Confessions of a Peasant.

Houdas

Member
Dec 18, 2006
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Since joining this forum in 2006, I have been mostly quiet as I prefer listening and learning to talking. Within these six years, I tried to learn as much as my brain is capable of. Compared to most guys there I am still a peasant, but still, if this thread helps some noobs noober than me, I would be happy. This is not a study about how much some site earns, which ranks does it have or how much I burned in PPC. This is just a simple walk-through of the process of building a simple content website I decided to put together.

So I launched my first serious content website in May 2012. Why content website? First, I like the idea of doing a long-term project with something actually valuable for people. Second, I can't afford just creating some landers and throwing a bunch of PPC traffic at them. I don't know shit about PPC. So, this case study will be about me creating a content website, things that I wouldn't do again and things I would have done if I knew back then. I like things simple and easy, so I will try to be brief and specific. Also, I tried to build the site with the goal to spend as little as possible, as my peasant budget is tight.

Niche
For a long time, I couldn't decide for any particular niche. It was frustrating, because I didn't want to just jump into one blindly and after couple weeks of hard work realize that I have zero chance. I had some favorites, but couldn't decide for one of them. And then it struck me – one of my best friends is actually a well known health / nutrition / fitness experts in Central Europe and I am working with him – creating and maintaining his on-line projects, consulting for him etc. I work with this guy since 2005 and I learned quite a lot about the health niche during that time, so I thought, I will go with that. I knew that this niche is quite difficult, but I felt like having an expert behind my back is such a big advantage that I would be stupid not to do it. So I talked with him and he agreed that he will help me with content curation and the overall supervision of the direction the website will take. It definitely helped that I worked with him before and I can say that my work helped him to get where he is now, so it is a mutually beneficial cooperation.

Peasant tip: Look for people that could help you, in any way. Don't be a lonesome hero if you are starting. Offer some of your skills. Give and take.

Content
I am lazy. Like not generally lazy, but I am just not a good writer. So I looked at various way of getting content. The great thing was that my friend has written a lot about health/nutrition/fitness etc. – a blog with many articles, many posts on forums, he has an on-line counseling website where people ask questions and he answers them. A goldmine of quality content. Remember when I said that he is a well-known expert in Central Europe? Well, all of this content was written in Czech language. So, I just translated it to English and basically got a lot of quality content for free. With his permission of course... I think. Based on that, I discovered another way of getting a good content easily – foreign books. What I do is I go to Google Books, search for German/Czech/Russian/whatever books in the health niche, find my content here and translate it. Now - I am not saying you should just blindly copy the text and translate it, because that would be stupid and you need to know what you are talking about on your website. You should curate your content and put your articles together in such a way that they actually not only make sense, but give a real value and advice to your visitors. Remember, you build content for people, not for Google. But it still saves a ton of time, because you are not writing your articles from zero. You don't need to think about what to write – you just need to combine several sources into one.

Peasant tip: There are always new ways of how to get content. Utilize existing, publicly available resources.

Domain, hosting
I am not crazy about a nice domain name. I picked a .com domain with a keyword in it, but it's not an EMD. Whatever, domain is just a domain, if it sounds good, is easily written and reasonably short, take it. As for hosting, choose whatever suits you. Just remember that if you are on a tight budget, there is always a bunch of promo codes laying around the net for various hosting companies, so use them.

Peasant tip: Don't worry about domain name so much. The first impression is usually right – if you like it, go with it.

Building the site
This IMHO is the point which I think many people are giving too much attention to. I mean, come on, it's 2013. You can build a site in 10 minutes. I am a web developer, but still. I chose Wordpress and I didn't give a crap about what SEO-plugins it has installed or if I have the best optimized theme out there. I just did the basics – titles, meta descriptions, keywords in URLs and sitemap. Create a non-crappy logo (I am not a designer, so what, anybody can do a basic logo, comeon), change the default theme a bit so it doesn't look that generic and that's it. You may think that if I want to create a long-term content website that I should care more about the design of it. That's correct, but not now. Don't get distracted by polishing when you should be hammering. I am still talking about very early stage of a website – like first day. Nobody knows your site yet, so don't spend five hours in Photoshop designing some stupid gradient or shit. The goal right now is not making the most beautiful site out there, just to make the site trustworthy and serious looking. Instead of working on fancy graphics, put that time and effort into „About“ and „Contact“ pages. Put your photo on the site if you feel like it. Give your visitors the feeling like there is a live person behind the site. People are social creatures and want to interact, so give them ways of doing so.

