Louey's Journal
- Thread starter Louey37
- Start date
TIME TO DIVERSIFY
I've realised that just having my main money site as my sole source of income is stupid on two counts:
1. If it goes down, so do I
2. It effects the choices I make for how to run the site
So, to elimiante this issue, I'm diversifying so that I have multiple income streams coming in from 3 major sites:
1. Review website
About 18 months ago, a friend of mine who started a review website 5 years ago decided that he wanted to get rid of it. It was getting roughly 1500 visitors a month with minimal SEO and almost no work put into it (his biggest earning month was $1000).
We're good mates and he knew I'd look after it so he basically gave it to me.
Since then, I've done nothing with it, not even change the affiliate links, and he's kept making money from it. It's time to get this up and running as there's only one other site in this niche and it's making a killing.
SITE SETUP: One of the big things that was stopping me from going ahead with this is the amount of physical work that needs to be put in to getting the reviews up on the site. There's currently 250 on the site that will need to be transferred over to the new website but they only cover about 15 products. There 25 key products that I need to add to the site before launch and another 100 I would like to have up in the next few months. If I'm adding at least 5 reviews for each, that's a lot of work.
To get around this, I've got three guys on board to help me with the transfer. I've promised all three that I'll teach them everything I know about making money online in return for them helping adding the content.
One guy will stay on once all the content is created to manage the site and make sure it's updated and get 20% of all profits.
CONTENT PLAN: The guy who's staying on will continue to create new reviews to keep the site fresh and updated. Users will also be able to submit their own reviews (this is the long term goal).
DESIGN: I've just hired a designer through oDesk and I'm writing up the design brief today. I'm expecting the site to be up in the next month.
MONETISATION: Affiliate links. Accounts are all set up and ready to be uploaded.
SEO: I'm doing very niche specific, white-side-of-grey hat SEO on the site with mostly blog comments, forum links, social bookmarks, press releases and social signals. If that's not getting me high enough, then I'll throw some homepage blog posts at it.
ADDITIONAL TRAFFIC: I have another site in this niche (more of an information site) that I can use to direct traffic at this site so I'll be making use of that as well.
LONG TERM PLAN: Become the number 1 resource in the niche for high quality reviews and information. Have this guy run it or a 20% profit share.
2. Teaching Website
A friend of mine purchased a site on the front page of an education niche and pushed it to number 1. It was making roughly $20k per month before it got a manual penalty and dropped rankings for all major KWs. He's since gotten out of the niche and so I'm pushing into it.
SETUP: The site is already set up and running. There's 26 pages of high quality content (articles range from between 500 and 6k words each of well written English).
CONTENT PLAN: I've got a guy writing 1 article a week of high quality, relevant content and uploading it to the site for $15. This guy knows the niche inside out and writes very well (he's my guest blog post writer).
DESIGN: The site currently has a premium WP theme on it and look good. I recently got a logo designed by the Fiver guy linked above and that really brought the site together.
SEO: This site has the most impressive SEO'd link profile of any site I have. It has niche relevant, contextual, high PR links (2 x PR7, 1 PR6, 1 PR5, and lots of PR4's and PR3's), and then some directory links to give it a big anchor text variation.
I'm currently only building guest blog posts to it from niche relevant sites and then throwing some high powered links at it to push it up.
I'm taking this one slowly and not just rushing in with huge quantities of low quality because I want this site to outlast any algorithm changes.
It's currently sitting on page 2 for on 30k exact match KW and page 3 for an 18k and 50k exact match term. These are only bringing in around 3 - 5 visitors per day but I know there's a lot more on offer when I hit page 1 and the long tails start to kick in.
ADDITIONAL TRAFFIC: Most guest blog posts are bringing in around 20 or 30 visitors when they're on the front page of their respective sites and so I'm going to continue with that.
LONG TERM PLAN: Take #1 for the three major KW's and laugh all the way to the bank.
3. Entertainment Website
Last year, I bought a PR6 dropped domain for $600 with the intent of just using it in a blog network. Once I reinstalled it, I found that it was getting between 80 - 130 visitors per day from organic search rankings and referral traffic.
When I did a bit more investigation, I found that it used to be the home page for a major tourist attraction in Asia and so has around 20k white hat links from lots of very big sites (including lots of links that still refer to it as the homepage for this attraction).
SETUP: Site is set up and running. There's 43 pages of content on the site and everything is in place.
