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A Year Learning Website Monetisation

31st October 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I remember that I read somewhere that it would be easy to set up a travel blog and make money from it, which kind of got me started on this whole adventure in the first place.

So over this last year, I’ve been furiously looking into what it takes to monetise a website or a blog and the different strategies you can employ to create an ongoing stream of revenue.

3 Things I learned about Website Monetisation in 2016

I was really keen to find out how that’s possible and whether I could do the same thing, so here are the key things I’ve learned this year

Keyword Research Is Key

If you’re going to start a blog or a website then you have to remember that this is a huge investment of your time, so you really need to get an idea of whether this is going to make you any money at all before you head off writing content.

The first thing that you’re going to need to do is to research a niche.

I’ve written about this in detail before, but they key is finding a niche that:

• You’re interested in

• Has low competition and high volume keywords

• Is a broad enough niche that you can potentially expand this into an authority site in the long term

Get any of these things wrong and you’re going to end up with a blog that is going to be nothing but hard work giving you very little in return.

For any website venture that you’re about to start on I would recommend that you invest up to a month in planning the growth of your website.

• Create a keyword matrix and identify long tail keywords that you will target initially and higher volume keywords that you might want to target in the future

• Consider how your site is going to generate revenue. Are you going to be using Adsense, Amazon Affiliates or other affiliate programmes to earn your bucks?

• Check out the competition in your niche and look at how you could potentially improve what they have created

• Think about how much time your website will take to manage in the future and whether this could be outsourced. The worse thing is that if your site becomes really popular and you have set up systems where you need to be involved in all parts of the business, then the more popular it gets, the more of your time it will use

You can’t Take Shortcuts

Unfortunately, there are no real shortcuts that you can take to building up a successful website.

I’ve read a lot about Grey and Black Hat SEO tricks such as using Private Blog Networks, however, whilst these might get you success in the short term, in the longer term you’re likely to get banned from Google, and ruin your business.

If something looks too good to be true like a gig on Fiverr promising 50 top quality links for $5, then you know it’s going to be dodgy so steer clear.

Yes, there is nothing for it, but hard work and putting in the hours initially.

You’re going to need to write a lot of your content to develop your own voice, manage your own website and then most importantly learn how to market your website and generate traffic, all of which can be hugely time-consuming.

On top of this, you can’t expect instant results as your new website will go into Google’s sandbox and won’t start ranking for 3 – 6 months anyway.

Content is King and Links Are the Queen

The days where you could just throw up an article of a few hundred words for niche keywords and expect to rank easily are long gone.

Now you’ll need to put a lot more work and thought into this.

The content that you generate will need to be:

• Unique (Either a fresh idea or a vast improvement on existing content)

• Interesting (Needs to be made shareable)

• In-depth (Minimum of 1000 words per article)

• Answer a question / Solve a problem

The digital landscape is now so crammed full of content for every conceivable subject, you’ll even find in depth 2000+ word reviews of toilet seats, so you have to make sure your content sticks out somehow.

Once you’ve written this killer content, the hardest part is generating links to this content, which seems to be the biggest single factor in 2016 for ranking your content.

There are plenty of strategies all over the internet on how to do this, but once again, this will just consume a lot of your time.

What Did I Achieve?

On a positive note I have to say that I achieved a great deal in this sphere over the last year:

• I set up 2 websites, www.mylifestyledream.com and a niche website

• I have learned a good understanding of SEO and different tactics

• I’ve learned a lot about internet marketing

• I’ve learned about affiliate marketing and the different tactics that people use to monetize websites

Overall I’ve got a great foundation now in both my knowledge and my websites to build on over the next year.

I haven’t been able to focus as much of my time as I wanted to on the niche website, but plan to switch focus back on to this next year.

Low Light of the Year

I think I’ve found a great niche with low competition keywords, however, it’s not the most exciting niche and is quite hard to write articles for.

I’ve written about 8 so far, however, have kind of lost heart a little bit, because even though some of the keywords that I am targeting are sub 20 Keyword Competitiveness, I still don’t rank in the top 100 for these keywords, which I find really bizarre.

I think the answer to this problem, is that I just need to put in more work, build out more articles and start my link building activities then the site should start to grow in traffic.

