Introductions Thread

Thanks for sharing, so to make sure I understand it correctly you main goal is build a content that will be shared - right?

You assuming that if the content is appreciated by the users e.g. they are sharing it, all other will follow: ranking, traffic, etc...

It would be very interesting to see how you planning on writing a content that people will share? Do you have any guidelines? Or any article that you share?

Shares aren't always the primary goal, some content functions as more of a funnel to pages that have different monetization focuses. With a pure informational site for instance there's going to be either AdSense, Taboola or whatever on there that's performing the best. So that's almost sitewide, but certain pages are going to have affiliate links on. These sometimes are just interest pages, they don't do so well when being promoted because you can't manipulate the headline to be better click-bait.

If I'm creating content that's primary goal is to be shared it's either because the headline is also crafted to get clicks or because the content could attract links. All content that is shared is shared to be clicked, but it's not really the primary goal.

Other content pieces are built to be the best on the topic and I know that these will attract links with outreach. This kind of content doesn't always share well on social media though which is why I like to take a multi-goal approach to content, what I'm doing is trying to cover all the bases.

One easy way to break this down is write out a content schedule and you'll instantly know what day of the week you need to publish what content for what goal.

I don't have any set rules for writing the content in terms of guidelines because every piece is a little bit different, but there are some best practises that can be adhered to.

When you're doing click-bait for example you need to look into yellow journalism to understand how this has worked in the past for newspapers selling issues (our modern equivalent is clicks). In journalism there is a big focus on finding the lead, what they mean by this is finding the real story in the story. This can be transferred to regular content as well, for example if you had a site about bees and you were doing a post on how their hive is run from a sociological point of view, you could do a really interesting piece on how the queen rules the hive and tie it into feminism or even anti-feminism 'What Bees Can Tell Us About The Matriarchy (Hint: The Matriarchy Keeps Males As Slaves).' This would be the kind of post that works as fantastic click-bait and is also controversial and polarizing enough to get comments and perhaps shares, maybe even links. So I think to get better at that kind of content you need to learn more about journalism.

I've learned a lot of what I know in terms of theory anyway by reading a LOT of books written for and by people in the closest profession... You can also of course find some great info around the web.. I would recommend checking out http://www.slideshare.net/Upworthy and taking anything you can learn from there.

If you want to learn how to do great content then learn how authority sites do it and if you want to learn how to do content that gets shares and comments then learn how viral sites do it. Trace them back to their roots, learn about how people prefer to read (formatting) and you'll be ahead of most of the crowd.

A lot of the info online is terrible and half-baked because people aren't going that extra mile to go back to the roots which means they don't fully understand. I pretty much avoid blogs at all costs, testing and research is your best friend.
 
Last edited:
Greeting all Builder Society members, it's been a while since I'm around and I want to take this opprtunity to tell my story, and to share with you my progress...

Who am I?

31 years male, with more then 10 years experience in online marketing.
Since I remember myself i'm in front of a computer, I'm very technical and I know how to code and do marketing at the same time, I have the ability to build a site from scratch and do everything including design.

What I want to achieve?

My goal is to build an online assets that will provide a nice income and profit.

Where to Start?

I've decided to stop planing and start doing, the plan is to build specific sites based on specific niches, I'm not looking for a very low search volume niches because I don't bevilive there is money to make there so I'm looking for small/mid size keywords/products that I can built a site around it.

What I've done Far?

I've built two sites, 1 site was for a very low search volume keyword, to be honest I'm not sure why I've built it so I pretty much dump it.

2 site which I launched yesterday is for a much larger niche with a nice amount of traffic and high demands.

What to expect?

I'm going to share with you my progress and would be happy to get your feedback and comments.
 
Nice, a veteran! We are of the same age and experience levels, and in the same boats. I'd wish that I had projects that were 15 years old, aged from the day I started, but alas. My most important project to me is only one year old and I'm getting ready to sell my other 4 that I didn't absolutely destroy over time. They did get caught up in a mass deindexing and penalization of my 100+ properties a while back though.