DESIGN: The has a premium theme with a Fiverr logo. Honestly, it's probably one of the best looking sites I've ever created. I still get impressed every time I go there.
CONTENT PLAN: Given that this is an entertainment niche site for a specific Asian country, it's hard for me to find writers to write content. So, I decided to do something different:
I put a page up on the site called 'contribute' to see if anyone who stumbled onto the site would want to 'have your work shown in front of over 10,000 people a month and make a serious contribution to (the niche)'.
I added a contact form and let it run for a month. I didn't get any notification emails so I assumed that no-one was interested. Then I checked the contact form and it turns out that I had the settings wrong. 9 people had applied in that month, including some very good writers, and I've contacted them to see if they're still interested. Only one has gotten back to me so I'm going to set her up as a writer and see how it goes.
SEO: Given that this site already has a backlink profile that would make any webmaster jealous (over 20k links from sites including high PR links wikipedia, DMOZ, and lots of .edu's and .gov's), and the KW's I'm going to start chasing are very low competition (mostly local venues and events), I'm not going to be too aggressive with the link building campaign. It will consist of mostly blog comments, forum links, and social signals and I'll just rely on the authority of the site to get those pages to rank.
MONETISATION: How to monetise this site was a question I struggled with for a while. I tried Adsense and it just looked cheap. I looked at groupon affiliate links and it looked even cheaper, so I decided to look around other sites in the niche. I found one that's doing very well (PR5 with over 30k visitors a month and a big enough income to support 5 or 6 staff) that was selling advertising space on the site for $250/month. With between 10 and 15 ads running at any one point in time, this seemed like a good idea so I'm going with that.
I've set up the advertising platform (OIO Publisher) with a few dummy ads, and once the site content gets a bit thicker, I'm going to contact everyone who's asvertising both through adwords and on the other niche sites to see if they're interested.
ADDITIONAL TRAFFIC: The site already receives traffic from referring sites (including wikipedia) so I don't need to focus too heavily on this. I've set up a facebook page but and I'm going to use this to keep visitors engaged with the site.
LONG TERM PLAN: Get a writer on board who's passionate about the niche and then have them run the site for a small salary.
So, that's the plan. I'll update with how things go.
I've realised that just having my main money site as my sole source of income is stupid on two counts:
1. If it goes down, so do I
2. It effects the choices I make for how to run the site
So, to elimiante this issue, I'm diversifying so that I have multiple income streams coming in from 3 major sites:
1. Review website
About 18 months ago, a friend of mine who started a review website 5 years ago decided that he wanted to get rid of it. It was getting roughly 1500 visitors a month with minimal SEO and almost no work put into it (his biggest earning month was $1000).
We're good mates and he knew I'd look after it so he basically gave it to me.
Since then, I've done nothing with it, not even change the affiliate links, and he's kept making money from it. It's time to get this up and running as there's only one other site in this niche and it's making a killing.
SITE SETUP: One of the big things that was stopping me from going ahead with this is the amount of physical work that needs to be put in to getting the reviews up on the site. There's currently 250 on the site that will need to be transferred over to the new website but they only cover about 15 products. There 25 key products that I need to add to the site before launch and another 100 I would like to have up in the next few months. If I'm adding at least 5 reviews for each, that's a lot of work.
To get around this, I've got three guys on board to help me with the transfer. I've promised all three that I'll teach them everything I know about making money online in return for them helping adding the content.
One guy will stay on once all the content is created to manage the site and make sure it's updated and get 20% of all profits.
CONTENT PLAN: The guy who's staying on will continue to create new reviews to keep the site fresh and updated. Users will also be able to submit their own reviews (this is the long term goal).
DESIGN: I've just hired a designer through oDesk and I'm writing up the design brief today. I'm expecting the site to be up in the next month.
MONETISATION: Affiliate links. Accounts are all set up and ready to be uploaded.
SEO: I'm doing very niche specific, white-side-of-grey hat SEO on the site with mostly blog comments, forum links, social bookmarks, press releases and social signals. If that's not getting me high enough, then I'll throw some homepage blog posts at it.
ADDITIONAL TRAFFIC: I have another site in this niche (more of an information site) that I can use to direct traffic at this site so I'll be making use of that as well.
LONG TERM PLAN: Become the number 1 resource in the niche for high quality reviews and information. Have this guy run it or a 20% profit share.
