Since joining this forum in 2006, I have been mostly quiet as I prefer listening and learning to talking. Within these six years, I tried to learn as much as my brain is capable of. Compared to most guys there I am still a peasant, but still, if this thread helps some noobs noober than me, I would be happy. This is not a study about how much some site earns, which ranks does it have or how much I burned in PPC. This is just a simple walk-through of the process of building a simple content website I decided to put together.
So I launched my first serious content website in May 2012. Why content website? First, I like the idea of doing a long-term project with something actually valuable for people. Second, I can't afford just creating some landers and throwing a bunch of PPC traffic at them. I don't know shit about PPC. So, this case study will be about me creating a content website, things that I wouldn't do again and things I would have done if I knew back then. I like things simple and easy, so I will try to be brief and specific. Also, I tried to build the site with the goal to spend as little as possible, as my peasant budget is tight.
Niche
For a long time, I couldn't decide for any particular niche. It was frustrating, because I didn't want to just jump into one blindly and after couple weeks of hard work realize that I have zero chance. I had some favorites, but couldn't decide for one of them. And then it struck me – one of my best friends is actually a well known health / nutrition / fitness experts in Central Europe and I am working with him – creating and maintaining his on-line projects, consulting for him etc. I work with this guy since 2005 and I learned quite a lot about the health niche during that time, so I thought, I will go with that. I knew that this niche is quite difficult, but I felt like having an expert behind my back is such a big advantage that I would be stupid not to do it. So I talked with him and he agreed that he will help me with content curation and the overall supervision of the direction the website will take. It definitely helped that I worked with him before and I can say that my work helped him to get where he is now, so it is a mutually beneficial cooperation.
Peasant tip: Look for people that could help you, in any way. Don't be a lonesome hero if you are starting. Offer some of your skills. Give and take.
Content
I am lazy. Like not generally lazy, but I am just not a good writer. So I looked at various way of getting content. The great thing was that my friend has written a lot about health/nutrition/fitness etc. – a blog with many articles, many posts on forums, he has an on-line counseling website where people ask questions and he answers them. A goldmine of quality content. Remember when I said that he is a well-known expert in Central Europe? Well, all of this content was written in Czech language. So, I just translated it to English and basically got a lot of quality content for free. With his permission of course... I think. Based on that, I discovered another way of getting a good content easily – foreign books. What I do is I go to Google Books, search for German/Czech/Russian/whatever books in the health niche, find my content here and translate it. Now - I am not saying you should just blindly copy the text and translate it, because that would be stupid and you need to know what you are talking about on your website. You should curate your content and put your articles together in such a way that they actually not only make sense, but give a real value and advice to your visitors. Remember, you build content for people, not for Google. But it still saves a ton of time, because you are not writing your articles from zero. You don't need to think about what to write – you just need to combine several sources into one.
Peasant tip: There are always new ways of how to get content. Utilize existing, publicly available resources.
Domain, hosting
I am not crazy about a nice domain name. I picked a .com domain with a keyword in it, but it's not an EMD. Whatever, domain is just a domain, if it sounds good, is easily written and reasonably short, take it. As for hosting, choose whatever suits you. Just remember that if you are on a tight budget, there is always a bunch of promo codes laying around the net for various hosting companies, so use them.
Peasant tip: Don't worry about domain name so much. The first impression is usually right – if you like it, go with it.
Building the site
This IMHO is the point which I think many people are giving too much attention to. I mean, come on, it's 2013. You can build a site in 10 minutes. I am a web developer, but still. I chose Wordpress and I didn't give a crap about what SEO-plugins it has installed or if I have the best optimized theme out there. I just did the basics – titles, meta descriptions, keywords in URLs and sitemap. Create a non-crappy logo (I am not a designer, so what, anybody can do a basic logo, comeon), change the default theme a bit so it doesn't look that generic and that's it. You may think that if I want to create a long-term content website that I should care more about the design of it. That's correct, but not now. Don't get distracted by polishing when you should be hammering. I am still talking about very early stage of a website – like first day. Nobody knows your site yet, so don't spend five hours in Photoshop designing some stupid gradient or shit. The goal right now is not making the most beautiful site out there, just to make the site trustworthy and serious looking. Instead of working on fancy graphics, put that time and effort into „About“ and „Contact“ pages. Put your photo on the site if you feel like it. Give your visitors the feeling like there is a live person behind the site. People are social creatures and want to interact, so give them ways of doing so.
