyword acquisition, the main one that I have been using for my latest project is a tool called Answer The Public.
Although it is a freemium tool, you get a few free searches per day that should be plenty for anyone just starting out and trying to get ideas for potential keywords. Simply head over to Answer The Public, put some initial seed keywords into the tool and let it do its thing. At this stage of the process, the broader the initial keyword the better as you want Answer The Public to pull as many potential keywords as it can.
The image below shows an example of what Answer The Public will deliver for an example keyword search for the term “best pens” and ask you scroll down the page, it shows you many more ideas.
The image below is an example of how using the Keywords Everywhere plugin will show the predicted search volume for a term from the “best pens” example pull from Answer The Public in the Google Search Results page shown by the Red arrow but you can also import keywords into the plugin for bulk searching too.
Next comes the long and boring task of manually checking the search engines for the competition for the list of keywords you have. Although this can initially take you a ton of time, as you get better at it, you can usually spend a few seconds looking at a search engine results page for a keyword and work out if it's worth targeting or not.
As I mentioned, this is becoming less and less effective with each new update to the Google algorithm as they are getting better at understanding searcher intent but at the time of writing this answer, the “About xx,xxx” result count is still helpful. The lower the count the better but you still have to check the actual websites ranking on the first page of Google for your terms.
Although Moz definitely does have its flaws, the free Moz Bar plugin for Chrome can save you a ton of time for this stage of the process. Unfortunately, the Moz crawler is not as good as some of its competitors but its domain authority score (DA) can still be helpful with an example shown in the image below.
Go through all of the keywords in your spreadsheet from your Answer The Public pull for the niche that you have chosen. You can add two new columns to your spreadsheet and manually add the “About xx,xxx comparing pages” number as well as the number of low DA domains on the first page for each keyword to work out what the lowest competition pages are.
Next you have to write your content for these keywords and this can take you hours of time depending on the type of content you are writing. The majority of my articles are at least 2000 words with some being over 5000 words depending on what I am targeting so each article will likely take you a few hours to publish. Thankfully though, I have shared 11 tips and tricks that you are able to implement in your own article writing journey in the video below that are well worth implementing. They can help you save a large amount of time on each article you publish allowing you to publish more and more content in a shorter period of time.
Even once your domain is out of this initial sandbox period though, any new articles that you do publish will still likley take around three months to get out of their own mini sandbox period too. This is totally normal and out of everyone I know who does this, there is not one single person who does not experience this effect. Try not to get down and give up before you have gave your content plenty of time to get out of the sandbox and start to pull traffic from Google.
This is basically the process for how I am building my new domain but this new project is based around informational content with its income coming from display ads. Most of my older domains are based around buyer intent keywords and the Amazon Affiliate program and if you keep on scaling it up, you can earn a nice amount of income. The screenshot below is from my Amazon One Link dashboard and as you can see, the highest income day I have had to date from doing this is almost $345!
Social Media
Social media can be a minefield, a few years back Facebook reduced their organic reach for your content that you share meaning that even if someone follows your page, very few people will actually see it unless you pay for the Facebook ads to promote your content. Due to this, most people have moved away from Facebook that I know to use other platforms.
Twitter and Instagram can potentially be solid sources of traffic depending on your niche but traffic leaking via hashtag search is becoming harder and harder to do. A common black hat technique for these two platforms was to use the mother and child system with your main account acting as the mother and a large number of automated accounts acting as the child account to promote the mother account but this does not work anywhere near as well as it used to.
Pinterest is kind of a mix between a social media platform, a social bookmarking platform, and a image search engine. I am actually trying to for my new domain as I have seen some people pulling massive amounts of traffic from Pinterest but the niche of your blog will definitely play a large part in the amount of traffic you will b able to get.
Social Bookmarking
Unfortunately, in 2020, the majority of the popular social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon have all gone under. The main one with solid traffic is Reddit and depending on the sub-reddit admins, it can be a nightmare to traffic leak and promote your blog on there.
I promote some of my content on Reddit with decent success but I have been a member of the communities I post in for years and have a good reputation and only promote high-quality content in there. Depending on your niche and the amount of time that you are willing to put into Reddit, it can be a decent traffic source but it is usually a one-hit wonder rather than long term traffic.
You will likley want some form of email opt in or browser notification plugin running to try and let you keep remarketing your content to the hits you can pull from Reddit. You can try to get your content ranking in the top section of the subreddit with the most upvotes as many people new to a niche and familiar with Reddit will organic the posts by top/all and result in residual traffic but this is niche dependent.
Forums
Niche relevant forums can potentially be an excellent source of traffic but again, this will depend on your niche and your reputation on the forum. I have managed to do some excellent promotion in a number of forums relevant to some of my niches whereas in other niches for other projects it has failed massively.
If you are an established member of some niche relevant forums then you can try to promote your blog there but again, it is often short term traffic similar to Reddit. You goal is to try and share some content that is so good that the admin team of the forum will pin it and result in residual long term traffic for years to come.
Q&A Sites
As you have seen throughout this answer, I have shared some of my own content for my YouTube channel that goes into some specific aspects of some parts of the organic traffic process in more detail. This is essentially me promoting my content and although I am promoting YouTube videos, you can use sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers to promote your blog too.
Depending on how well your answer does, you can sometimes get some solid traffic back to your own projects but again, this is going to be niche dependent as some niches will likley not do too well on Q&A sites whereas others can sometimes pull large amounts of traffic.
Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is an older method of promoting your blog that is nowhere near as effective as it used to be. The idea was that you would go to other blogs covering similar content to your own and publish a comment on their content with a link back to your own niche-related content. I have never actually tried this one myself but I have seen some blogs getting over 10,000 hits a month that friends who using this method on a large number of other blogs.
shaunm
Well-Known Member
I do have CTA throughout the content as my Analytics time on page shows many people do read the longer posts but my buyer intent posts usually have a comparison table after 300 words or so often with one or two links in the first 300 words to Amazon.
shaunm
Well-Known Member
Update
- Article 1 - 1508 Words - Outsourced.
- Article 2 - 1788 Words.
- Article 3 - 1919 Words.
- Article 4 - 1579 Words - Outsourced.
- More pages on the new project are jumping into the SERPs so looks like things are getting started, I think it must have been from the force indexing in search console.
shaunm
Well-Known Member
Cheers
.Yea I have been researching it a bit today and apparently there is a bug with Search Console not indexing pages correctly since mid-April or something. Just going to keep force indexing the content for now as it seems to be working.
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