2. Teaching Website
A friend of mine purchased a site on the front page of an education niche and pushed it to number 1. It was making roughly $20k per month before it got a manual penalty and dropped rankings for all major KWs. He's since gotten out of the niche and so I'm pushing into it.
SETUP: The site is already set up and running. There's 26 pages of high quality content (articles range from between 500 and 6k words each of well written English).
CONTENT PLAN: I've got a guy writing 1 article a week of high quality, relevant content and uploading it to the site for $15. This guy knows the niche inside out and writes very well (he's my guest blog post writer).
DESIGN: The site currently has a premium WP theme on it and look good. I recently got a logo designed by the Fiver guy linked above and that really brought the site together.
SEO: This site has the most impressive SEO'd link profile of any site I have. It has niche relevant, contextual, high PR links (2 x PR7, 1 PR6, 1 PR5, and lots of PR4's and PR3's), and then some directory links to give it a big anchor text variation.
I'm currently only building guest blog posts to it from niche relevant sites and then throwing some high powered links at it to push it up.
I'm taking this one slowly and not just rushing in with huge quantities of low quality because I want this site to outlast any algorithm changes.
It's currently sitting on page 2 for on 30k exact match KW and page 3 for an 18k and 50k exact match term. These are only bringing in around 3 - 5 visitors per day but I know there's a lot more on offer when I hit page 1 and the long tails start to kick in.
ADDITIONAL TRAFFIC: Most guest blog posts are bringing in around 20 or 30 visitors when they're on the front page of their respective sites and so I'm going to continue with that.
LONG TERM PLAN: Take #1 for the three major KW's and laugh all the way to the bank.
3. Entertainment Website
Last year, I bought a PR6 dropped domain for $600 with the intent of just using it in a blog network. Once I reinstalled it, I found that it was getting between 80 - 130 visitors per day from organic search rankings and referral traffic.
When I did a bit more investigation, I found that it used to be the home page for a major tourist attraction in Asia and so has around 20k white hat links from lots of very big sites (including lots of links that still refer to it as the homepage for this attraction).
SETUP: Site is set up and running. There's 43 pages of content on the site and everything is in place.
DESIGN: The has a premium theme with a Fiverr logo. Honestly, it's probably one of the best looking sites I've ever created. I still get impressed every time I go there.
CONTENT PLAN: Given that this is an entertainment niche site for a specific Asian country, it's hard for me to find writers to write content. So, I decided to do something different:
I put a page up on the site called 'contribute' to see if anyone who stumbled onto the site would want to 'have your work shown in front of over 10,000 people a month and make a serious contribution to (the niche)'.
I added a contact form and let it run for a month. I didn't get any notification emails so I assumed that no-one was interested. Then I checked the contact form and it turns out that I had the settings wrong. 9 people had applied in that month, including some very good writers, and I've contacted them to see if they're still interested. Only one has gotten back to me so I'm going to set her up as a writer and see how it goes.
SEO: Given that this site already has a backlink profile that would make any webmaster jealous (over 20k links from sites including high PR links wikipedia, DMOZ, and lots of .edu's and .gov's), and the KW's I'm going to start chasing are very low competition (mostly local venues and events), I'm not going to be too aggressive with the link building campaign. It will consist of mostly blog comments, forum links, and social signals and I'll just rely on the authority of the site to get those pages to rank.
MONETISATION: How to monetise this site was a question I struggled with for a while. I tried Adsense and it just looked cheap. I looked at groupon affiliate links and it looked even cheaper, so I decided to look around other sites in the niche. I found one that's doing very well (PR5 with over 30k visitors a month and a big enough income to support 5 or 6 staff) that was selling advertising space on the site for $250/month. With between 10 and 15 ads running at any one point in time, this seemed like a good idea so I'm going with that.
I've set up the advertising platform (OIO Publisher) with a few dummy ads, and once the site content gets a bit thicker, I'm going to contact everyone who's asvertising both through adwords and on the other niche sites to see if they're interested.
ADDITIONAL TRAFFIC: The site already receives traffic from referring sites (including wikipedia) so I don't need to focus too heavily on this. I've set up a facebook page but and I'm going to use this to keep visitors engaged with the site.
LONG TERM PLAN: Get a writer on board who's passionate about the niche and then have them run the site for a small salary.
So, that's the plan. I'll update with how things go.