Highlight of the Year

The best thing for me with building out these sites has to be the amount that I have learned about SEO.

I find this dark art really interesting and is definitely something that I want to learn more about and spend more time perfecting in the future.

How much Time did I spend?

With a full time job in front of a computer screen, I’ve also needed to research and practice these 3 ways to make money online as well as write about them, all of which takes a huge amount of time.

In reality I’ve needed to just focus on one thing at a time, or free up more time, which I intend to do next year.

How much Money Did I make?

A big fat £0

In fact, by the time I take hosting and themes and domain names into account I’ve probably invested about £150 so far.

However, I feel that I’ve put in a lot of the groundwork with which to monetize these sites in the future.

Was It Worth the Effort?

Yes, absolutely. I feel that I’ve started a new path that I’m interested in and could potentially reap rewards in the future.

Out of all the things I’ve looked at this is most likely to be the idea that comes closest to giving me real passive income in the future.

Streamlining your Content Creation Process

13th April 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

This month I have managed to refine my content creation process so that it is a lot more efficient than previously. This is particularly useful when I’m writing articles for things that I know nothing or very little about, which will be a common occurrence for a lot of niche site builders.

For each article that I am writing I find it helps enormously to run through these following logical steps:

STEP 1 – CREATE A LIST OF ARTICLE TOPICS

I’ve got a spreadsheet where I list out all of the potential ideas that I may have for articles in my niche. Whenever an idea pops into my head I just collate the ideas into this spreadsheet.I’ll usually then do a bit of keyword research using Long Tail Pro and list out the Keyword Competitiveness and the Monthly Search volume next to the article.

STEP 2 – PICK AN ARTICLE

Whenever, I have a bit of free time I’ll go to this list and pick out an article topic, that I feel like writing at the time. Some articles are going to be harder to write than others so it’s best to have a range of articles for me to choose from depending on how I feel.

STEP 3 – CREATE SUB HEADINGS

Before I start writing the article I’ll do a 10 minute brainstorm to flesh out some ideas for things that I could write about in the article. Then I’ll try and place these in a logical structure, thinking about the best way to make the content flow.

What I usually find is that the items that I list out here, become the sub-headings on my actual article.

STEP 4 – RESEARCH IN GOOGLE

I’ll simply type the keyword, the sub-heading or the article topic into Google and scan through the results. Any articles that I think look interesting I’ll open in a new tab.

STEP 5 – REVIEW OPEN TABS

Next I’ll simply work through the tabs one by one, discarding the ones with low value or unrelated content and copying the info from pages that I think contain useful information into a new Word document.

STEP 6 – ORGANISE CONTENT

At this stage I’ll have a massive 20 page word document, full of all the source content in different fonts and styles, which will look and feel like a complete mess, so lets get organised!I simply start to cut up the content and group relevant bits from each article into the sub-headers that I had written at the start. During this process you’ll find that you start to discard some more unrelated content and end up with a pretty big document still, with the benefit that it is now grouped into related content items

STEP 7 – REWRITE THE CONTENT

I usually just make a copy of the word document then work my way through the different sections of content, taking the key points, facts and figures from the source content and rewriting in my own style. This has the benefit that it applies your own voice to the content and you won’t get into any trouble with plagiarising content!

STEP 8 – TOP AND TAIL

Make sure you write a good introduction to the topic, and if it’s a long article add jump links to the relevant sections.At the end of the article try to write a summary of what you have found and pull out some of the key learnings. Both of these places are good locations to bring in your keywords.

STEP 9 – WRITE A KILLER HEADLINE

It’s always good to try and get your keyword into your headline, but creating a title that sticks out can also make the difference. Remember that your site will be sitting in the search results competing against many other sites, so if you can make a heading that stands out and are position 9 on the page, you could end up getting more click throughs than position 3 if their title is written poorly.

There is a great free tool that you can use to help you ensure that your title is up to scratch : http://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer

STEP 10 – REVIEW YOUR ARTICLE

Leave the article for a day or so, before you come back to it, and you’ll be surprised at the things you spot with a fresh pair of eyes. I usually then try to read the article out loud to myself and make final edits to the content, before preparing this for publication on my site.

