My attempt at being a "Big Brand"

[Chupin]

I have been wanting to do a journal type post for quite some time as a means of keeping myself consistently motivated and headed in the right direction, but have felt that my site wasn't quite to a point where a journal would benefit the forum. I still don't think I'm quite there, but sometimes close enough has to be good enough, so here it goes.

Site Creation

I registered my domain on May 10'th, 2013 so the site is over 1 year old. I identified a Niche that I was personally interested in that has exactly 1 "big brand" that dominates every facet of the niche. Every other site ranking within the top 20 is either .gov's, .edu's, non-profits, or Wikipedia, in other words ripe for another "big brand" to gain some traction (at least in my mind...)

The Domain is in the style www.KeyWordmodifier.com Where Modifier is a word unrelated to the keyword but adds a "big brand" feel to the site name. Think "www.tintedwindowemporium.com

I built the site on Wordpress, utilizing a modified responsive theme. I drew heavy influence from one of the best posters on Wickedfire, CCarter, and his big brand post.

http://www.wickedfire.com/enlighten...rter-big-brand-checklist-how-i-represent.html

Building the Site

I identified 4 main keywords that I could would be my main "hub" keywords, that had multiple tertiary keywords related to them. Each of the focus keywords have dedicated pages with 2000 words of content, and a link to the top page of the silo underneath the category hub page. Each of the subcategory silo pages have anywhere from 500-800 words, each linked to the next article in the silo along with at least 2 outbound "authority" links and a relevant youtube video imbedded. The pages are in the style:

KEYWORD

Text
Subheader
Text
Subheader
Test
Youtube Video
Relevant outbound links.

Here is a picture of Google Webmaster Tools identifying indexed pages.

​

Link Building Efforts

Being a "Big Brand" I've been very careful with the links that I've built for the site. I've made heavy use of OpenSiteExplorer to look for links that my big competitor has, and have done my best to slowly copy his link profile. Where I've got a big problem is that the big competitor is established and has lots of big news links, sponsor links, and blog links from other people inside of the niche that I can't conceivably obtain. I've attempted to contact people who run the blogs that my competition gets some really juicy links from, and the webmasters have declined linking to my site (even for a fee) saying that their blogrolls are full.

I've also analyzed competition through an awesome website that I found that provides awesome crawling and categorizing of links.

https://www.linkdetective.com

I find myself at a point where I don't know where I can go out and acquire quality links from, and don't feel as if I have the knowledge to really build sketchy links without damaging the work that I have already done. However, I'm at a huge junction point with this project because I'm finding myself mid-ranking for hundreds of keywords...

And what happens when something like the above happens?

Yeah... Brutal.

At the moment I do not have a plan to address the situation, I obviously need more links and I'm going to continue looking for places and trying to acquire quality for the site.

To-Do List
Optimize site to reduce page loading times, especially for front page. Currently my site loads in the 2 second range, I would like it as close to sub 1 second as possible.

Figure out how to increase links and rankings in order to close that gigantic gap between impressions and clicks.

Continue to build content and indexed pages.

Hopefully those of you in this section that feel overwhelmed with the process of starting a site can obtain some insight and motivation from this post. I've read it time and time again on this forum that he best course of action is to just get started, and learn as you go. There is a tremendous amount of resources and knowledge to be found on this forum that can help you along the way.

If anyone has any suggestions, comments, questions, or can provide me with any guidance to help me along the path I would love to interact with you in the thread. Thanks for reading.





​

 

[Louey37]

Hey mate,

A really good place to start is to think about ways you can get traffic without SEO. The easiest way is to start crawling through related forums and then providing value there. When people start asking specific questions, write an article on that and link back to it.

Try social media.

Try existing communities.

Try anything that means you can start building now, regardless of whether Google likes you or not and you'll see how quickly Google starts to like you.

Google is like that hot girl in the club. She only wants you when you don't need her. So start working out how to not need her.

 

[Chupin]

Hey mate,

A really good place to start is to think about ways you can get traffic without SEO. The easiest way is to start crawling through related forums and then providing value there. When people start asking specific questions, write an article on that and link back to it.

Try social media.

Try existing communities.