LESSON LEARNED: Fresh content makes a difference
I started an experiment on the 14th of October to see just how much of an impact fresh content could make to organic traffic.
For the last 17 days I've added a new article (between 300 and 1200 words) to the site every 2 days and haven't changed the ongoing SEO work I'm having done to the site (I have a guy employed full time building niche relevant blog comments and forum links).
Organic traffic is up from 1089 visitors on the 13th October to 1491 on 1st November. That's a 36% increase in just over 2 weeks. Not bad if you ask me.
And yes, it could be because of the SEO work that's finally taking off but the majority of the new traffic is coming to the site is finding it's way through long tails that aren't associated with the pages that are getting links built to them so I highly doubt it.
So, make sure that fresh content is being pumped out all the time.
I started an experiment on the 14th of October to see just how much of an impact fresh content could make to organic traffic.
For the last 17 days I've added a new article (between 300 and 1200 words) to the site every 2 days and haven't changed the ongoing SEO work I'm having done to the site (I have a guy employed full time building niche relevant blog comments and forum links).
Organic traffic is up from 1089 visitors on the 13th October to 1491 on 1st November. That's a 36% increase in just over 2 weeks. Not bad if you ask me.
And yes, it could be because of the SEO work that's finally taking off but the majority of the new traffic is coming to the site is finding it's way through long tails that aren't associated with the pages that are getting links built to them so I highly doubt it.
So, make sure that fresh content is being pumped out all the time.
LESSON LEARNED: Just because people aren't reading your content, it doesn't actually meant that it's not relevant.
My teaching site is currently bouncing between the bottom of page 1 and the top of page 2.
When it's at the top of page two, the average pages per visit is 1.54, the average time on site is between 30 seconds and a 1:00.
When it's at the bottom of page one, the average pages per visit is 8, the average time on site is a little under 10 minutes.
Lesson learned: SERPs effect onsite metrics.
My teaching site is currently bouncing between the bottom of page 1 and the top of page 2.
When it's at the top of page two, the average pages per visit is 1.54, the average time on site is between 30 seconds and a 1:00.
When it's at the bottom of page one, the average pages per visit is 8, the average time on site is a little under 10 minutes.
Lesson learned: SERPs effect onsite metrics.
hey leigh,
how are you going about finding / doing guest posts?
scrapebox for related sites and then manually contact and offer money / links in exchange?
or are you going through forums, guest post directories etc to find people,
or guest posting via private blog network.
imo, go social. simplepickup went from 0 to 440k youtube subscribers in roughly a year
how are you going about finding / doing guest posts?
scrapebox for related sites and then manually contact and offer money / links in exchange?
or are you going through forums, guest post directories etc to find people,
or guest posting via private blog network.
imo, go social. simplepickup went from 0 to 440k youtube subscribers in roughly a year
If anyone's looking for marketing advice, you have to check out: http://marketingsherpa.com
The sheer amount of free information of case studies, techniques, and results is mind blowing. Well worth the read.
The sheer amount of free information of case studies, techniques, and results is mind blowing. Well worth the read.
No worries mate. Glad you got what you were looking for.
He's just one guy trying to make a buck doing what he loves and he's producing quality at a more than reasonable price. I'm more than happy to pimp guys like that out.
I've used him for 6 or 7 projects now and he delivers every time without fail. As long as you give him a details brief, you end up with exactly what you want.
He's just one guy trying to make a buck doing what he loves and he's producing quality at a more than reasonable price. I'm more than happy to pimp guys like that out.
I've used him for 6 or 7 projects now and he delivers every time without fail. As long as you give him a details brief, you end up with exactly what you want.
My affiliate site is starting to see some big moves. On the back of some hard core links (PR7 and solid guest blog posts), it's just jumped to #3 for it's main KW (165,000 exact searches / month). The only problem is that the top three positions are all adsense results meaning that I'm really only at #6.
Traffic is up to around 150 people per day and almost all of that is from the main KW.
From what I've been reading, the key to drawing serious long tail traffic is to get at least 50 pages up on your site so I'm busy pumping high quality content on there. I've got a guest blog post writer putting up 1 post a week ($15 to come up with the article idea, create a catchy headline, write 500 words, find a picture, and upload it onto the site) and I'm putting up articles as they come to mind. I have about 25 at the moment and it's growing steadily.