Of course after these steps, there are another series of things you need to go for before publishing you article such as:

Make sure your content has been properly optimised for SEO
Format your content correctly
Add in a decent amount of outbound and internal links
Check how this will look on Social accounts

However, I’ve found that running through these 10 steps has made my approach to content a lot more systematic, logical and of course time saving.

My Website Dream: Chapter 5 – Content Writing Process

13th April 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

The overall progress on my niche website has been a little slower than I had hoped this month as I’d mainly been distracted with my matched betting updates instead, given the Cheltenham Festival and the fact that I recently purchased the Accumulator Generator software.

I’m also finding it hard again to know what is best to focus on as I need to work on the moment as there are lots of things that I need to work on, but don’t have the hours in the day to look at everything.

Anyway, enough whinging, so what did I achieve this month:

MY NICHE WEBSITE

The good news is that I did manage to write another 3 articles, so I have a total of 8 written now and I finished compiling the details of the London listings page.

However, I’m struggling a bit to find additional content to write for the site to be honest. There are definitely more articles out there that I can write, but they are likely to be smaller articles than I have written so far, and I need to figure out how I can bring them into the site and make the site hang together well.

Realistically I have enough content already to launch the site, so I think that logically that should be my next step. Once I have the site up and running it will be a lot easier for me to see how the content fits together and where the holes are.

Content Writing Process

I found that I could distill this technique down into a number of repeatable steps that would help me speed up this process in the future. You can read about these in more detail in my post on Streamlining your Content Creation, which covers the following steps:

Create a List of Article Topics

pick an article

Create sub headings

research in google

review open tabs

organise the content

rewrite the content

top and tail

write a killer headline

review your article

However, I’ve found that running through these 10 steps has made my approach to content a lot more systematic, logical and of course time saving.

AUTHORITY HACKER PRO MEMBERSHIP

This month I’ve been hot on the learning trail again and one of my key resources recently has been the Authority Hacker website. This is a site run by Gael and Mark, who are 2 entrepreneurs and experienced Digital Marketers who give you really solid and actionable advice in building up authority sites.

I attended a webinar where they pretty much gave step by step instructions on how to build up a niche and authority site so that it brings in a steady passive income stream. At the end of the webinar was a Q&A session and then they offered a discount membership plan to attendees (a pretty standard marketing tactic)

The webinar was really useful and they both provide valuable insight into building out your business so I decided to sign up for the annual membership, for just over £350.

This might sound like a lot of money but for this price you get:• A 30 minute 1 on 1 call with Gael• Access to a private Facebook Group• 2 x monthly webinars and Q&A sessions• Access to all of their blue prints

For me this seemed like a solid investment, especially as I am currently in the process of building out my niche site so I went ahead and made the purchase.

There is a bunch of really useful content available in the ‘Blueprints’ section. Each blueprint is made up of a series of lessons with a video and step by step instructions of what you need to do.

Some of the themes covered were:

Affiliate Marketing
Content Upgrades and Promotion
Email Marketing
Guest Posting
Lead Magnets

Outreach Process
Pinterest
Creating effective Pop Ups
Producing & Outsourcing Top Content

The content creation and the outreach blueprints were particularly relevant to me at the moment and I definitely learnt some things from these, however, overall the area is pitched at people who are a bit further downstream with their websites than I am.

Most of the blueprints are for larger Authority sites, that already have a decent amount of content on them and to a certain extent already have some kind of following / social presence.

In the end I decided to ask for my 30 day refund as I think this will be more useful to me in the future and I’m pretty sure that I’ll pick up a membership with these guys again in the future.

If anything, the most beneficial thing is access to the Facebook group and the bi-monthly webinars, where you can ask all of those questions that crop up from time to time. I think I would find this hugely beneficial as a lot of the time it feels like there is no one to ask, and is always great to bounce a few questions and ideas off of other people.

You can sign up for the Pro Membership from as little as $39 per month if you sign up to a yearly membership and I would definitely recommend this service.

