Google Adsense Authority Site Case Study – Month 0

This is a re-post of an article i wrote on the affiliatefix.com forum on August 26^th, 2021.

I have been intrigued lately by few examples of bloggers/affiliate marketers successfully launching informational niche sites and grow them to the tune of 5-6 figures a month.

This made me wonder if their process/approach could be replicated by any content marketer and hopefully generate the same results. Hence my current project.

The Project: Start and Grow a content site from $0 to $$,$$$ in 12 Months or less.

The main goal of this project is to test few hypothesis pertaining to SEO, Ranking and Traffic:

1. Can a brand new site ranks on Google page 1 without any backlinks?
2. Can a brand new site reach 50,000 page views per month within the first 12 months and generate a 5 figure positive ROI?

Project Start date: September 1st, 2021

Overall Strategy

Research and publish informational content on long tail and low competition keywords with search volumes 0-50 / month.

1. Furthermore, keywords should have a keyword difficulty (KD) of 0-5 as per Ahrefs’ metrics. Just an indication not a fast rule.
2. Focus mostly on questions related keywords.
3. Articles length will average 750-1500 words.
4. Each post will be SEO optimized and have at least 1 outbound link to an authority site and 1-5 internal links.
5. Content will be 100% outsourced except for the standard/legal pages of the site such as Privacy Policy, Terms & Services, About Page, Contact Page.
6. Front load the first 3 months with content e.g publish at least 100 articles.
7. Monetize the site primarily with Display Ads and other relevant affiliates offers but only when it reaches a 200+ pageviews / day.

Investment / Budget / ROI

• Domain name registration: $0.58/month with namecheap.
• Website hosting: $24.99 / month with wpx.
• Content outsourcing: $350/month with hirewriters and textbrokker (average of 33-34 articles per month).

Anticipated Average monthly investment: $375.57. Not included: personal time in setting up the site, editing content and publishing.

This means if everything goes according to plans, I will end up with a total investment of $4,506.84 by month 12.

Some bloggers have built successful niche sites based on similar concept before. Shaun Mars built an informational intent site but also built some backlinks. Read More here on this forum.

My project is inspired and mimics that of Phil from earningfinancialfreedom.com (that's his website). He’s managed to earn a total of $8k+ within a 12 months period with roughly 442 published articles.

For the first 7 months of 2021 e.g Jan-July, Phil published an additional 127 articles and has already earned $15k. That’s an impressive success story in my opinion.

I hope to do as well as he did if not better. If I stick to my 33-34 average monthly content publishing schedule, I should have between 396-408 published articles by month 12. Hopefully my earnings should sit around $8k or so if not more.

That would be an ROI of approximatively 43% and a take home of roughly $3.4k.

Reporting

Monthly update on this site including:

1. Main activities progress
2. Number of articles published and words count
3. Ranking update
4. Traffic update
5. Insight / Tips / Recommendations / Lessons Learned

Planned Activities for the first 30 Days or Month 1 September 1 – September 30, 2021


Niche selection, including assessment of income potential

1. Initial keyword research and site structure planning
2. Domain registration and web hosting
3. WordPress (site) setup
4. Initial 34 articles ordering and publishing

Initial Update on September 5^th, 2021

For the month of September I set out to perform the following activities:

1. Niche selection, including assessment of income potential
2. Initial keyword research and site structure planning
3. Domain registration and web hosting
4. WordPress (site) setup
5. Initial 34 articles ordering and publishing.

I just wanted to provide this first update to confirm that I have started the process and already crossed off the following (boring tasks):

1. Niche selection and earning potential

I picked a niche that lands itself nicely to informational content with loads of questions. Without giving away the niche itself i can tell you that i drilled down to 3 levels. I wanted to remain in a sub niche but without going too narrow.
Just to give you an idea of what i mean, let me illustrate with an example:
- Niche - Level 1: Pets
-Sub Niche - Level 2: Dogs
-Sub Niche Level 3: Golden Retriever ---- I stopped here

You could drill down further but that could hinder your earning potential.

If you are not clear about where to start from a niche selection perspective with adsense like business models then check out the following information from Google (Adsense revenue calculator):

2. Initial keyword research and site structure planning

I used 3 tools to complete my initial keyword research:
- I plugged my level 3 main keyword into Google Keyword planner and exported the results into csv/excel
- I plugged in the same main keyword into the keywordshitter tool which is pulling from Google auto suggest results and dumped the results into a cvs file
- I did the same with Ahrefs tool (I have a paid subscription) and expored the results

I subsequently merged all 3 files, removed duplicates and run the result against ahref database to filter what i needed e.g:
- keyword within 0-50 searches per month results, mostly questions keywords AND
- have 0-5 difficulty rating as per ahrefs.

Not very scientific but i needed a place to start. I ended up with an initial list of 2402 keywords. Enough to keep me busy for the coming 12 months.

As for site structure, using the golden retriever example, i decided to create sub-sub niches as categories e.g Diet would be a category, Health would be another one, habitat and so forth. You get the gist.

My plan for the first 90 days is to focus on one category, cover it in length before moving on to the next one. So i started the site with only 1 category for now.

3. Domain registration and web hosting

I picked a branded domain name, short 2 words including one that tell people what my site is about. As previously mentioned i registered the domain with namecheap and hosting on wpx.

4. WordPress setup

• Theme: GeneratePress
• Plugins: Classic Editor, Smush, Classic Widgets, Google Kit Site, Tablepress, Yoast SEO -- for now
• Created standard pages for Privacy Policy, Terms, Contact Us. Set them all to no index.
• Logo: designed it myself with canva.

5. Initial article ordering and publishing

I had to write the first article of the blog so that google does not index blank pages. That's the only one i will write as my initial goal was to outsource the content at 100%.

I have placed the order for 10 articles. I will be ordering/publishing in batches of 10.

I will provide another update in the first week of October 2021.