Peasant tip: While it's important to get all the basics right, again – don't worry about technical stuff too much at this point. Get the site going, make it look nice and at least a bit unique and move on.
Growing the site, making some starting money
I am in this stage right now so I will share experience I have up until now. For a long time, the only thing I did was adding articles. Instead of setting up the whole post scheduling thing, I manually published around 100 articles before getting annoyed and making a huge mistake. I discovered Guest blogging: Looking for guest bloggers or guest post? Join MyBlogGuest! and being a lazy bastard I am, I thought „hmm, free content without any work!“. Stupid me. I published a request for guest bloggers for my website. I don't know why (maybe because the site got PR4), but I got so many responses that the only thing I did for next couple of weeks was publishing shitty articles with one or two outbound links. Stupid, stupid me. On the other hand, the organic traffic went up since then. Significantly. And, like a lightning from a clear sky, I got an offer for publishing two articles and for each one, I'll get $50. Another guy offered me $10 for every article I publish for him. This time, I actually made sure that the articles are written by somebody with a brain that they and offer a real value, so it's a win-win situation. This got me thinking and I realized that there really are many ways of making (even if small) money online and it's bad to focus on one or two of them, especially in the beginning. There is more than AdSense. Right now I am looking at BuySellAds.com, but I will wait until I have bigger traffic. Do you know any Blog Ad networks who accept low-mid traffic websites?
So, right now, I am in process of growing the site. I have to focus on social media. I suck at it. I bought 250 Facebook followers and they all suck. Fuckers don't even like my posts. Haha. Also bought 2000 Twitter followers. Yeah I know, but this is purely for the sake of looking at least a bit like a brand. Nobody wants to have a Twitter account with 1-3 followers. As soon as my 2000 followers were in, more naturally started to follow me. People are sheep, but who am I to complain.
Last but not least, some random peasant tips:
So I launched my first serious content website in May 2012. Why content website? First, I like the idea of doing a long-term project with something actually valuable for people. Second, I can't afford just creating some landers and throwing a bunch of PPC traffic at them. I don't know shit about PPC. So, this case study will be about me creating a content website, things that I wouldn't do again and things I would have done if I knew back then. I like things simple and easy, so I will try to be brief and specific. Also, I tried to build the site with the goal to spend as little as possible, as my peasant budget is tight.
Niche
For a long time, I couldn't decide for any particular niche. It was frustrating, because I didn't want to just jump into one blindly and after couple weeks of hard work realize that I have zero chance. I had some favorites, but couldn't decide for one of them. And then it struck me – one of my best friends is actually a well known health / nutrition / fitness experts in Central Europe and I am working with him – creating and maintaining his on-line projects, consulting for him etc. I work with this guy since 2005 and I learned quite a lot about the health niche during that time, so I thought, I will go with that. I knew that this niche is quite difficult, but I felt like having an expert behind my back is such a big advantage that I would be stupid not to do it. So I talked with him and he agreed that he will help me with content curation and the overall supervision of the direction the website will take. It definitely helped that I worked with him before and I can say that my work helped him to get where he is now, so it is a mutually beneficial cooperation.
Peasant tip: Look for people that could help you, in any way. Don't be a lonesome hero if you are starting. Offer some of your skills. Give and take.
Content
I am lazy. Like not generally lazy, but I am just not a good writer. So I looked at various way of getting content. The great thing was that my friend has written a lot about health/nutrition/fitness etc. – a blog with many articles, many posts on forums, he has an on-line counseling website where people ask questions and he answers them. A goldmine of quality content. Remember when I said that he is a well-known expert in Central Europe? Well, all of this content was written in Czech language. So, I just translated it to English and basically got a lot of quality content for free. With his permission of course... I think. Based on that, I discovered another way of getting a good content easily – foreign books. What I do is I go to Google Books, search for German/Czech/Russian/whatever books in the health niche, find my content here and translate it. Now - I am not saying you should just blindly copy the text and translate it, because that would be stupid and you need to know what you are talking about on your website. You should curate your content and put your articles together in such a way that they actually not only make sense, but give a real value and advice to your visitors. Remember, you build content for people, not for Google. But it still saves a ton of time, because you are not writing your articles from zero. You don't need to think about what to write – you just need to combine several sources into one.
Peasant tip: There are always new ways of how to get content. Utilize existing, publicly available resources.