Peasant tip: While it's important to get all the basics right, again – don't worry about technical stuff too much at this point. Get the site going, make it look nice and at least a bit unique and move on.

Growing the site, making some starting money
I am in this stage right now so I will share experience I have up until now. For a long time, the only thing I did was adding articles. Instead of setting up the whole post scheduling thing, I manually published around 100 articles before getting annoyed and making a huge mistake. I discovered Guest blogging: Looking for guest bloggers or guest post? Join MyBlogGuest! and being a lazy bastard I am, I thought „hmm, free content without any work!“. Stupid me. I published a request for guest bloggers for my website. I don't know why (maybe because the site got PR4), but I got so many responses that the only thing I did for next couple of weeks was publishing shitty articles with one or two outbound links. Stupid, stupid me. On the other hand, the organic traffic went up since then. Significantly. And, like a lightning from a clear sky, I got an offer for publishing two articles and for each one, I'll get $50. Another guy offered me $10 for every article I publish for him. This time, I actually made sure that the articles are written by somebody with a brain that they and offer a real value, so it's a win-win situation. This got me thinking and I realized that there really are many ways of making (even if small) money online and it's bad to focus on one or two of them, especially in the beginning. There is more than AdSense. Right now I am looking at BuySellAds.com, but I will wait until I have bigger traffic. Do you know any Blog Ad networks who accept low-mid traffic websites?

So, right now, I am in process of growing the site. I have to focus on social media. I suck at it. I bought 250 Facebook followers and they all suck. Fuckers don't even like my posts. Haha. Also bought 2000 Twitter followers. Yeah I know, but this is purely for the sake of looking at least a bit like a brand. Nobody wants to have a Twitter account with 1-3 followers. As soon as my 2000 followers were in, more naturally started to follow me. People are sheep, but who am I to complain.

Last but not least, some random peasant tips:
  • Go to myblogguest.com if you want guest bloggers, but be very picky about the quality of the posts. I manually got through ~400 articles and around 60% of them were absolute rubbish.
  • In the beginning, don't worry about traffic stats that much. They suck anyway. If you want to have some numbers, statcounter.com is enough.
  • Engage with people. It's all about people. Google is not people. Now go read it a hundred times over.
  • Don't get discouraged. I was too weak and got discouraged many times. I lost interest when my site didn't get big enough traffic after some time. This is wrong. Keep at it. The moment you give up is usually right before the moment things will get off the ground.
  • Go to Social Media Networks Currently Tracked By KnowEm and make account on all social networks in your niche.
  • Develop your skills. It helped me immensely that I know PHP, HTML, CSS, JS and all that. I can do things quickly. That's why my clients love me. I hate repetitive work, so I build tools for all the automation. Technology is there to help, so use it.
  • Don't want to sound like yo mama, but... don't forget that there is a world outside. Screw all this, you still want to meet people, talk with them and live your life. If your site doesn't make it, so what? Start another one, or do something else. Quite interestingly, as soon as I started to care about my actual life, my work and my projects started getting better too. Go out now.
 
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Nice post Houdas. Too bad you made the mistake with the guest bloggers. Have you ever thought to outsource the content writing?

You haven't mentioned link building. How have you approached this? And how are the sales up till now?

Keep it going!
 
I discovered Guest blogging: Looking for guest bloggers or guest post? Join MyBlogGuest! and being a lazy bastard I am, I thought „hmm, free content without any work!“. Stupid me. I published a request for guest bloggers for my website. I don't know why (maybe because the site got PR4), but I got so many responses that the only thing I did for next couple of weeks was publishing shitty articles with one or two outbound links. Stupid, stupid me. On the other hand, the organic traffic went up since then. Significantly.

The content that they give you to put up for them, is it always unique? Do you run it through copyscape or something else to make sure?

Great post by the way!
 
techmen:
Yes I have tried to outsource it, but the problem is that my budget is really tight. I am no baller, I have enough to make a living (doing webdesign) and so I cannot afford to pay $500+/month for regular articles. As for link building, again nothing special, nothing black hat - I just registered the site to some niche directories, did some blog commenting (which worked nicely for me) and put links on some of my existing projects. Link building is my weakest skill, I don't know how to do it properly. But, MajesticSEO shows ~1700 backlinks from 85 domains, so at least the foundation is there I guess.

