Flipping Big Brand Magazine Site - Journal

Varys

Varys

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May 25, 2014
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So here we go!

What is the plan? Well the plan is to build a big brand magazine website and flip it after a year.

What have I done so far?

-picked a niche. It is broad niche with huge number of topics to write about.

-picked short two word brandable domain name. No keywords included, pure brand. Domain registered in May 2014.

-bought nice Wordpress theme on ThemeForest, did some light customization and made a custom logo.

-picked 5 general categories.

-to this day I have 37 published articles ranging from 500 words to 5000 words. (I have one "Top 101 article" with ~5000 words) average article size is ~1000+ words

-I am using Semrush for keyword research, mainly extracting keywords from similar sites in my niche. Until now I did not have any rule regarding search volume or competition, but now I am starting to focus on long-tail keywords with smaller competition.

-registered top 10 social profiles like Facebook, Twitter etc. Also I am re-tweeting and liking relevant content in my niche everyday.

-I created account Mailchimp and placed signup form in sidebar. Sill need to write welcome email.

-I "wrote" privacy policy, TOS, about us and made contact page. Made privacy policy and TOS non-indexable.

What's next?

I still don't have any followers/likes so I will buy few thousand to speed things up. There is problem, I don't know where. I looked at some gigs at fiver but I did not find anything special. If anyone have trusted provider hit me up!

Next thing I need to do is to make a recap. This is getting little overwhelming so I need to go back and make a review of things that I did and things that need to be improved, changed or removed. Things like on-page seo stuff, recheck grammar and stuff like that.

Content

As I said I already have 37 published articles. I am focusing on two types of content:

1. Small content - Top 10 articles

When I say small I don't think small in terms of words per article. I will try to keep every article above 1k words

2. Big content - Bucket lists and authoritative articles

Buckets list - "top 101 different ways you can get fucked in ass" type of article.

Authoritative articles will be articles on little broader topics, like “fucking in ass”. That articles will contain history of ass fucking, how to get fucked in ass, links to medical research that claims how people who get fucked in ass are happier in life, etc.

This is not strict plan, everything depends on topic/keyword.

Currently my girlfriend is writing most of the content. English is not our first language so thing are going little slower.

We are writing few articles a week for now, enough to keep things fresh.

Promoting content and link-building

So I won't be doing any hard link building besides some blog commenting in my niche.

As I said we are writing large "bucket list" articles. We have one now, written few days ago. Sill need to make some nice picture in Photoshop for featured image. Most of you are probably already familiar with Lifed, site that sold for 200k some time ago on Flippa. Basically as I see it, guy hit it big with one or two big articles that got popular on Stumbleupon.

So plan for big articles is to give them a little push on Stumbleupon with some paid promotion and see the results. Also submit them on relevant forums and subreddits in attempt to get some traffic.

In general I am imitating successful sites in my niche and focusing on long term traffic from Google with attempts to promote "big articles" on relevant social media sites.

Big Brand stuff

One of the things I will be focusing on is increasing big brand footprint. This will be also accomplished by imitating big brand sites in my niche.

TO DO

1. Buy twitter followers and Facebook likes. I will take a look on fiver one more time and see if I can find some legit gigs. Also if you guys have trusted supplier or something like that, hit me up.

2. Make fake writer or use pen name as an author. Build social media stuff for that fake person and link things up.

3. Content. Main focus for next few months is content. I will be looking for good keywords, exploring my competition and write articles. Exploring and analyzing competition is my favorite thing to do while writing content mentally drains me.

4. Try to promote that big "top 101" article on Stumbleupon and relevant sites. I will report the results.

I don't know if I missed something, there is so much stuff.

Also it seems like I can't use BB code for some reason so this will show as huge block of text. I apologize for that.
 


- one suggestion in the future, since you already have 34 articles and the site is around 5 months old dont do this already

- but the next time you do another project like this, buy the site from auctions and not create a new one, age plays an important factor in selling

super magazine site 3 years of age =/ super magazine site 8 years of age
Age sells more with the same effort in the project, just my 2 cents anyways cool thread for a start, subbed
 
Member8200 said:
- one suggestion in the future, since you already have 34 articles and the site is around 5 months old dont do this already

- but the next time you do another project like this, buy the site from auctions and not create a new one, age plays an important factor in selling

super magazine site 3 years of age =/ super magazine site 8 years of age
Age sells more with the same effort in the project, just my 2 cents anyways cool thread for a start, subbed
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was looking for older domain when I was starting this project but I did not find anything that I liked and I am on very limited budget so I decided to buy fresh domain.

