My Launch Plan + Q's

[jordantyeburn]

Hey BuSo - I'm not too new here, but this is my first post.

I want to contribute to the community by outlining my plan for a new content site and also ask a few advanced questions at the end for any pros that might want to chime in. So here goes:

Niche Research

Through research which involved looking at other sites for sale on Flippa etc, looking through my interests, and talking with other friends in the content space, I found a niche I believe is a very great point to start. I plan to start with a sub-sub-sub-niche (sss-niche) and then grow into a larger site by filling out more silos with content.

An example would be - a 'Home' niche blog. Under that would be 'Hobbies', and then 'Woodworking' and under that we could have 'Routers'. So the idea is to start by dominating the 'Router' niche with how-tos, guides, and review content and once that's filled up, spread to 'Saws' and 'Chisels', etc. At least, this is what makes sense to me so feel free to lmk if this is a dumb strategy lol

Keyword Research

According to SEMrush, the keywords I'm looking at all have under 30 difficulty and total 120k volume. There's about 300+ keywords that have over 100 volume I've found that are sss-niche relevant. The total sss-niche (including all difficulty) is up to 1.5MM volume.

Site Structure

The site structure I believe is quite important in terms of interlinking and user flow. The content 'map' is in silos that are then broken into 'clusters' and then finally into individual articles. So from the earlier example in the 'Home' niche you might have 'Hobbies' with 'Woodworking', 'Metalworking', 'Fishing', etc (this is from a site I saw recently doing very well). Each one of those topics is a large silo and then broken into clusters like 'Routers', 'Saws', and 'Chisels' etc.

For some inspiration, just look at some of your favorite conglomerate sites like TheSpruce, Angi, AllRecipes, Brides, People, Investopedia, SouthernLiving, among others.

Fun Fact - those are all owned by IAC

On SouthernLiving you can click into one of their silos 'Home' and they very nicely show you all their silos and clusters.

How kind of them
​

So one could start with the 'Porches' sss-niche and grow from there.

Each cluster is interlinked back to it's parent silo and also links out to the smaller articles. My plan is to have my main highest competition/volume keyword be the focus of the main silo and then all the other articles support it.

So the site is structured like this:

• 1 Main Silo (e.g. Routers). As the site grows, this would turn into a 'Cluster' under the 'Woodworking' Silo
• 3-5 Clusters off of the Silo (e.g. CNC router, router tables, router bits)
• 10-15 'Children' off each cluster

Silo/Clusters

I ended up with 45 posts in total covering details, information, and product reviews for each cluster. Keep in mind, I plan to have the Silo and Cluster pages actually have content written on them - something like "7 Top Tier Wood Routers" or whatever makes sense with the keywords. These will actually be targeting high difficulty keywords like "wood routers". I don't expect the silo or cluster pages to rank easily (or at all), but I need them there for the visitors to make sense of things. Plus as the site grows, I will need them.

I decided on the Clusters effectively by simply looking at the Magic Keyword tool on SEMrush. You put in your main keyword "wood router" and then the side bar shows keywords grouped by volume. The top ones that make sense are the Clusters (cnc, bit, machine, table)

'Wood Routers' is not nearly as good as my actual niche, it's just an example!

Article Length

After looking at various competing pages, I determined the rough word count for each article ranging from 500-2500 words with the silo and clusters being the 2500 word articles. I also chased down some long tail keyword like "wood surfacing router bit" among others that will be added to various articles where that make sense. E.G. that above keyword would go under the 'router bits' cluster as an article outlining different bits and their uses.

So overall I'll have 45 articles covering ~300+ keywords with 1.5MM volume. So now I just gotta build out the site on WP and add the articles. Any suggestions for fast and great looking WP themes? I want the site to actually LOOK nice as this will improve user trust and organic backlinks. Plus I like nice looking things

Again, this is just the LAUNCH strategy. I plan to spend $1-2k+ every month on content after this initial batch is all rolled out.

Feel free to drop any questions! and I have some of my own...

Some Advanced (for me at least) Questions:

1. I have a domain that is 301'd to another domain at the moment (both are quite dead though), but it would be a great brand name for this new site. Is it ok to un-301 this domain and use it or would it be better to start fresh? I don't really want to buy an aged/expired domain at this point.

2. I'm looking to have all this initial content written for me as I have a full time job and don't have time to write 45+ articles quickly and I want to get the site up ASAP. In the marketplace here on BuSo I've seen content from $0.025 - $0.07+ per word. That's a range of $1,500 - $4,000+ for this initial site build. Does anyone have advice in this area regarding quality vs price? I also don't want to hire my own writers as that is a whole headache I don't want to venture into at this point in time.