Try anything that means you can start building now, regardless of whether Google likes you or not and you'll see how quickly Google starts to like you.

Google is like that hot girl in the club. She only wants you when you don't need her. So start working out how to not need her.

I am planning on starting a "traffic leaks" type project as described by CCarter in yet another of his epic posts...

http://www.wickedfire.com/enlightened-members/177893-traffic-leaks-final-level.html

My issue for this particular niche is that the major forum is controlled by the aforementioned existing "big brand" and he watches it like a hawk (I've already tried leaking some traffic from there and was promptly user deleted).

I'm going to try to get actively involved with Reddit (there's a rather large subreddit directly related to my niche) and try to leak traffic from there, as well as get actively involved in Facebook Pages / Google Circles involved in my niche to see if I can't get some more people headed to the site.

I've also got to brainstorm and figure out a way to make people want to come back to the site. As it stands right now every single page that I have on my site is filled with really good information but the sort of stuff you'd check once, get what you need and *maybe* come back next month...

Thanks for the reply Louey.

 

[Louey37]

Dude, Reddit. Just make sure you have a good server or CDN in place before you do it.

On my biggest days when I was experimenting with Reddit, I was getting 1000 visitors AN HOUR to the site and I crashed my site the two times I tried.

It's not a leak, it's a fucking Tsunami!

Get into it.

 

[thehobbster]

Rome wasn't built in a day!

Time and age of everything will factor into this. At a certain point, things will also "click" with Google and they'll respect you as a big brand. Keep rolling content.

Build a brand footprint. Create things that brands create, such as social profiles for your site on all of the big social sites and get them loaded with some content. Get shares/retweets/repins and all that that not only spreads the footprint but also siphons juice back to your profiles.

Keep adding content for the low volume long-tails too. If not already, when things click, you'll take most of those just by the merit of them being on your domain.

Any page that is doing okay can do better without links. You can expand, optimize, etc. This especially fun to do with the homepage if you get creative.

Don't just worry about links to the homepage. It's not natural and not the sign of a brand.

You can't get links that your competitor has? Create links he can't get. Build your own network. If you're going to play in this vertical for a long time, make sites that are generalized so you can re-use them on future projects. It won't hurt to make hyper-relevant sites either. Can't afford to host a ton of shit and take on the overhead? Make some web 2.0's on the big platforms that aren't at risk of being deleted or no-following your shit.

Make an infographic and distribute it. This works well for forums and Reddit too.

Write viral style posts just to get links and traffic to those posts. If you have analytics installed, this is gonna look good for you sitewide. Add links from these posts back to where you want juice to flow.

There's oh so much more but I don't want to get into specifics either. Think about every asset your site has or assets you could create that would garner links and do it.

I wrote a journal that's in the Enlightened Members section that went on for a while that you might find helpful or in the least inspiring.

Best of luck!

 

[Chupin]

Rome wasn't built in a day!

Time and age of everything will factor into this. At a certain point, things will also "click" with Google and they'll respect you as a big brand. Keep rolling content.

Build a brand footprint. Create things that brands create, such as social profiles for your site on all of the big social sites and get them loaded with some content. Get shares/retweets/repins and all that that not only spreads the footprint but also siphons juice back to your profiles.

I didn't mention the social side of things. I have a Facebook/Twitter/Google+ which I purchased a likes/share package for and have neglected. I need to get on hootsuite and just schedule a few months worth of posts for the profiles.

You can't get links that your competitor has? Create links he can't get. Build your own network. If you're going to play in this vertical for a long time, make sites that are generalized so you can re-use them on future projects. It won't hurt to make hyper-relevant sites either. Can't afford to host a ton of shit and take on the overhead? Make some web 2.0's on the big platforms that aren't at risk of being deleted or no-following your shit.

Yep, that's on the to-do as well as I can tell web 2.0 networks are the newest "thing" (just look at BST....) How often do you refresh content to web 2.0's? Seems like the standard is to build each with 3 articles and then what? Once a month add something to keep them fresh? I'll have to find a way to automate that since keeping 15+ 2.0's fresh would likely start to suck really fast..

Make an infographic and distribute it. This works well for forums and Reddit too.