Cheers!
 
Fiverr has plenty of gigs for social media, a lot of gold if you just keep looking. 5k-10k twitter followers for $5 is a damn good deal to me.

Looks like you are starting off great, and it's even better that you have your own writer that's writing for free. Regardless of not being an english native, she and you will only get better.

Subbed man, keep this thread alive.
 
Varys said:
Buy twitter followers and Facebook likes.
Click to expand...

Buying phony FB likes/followers is going to hurt your reach in a big way if you actually try to get traffic from FB. Buyers love to see diverse traffic streams, but if you handicap yourself by frontloading a ton of shitty FB "fans" it's going to be harder for you to pull that off.

If you need a few handfuls to ge the ball rolling, sure...but padding your profile with mass fake follows/likes in volume is either going to hurt you or your buyer in the long run.
 
Supraman said:
Fiverr has plenty of gigs for social media, a lot of gold if you just keep looking. 5k-10k twitter followers for $5 is a damn good deal to me.

Looks like you are starting off great, and it's even better that you have your own writer that's writing for free. Regardless of not being an english native, she and you will only get better.

Subbed man, keep this thread alive.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the support man, I will definitely keep this thread alive, there is no going back now.

IceToEskimos said:
Buying phony FB likes/followers is going to hurt your reach in a big way if you actually try to get traffic from FB. Buyers love to see diverse traffic streams, but if you handicap yourself by frontloading a ton of shitty FB "fans" it's going to be harder for you to pull that off.

If you need a few handfuls to get the ball rolling, sure...but padding your profile with mass fake follows/likes in volume is either going to hurt you or your buyer in the long run.
Click to expand...

Yeah I don't want to fuck myself up by buying shit ton of followers. I just want few hundred to get things rolling. I have a feeling that when someone comes to a website and see Facebook box in sidebar with even few hundred likes is more likely to engage in linking/following that opposed to zero/likes followers. I will keep things low.

Thanks!
 
As ice said, I would avoid buying many fake followers. I have done it a few times before to get that big brand look, but it really hampered my ability to reach actual fans down the road.
Stoked to read your updates! Keep it up.
 
- another input, buying fakes likes and followers is actually a good thing when you are starting out. Its better for a customer/prospect client to see 1-3k likes (all fake) rather than a 1like page
- But after buying all those initial likes stop and let it flow, join groups, contribute something for a few days then invite them to like you fanpage
- use other social media to promote the fanpage like reddit, twitter and pinterest

Real likes and activity is actually the main reason why internet marketers use it. Make your GF do the relationship marketing, replying stuff/joining groups while you focus on the site, just 2 cents

If you have 15-30 minutes read this thread by meaty, actually helps in resource/responsibility distribution:
 
Buying phony FB likes/followers is going to hurt your reach in a big way if you actually try to get traffic from FB. Buyers love to see diverse traffic streams, but if you handicap yourself by frontloading a ton of shitty FB "fans" it's going to be harder for you to pull that off.

If you need a few handfuls to ge the ball rolling, sure...but padding your profile with mass fake follows/likes in volume is either going to hurt you or your buyer in the long run.
Click to expand...


This is good advice, but at the same time you have to start somewhere, because people are followers. It's going to be rough to gain followers if you don't give yourself an initial bump.

In the past, buying followers wasn't that bad, since the organic reach for FB wasn't heavily, heavily throttled like it currently is now. So you could buy followers (1k-3k) and make up for it in the long run. This obviously is a bad call now since the organic reach is so limited now.

Workaround:
To get around this now you can run a FB ad for likes for your FB Page and target your page niche interest, and target the Philippines or Thailand. Both countries have loads of english speaking users for cheap.

If you setup a decent ad, odds are you can get your like cost down to 0.1 (1 cent) per interaction

So you can pump your page with 10k+ followers for $100 +

Obviously the niche will dictate how clicky your ad will be, if your niche is boring like taxes, etc. It might not got so well.

