Gold [Journey] Growing An Informational Intent Site To $10,000 A Month From Scratch!

[RogerFederer]

Hey shaunm, thank you very much for your detailed posts. It really helped me, getting a better picture of what your actual work is looking like and which techniques you are using.

My goal is it to have an income source while keeping my normal job for the beginning. Can I manage to do this with a blog with 5-6 good quality posts which I can promote in forums, quora and maybe other blog comments (like you said in your post)? Or will that just take to much time?

Thanks in advance and good luck to you,

Stefan

 

[shaunm]

Hey shaunm, thank you very much for your detailed posts. It really helped me, getting a better picture of what your actual work is looking like and which techniques you are using.

My goal is it to have an income source while keeping my normal job for the beginning. Can I manage to do this with a blog with 5-6 good quality posts which I can promote in forums, quora and maybe other blog comments (like you said in your post)? Or will that just take to much time?

Thanks in advance and good luck to you,

Stefan

I guess that you can technically go it with 1 post but traffic leaking from forums, Quora, and blog comments is often harder than it sounds, especially when your goal is to pull converting traffic to your own projects too. SEO would be the main thing that I would go with as its more passive but needs more articles in my experience.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1590 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 2 - 1677 Words - Outsourced.

The offline stuff I have on Tuesday and Thursday will go back to normal from next week so it should be back to regular working of 2 articles or more myself a day plus whatever my freelancers can deliver.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1975 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 2 - 1684 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 3 - 1508 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 4 - 1499 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 5 - 2005 Words.
  
• Article 6 - 1900 Words.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1969 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 2 - 2080 Words.
  
• Article 3 - 1478 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 4 - 1714 Words.

I have also uploaded a new video going over a day in the life of me as a full-time affiliate blogger that some people following along may get some value out of.

 

[shaunm]

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. Also, I accidentally deleted the original images so I have had to use the ones from Quora and their compression is not the best so they are a bit distorted but they still serve their purpose. The people on Quora seem to be browsing about a potential hobby rather than actually taking part in it some this is not meant as an extensive guide but it may still help some people.

8 Tips That May Help To Speed Up Your Blog

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The image above is the page load time for one of the pages on one of my affiliate blogs from the free GTMetrix site speed checker. As you can see, the page was fully loaded in less than 0.6 seconds so I hope that these insights will help anyone else looking to improve their page load times on their own blogs too. There are a number of steps that you can take and although you don't have to implement them all, the more that you implement with your own blogs the faster your own blog pages are likley to load for a visitor.

Hosting

One of the quickest and most effective things that you are able to do with your blogs to help improve your page load times is to get your domain hosted on a better hosting provider. So many people new to blogging go with services such as Bluehost and Hostgator that are all owned by EIG as so many other bloggers recommend them in their getting started guide for bloggers.

Unfortunately, both companies are pretty bad and are usually only recommended by these bloggers due to them having high affiliate commissions. There are much better and faster-hosting companies out there that you are able to use that usually offer much lower commissions than the EIG hosting companies so not many people promote them.

At the time of writing, my money site network is split pretty evenly with half being hosted on Cloudways and half being hosted on Site grounds. Although both have very similar page load times once your blog has been taken through the steps below, I feel that Sitegrounds is currently the better option as it is so user friendly and even if you are brand new to blogging, you should be able to easily set the package up and get it going with ease.

One little side note that I would highly recommend that you do during your hosting set up is to try and ensure that your domain will be on a server cluster as close to your primary target audience as possible. For example, I target the English speaking markets and with the USA being the highest population English speaking market, I try to ensure that my domains are hosted on server clusters in the USA. When setting your hosting package up, it is usually easy to do this and it's usually just a drop-down option where you select USA as your server cluster.

Taking this simple step can help improve your page load times as the server will be closer to the majority of your audience so when the request a page from the server, the data has less distance to travel. Although it may only save your 0.1 of a second, every little helps and it all adds up as you add the following steps below.