If that’s too steep for you at the moment, then they have loads of invaluable information on both their website: http://www.authorityhacker.com/

And also in their podcasts : http://www.authorityhacker.com/podcast-2/

LAST MONTH’s GOAL

Complete the London listings page for my niche site : COMPLETE
Write 5 more articles for niche site : INCOMPLETE
Stretch goal – look at the Thrive Content Builder : INCOMPLETE

NEXT MONTH’s GOAL

Write 5 smaller blog posts of max 1500 words
Set up the site in Word Press
Buy a domain
Stretch goal – look at the Thrive Content Builder

TOOLS AND SITES USED

http://www.authorityhacker.com/

My Website Dream : Chapter 4 : Content Creation and Optimisation

28th February 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Niche Content Creation

This last month has been all about content creation and organisation for both my niche site and www.mylifestyledream.com

My target was to write 3 articles for my chosen niche site, but luckily enough I’ve had quite a quiet time at work this month and I’ve tried to use every spare hour I could get for writing. This meant that I managed to create 5 pillar content articles for my niche site, totalling more than 12,000 words of pretty decent content.

I think that with another 5 pillar articles and 5 smaller articles I should have enough content on the site to be able to launch it. On top of this I have also collated a list of all the businesses in London that are qualified to provide the service in the niche that I am focusing on. I’ve captured their addresses, services provided and am writing a paragraph of SEO focused introductory text for each of these businesses. My plan is that I will then create one big listings page that targets the keyword ‘[myniche] service in London’.

Failed Survey

One of the keywords that I want to go after as well is ‘[myniche] service prices’ or ‘how much does an [myniche] cost’ so I decided that I’d put a survey together and reach out to a number of businesses in the UK who offer this service and find out what their price list is.

I set up a Survey Monkey survey and wrote an email to 20 different businesses, pretending that I was a student doing a study on regional diversity and was interested in finding out how prices in the industry differ across the country.

Out of the 20 businesses I surveyed, guess how many responded? Yes, that’s right, a big fat 0. Looking back even though the email was nicely worded and the survey would only take 5 minutes to complete, it did look a little complicated and there was no real reason why they would participate as they weren’t getting anything out of it. I think I’m going to put this on hold now, until the site takes off and then do a proper survey offering the businesses a page to promote their business on my site in return for their participation. I’ll then create a nice infographic out of the results, which would be a useful piece of information as no one really has this information readily available on the internet.

Alexa Submission

Another thing that I did this month is submitted my site to Alexa as this sounds like another useful place to list your site to enhance your search rankings.

A couple of quick tips to help boost your Alexa rank are to install the Alexa toolbar in your browser, and the Alexa widget to your site. The word on the street is that this will boost your Alexa rank, although I am still showing as having no data! I think it just takes a month or so until you get listed though.

Optimisation

I thought it was about time this month to take stock of where I’ve got to with building www.mylifestyledream.com. I wanted to check how the site was performing and see if there were any issues with how I was creating the content and the structure of the site and also check my SEO rankings.

As I was looking into this I came across 2 really useful tools:

Onpage.org

This is a really handy tool that checks your site for 3 key areas:

SEO Aspects
Technical Aspects
Content Aspects

Onpage.org allows you to generate a report where it will check against a multitude of criteria in these categories and list out any errors for you. It takes a while to generate the report, and you are limited to creation of 1 report a month, however, this gives you some really great pointers into potential issues on your site.

Moz

Moz in general is a pretty amazing must have tool for anyone interested in SEO. They have a free toolbar that you can install on your site that looks a bit like this:

This helps you tell at a glance useful SEO metrics such as the domain authority or page authority of pages in the search results so you can see how easily you could rank for that keyword. You can find out the full feature set here : https://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

On top of this if you can afford it then I’d recommend getting a Moz Pro account, which has some really useful features such as doing an indepth SEO analysis of each page on your site. Based on the tips that it gave me, I went back and re-worked all of my pages so there were no issues showing with Moz.

Fiverr Gigs

Welcome to the world of fiverr.com. If you haven’t heard of this before then this is basically a marketplace where people offer all different kinds of services for a maximum of $5. You can source everything from logos to software subscriptions so there are a number of things that can come in useful if you are just setting up a website.

Because I am researching niches at the moment I used it to get a 1 month subscription to SEMrush and it worked perfectly. To be honest, it is a little bit dodgy so I wouldn’t use it in the long term, and you are sharing your account with other users, so if you want to keep your niche close to your chest, this may not be the best bet.

