#2 - Site Takes Off, Algorithm Leaks & Link Building

What a week…

Since starting the sale process of my last website back in December, the past week was the first normal week I have had.

I could finally get back to doing what I enjoy… doing some actual work.

I will break down what I have done each week in a section called “The Rundown”.

Let’s take a look at what I did this week.

The Rundown

Currently, I have 3 main sites, all in the early stages.

Affiliate Site

This is the main site I’m focusing on right now. It is focused on affiliate sales which generate recurring revenue. That means if we get hit by an algo update, our revenue should stay pretty flat.

This week I pumped out 3 posts (about 10,000 words). Met the target on this one. I’m writing every single word on this site and keeping the content A++.

It’s actually showing some really good signs of growth this early on. We take a look at why later on in this letter.

Hopefully, we aren’t too far away from the first commission.

Travel Site

My second site is a travel site I started in early December.  I was aiming for 5 articles pushed out this week but only managed 3.

I was mainly focusing on keyword research this week and lining up testing for more writers. If you want me to cover my keyword research strategies in a future email, reply to this email and let me know.

Hopefully, a couple of the writers are good enough to keep on full-time.

This is maybe the most challenging part of building a site. Finding good writers isn’t easy but once you have one or two really good writers, you can start pushing content at scale.

Hopefully, in February, I can get a consistent system in place for pumping out articles on this site.

AI Aged Domain

Ohh, don’t talk to me about this one… I haven’t touched it, yet.

As I still believe AI content will get struck down by the wrath of Larry page, I’ve been putting it on the back burner.

Hopefully this week I’ll get around to setting up a process for pumping out AI content using the OpenAI API.

The main problem is finding an article silo (group of similar-style articles) that works well with AI content. 

This site veers towards the tech niche which requires content around recent products. AI currently isn’t great at this. We’ll see where it goes.

Hosting

As I mentioned earlier the affiliate site has been doing really well right out of the gate.

It’s already doing over 100+ impressions every day. I mean who really cares, impressions don’t make money but it’s a start.

Normally when I start a site it would take well over a month to see the types of results I have had in the first week.

Most of the sites I have previously started have been on cheap, shared, EASYWP hosting.

This time I decided to go for a dedicated Cloudways, Digital Ocean server right from the start. 

I switched my main site doing 300k pv per month to it about 10 months before selling. During that whole time, I never had an issue and it improved my site speed.

I don’t have any evidence to back it up, but I think it could have helped with the initial indexing of my posts.

Link Building

The last thing for this week is link building. Touchy subject…

The affiliate site I’m building is in a pretty competitive niche.

I know a lot of people say you don’t need links but I don’t think they’ll hurt.

The more competitive niches SEOs seem to be in, the more the focus is on link building.

So this week I have scheduled a HARO campaign to get started with a HARO agency.

I’m not going to mention them yet until we can see what type of links they can pull in for me, then I’ll maybe share them…

SEO News This Week

Yandex, which is a Russian search engine had its source code released this week.

This led a ton of SEOs to get VERY excited. While it isn’t the google source code, people are speculating that it can give us clues about the google algorithm.

I’m not an expert in algorithms so I’m going to leave this thread here. It details some of the main findings from the leak.

It’s well worth a read. While it isn’t google it does give us a lot of best practices to use.

That’s us for this week! Good luck with your sites in the week ahead…