3. I haven't given much thought to backlinks. Mistake? Where can I get quality backlinks that aren't $200+ each (like I've seen here in the marketplace)? Do I even need to right now? When does it make sense to start trying to get high quality links? Should I nab just 2-5 once the articles are up? This is where my knowledge is weakest TBH.

Thanks for reading!

-J

 

[secretagentdad]

Target some fresher keywords than you see in the db sites.
Look at auto complete, suggested and related 3 worder plus items.
Those are good targets cuz they have volume and tend to get more cuz google is pushing volume at them via related, suggest and auto complete even if 3rd party database tools haven't recorded it yet.

 

[Ryuzaki]

This is a well thought out plan that's wide open for growth. I've tried to create projects of this scale and ultimately never got through all of it before selling it. That's a good thing, I suppose.

These days I get overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of projects like this, in terms of their organization and all that. I still tackle big, wide open verticals but I don't bother with trying to be a completionist any more. I cover the keywords that make sense for the power-level I'm at and move on and then circle back later and just treat everything like a numbers game instead. There's a benefit if you can manage this kind of vision, in my opinion, though.

1. I have a domain that is 301'd to another domain at the moment (both are quite dead though), but it would be a great brand name for this new site. Is it ok to un-301 this domain and use it or would it be better to start fresh? I don't really want to buy an aged/expired domain at this point.

I had two powerful domains that sat 301'd to another domain for years that I eventually un-301'd and gave to a friend, who has built sites on both of them. One of them only recently was put together and is getting decent traffic already, relatively. The other has been live and worked on for a few years now and it's doing as well as a site should on an aged, juicy domain. Their previous usage didn't seem to affect anything negatively.

2. I'm looking to have all this initial content written for me as I have a full time job and don't have time to write 45+ articles quickly and I want to get the site up ASAP. In the marketplace here on BuSo I've seen content from $0.025 - $0.07+ per word. That's a range of $1,500 - $4,000+ for this initial site build. Does anyone have advice in this area regarding quality vs price? I also don't want to hire my own writers as that is a whole headache I don't want to venture into at this point in time.

When you get down to the 4¢ and lower level from a provider (and not writers you're hiring yourself) you're going to get a lot of broken English, pure gibberish sometimes, weird references to things that are obviously commonplace for other parts of the world but perhaps not where you and your readers are from, etc. If you don't want to spend the time fixing up the content and want to be able to publish it without a ton of editing, you'll want to spend a bit more.

I think once you start getting up towards 7¢ and 8¢, you can expect decent quality (the same you might get for 4¢ to 5¢ with writers you hire). Anything higher you start paying for other benefits like actually getting the content on time and being able to get a bulk amount of content in a reasonable amount of time. For big bulk I think you should be able to get down to 6¢ and expect these same benefits, but by big bulk I mean $30k+ spends.

3. I haven't given much thought to backlinks. Mistake? Where can I get quality backlinks that aren't $200+ each (like I've seen here in the marketplace)? Do I even need to right now? When does it make sense to start trying to get high quality links? Should I nab just 2-5 once the articles are up? This is where my knowledge is weakest TBH.

I wouldn't bother yet. Build the site out, get the content indexed and aged, and see how it performs first. If you do well you can earn backlinks from the SERP exposure, and you can certainly do real marketing to get your content in front of more eyeballs, or do outreach, etc. There's a ton of link opportunities you can build, too. The options are to buy, build, or earn the backlinks. But it doesn't have to happen at the start.

If I was going to do anything though, I'd go claim all the social media profiles and flesh them out and get them linking back to me (and me to them).

 

[jordantyeburn]

Target some fresher keywords than you see in the db sites.
Look at auto complete, suggested and related 3 worder plus items.
Those are good targets cuz they have volume and tend to get more cuz google is pushing volume at them via related, suggest and auto complete even if 3rd party database tools haven't recorded it yet.

Nice suggestion - I will grab some

If I was going to do anything though, I'd go claim all the social media profiles and flesh them out and get them linking back to me (and me to them).

That's a very solid point and I do plan to do that. Thanks for all the rest of your answers as well. I think I'll be executing this plan Monday!

 

[jnnkov]

3. I haven't given much thought to backlinks. Mistake? Where can I get quality backlinks that aren't $200+ each (like I've seen here in the marketplace)? Do I even need to right now? When does it make sense to start trying to get high quality links? Should I nab just 2-5 once the articles are up? This is where my knowledge is weakest TBH.

As @Ryuzaki said, I also wouldn't bother with Link building in the beginning.
I’ve made the experience that links are a lot more effective, when the pages have been up for some time beforehand.
Moreover, when you’ve built up the first silo and start link building to the hub-page, more pages will benefit in rankings, since you’ve already interlinked them.