CCarter:
The content seems to be unique, but most of the time, it is clearly spun. Around 30% of the articles had so bad grammar that I couldn't believe it. People who entitle themselves as "copywriting experts" write things like "Health are a difficult theme so there is always a need to learning more". Fuck me. But the strange thing is, that most of the articles I published this way is indexed are Google and create some longtail traffic.

As for some numbers, it's really nothing to be proud of yet. Currently, the site has ~200 articles (100 of them from myblogguest, 100 by me), gets around 100 visitors a day and makes around ~$50/month. But, I didn't create the site to have quick results. I want to learn this shit and make the mistakes as soon as possible to learn from them. I work on the site daily and create new content and I see the number slowly going up.

Also, I had goal to rank for my main keyword, which is done now (3rd place in Google). I can clearly see how big difference is to be on 5th / 4th / 3rd place in terms of traffic. It's insane. I want to be first someday :)
 
techmen:
Yes I have tried to outsource it, but the problem is that my budget is really tight. I am no baller, I have enough to make a living (doing webdesign) and so I cannot afford to pay $500+/month for regular articles. As for link building, again nothing special, nothing black hat - I just registered the site to some niche directories, did some blog commenting (which worked nicely for me) and put links on some of my existing projects. Link building is my weakest skill, I don't know how to do it properly. But, MajesticSEO shows ~1700 backlinks from 85 domains, so at least the foundation is there I guess.
Ah, outsourcing doesn't have to cost you $500. On Odesk or iWriter you can get content for about $3 a piece. That's better than these guest bloggers you're having now. But if you're tight on a budget I'd find a good wordspinner and do the math. As for the link building I'm no expert either but if you can find come niche relevant blogs/ forums and put some relevant comments that's ok.

CCarter:
As for some numbers, it's really nothing to be proud of yet. Currently, the site has ~200 articles (100 of them from myblogguest, 100 by me), gets around 100 visitors a day and makes around ~$50/month.

100 visitors a day can make you more than $50/month. Now you're making $50/(100x30)=0,016 per visitor. My average was 0,20 per visitor in 2012.
Maybe you can try to get better conversions by improving your pages.
 
Ah, outsourcing doesn't have to cost you $500. On Odesk or iWriter you can get content for about $3 a piece. That's better than these guest bloggers you're having now. But if you're tight on a budget I'd find a good wordspinner and do the math. As for the link building I'm no expert either but if you can find come niche relevant blogs/ forums and put some relevant comments that's ok.
Sites like iWriter and Textbroker are increasingly full of people doing this. It actually was like that way before wordai.

Not worth the time IMO.

(NinjaProTip: be wary buying clickbank sites on flippa. always insist on seeing at least a large percentage of the "product" first. Because with a lot of them the product is nothing more than a pdf full of stolen/spun content.)
 
Yeah, that's the problem. I tried oDest before (not iWriter though) and the quality of the articles (in the low price range) was low aswell. I guess you get what you pay for. So my mistake was thinking "I better get shitty guest posts for free than shitty articles for money". Now I know both of these options are wrong.

So now I am writing my content myself. I am not the best writer, but as I stated in my original post, books and old online content (archive.org is great) are helping me a lot. I have a problem writing a new article from scratch, but I am actually quite good at rewriting an existing content in such a way that it keeps the quality, sense and correct grammar. Slow, but worth it in a long timeframe IMO.

I guess I'll share some more info about the site and how it went from start to today:

The site was started in May 2012 and during the first month I put around ~30 manually written articles on it. In the term of backlinks, I only registered the domain to various free niche directories and did blog commenting. I knew a vast majority of blog comments are no-follow, but I did it anyway because I heard it's good to have no-follow backlinks to have a diverse backlink profile. I used my first name, my site URL and some other names for anchors. MajesticSEO showed these backlinks quickly, but I still don't know if they have any impact on rankings. About rankings - my site was nowhere to be found for first 2-3 months. It was indexed, but it had close to zero natural traffic. No longtails, but there was some traffic from google image search - I learned that optimizing the images is important too (alt / title tags, surrounding text).

I guess my another mistake at that time was that I didn't make any proper keyword research - I just created content on various topics. Maybe if I wrote 100 articles targeted at good longtail keywords, my traffic would be significantly bigger, but yeah I didn't. Anyway, in the last 3 months I am seeing a rising longtail traffic, from 1-5 a day to 50-100 a day, which is small but I am happy with the trend. I am doing no interlinking in the articles, because I admit I was too lazy to do it... maybe some WP plugin will do that?
 