Image Optimization

Next up has to be image optimization and I go over my full process on how I optimize my images for the fasted possible load speeds in the video above. Depending on the quality of your image, you can sometimes take an image that is 4MB in size down to less than 100KB when optimized correctly. If you have multiple images on your blog posts then this can actually end up shaving a surprising amount of time of your page load speed.

Although I do into a little more detail and show live examples in the video above, the basics of the process is as follows:-

• If you are using Wordpress as your blog's content management system then resize the image before uploading it to your blog. The majority of modern versions of Wordpress will be able to natively load an image that is 1200px wide or less. If you are using an old version of Wordpress though, its native image loading may still be restricted to images that are 768px wide or less.
• Prior to uploading your image to your blog, upload it to a free image compression service such as tinypng.com as it can drastically reduce the file size of your images without sacrificing the image quality.
• Have the shortpixel plugin installed on your Wordpress blog prior to uploading your image. Although this is a freemium plugin, the free 100 credits a month should be enough for most people and it can further reduce the image size in addition to the improvements tinypng made.

This will ensure that all of the images on your page are as small as possible while still offering excellent image quality to anyone viewing them. As you can potentially be reducing the file size of every image on your blog post by over 97.5% by running them through this process, it can drastically improve the load times of your content while the process to optimize them can be done in less than 30 seconds with ease.

Theme

Using a theme that has been specifically designed for speed is another quick and easy step that you are able to implement to further reduce the page load speeds of your blog posts. I used the slow and clunky colormag and newspaper themes on my domains for years but I recently made the switch over to the free version of the Astra theme and I won't be going back.

Although I haven't actually used the OceanWP theme myself, I hear that it is just as fast as the Astra theme so it might be worth checking out too. Both Astra and OceanWP have been optimized for speed and had all of the things that slow a Wordpress theme down removed from them to keep your blog posts loading as quickly and easily as possible.

General Plugins

The plugins that you use on your domain can also end up slowing your page load speed down. Due to there being so many plugins that all do different things, it's hard to make a list of what is likley to slow your blog down. The easiest way to see if you are having issues with this is to probably use the free GTMetrixs page load speed checker and use their Waterfall tab shown by the red arrows in the image below.

This will allow you to see the name and load times of the various things loading on your blog page. If you see any that are names of the plugins that you use then it might be an idea to play around with finding an alternative plugin that has been optimized for speed.

Caching Plugin

A caching plugin can be hit or miss in my experience and there is no need to go off and pay for a premium, paid plugin such as WPRocket. I have tried WPRocket previously and it actually ended up causing my blog posts to load at a slower speed than some of the free alternatives.

Although there are a number of blog posts that you are able to use to cache your blog, I personally use the Autoptimize plugin. I have tried the majority of the other caching plugins out there and nothing has been as easy to set up or as quick as Autoptimize to date.

You will likley be able to set Autoptimize up in less than a minute and get >80% of the speed benefit that it can offer you. If you want to get that final 20% then you can spend time playing with the plugin but I just set and forget it with the following settings in the plugin.

On the “JS, CSS, & HTML” tab I have the following options turned on:-

• Optimize JavaScript Code.
• Aggregate JS-files.
• Optimize CSS Code.
• Aggregate CSS-files.
• Also aggregate inline CSS.
• Optimize HTML Code.
• Save aggregated script/css as static files.
• Minify excluded CSS and JS files.

On the “images” tab I just turn on “Lazy-load images” as I prefer to manually do the ShortPixle stuff myself but you can tick that box if you wish.

The two-speed tests above are from the exact same page on one of my domains, the first one is will the Autoptimize plugin turned off and the second one is with it turned on with the settings as I covered above. As you can see, it helps to shave off around 1.3 seconds of load time and takes less than a minute to set up.