The next step for me with this site is to keep getting more guest blog posts up, more articles on the site, and chase down more seriously high PR links. I've just been put in contact with a woman who can line up PR8 links (DA86) (at around $250/month) so I'm going to set one or two up and see what that does to the site.
The review site is coming along. I've set up the management systems to look after the guys uploading content and they're getting stuck into it. They've added about 10 products and 30 reviews to the site in the last 2 weeks and will be adding 6 products and 30 reviews per week for the next 4 weeks until we launch it.
I've made one the manager and he's finally starting to take control which is meaning I'm able to step back and let him do his thing.
The entertainment site is coming along well as well. I've got one very dedicated contributor and another 2 who submit articles form time to time. I'm starting to see long tail traffic for all the articles I've added to the site without any linkbuilding (just on the site authority) so I'm going to do a little bit of link building and see what happens there. Traffic is up from around 60 visitors per day to around 100. My goal is to get it up to 500 visitors per day and then start hunting for advertisers.
Traffic is up to around 150 people per day and almost all of that is from the main KW.
From what I've been reading, the key to drawing serious long tail traffic is to get at least 50 pages up on your site so I'm busy pumping high quality content on there. I've got a guest blog post writer putting up 1 post a week ($15 to come up with the article idea, create a catchy headline, write 500 words, find a picture, and upload it onto the site) and I'm putting up articles as they come to mind. I have about 25 at the moment and it's growing steadily.
The next step for me with this site is to keep getting more guest blog posts up, more articles on the site, and chase down more seriously high PR links. I've just been put in contact with a woman who can line up PR8 links (DA86) (at around $250/month) so I'm going to set one or two up and see what that does to the site.
The review site is coming along. I've set up the management systems to look after the guys uploading content and they're getting stuck into it. They've added about 10 products and 30 reviews to the site in the last 2 weeks and will be adding 6 products and 30 reviews per week for the next 4 weeks until we launch it.
I've made one the manager and he's finally starting to take control which is meaning I'm able to step back and let him do his thing.
The entertainment site is coming along well as well. I've got one very dedicated contributor and another 2 who submit articles form time to time. I'm starting to see long tail traffic for all the articles I've added to the site without any linkbuilding (just on the site authority) so I'm going to do a little bit of link building and see what happens there. Traffic is up from around 60 visitors per day to around 100. My goal is to get it up to 500 visitors per day and then start hunting for advertisers.
LESSON LEARNED: The Reddit Effect
One of my articles just got upvoted to the top spot in a niche relevant sub-reddit's. Because of that, I've had 18 times my daily traffic land on the site and it's only lunch time.
The traffic doesn't seem especially sticky or well converting but even if just a fraction of it converts, it's going to be a massive boost.
One of my articles just got upvoted to the top spot in a niche relevant sub-reddit's. Because of that, I've had 18 times my daily traffic land on the site and it's only lunch time.
The traffic doesn't seem especially sticky or well converting but even if just a fraction of it converts, it's going to be a massive boost.
/r/seduction ++ I think reddit killed your site though. It's not loading for me as of right now (5:40p)
If it's crashed, cPanel is going to be non-responsive as well. Unless there is a 'hard power cycle' option on an admin panel the host controls, your best bet is to have them reboot it. Might be better to move to a dedicated host also - they generally respond to tickets faster. Or get a backup server that mirrors your site every day, and then if this happens just update the DNS to send traffic to the mirror.
Once you get it solved, might want to look into a CDN solution (e.g. CloudFlare) to minimize down time.
This tells of how a wordpress a site running on a Raspberry Pi and survived being frontpaged on Hacker News, if you're using wordpress also you should use whatever caching plugin he's using.
pipress.vo3.net | Wordpress running on Raspberry Pi server
pipress.vo3.net | Wordpress running on Raspberry Pi server
I've got a CDN running at the moment. I'm using MaxCDN. They had a special deal that I jumped on and it seemed to work great.
Thanks for the heads up though. I think I'm just going to go for a private server.
If your site is crashing due to too much traffic I would look into upgrading to a better VPS or even a dedicated server.
Edit: Looks like you're doing that already. Definitely worth the money considering how much money downtime costs.
Edit: Looks like you're doing that already. Definitely worth the money considering how much money downtime costs.
Yeah, going for a managed with a 100mb port. I've just been put in touch with some the guys at knowenhost and they're going to walk me through it.
I'm going to try pursuing Reddit as a traffic source and if it works out, I'm going to need all the bandwidth I can get.