Domain, hosting
I am not crazy about a nice domain name. I picked a .com domain with a keyword in it, but it's not an EMD. Whatever, domain is just a domain, if it sounds good, is easily written and reasonably short, take it. As for hosting, choose whatever suits you. Just remember that if you are on a tight budget, there is always a bunch of promo codes laying around the net for various hosting companies, so use them.
Peasant tip: Don't worry about domain name so much. The first impression is usually right – if you like it, go with it.
Building the site
This IMHO is the point which I think many people are giving too much attention to. I mean, come on, it's 2013. You can build a site in 10 minutes. I am a web developer, but still. I chose Wordpress and I didn't give a crap about what SEO-plugins it has installed or if I have the best optimized theme out there. I just did the basics – titles, meta descriptions, keywords in URLs and sitemap. Create a non-crappy logo (I am not a designer, so what, anybody can do a basic logo, comeon), change the default theme a bit so it doesn't look that generic and that's it. You may think that if I want to create a long-term content website that I should care more about the design of it. That's correct, but not now. Don't get distracted by polishing when you should be hammering. I am still talking about very early stage of a website – like first day. Nobody knows your site yet, so don't spend five hours in Photoshop designing some stupid gradient or shit. The goal right now is not making the most beautiful site out there, just to make the site trustworthy and serious looking. Instead of working on fancy graphics, put that time and effort into „About“ and „Contact“ pages. Put your photo on the site if you feel like it. Give your visitors the feeling like there is a live person behind the site. People are social creatures and want to interact, so give them ways of doing so.
Peasant tip: While it's important to get all the basics right, again – don't worry about technical stuff too much at this point. Get the site going, make it look nice and at least a bit unique and move on.
Growing the site, making some starting money
I am in this stage right now so I will share experience I have up until now. For a long time, the only thing I did was adding articles. Instead of setting up the whole post scheduling thing, I manually published around 100 articles before getting annoyed and making a huge mistake. I discovered Guest blogging: Looking for guest bloggers or guest post? Join MyBlogGuest! and being a lazy bastard I am, I thought „hmm, free content without any work!“. Stupid me. I published a request for guest bloggers for my website. I don't know why (maybe because the site got PR4), but I got so many responses that the only thing I did for next couple of weeks was publishing shitty articles with one or two outbound links. Stupid, stupid me. On the other hand, the organic traffic went up since then. Significantly. And, like a lightning from a clear sky, I got an offer for publishing two articles and for each one, I'll get $50. Another guy offered me $10 for every article I publish for him. This time, I actually made sure that the articles are written by somebody with a brain that they and offer a real value, so it's a win-win situation. This got me thinking and I realized that there really are many ways of making (even if small) money online and it's bad to focus on one or two of them, especially in the beginning. There is more than AdSense. Right now I am looking at BuySellAds.com, but I will wait until I have bigger traffic. Do you know any Blog Ad networks who accept low-mid traffic websites?
So, right now, I am in process of growing the site. I have to focus on social media. I suck at it. I bought 250 Facebook followers and they all suck. Fuckers don't even like my posts. Haha. Also bought 2000 Twitter followers. Yeah I know, but this is purely for the sake of looking at least a bit like a brand. Nobody wants to have a Twitter account with 1-3 followers. As soon as my 2000 followers were in, more naturally started to follow me. People are sheep, but who am I to complain.
Last but not least, some random peasant tips:
- Go to myblogguest.com if you want guest bloggers, but be very picky about the quality of the posts. I manually got through ~400 articles and around 60% of them were absolute rubbish.
- In the beginning, don't worry about traffic stats that much. They suck anyway. If you want to have some numbers, statcounter.com is enough.
- Engage with people. It's all about people. Google is not people. Now go read it a hundred times over.
- Don't get discouraged. I was too weak and got discouraged many times. I lost interest when my site didn't get big enough traffic after some time. This is wrong. Keep at it. The moment you give up is usually right before the moment things will get off the ground.
- Go to Social Media Networks Currently Tracked By KnowEm and make account on all social networks in your niche.
- Develop your skills. It helped me immensely that I know PHP, HTML, CSS, JS and all that. I can do things quickly. That's why my clients love me. I hate repetitive work, so I build tools for all the automation. Technology is there to help, so use it.
- Don't want to sound like yo mama, but... don't forget that there is a world outside. Screw all this, you still want to meet people, talk with them and live your life. If your site doesn't make it, so what? Start another one, or do something else. Quite interestingly, as soon as I started to care about my actual life, my work and my projects started getting better too. Go out now.