Another benefit is these users will actually interact with your content, if you focus on quality posts too.
 
Or you can run a contest targeting your demographic and give them something they really want.

WooBox is free for a short term contest, or pay and get other features. If the contest is correctly targeted you will get followers that are focused on your niche for pennies each. This is because FB lowers the cost per click as your click through percentage rises.

I am running a contest now for a client on their site, and clicks are coming in at $0.12 and we are gaining about 100 likes a day. And the sweepstakes reward is 1 free product and a $50 gift certificate.
 
Meh, spare those few bucks that you want to spend on fake likes or ads and just contact fb page admins and bribe them to share your post. If it's a tough niche, you can start with those lovely "quote posts" or similar, not related to your main audience. Delete or dark the posts after you get your likes.

After you have the initial few hundreds for social proof, you will start gaining steadily from the like button on your page (assuming you have traffic), and organically after that.

If you want to rock on facebook, you have to spend significant time developing a strategy, testing, analyzing and optimizing.

PS: No matter whether you want to focus heavily on facebook or look at it as a residual source, spend an hour implementing the open graph protocol. It makes a difference.
 
The last few guys above have laid out some great advice, so the only thing I can add is that your user experience should be tip top. I suggest a great sidebar.

A subscription in the sidebar is a decent idea, but I would never signup to a new 'untrustworthy' site unless it did it more subliminally. I mean that you should have an interaction based subscription. If someone wanted to comment on your site, well they should login with FB or twitter (here's where you get their info into a mailing list) and then they can share their thoughts on your site. Make the sidebar subscription more like a login of sorts...

Also, after a person is done reading the post, are they going back to stumbleupon? Or are they going to read your next great post? You should be leveraging your greatest content with captivating images and headlines so that the visitor stays until they find a need to login and submit their thoughts or buy something from your affs.
 
Ok, here is the long overdue update!

So, first about the numbers. Site is now exactly 4 months old (first article was published at end of May). There is currently 70 published articles spreading around 5 categories. I have approximately 20 visits per day of which 10 are organic from Google. Rest of them are social, direct and referral.

Here are some screenshots.

Webmaster tools screenshoot:

a2PRrpC.jpg


Google Analytics screenshot from Aug 1. - Today

dwRIyXd.png


As you can see on the screenshot above there are three spikes.

Ignore the first one. That was from some crawler that I used.

Second spike is mainly Stumbleupon and Reddit traffic after I posted one big “101 things” article. More specifically, I spent $10 on Stumbleupon paid traffic and got 44 visitors and from submitting article to few relevant subreddits I got 80 visitors.

ktdszBv.png


Third spike is from recent viral event that happened where I got around 300 visits from Facebook and Twitter in 7 days from using relevant hashtags.

1nGEz4q.png


Some general stuff:

I must admit I did not work at my full potential on this site since my last update, I was procrastinating most of the time, while my girlfriend continued to write articles every day. I have been little overwhelmed which resulted in not working so much on this site.

I also decided not to buy followers/likes from fiverr but instead try methods that you guys suggested. I am grateful for your advice, thank you everyone. I will update on that topic next time.

Next steps:

Next step is to promote every single article that has been published to relevant subreddits, forums and social media. This sounds obvious but I ignored that till now. Plan was to write articles, do little seo and wait for rankings. Now I see that it's not enough. I realized that after reading badya122’s update in his Tech blog Case study and his conversation with CCarter.

There are also 50 things to do around site from site speed problems to slow hosting and onpage seo.

About on-page seo:

I don’t know if I am doing the right thing here. In my niche, I see sites with 500k organic visitors per month with carefully written title tags, descriptions and with 20 keywords in keywords tags. On the other side, there are big sites that just write title tags and still rank for relevant keywords.

So, I decided to go with just writing title tags and let Google do his thing about descriptions.

I also have site speed problems that I need to address starting by leaving $10/month hosting on Hostgator to something better.

Problem with old articles:

Another problem is with first group of articles that were published in first month when site went live. They are indexed and that is all good but I don’t see them showing in results for relevant keywords in Webmaster tools. Every new article that we write and publish is starting to show for relevant keywords in a week max. That is not the case for older articles. I think I will update them a little and republish, don’t know what else to do.

