[Journey] Start and Grow a Content Site From $0 to $$,$$$ in 12 Months or Less

[iamb]

Total costs $40 3-year domain name $35 hosting for year. Total $75
+ A lot of time and labor.
6,500+ SEO referrals and made $11.75? Seriously.

I think that was his first 3 months report

Don't let this get to you just understand what google says is their opinion --deal with it
Sorry, carry on and see how it goes iamb

Cheers, pretty interesting case study, he seems like one of the good guys.

Yes. I started my case study after reading about his experience as well as Shaun's case study. I wanted to see for myself if one could really rank a brand new site and take it to $1,000/month without any backlinks building.

Needless to say my results after 7 months are no were close to his. My guess is either my content is not top notch enough to attrack high quality natural backlink or there are some missing pieces in the process.

I know I also experience the whole google indexing thing so it could be a contributing factor.

I am adjusting my strategy:
- reworking some articles and resubmitting to G for indexing - see if it makes any difference
- building a social fortress around the site aka social profiles to see if increases the brand profile

I have not started building other links yet as I want to make one change at a time and see which one moves the needle.

 

[Strickland]

Needless to say my results after 7 months are no were close to his.

Let's not forget he's an experienced blogger with years of practice, an SEO consultant, and a content writer.
You should be proud of your achievements so far, look how much you've already done.

And it's working !!!

99% of people don't even get close to that.

 

[Strickland]

I have not started building other links yet

My advice here would be don't,

just keep publishing more content

 

[iamb]

Im having the same thing with a similar % to yours
View attachment 24083
This domain is 18 months old although I only started really adding content in January. I have done some backlinks but mostly only social media stuff. It has over 90 indexed keywords but only a handful are stable, the rest are jumping around all over the place, sometimes 40 places or more.
Are you having the same with your keywords?

Hey @Strickland , it looks like the indexing issue has been resolved by Google. If you inspect your URLs and resubmit for indexation, google should pick it up. I have tried a few now. You are just limited by number of URLs you can submit per day.
Let me know if it works for you as well.

 

[iamb]

Months 8 to 10 Update: I started this content site based on other successful stories about low competition keywords. More importantly rank on page 1 of google without any form of backlinking.


My Goals for Months 8 to 10 (April, May, June 202) were:

• Optimize articles for better rankings.
• Build more internal links.
• Build more social profiles/properties to increase brand trust
• Publish at least 50 more articles.

My Results for April, May, June 2022:

• I published 58 articles, slightly above the planned 50. My total articles count is now 158 with 116, 667 wordcount.

• Although most of my metrics are on the rise, I have not reached a level of traffic allowing me to monetize the site properly

• I built more internal links to strengthen some of my articles.

• I also created few social media properties to increase brand trust. Indeed, I created a facebook page, a youtube channel (no videos posted yet), a pinterest profile and a tumblr account.

• I created some IFTT recipes to automatically update my facebook page as well as tumblr posts. These build some social activities around my website/brand. The also embed some external links back to my site but they are all no follow.

Indexing Issue on Google


As mentioned in my previous update, many of my posts were discovered by Google but not indexed. Sometimes during late May 2022 things started to pick up again from an indexing perspective. I have a good ratio of indexed posts now. Which explains the spike in impressions.

From April till June 2022 Google search console shows the following:

​

Rankings

According to Ahrefs I have more than 1.2k keywords ranking with only 66 of them on page 1 of google for the USA. The few backlinks showing up here are some scraping sites copying my content and linking back to the source.

​

Build Links or Not? Competitors Analysis

From my results so far it’s clear that my site is not generating enough traffic to my liking even for a 9 months old site.

At this point I can conclude that my experiment proves that I can’t hit a target of making $$,$$$ with a brand new site built around content only without any link building campaigns.

I decided to check out the competition and see what they were doing as shown below.

As you can see, my top competitor has a website that is more than 2 years old with more than 400 backlinks to their site. Either acquired or not, the fact is that you need backlinks to increase your domain authority thus increasing your chances of ranking higher in the serps.


My Plan for July - August - September 2022

• Optimize articles for better rankings.
• Build more internal links.
• Start external link building campaigns
• Slow down on article publishing with 5-10 articles per month

I will be interested by your comments, feedack, insight.

 

[iamb]

Keep going.
Competitive may be the issue.
What is the topic of interest? `niche?

Thanks @Graybeard , I will keep pushing even beyond the initial 12 months I set out as I want to see for myself how far this will go. More importantly document my findings.

I agree that competitive may be the issue. Although, most targeted keywords are long tails, questions/informational types and I have seen some articles with less than 400 words rank on page 1. That's what led me the believe that other factors such as backlinks and domain age/authority play a role.

It's a pet niche addressing various questions/answers around a given pet (care, nutrition, behavior etc...). Mostly long tail and low volumes keywords according to keyword research tools.

Just to note that I have not monetize the traffic yet. I will likely do so after the 11 months mark. I am just curious to see how to site will turn out after the first 12 months, traffic wise.

 

[iamb]

Broad interest area 'pets'
Maybe, if you can narrow the focus a bit --to limit competition.

Consider buying some (daily low volume) RTB type brand awareness ads over a period of months? Developing type-in type traffic.

Thanks @Graybeard.
Pets is the broad niche but it's narrowed down to a specific pet only. I may try the RTB brand awareness campaign.
I am writing 5 more pillar articles to be published soon then turning on adsense. Will let the site stew for a bit with only few articles per month.

