A Birds Eye View Blueprint for Newbs

[Daquan]

Here's something I recommend to my people in the trap. It's vague on purpose because I'm not here to type a novel to you. You can ask questions and I can get more specific. Anyone feel free to answer the questions too. This ain't The Daquan Show. But if you newbs follow this, you'll have early wins, middle wins, and have positioned yourself for a bigger win later. Time is a huge deal in this game, so take advantage of aging.

Do keyword research (learn this first and get a legit understanding of it, cuz this is the make it or break it moment) and find three topics you are interested in that you won't go nuts writing about for the next while. Find one that is very easy to rank. I mean, ridiculously easy, but have it so that it'll make some money too. We aren't trappin for nothin. Second, pick one that's a lil harder, maybe around 2,000-3,000 exact searches a month. Then, find a third one that's kind of a "moon shot" for you right now. Don't do anything ridiculous, but somethign that's far out of your range of capability.

Build the first one out small. 20 pages over all. Get it done. Learn how to do on-page and how to buy a domain to benefit that and tweak the homepage for the main term. Have all of the other pages be about "long-tails" for that niche.

Build the 2nd and 3rd out to the same size, but have them ready to grow larger for later.

Then learn about link building and start ranking that first smallest site. Get a win under your belt and see that real money can come from this. It won't be a ton, but i'll be a quick win, a confidence builder, and an experience gainer. Then you can keep it (you'll likely be attached to it like your baby) but I'd consider flipping it on Flippa or somewhere. Take the earnings and buy yourself a toy. Don't buy content or links. Go eat a meal, buy a nice monitor or something. Celebrate.

Then attack that 2nd one just the same way you did the first. Once it's done, you might consider keeping it for longer term earnings or sell it and cash out. Then you're ready to start more sites as you start working on the third and biggest one. If you did your keyword research right, you'll have an aged site that's been sitting and ready to rank, and it'll be worth it once you win.

At this point, I'd consider rolling out batches of sites. You probably have discovered a repeatable process for link building at this point. Roll out 3 sites at a time of 20 page size for small victories and keep snowballing that to get funds for nicer site you'll keep for consistent cash flow.

I'm willing to answer questions about this if anyone wants to ask. Keep trappin and slangin dat whyte!

 

[Mandalay]

Daquan, you're my hero lol. This post was informative and entertaining

You said to pick 3 topics that I won't go crazy writing about and to make sure that they're ridiculously easy to rank for. How can I tell how difficult a topic will be to rank for? Can you please elaborate on that for me?

 

[Daquan]

How can I tell how difficult a topic will be to rank for?

Exact Search Volume

For the fastest snapshop, you can get a general idea from the search volume Google reports to you in their Adwords Keyword Tool. This is the number that all of these other pieces of software are pulling for you. You want to make sure you're looking at the "EXACT" amount, versus BROAD or PHRASE. You can research what those mean, but exact means that it's only the number of searches for that exact search typed just like you typed it. Not mix and matched or with other words added.

The higher that number is, the more competitive it likely is, but not always. Sometimes you can find winners that nobody else has really found, or you can find some that aren't too competitive that people have found. If you think you found a secret keyword, ask yourself if you is trippin or not, cuzzo. It might not have any buyer intent or value to it.


Top 10 Competition Metrics

Your ONLY competition to worry about is the front page. If you can't get on the front page, you're not getting traffic. If you aint' getting traffic, you ain't pushin powda and makin dat scratch. Dat skrilla. Pay attention mainly to the top 3. That's where the volume is. Below that is meager living. Top 3 is where it explodes exponentially.

You have choices of stuff to look at and software that makes it easy. People make jokes but Market Samurai is worth the price just to look at the top 10 real fast. You can check their basic on-page optimization, # of links to the page, to the whole domain, PR, DA, some Majestic TF and crap. Once you're familiar with those metrics and what they mean and what's low, mid, or high, you can figure out if you think YOU can tackle the top 10.

You should analyze a LOT of SERPs in this fashion to get an idea of how sitewide metrics on amazing EDU domains or huge authorities still manage to boost the crap out of an inner page that has no backlinks, and that you can still struggle to take them down.



As I said. Step One needs to be learning how to do keyword research. If you goof that up, all of your efforts after it are for naught.

 

[Samwise89]

I just said this in another thread but my main issue is backlinks. I saw a thread in The Board Room about where to find backlinks which has been an eye opener but it's still so time consuming to make them all. I've been doing social bookmarks and blog comments. Now I know there are some others to do but wow it's already hard enough to find time to backlink my 10 sites as it is.

What should we do if we can't afford to pay someone to help make backlinks but we aren't really getting enough done to rank?

Do you think I didn't choose the right keywords? I might have gone too hard

I think after reading this that I might go back to the drawing board and start ONE site to work on until it ranks, and make sure it's super duper easy. The rest of these can be aging. I didn't realize age was such a big deal.

 

[Heathcliff]

Samwise89,

"Too hard" is relative. You might have gone too hard for YOU but not for someone else. It all depends on what you have access to and what time frame you're dealing with. You could certainly take any SERP with enough time by getting out there and creating more backlinks and more content with proper on-page optimization.

What I'd might suggest to you is to set that current site aside and start a new one that you know is dead easy. Start with a level that's appropriate to your skill set and succeed there. You'll learn a lot and then can move forward. Later you can look at your first site we are talking about and see if it's worth continuing. Maybe at that point you'll be ready to slaughter it. Maybe you'll realize it's not even worth pursuing.

If you aren't sure, it's time to do something you can be sure about, and then come back!

 

[bubuk]

Study your competition to see what works in your serps and woo them

 

[Sobol]

You have some good ideas in this post. How would you go about analyzing a competitors back links?

 

[Maha]

This is a good plan to get started. I happen to be the type that wants to know an exact game plan before I get rolling, mainly to avoid mistakes and having put in effort for naught. This covers a lot of ground that I need to know.