Starting from scratch this far down the road is great, especially when you can do everything on your own that's better than what people pay five figures for, including SEO, web design, conversion testing, graphic design, and all of that. A clean slate with that level of XP is a guarantee of success.

I agree with going after bigger terms and niches than playing the micro-game. Scaling with 100+ sites isn't really effective these days so much as narrowing your focus and making sure to knock one killer authority site out of the box.

Good luck!
 
Hi, I'm Andreas from Germany and I'm here because CCarter send me here. I hope to learn more Marketing and Traffic Leaking Strategies to increase Revenue.

Regards

Andreas
 
So in the last two days I've worked on my new site that I've launched this week, the site is run with Wordpress but I created the theme from scratch and it's including responsive design.

I'm working now on small fixes (css, templates) but I decided to spend most of my time on writing content, I'm not a native English speaker and I hate writing content but this is what I have for now, once I'll see some profit I'll hire a detectable content manager.

A few questions:

  • Do you have any experience in writing content from YouTube videos? Any guides/tricks?
  • What do you think is the best in terms of new content e.g daily, weekly etc...
  • What keep you motivated for doing something you don't like (like writing content)
 
@iam_mine My biggest tip is don't write content just for the sake of writing content or because you feel you 'should', in response to frequency. Make sure every article you put up has a purpose. Daily, weekly, it doesn't matter - as long as that content has a reason to be there, and you have a plan on how you're going to get eyeballs on it. 1 article that gets seen by 10,000 people is better than 100,000 articles that get seen by nobody.

The reason might be to attract organic search traffic, and that's all good, so the answer to how often you should be publishing content just depends on your content plan and how soon you'd like to get it all live. If you have a list of 50 articles in your organic search strategy, the sooner they're all live, the sooner they'll get indexed and can start bringing in traffic so in that case I wouldn't wait to do them weekly. The purpose of the article will influence how "good" it needs to be, if you're banging 'em out for adsense clicks it probably doesn't need to be as A+ as if you're trying to convert it.

However if you're putting out articles to attract links from news organizations, to get traction on Reddit, to share on forums, to go viral, like if you really plan on marketing your site and not waiting around for Google to catch up, I'd spend a lot more time on each article and once a week or so is a much more realistic timeline since the rest of your time will be spent promoting the content.

You can obviously put out great content that has social appeal AND appeases the search engines, and that's the best move imo, but it would be tough to do that every single day depending on how hard you want to push each piece of content.
 
@iam_mine My biggest tip is don't write content just for the sake of writing content or because you feel you 'should', in response to frequency. Make sure every article you put up has a purpose. Daily, weekly, it doesn't matter - as long as that content has a reason to be there, and you have a plan on how you're going to get eyeballs on it. 1 article that gets seen by 10,000 people is better than 100,000 articles that get seen by nobody.

The reason might be to attract organic search traffic, and that's all good, so the answer to how often you should be publishing content just depends on your content plan and how soon you'd like to get it all live. If you have a list of 50 articles in your organic search strategy, the sooner they're all live, the sooner they'll get indexed and can start bringing in traffic so in that case I wouldn't wait to do them weekly. The purpose of the article will influence how "good" it needs to be, if you're banging 'em out for adsense clicks it probably doesn't need to be as A+ as if you're trying to convert it.

However if you're putting out articles to attract links from news organizations, to get traction on Reddit, to share on forums, to go viral, like if you really plan on marketing your site and not waiting around for Google to catch up, I'd spend a lot more time on each article and once a week or so is a much more realistic timeline since the rest of your time will be spent promoting the content.

You can obviously put out great content that has social appeal AND appeases the search engines, and that's the best move imo, but it would be tough to do that every single day depending on how hard you want to push each piece of content.
@MetaData I agree with you but as for now I can't afford myself to hire someone to write content so I don't have any other choice, I'm motivating myself by looking at the bigger picture and understanding that this is temporary.