Write viral style posts just to get links and traffic to those posts. If you have analytics installed, this is gonna look good for you sitewide. Add links from these posts back to where you want juice to flow.

There's oh so much more but I don't want to get into specifics either. Think about every asset your site has or assets you could create that would garner links and do it.

I wrote a journal that's in the Enlightened Members section that went on for a while that you might find helpful or in the least inspiring.

Best of luck!

I need to do all of those.

Thanks for taking the time to give me some advice Hobbster! For anyone reading the thread, if you need some rock solid links the ones that Hobbster sells are as solid as they get. I've purchased 2 packages from him and both sites are in the top 10 of my link value and I bet will stay there for a long, long, long time regardless of how hard I hit the link building efforts.

Today I'm going to explore building an infographic and see if I have the capability of doing it myself.

 

[ard555]

Great OP and discussion.

Is there a reason you put a YT vid on each page?

 

[Chupin]

Great OP and discussion.

Is there a reason you put a YT vid on each page?

Figured that it couldn't hurt and might give me a little more legitimacy in the eyes of Youtube's owners..

 

[Chupin]

What I've done the last few days.

I dug up the thread that Hobbster mentioned in Enlightened. It was a really neat read for two reasons.

1.) I remember reading it once before when he first started the thread but I found so much value that I had completely forgot about.

2.) It's really cool reading the work he did on a site that I *think* would later be utilized by him in various ways.

Anyway. Go to Enlightened Section and read threads there, even when you've already read them. You'll find something good if you do.

I submitted my site to Alltop (and was accepted for my niche) and started a feedburner. Might as well take advantage of those links sources. I'm going to start a pintrest as well.

I downloaded a plugin to auto post on Facebook/Twitter/Google+ and a bunch of other social networks when I post on my site. That should help the social side a bit.

Now, I'm going to work on pagespeed. Here's the baseline that I'm starting with.

Yeah.. 4 second load time... faster than 37% of sites. Somethings gotta change here in a big way. I'm going to tackle the first thing on the list... "Remove query strings from static resources" and see how far down this rabbit hole I have to go.

 

[Chupin]

My mind is so full of fuck right now...

Requests down... Page Score up.. Load time up exponentially...

Gotta figure out what's causing it. Right now I have no idea..

The above problem of "Remove query strings from static resources" was caused by W3 Total Cache setting under Browser Caching.

Prevent caching of objects after settings change
Whenever settings are changed, a new query string will be generated and appended to objects allowing the new policy to be applied.

 

[CCarter]

Reading this correctly, you have 39 requests, taking 4.58 seconds, but the total requests add up to 421.1KB? That's a slow host issue. Less than half a MB taking over 4 seconds to load??? Nah... that's a slow host issue.

To put it in perspective:

I've got more than 3x the data being sent, at almost 1/11th the load time. Removing those '?variable=data' queries isn't going to make up for a slow host.

P.S. can you make the screenshots a little smaller, I'm not completely blind yet. ​

 

[CCarter]

My mind is so full of fuck right now...

Requests down... Page Score up.. Load time up exponentially...

Gotta figure out what's causing it. Right now I have no idea..

The reason the requests are down is because browser caching was on. So it only need to request 8 files instead of 39 the 2nd time around. That happens when you just re-click test now on pingdom. That's a good thing.​

 

[Chupin]

Reading this correctly, you have 39 requests, taking 4.58 seconds, but the total requests add up to 421.1KB? That's a slow host issue. Less than half a MB taking over 4 seconds to load??? Nah... that's a slow host issue.

To put it in perspective:

I've got more than 3x the data being sent, at almost 1/11th the load time. Removing those '?variable=data' queries isn't going to make up for a slow host.

P.S. can you make the screenshots a little smaller, I'm not completely blind yet. ​

Stuck on that peasant hosting....

Sorry for the image size. I hate it when I'm reading a thread and get blown up with a huge image so I was hyper aware of that...

Thanks for the reply. I did fix some issues and am at 97/100 perf score. Most recent load time was 2.77s

Mostly all W3 Total Cache tweaks.

 

[cronik]

Hey mate,

A really good place to start is to think about ways you can get traffic without SEO. The easiest way is to start crawling through related forums and then providing value there. When people start asking specific questions, write an article on that and link back to it.