 

[kayode10]

You don't have to back down on this project, I believe you have what it takes to turn this situation around. The key to growth in blogging is regular publishing of the contents together with acquiring quality backlinks pointing to it website. Do this consistently for 3 months and you're going to see a great result. There is nothing like the zero backlink building when it comes to blogging.

 

[Graybeard]

Total costs $40 3-year domain name $35 hosting for year. Total $75
+ A lot of time and labor.
6,500+ SEO referrals and made $11.75? Seriously.

Do you know *why* 79 pages (posts) are excluded?

1. Are you using <link rel="canonical" href=""> is duplication the issue? (I think not with WP)?
2. The uniqueness of the content?
3. Other
4. Don't really know (--investigating)

Seems like a high percentage exclusion rate unless it's made from a feed straight up ...
Does content word count seem to make a difference with what gets into the SERPs and what is excluded ?

click in the excluded box and scroll down to the details:
brand new domain I am letting Google(dumb)bot to crawl
the 'redirects' were just to the mobile.domain.com <<nothing sinister and they indexed that sub domain --nutcases (@_@) so i remove the redirect and forced a re crawling

An older adult domain with a over 18 warning page --that's the redirect so fucking what?
--googlebot was born 2003 OMG!

Fix what you can fix I suppose.
I redid my new site in bootstrap 5 and almost no media queries (so far)
built the skeleton based on the old bootstrap --fast sub page fix
using a PHP wrapper+ injecting the right content page *.php
Cost $0 + a lot of labor -$xxx so far

Don't let this get to you just understand what google says is their opinion --deal with it
Sorry, carry on and see how it goes iamb

 

[kayode10]

Backlinks are still valuable, but their value has diminished somewhat over the years. In the early days of the internet, backlinks were incredibly valuable. They were seen as a vote of confidence from one website to another, and they were an important factor in helping a website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). These days, Google and other search engines place less emphasis on backlinks when determining how to rank websites. That's not to say that backlinks are completely worthless - they're still a valuable part of SEO - but they're not as important as they once were.

Welcome to 2005
Post any proof you have that this is current (this year)

My website would have had nothing less than 100k pageviews by now with over 400 published comtents on it. You can show us your own website which ranks higher on Google search engine for keywords without Backlinks. If you can do that I will agree with everything you said in your comment.

 

[iamb]

You don't have to back down on this project, I believe you have what it takes to turn this situation around.

Not backing down. Still working on the site. Just slowing down on articles publishing and increasing backlink building. My next update is next month as the site will turn 1 year at the end of september

 

[kayode10]

Not backing down. Still working on the site. Just slowing down on articles publishing and increasing backlink building. My next update is next month as the site will turn 1 year at the end of september

Can't wait to see the progress on the website.

 

[iamb]

Months 11 and 12 Update: I started this content site based on other successful stories about low competition keywords. More importantly rank on page 1 of google without any form of backlinking.


My Goals for Months 11 to 12 (July, August, September 2022) were:

• Optimize articles for better rankings.
• Build more internal links.
• Start external link building campaigns
• Slow down on article publishing with 5-10 articles per month

My Results for July, August, September 2022:

• I published 24 articles, in line with what I had planned e.g 5-10 articles per months. My total articles count is now 182 with 184, 852 wordcount.

My Stats

For the month of september 2022 my total number of impressions and clicks increased but my number of unique visitors dropped.

Rankings

My keywords are climbing to the top positions as the articles age. I have now 130 keywords on top 10 positions as opposed to 66 the last reporting period.

Some Fun facts from the past couple of months

1) I had applied to Amazon associates and activated it on the site. Got excited when I got $25 earnings from qualified leads but the joy was short lived as Amazon banned my account. Obviously they withheld the money

Why was I banned? 3-4 years ago, i had a previous account that was banned due to a stupid plugin i had on my site. I made a mistake of creating a new account this year using the same email account thinking that was in the past. How dumb is that

2) I applied to adsense but big brother G says my content is thin and I need to fix that before re-applying. Honestly rewriting 182 articles is not appealing at all! I have also noticed that some of the writers I hired used AI content so lots of touch up to be done here.


Where to from here?

1) I will rewrite the top 10-20 articles/pages in long form then re-apply to adsense
2) Keep publishing on the site at a slow pace of 5-10 articles per month
3) Keep building backlinks to the site to increase its authority


Any comment, ideas, insight welcome

 

[Proxy-Sale]

Semms like really nice results

 

[iamb]

Final Update: I started this content site based on other successful stories about low competition keywords. More importantly rank on page 1 of google without any form of backlinking.

Final Results
I am writing a formal closure update given that things did not turn out the way I wanted but I did learn a lot along the way.
Needless to say the site did not live to its potential.

The charts below tell the story. After a strong start in the early months, brother G came along with a liedge hammer around months 11 or so.
Impression and traffic went to almost nil.

I tried for few months to revive the site to no avail.

Comment, suggestions are welcome.

Search Console:

Analytics

Ahrefs

 

[Strickland]

Did you get an email from Google about any penalties ect

 

[Graybeard]

Keep going.
Competitive may be the issue.
What is the topic of interest? `niche?
I would hope for 15 'events' per month that would make money from that traffic.

SEO traffic is only good if it is relevant to the offers/ads.

 

[iamb]

Did you get an email from Google about any penalties ect

They never send you an email. No manual action in the google search console either

 

[Graybeard]

It's a pet niche addressing various questions/answers around a given pet (care, nutrition, behavior etc...). Mostly long tail and low volumes keywords according to keyword research tools.

Broad interest area 'pets'
Maybe, if you can narrow the focus a bit --to limit competition.

Consider buying some (daily low volume) RTB type brand awareness ads over a period of months? Developing type-in type traffic.