There are a lot of gigs on Fiverr offering traffic and backlinks as well but you should definitely stay clear of them as this will do more damage than good to your site.

Podcasts

Amongst all of the content that I’ve been creating I’ve also been making the most of every second I can get to listen to Podcasts from some of the key influencers in the internet marketing / niche website markets.

The best of the bunch are listed below:

Smart Passive Income

This podcast from guru Pat Flynn gives you all kinds of hints, tips and motivation to get your online business up and running. His goal has been to set up businesses with a bit of hard work to start with that free up time in the longer term and generate passive income for you. Great listening, but takes a while to get used to Pat’s fast, squeaky voice!!!

Ask Pat

This is another podcast from Pat Flynn but comprises of shorter 10 minute podcasts, where he responods to a listener’s questions. A wide range of topics discussed but he provides useful, digestable information

Authority Hacker

My personal favourite site and podcast at the moment. The duo of Gael and Mark give you no nonsense tips about creating your authority website based on their real experiences running Health Ambition and Authority Hacker. They ran an agency together but the podcasts are usually full of actionable information about SEO, content marketing and anything you need to know about running a site.

Niche Pursuits

Spencer Hawe and Co-host Perrin Carrel focus on creating niche websites, and are now branching out into the Amazon FBA programme. These guys are behind the Niche Site 3 project, where they are mentoring 3 differetn listeners as they help them to set up and develop their websites. Essential listening.

WP Elevation

This blog is more focused on how you can use the power of WordPress to elevate your blog and improve your business and features interviews with a range of eminent online entrepreneurs and internet marketers.

Pro Blogger

Darren Rowse is the goto man for blogging on the internet and has many years of experience. His podcasts tend to offer writing tips and anything blog related. Worthwhile listening, although the nuggets of information are a little hidden amongst the waffle, and he does sound a little bit preacher-like. Still, he’s been there and done it, so you should listen!

Last Month’s Goal

Write 3 articles for the niche site – COMPLETE
Create a list of the niche services in London – COMPLETE

Next Month’s Goal

Complete the London listings page for my niche site
Write 5 more articles for niche site
Stretch goal – look at the Thrive Content Builder

Tools and Sites Used

My Website Dream : Chapter 3 : Keyword Research and Choosing my Niche

24th January 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Through listening to the podcasts on Niche Pursuits and doing a lot of background reading, I’ve decided that I need to diversify my website monetization strategy. I had originally planned that I would focus my efforts on building out this website www.mylifestyledream.com and look at how I could monetize this site, however, I’ve switched my focus somewhat.

Through the initial keyword research that I’ve done it’s obvious that the ‘How to make money online’ niche is one of the most competitive niches out there and will take me a long time to rank for an ultimate build up an audience. Whilst I still want to pursue that avenue, I also want to try something that can bring back dividends in the shorter term, so I’ve decided that I also want to set up a niche site.

From what I’ve read so far, creating a niche site that brings back £500 to £1000 a month in recurring passive income, is not a dream, but actually a distinct possibility. There are loads of people out there doing this and making money from niche sites already, and most of them seem to be employing pretty similar methodologies and techniques. In the short term, I’m going to look at these approaches and start to apply them in practice as I build out my own niche site.

Detailed Keyword Research / Choosing a Niche

I know I’ve banged on about it before but doing extensive keyword research before you start building a site is absolutely essential. There’s no point in spending hours and hours writing content that no-one reads, so this month my focus has been 100% on keyword research, evaluating market size and eventually, choosing a niche that I want to go into.

One of my money spinning plans has been to set up a niche website and monetize it with either Adsense or Amazon affiliate links. I’ve had a few ideas bouncing around in my head for months now, so I wanted to road test these ideas and find out whether there really was any business opportunity in developing a niche in those areas.

To come up with my shortlist of niches I simply went to Wikipedia and looked through their list of hobbies to find potential niches that I might be interested in.

Then for each niche, I looked on Amazon for potential products and also used Ubersuggest to give me a list of keywords related to that niche.