Regarding content, ,my strategy is to have three types of content:
  1. Review pages - Detailed reviews.
  2. News Pages - Short articles that will provide my site with a fresh content
  3. Blog Pages - Impressive pieces of content
In the news section I'll work more on quantity while on the other two types I will be working more on quality.
 
Hi guys, I heard that this is where the happening (saw it on CCarters skype I think) is so I decided to check it out. I see many of the same usernames here from another forum so I think that this should be good!
 
What's up? What can you comfortably tell us about you? What kind of sites do you make? What kind of monetization do you prefer to use? How long have you been in the game?
 
Soma quick update, I've been really busy this past week and didn't had much time to update the site.
Do you think that if a site is not update for one week is "dead" ?

Today I posted a new blog post, and tomorrow I'm planing to improve it, in the upcoming days I'll be working on improving the existing content page that I've created.
 
Do you think that if a site is not update for one week is "dead" ?

Not at all. If it's live and the hosting is being paid for, I assume someone cares to some degree. I think Google does the same. However, some niches rely upon a constant stream of news, and those sites being updated more frequently are going to be favored. There is a "freshness factor" that you'll notice if you're in one of those niches.
 
Not at all. If it's live and the hosting is being paid for, I assume someone cares to some degree. I think Google does the same. However, some niches rely upon a constant stream of news, and those sites being updated more frequently are going to be favored. There is a "freshness factor" that you'll notice if you're in one of those niches.

Do you have any example of niche that requires fresh content and a niche that requires less updates?
 
Do you have any example of niche that requires fresh content and a niche that requires less updates?
IMO. I'd say for example a keyword like "How to integrate an equation" is going to rely less on 'freshness' as a ranking factor than "best graphics card".

Why? Well we've been integrating equations for the same way for hundreds (thousands?) of years. Whereas the best graphics card is going to change every few months or at least yearly.

Lets think of this in 'the real world'. If you're advertising a computer parts store as holding the best graphics cards and someone comes in and only see's a bunch of old AMD cards and a GTX 460 they might feel tricked, right?

I think it should be pretty obvious which niches require fresh content and IMO it's even better to go an a keyword-to-keyword basis, because not all tech keywords are time relevant either.

Maybe it's just me but I find it a lot easier to think about SEO like things in terms of marketing a brick & mortar business, because it should be a REAL business to you.

So if you're advertising the best graphics cards you'll probably advertise in places where computer geeks hang out, or in magazines the read. You're not going to be putting up an advertisement in a day nursery or a clothes shop. That's what link relevancy is about to me. Just easier to think about it all in terms of a 'real' business.
 
Interesting, so maybe it will be easier to target more "static" niches.

This way you need to invest less in content.
 
Just about any niche should have your fundamentally "evergreen" pillar articles that could be written and attract constant traffic without frequent intervention.

For a site that's all about attracting commissions on selling the newest hottest graphics card, you might have something like this:

Evergreen style:
  • What is a graphics card?
  • What should I look for in a graphics card?
  • Do dual GPU's beat single GPU's?
  • Is there a difference between workstation GPU's and gaming GPU's?
  • Repairing, re-soldering, how to find info about your current GPU, etc.
Freshness Style:
  • News posts on every bit of news about a potential or imminent release, rumors
  • Video reviews, text reviews, unboxings, installations, galleries
  • Best Graphics Card for 2015 (eventually make 2016 and link to it from 2015)
Not only will all of them get you organic traffic but the freshness style will keep people coming back frequently, get you all up in the social sites, etc, which will only further help you dominate the organic and evergreen side.
 
Hey guys I'm the new guy here.

I found this place because 1 of my brands was mentioned and I got the Google alert.

Rather not say which one because I don't want any advice or convos I have on here being mirrored to my projects so that I don't slip up and give away any competitive edge I have.