Try social media.

Try existing communities.

Try anything that means you can start building now, regardless of whether Google likes you or not and you'll see how quickly Google starts to like you.

Google is like that hot girl in the club. She only wants you when you don't need her. So start working out how to not need her.

This is a very good way to look at it! Join communities, use social media and work your @ss off until you have a good following. Then, you will have traffic before Google and after, if you ever get penalized.

 

[emp]

Where are you hosting?

::emp::

 

[Chupin]

Where are you hosting?

::emp::

HostGator

 

[statelizard]

I don't know how stable it is yet, but if you're on a budget give digital ocean a shot. I just moved a site over there from a shared server as a test run. I've never worked with an unmanaged server before, but it wasn't too difficult to get setup.

Load time went from 2.5 seconds to an average of right around 490ms, with 900kb on the page. That's on the $5 plan.

I'm running wordpress as cms and set the server up with ubuntu 14.04, Lemp stack (nginx, mysql, php) and varnish. You have to experiment and mix and match some of the tutorials on DO to get it running smoothly, but it isn't brain surgery.

I do have cloudflare set up on it, but haven't configured any caching yet, so I expect I'll be able to get a little more performance yet too.

Like I said, I'm testing DO out for the first time, so I can't speak to reliability yet. Something you might want to look into though. Probably fits your budget and is also a good little learning project if you haven't worked with a server before.

If you do give them a try, look around for a promo code too. It's easy to find one that will give a $10 account credit. So that's two months for free on the $5 setup. Additionally, they bill at the end of the month cycle. So you'll essentially get 90 days to test it out for $5. If you're working with a limited hosting budget, this might be the way to go for price/performance combo.

Loving the thread so far. Keep putting in work and you'll get it all figured out.

 

[GimpSpack]

Nice start to your journal thus far.

OP, have you ever considered YouTube as an additional content distribution platform? If you can find a quick and efficient method of transforming your posts into catchy mini-Youtube clips, you could potentially rank both your site AND your YouTube videos for the same kw.

You could also probably promote your YT videos for dirt cheap. Dat YT traffic leak status... (to be honest, I'm not completely sure about the cost lol)

 

[Chupin]

I don't know how stable it is yet, but if you're on a budget give digital ocean a shot. I just moved a site over there from a shared server as a test run. I've never worked with an unmanaged server before, but it wasn't too difficult to get setup.

Load time went from 2.5 seconds to an average of right around 490ms, with 900kb on the page. That's on the $5 plan.

I'm running wordpress as cms and set the server up with ubuntu 14.04, Lemp stack (nginx, mysql, php) and varnish. You have to experiment and mix and match some of the tutorials on DO to get it running smoothly, but it isn't brain surgery.

I do have cloudflare set up on it, but haven't configured any caching yet, so I expect I'll be able to get a little more performance yet too.

Like I said, I'm testing DO out for the first time, so I can't speak to reliability yet. Something you might want to look into though. Probably fits your budget and is also a good little learning project if you haven't worked with a server before.

If you do give them a try, look around for a promo code too. It's easy to find one that will give a $10 account credit. So that's two months for free on the $5 setup. Additionally, they bill at the end of the month cycle. So you'll essentially get 90 days to test it out for $5. If you're working with a limited hosting budget, this might be the way to go for price/performance combo.

Loving the thread so far. Keep putting in work and you'll get it all figured out.

Setting up Cloudflare is on my to-do list. I want to try it out before I make the switch from hostgator.

Thx for the post though, i'll def give it a look if I choose to dump them.

 

[Chupin]

Nice start to your journal thus far.

OP, have you ever considered YouTube as an additional content distribution platform? If you can find a quick and efficient method of transforming your posts into catchy mini-Youtube clips, you could potentially rank both your site AND your YouTube videos for the same kw.

You could also probably promote your YT videos for dirt cheap. Dat YT traffic leak status... (to be honest, I'm not completely sure about the cost lol)

I have seriously considered it, thus far I haven't put much effort into creating a system to create them.

I hand created over 100 articles for this site, each 500-800+ words. If this project has taught me anything its that automation is VITAL and I'm just now dipping my foot into the automation waters (I have so much to learn it's crazy...)