Display Ad Code

As you may have noticed in the two-speed tests images in the section above, even when optimized, the page comes in with a 2.3 second load time. This is much slower than the 0.6 seconds in my first image in the answer and I have intentionally done this. The images are both from different domains, the 0.6-second image is based around affiliate marketing and the 2.3-second image is from a domain-based around display ads.

Even when fully optimized in every way, a blog that has display ad code running on it will always be slower than a blog without. This is due to the page having to request the ads to serve from a third-party server, then render them, and display them before the page load is complete. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there is no way to optimize this and reduce the time it takes for the third-party ad server to serve the ads.

Keep in mind, different ad networks also have different ad code running with some ad networks having reported load times of well over 10 seconds per page! From what I can tell, Adsense, Mediavine, and Adthrive seem to be the more optimized display ad networks and will likley have the fasted page load for your blog if you do have to use display ads.

Content Delivery Network

In theory, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) should be able to speed up your blog page load times but the benefit of this will depend on the location of your hosting server cluster and the location of the page request. A CDN is basically a network of third-party servers that will store all of the media on their servers that are located all around the world. When your blog gets a page request, the CDN then sends the media on the blog page to the user from the closest server to them rather than from your blogs actual server.

This can be hit and miss in my experience, especially if you are using a free package for a CDN. In my experience, the free packages often slow your domains down rather than speed them up and if you optimize your images as explained above and ensure you have a plugin with lazy loading turned on such as Autoptimize your blog will likely be fine without actually needing a CDN anyway.

Limit API Calls

If you are an affiliate marketer and using something like the Amazon Affiliate program then you are not able to use the images from the Amazon domain on your own blog posts unless they are pulled in real-time via their API. This goes for a number of other details about the products too so I would highly recommend that you look to limit the amount of API calls to the Amazon server is possible.

Each call can add time to your blog page load speed and slow you down and most of the time, there are workaround available. For example, if you are using the API call to pull and image from Amazon to show in your blog post, find an alternative image on a royalty-free stock photo site such as Unsplash, optimize the image as I covered above and then upload it to your blog and use that instead.

By taking this simple step I have shaved more than three seconds off the page load times for some of my affiliate posts. On some of my more recent affiliate posts, I don’t use any API calls at all as you are usually able to avoid using them without issue anyway.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 2155 Words.
  
• Thinking of selling my bitcoin holdings to put the cash into this new project as the halvening has happened and I am in half minds of if it will correct or not now so looking to take the profit.
• 3 writers from the USA are going back to work tomorrow for their regular jobs after lockdown restrictions are eased and have said they won't be writing anymore, I still have 4 writers working with me but I will see if they hang around as more and more people go back to their regular jobs.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1847 Words.
• Checked my Pinterest analytics and impressions are starting to climb up steadily so hoping it continues, traffic from Pinterest is around 15 right now where traffic from Google is only about 4 for this new project.

 

[IndeXer]

Where do you outsource your content writing? Fiverr?

 

[shaunm]

Where do you outsource your content writing? Fiverr?

Most of it is from Upwork right now but I am working with two writers on iwriter now too and might look to move more of my content generation over to iwriter.

 

[Forseti]

Most of it is from Upwork right now but I am working with two writers on iwriter now too and might look to move more of my content generation over to iwriter.

Hello. Tell me if you tried to use the content generated by artificial intelligence. I asked a question in the subject and I was recommended to find out from you. Auto generated content

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1500 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 2208 Words.
• Article 3 - 1505 Words.
• Had another writer complete their job today and say they are going back to their regular job, expecting this to continue as more places re-open.
• Sold my bitcoin and used the cash to order 3 x niche edit links, should be done in the next 30 days or so.