I have been at this since 2009. I started off with little mfa sites and one by one they all disappeared so I just went bigger and bigger until I found a formula for sites that can't be stopped just from losing one traffic source.

My best advice is why create limits for yourself? I hope at lease one person reads between the lines there.

Happy to be a member here and I'm looking forward to networking and sharing what I can.

-- MM
 
I have been at this since 2009. I started off with little mfa sites and one by one they all disappeared so I just went bigger and bigger until I found a formula for sites that can't be stopped just from losing one traffic source.

Yes! If guys stop reading the blogs and forums and look at the actual playing field, its pretty obvious what path should be taken based on who's dominating. And if you're just looking at the Google field, you're seeing a small piece of the total pie. Social is huge and there's a boatload of social sites, and only one Google.
 
Quick update:

In the past two weeks I've been very busy and didn't had the time to work properly on the new site, but in the past week I manage to spend at least two hours a day for this project.

I've managed to:

  • Write 3 reviews on specific products that I'm promoting through Amazon affiliates program.
  • Add a news section with 1 post
  • Add a blog section with 1 post
For the upcoming days I'm planning on investing 50% of my time on improving exiting content and the other time to write new content, I hope I'll have time to work on another site but at the moment I want to wait to see if this site peaks.

I'm a bit worried that so far I've received 0 organic traffic, is it normal?
 
I'm a bit worried that so far I've received 0 organic traffic, is it normal?

Yeah, I think so. When you have more content up, they might send you a very small amount of traffic to some articles just to establish a baseline of user-interaction, such as CTR's in the SERP and pogosticking and time on site, etc. But yeah, generally until you get some links and juice flowing, you're not going to get much of anything.
 
@Ryuzaki thanks for your feedback, so you saying that without links and juice flowing, there is no way I can get organic traffic?

That's leads me to my other two questions:

1. when is the right time to get links and juice flowing?
2. what is the best strategy to get it?

Cheers!
 
No, I definitely think you can get organic traffic without juice, if you're targeting some very very low competition terms where nobody is optimized for the terms on-page but you are.

However, even in those cases, some other domain's page with zero links going to it while not being optimized may outrank you because it belongs to a highly powerful domain that has a trillion links to other pages.

When is the right time to get links? Personally, I like to wait until my site is actually ready. By that I mean that it has enough content in all sections of the site so that any visitor will have a decent first impression. I don't want them to go clicking around and find that it's still under construction. But Google ranks pages, not sites. So if you have a page you're ready to drive organic traffic at, go for it.

The best strategy? That's a huge discussion, probably 70% of the discussion surrounding SEO. The most helpful thing I think I could say is that you should do real marketing and attract real links from related sites if you aren't sure about other methods. The "other methods" can destroy the longevity of your site if not done right, in terms of unnatural link penalties, etc.
 
The best strategy? That's a huge discussion, probably 70% of the discussion surrounding SEO. The most helpful thing I think I could say is that you should do real marketing and attract real links from related sites if you aren't sure about other methods. The "other methods" can destroy the longevity of your site if not done right, in terms of unnatural link penalties, etc.

Agree, but this is very general - I'm curios if you have any links to read on a good strategy that you can say that is working, for example I read this, which look impressive: http://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique
 
New recruit here, just following rules :smile:

8 years in the affiliate arena, making review sites and so.

Just ready to get rid of the hamster's wheel and start building my own thing.
I came here to share, learn and grind.

Yours faithfully
 
  • Do you have any experience in writing content from YouTube videos? Any guides/tricks?

It is tough if the video doesn't have captions.

If the video has captions, as in this video (remove spaces): https :// www .youtube .com/watch?v=9yDRldqSPGM , you can extract the captions by acessing this URL: http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=en&v=9yDRldqSPGM

For any other video, replace the video's "v=" value at the end of that second URL.

Good to read your journal. Subscribing.
 
Back