Yeah, that's the problem. I tried oDest before (not iWriter though) and the quality of the articles (in the low price range) was low aswell. I guess you get what you pay for. So my mistake was thinking "I better get shitty guest posts for free than shitty articles for money". Now I know both of these options are wrong.
My first site had shitty articles too but unique though. Although shitty I got sales from them. I'd advice to leave them as they are and continue with better articles. When you really don't like some you can redirect.

I am doing no interlinking in the articles, because I admit I was too lazy to do it... maybe some WP plugin will do that?
I've read here and there that interlinking will make a difference but I've seen no difference after I did it on one site. I've no experience with plugins for interlinking but I don't believe it will help.

Anyway, I'd stay on this path you're on and try to optimize your sales page to get a better CTR.
 
I would argue that interlinking from shitty articles is even more important. Yet, this has nothing to do with SEO... If you have a shitty article, the person reading is gonna either hit the back button or click a link and move on.

Give them somewhere to go, where the content is good!
 
In-content interlinking is the biggest onsite SEO factor! Don't use a plugin since they are javascript based most of the time and don't actually hardcode the backlink.

You want to increase traffic quickly? Go to each article and backlink to two other articles within the content.

You really want to increase traffic from SERP? Add 1-3 outbound links (authority site, niche related, etc) in the content as well.

You guy have a bunch of unique content and can't get them to rank because you are missing out on the biggest ranking factors! Take 1-3 hours of your day, get a spreadsheet of all your articles and backlink and track what is linked to what. One month later come back and re-evaluate what pages got the biggest boost versus best time on site/conversion. Add one more link to all the articles to the top 5-10 pages that have the best conversion rate (most likely to turn into a sales/lead or Ctr). Now your increasing time on site, reducing bounce rate, and increasing conversions, while flying through the SERPs.
 
Thanks guys, I will work on interlinking ASAP. Also CCarter, I totally forgot about linking to authority sites, damn. Is it okay to open the outbound links in new window? I don't want them to completely leave my site...
 
I would think about it from your experience. If you open a link and then leave the site, if it was a good site you'll go back. Trust me, don't try to "hog" or tie down the visitors. They will come back, and if they don't them they weren't goin to convert in the first place. I always use links in the same window. Your going to gain more benefit from new traffic cause of new Search visitors than wasting time on people that want to leave yor site. At the end of the day, they will hit the back button on the land page, or your page and go back to the search if they don't find what they are looking for. It was hard for me to let go too, but once you do, you'll see your rankings increase and never think twice about it again.
 
Great thread. Thanks everyone.

I have a questions about interlinking, because I've been paying special attention to that lately. But, do you guys ever link back to the homepage from within content with variations on the main short tails in your niche? I've seen people do this a lot, but it seems pretty unnatural to me, like something that'd throw a red flag, if not now then in the future.
 
IMO, the point of interlinking is not linking to homepage. Instead, link between related articles / pages.
 
Thanks for responding, Houdas. After posting that question, I employed my actual brain and it occurred to me that people probably do the homepage linking solely for some supposed SEO benefit for their main short tails. That, to me, combined with the fact that it looks pretty unnatural, makes it a bad idea.

I'm still trying to divest myself of all tendencies to think of SEO in that way, of gaming anything, and focus on user experience, natural linking on and off site, etc. It's funny how hard that is to do. It must be my inner slacker looking for an easy win.
 
Techmen, you forgot to say that iWriter has Elite and Premium writers. I mean some people complain about quality of standard writers, so Premium and Elite writers at iWriter are the solution to this issue. However, the articles produced by these writers must be used for website pages. In general, articles at iWriter are cheap.
 
The Problem with iwriter is, that you have to be very specific to prevent getting ripped off. Then, you also have to micromanage A LOT. It is a pain in the ass to handle dozens of writers at the same time, giving them feedback, correcting errors and all the stress that comes with handling the scammy types. Save up your pennies, go to elance, odesk - you name it and post a nice, juicy job to attract decent people who won't bog you down and suck up your time.

Don't get me wrong, i like to cultivate a close relationship with my writers and i can because i don't have to deal with an army of "yes sir, thank you sirs" on iwriter.