Monetisation:

I also embedded Adsense ads in top left of every article and I get one click a day and that click is usually $0.01.

So what do you guys think? Is this normal organic growth for 4 months old site with 70 articles or it should be better/faster?

Thank you everyone!
 
Ok, so last update that I posted was written few days ago but I was unable to post it till today for unclear reasons.

In that few days I was reading CCarter's Traffic Leaks and I realized that I am thinking to much about seo and rankings and that I am not treating this site as a real business.

Original plan was to find keywords, write articles do light seo optimization, pray for rankings and hopefully get some organic traffic and sell after a year.

Site is now 4 months old and now I see how much more traffic I could have if I just utilized other traffic sources like relevant communities, social media sites etc...

So plan is to "leak" some traffic to my sites from other relevant channels using different tactics.

Plan is to start with Reddit. For example, finding relevant subreddits and post articles there. I tested that last week on small subreddit with 5000 subscribers. I posted link to my article there and got 20 upvotes and 140 visits over span of three days and I still get few visits a day for now from that submission. Not much but not bad for 2 minutes for finding a relevant subreddit and posting link there. It shows the great potential using different tactics across multiple channels.

Now I will go back every article that we have, find relevant subreddits and post them there. I will be trying multiple stuff like posting directly to relevant subreddits, replying with comments to other people and dropping links, asking a question about something and dropping my link with combination with other links from authoritative resources in niche and so on...

Some long term possibilities include creating my own subreddit or becoming admin of some other inactive subreddit and getting traffic from there. Here is some info about that from Wickedfire that I found if someone is interested.

Using Subreddits to Build Traffic - San Diego Inbound Marketing Blog

http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-and-content/177409-creating-my-1st-subreddit.html

Like I said there is so many possibilities, now I just need to pick few thing that I want to do and stick to them because if I don't to that I could easily get overwhelmed...

Also there are some problems that I noticed. My site is what you call informational site or entertainment site. Think top ten sites with wide range of topics. I feel that it would be easier if we started in more specific niche. That way I could have some evergreen content and focus on specific set of customers and sell or promote something specific.

In my case I need to write articles over and over again just to keep people interested.

Other concern is that every time I get traffic from reddit or some similar site, visitors read article and go away. I could build a list but i think niche is to general for that. Or instead of that I could try to get them to like me on Facebook and grow fans there, so I can get new article to them again?

So many questions that I will try to figure out on the way...
 
OH man..

Reddit traffic is that way - huge spike, then gone.
Especially with entertainment/fun .. they are not gonna come back.

Now you need to traffic leak.

Try not sending them to your site, but to an imgur link (if picture)

That picture should be watermarked with your URL.
The URL should also be mentioned in the comments (fake account, anyone?), maybe a tactic to not use all the time.

So if someone reposts the pic, they repost your watermark (hopefully).

::emp::
 
emp said:
OH man..

Reddit traffic is that way - huge spike, then gone.
Especially with entertainment/fun .. they are not gonna come back.

Now you need to traffic leak.

Try not sending them to your site, but to an imgur link (if picture)

That picture should be watermarked with your URL.
The URL should also be mentioned in the comments (fake account, anyone?), maybe a tactic to not use all the time.

So if someone reposts the pic, they repost your watermark (hopefully).

::emp::
Click to expand...

Thanks, I will try that with watermarking pictures!

I mean, my site is not purely entertainment. It can be both evergreen content plus short term entertainment content. I don't know how to explain it without telling exactly what my site is. Or I can just tell what is site about, you don't seem to have problem with that? I mean I could, I don't have nothing to hide, there are hundreds of sites like mine.

Just like you have games website where you can post funny fails in League of legends, you can also make authority guides for specific games. Same thing for my site type.

I just noticed nice article that you linked from your blog, not sure how I missed that. I need to read that later.

Data driven reddit posting

Tnx!
 
@blank_czech
Awesome example. Thanks.

Here is a look at the stats for it:
Successful leak is successful - Imgur

If you are doing this, and anything with pictures, don't forget to leak it everywhere

Work on
- pinterest
- flickr
- Slideshare


Fucking do a youtube video witha voiceover on this.

::emp::
 
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