Hello. Tell me if you tried to use the content generated by artificial intelligence. I asked a question in the subject and I was recommended to find out from you. Auto generated content

I would avoid it like the plague mate, there are different types of auto-generated content and I used to use the stuff tools like Kontent Machine generate every day back in 2014-2016ish but in my opinion, Google are too smart for it now. I haven't been able to get it to work for years, I think that Google understands articles better than they used to and their synonym understanding has increased to a level where they old scrape and spin tools are not clever enough to outsmart them anymore. I used to know a bunch of people who used to use the GSA toolkit back then and use auto-generated content heavily but none of them do it anymore.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1003 Words - Outsourced.
  
• A writer missed their deadline with zero comms from them so I think they might have went back to their regular job and stopped writing. I think this is the 5th or 6th writer to do this over the last few days as more and more people go back to work. Going to look at other options for outsourcing content over the coming week.
  
• The guest post order from the start of the month has been delivered, DA 56, DA 53, and DA 66 all with solid predicted keyword counts ranking in Google and >10,000 predicted monthly organic search.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• No content out today, with so many freelancer writers going back to work I have basically spent the day looking at reviews of other writing agencies and trying to find more freelancers. Sent three jobs out on iWriter, I had a writer referred to me on Upwork and I will send her a job when she replies to my messages and I have uploaded a few test articles to buyselltext to see how it goes. I think I am at a stage where I rather just pay more and not have to waste time chasing writers up or having them flake on me now. If iwriter or buyselltext goes well I will probably just pay their rates rather than use Upwork.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 2032 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 2 - 1511 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 3 - 1879 Words.
  
• 1648 Words Added to older articles to try and make it easier to add to a new affiliate program I found for this domain.
  
• Looking to push affiliate content out for this new project specific to the new affiliate program I found but I haven't had a chance to do any keyword research for it yet.
  
• Reached out to one of the writing services that I plan to use about getting their writers to use Surfer SEO templates.

I also published the video below going over 30 questions that I was asked that may be helpful to some people following along.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 2013 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 2 - 2086 Words.
  
• Sent out initial test order to the Upwork writer who was referred to me. I know its the weekend so that's coming into play but all 3 of the test orders on iWriter have not been started yet. Not sure if this is due to the lockdown lifting and more and more people going back to work but if buyselltexts content is good I will likely just go with them next month and put the bulk of my content their way.
• Spend a few hours fault finding on the new Google update 21/22nd May as it might have hit two of my other sites so I wanted to look for patterns.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 2009 Words.
• Article 2 - 1615 Words. - Outsourced.
• Ran out of Keywords Everywhere credits so had to buy another 100,000 as I plan to take tomorrow off from writing content and focus on keyword research to try and avoid burn out from writing and source new keywords from the new affiliate program that I want to try get some content online for.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1504 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 2 - 1508 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Reached out to a manual web 2.0 service about a custom order that I might try for a price for a custom order and samples, if he comes back with $50 I might give it a try but I'm not spending more than that for web 2.0s in this day and age.
  
• One of my writers on iwriter had to decline the job as its the only way she could get communications up with me to say it's giving her an error message when she tries to write it. I tried to ticket their live support to report the issue and I’m not getting any reply so I think they are having major problems with their system. The system doesn’t seem to have refunded the escrow for the job that the writer had to reject to let me know she couldn’t do it either but with the quality of the other service I got the two articles back from today, I don't plan to add any more money to the iwriter system anyway even if they manage to fix the issues they are having.
  
• Spend some time force crawling the pages in the "Discovered - currently not indexed” and the "Crawled - currently not indexed” sections of Search Console for my domains and force crawling definitely seems to be helping with this bug for indexing new pages.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1500 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 2 - 2015 Words - Outsourced.
  
• Article 3 - 1964 Words - Outsourced
  
• Article 4 - 1998 Words.
  
• Burn out is definitely setting in for content production, probably going to knock it down to one article a day for the rest of this month and next.
  
• My Google Adsense payment hit my bank account so I used the cash to order two more test articles with the new writing service using Surfer SEO templates.

 

[Tuavale]

Hey @shaunm How's everything going? You had great posts and was wondering if you have more to share