I then plugged these keywords into Long Tail Pro and did a short sample of keywords to get an idea of keyword competitiveness in that niche. Some of these niches were clearly overly competitive with lots of keywords with keyword competiveness scores of over 30, so this helped me to start whittling down the list to about 5 niches.

For each of these 5 niches I then used SEMrush to gauge how much traffic was in those markets. This was quite a simple process of looking at the top ten results for some of the keywords in the niche, and choosing sites, which were similar to what I would like to build ie Doppelgangers. I could then take their URLs and put into SEMrush, which gives you an indication of the traffic size:

SEMrsuh monthly traffic stats — Screenshot showing SEMrush monthly traffic stats

The other good thing about SEMrush, is that you can view the keywords that the specific site is ranking for and put these on your list of keywords you want to rank for:

This clearly showed that a couple of niches I was thinking of entering had very little traffic, so I removed them from my list.

In the end my choice was between 2 niches:

Niche 1 – This would be entering a sub-niche for a product that has taken off in the last few years, and I think will have great potential in the future. The sub-niche doesn’t have great traffic at the moment, however, is fairly easy to enter, and I think will grow in the future. I can also see potential that you could then expand into the main niche with time and become an authority site, even though that is quite a competitive niche.

Niche 2 – Is entering into a niche where you would promote a service that other people are supplying. There are loads of really low competitive keywords in this niche, and most of the sites are obviously built by people who don’t know a lot about SEO. I’m not sure how much it helps either, but the Cost Per Click for these keywords is really high:

Long Tail Pro Screenshot screenshot showing keyword competitiveness in my niche

The only problem I can find with this niche is that it will be hard to write a lot of decent quality articles.

In the end, I have decided to go with Niche 2, just because the Keyword Competitiveness is so low and the major site in this niche is getting 40k visits per month!!!

Content Research

After choosing my niche I was really keen to crack on with content creation so this month I’ve started to do a lot more research into the niche to generate content ideas.

I’ve basically been reviewing other sites in the niche to ‘borrow’ content ideas, and this has proven to be a really useful exercise. From this exercise I have decided that I can expand my site into 3 main areas:

Helping visitors to find the niche service in their area
Helping businesses to find training for the niche service
Helping visitors find a related niche product

I really think there is potential to become an authority in this niche as well, and I’ve started creating a list of different content ideas to put on the site. I found the guys at Digital Marketer wrote this really great article

How I Nearly Bought a Website

Talking of distractions, well this month I nearly took a massive shortcut around the whole niche site building process and almost bought myself a ready made website, complete with WordPress plugins and 40 keywords focused articles.

The opportunity arose when I was reading an article on Matthew Allen’s blog about the Google Thin Content Penalty. This is basically a new algorithm that Google introduced recently to penalise websites, which are perceived to add no value and are built for the sole purpose of generating Affiliate revenue ie Niche Sites. If you don’t have a lot of content on your site and you have a lot of affiliate links, then you’ve probably been penalised and received something like this from Google:

So, Matthew Allen had 2 of his sites hit with this penalty and had since then de-indexed the sites, put them on a new URL and was selling them through Human Proof Designs for $799. He claimed that these sites were making a few hundred pounds every month and with a bit of careful nurture could make even more money.

To me this sounded like a great opportunity, not just because they were tried and tested websites that had already made money, but because this would afford me a great opportunity to learn how he had set these specific niche sites up in WordPress. More than anything I was looking at this as a really good learning tool so I clicked on the ‘Buy Now’ button for the site about Organic Shampoo, and initially it looked like I was successful.

However, I was completely gutted to find out a few hours later that there had been an issue with the checkout flow, and that the site had already been sold. Matthew was extremely apologetic and offered me first refusal on the Fertility Kit site instead, but to be honest, that niche just wasn’t going to float my boat.

Looking back, it’s probably not such a bad thing as I want to go through this whole set up process myself, so I guess it’s back to the drawing board and time to focus on writing them articles!!!

NEXT MONTH’S GOALS

Write 3 articles for the niche site
Create a list of the niche services in London

LAST MONTH’S TASKS

Choose a niche for my website – COMPLETE
Publish 5 more articles – INCOMPLETE
Create a backlinking strategy – INCOMPLETE

TOOLS AND SITES USED