Although I have been wanting to start a new informational intent-based domain for a while now, I was planning to wait until 2021 to start it but due to the new round of commission changes in the Amazon Affiliate program, I have decided to put all of my Amazon projects on hold for now as I am massively overexposed to Amazon right now. Although I managed to earn almost $3600 last month from my money site network, the vast majority of it was from the Amazon Affiliate program.
Thankfully, I only had one small site hit by this latest round of changes with it taking about a 60% hit in commissions. My other two main domains are predominantly in the “All Other Categories” section and held at a 4% commission rate. That said though, I definitely think that there will be additional cuts and changes to the Amazon affiliate program in a few years so I want to get this informational intent domain off the ground as soon as possible.
My goal is to diversify both income and traffic sources with this new domain to help reduce future risk too as I have had a number of domains slapped by Google updates in the past. It will hopefully be making most of its money from display ad networks supplemented with a number of different affiliate programs with its traffic predominantly coming from organic search traffic supplemented by Pinterest and eventually Quora with any luck.
The majority of the content I am publishing right now is based around high search volume, low competition informational intent searches to try and scale the traffic on the domain as fast as possible to be able to apply to the Mediavine ad network. After that, I will start adding more content that is more suited to Pinterest and Quora traffic generation.
Niche
Although I have chased the commissions in the past and made sites around niches I had zero interest in, over the last year or two I have gone for lower-income potential niches that I actually know more about and enjoy. So far this is working well for me as I have been able to churn out tons of content without having to put much research in as I know a large amount of the information already as my last three domains have been based around my hobbies.
Although this new domain is not based around a hobby, it is based around something where I know a number of the sub-niches that I plan to cover on the domain well. This should allow me to churn out a ton of content when I have time while also bringing on freelance writers when possible to help me scale this new project as quickly as possible to get it off the ground.
Although the niche of the domain is specific, it is very broad so I should not be running into any problems with running out of content to write about any time soon. This has been an issue for a domain that I made in 2018 as well as one in 2019 where they are hard to scale at their current stage due to having covered so much of the niche already. With this new domain, I should be able to scale it for years to come without much of an issue. Also, I don't give out the specific niche to any of my projects so don't plan to reveal the niche that this domain is in.
Starting With The End In Mind
Although I do plan to keep this new domain going for a few years yet and focus on growing it, I am trying to build the domain in a way where it should be quick and easy to sell once its traffic and income are high enough. This should give me a way to quickly sell the domain if I want in a few years without having any issues but time will tell. On the subject of selling sites, I may sell one of my Amazon Affiliate sites in a few months to fire up some cash to scale this new domain even quicker depending on how it is looking in a few months but so far I have $1000-$2000 a month for this new project for various tasks.
One of my friend's purchases sites to diversify her investing portfolio and I reached out to her for things she looks for in a potential new domain and this is what she came back with saying the first 6 are the main ones she will try to get in any potential new purchase:-
- Have multiple traffic sources with no single traffic source being more than 70% of total traffic.
- Have multiple income sources with no single income source being more than 60% of total income.
- Have an even organic traffic spread across all pages with no single page being more than 15% of all organic traffic to the domain.
- Have low maintenance traffic sources.
- Have a link to the original image in the image description of the media library for any copyright claims to show its royalty-free to avoid fines.
- Have a content plan that is easy to outsource and continue with.
- Have no paid traffic sources.
- Be in an evergreen, long term niche.
- Have no strikes for breaking TOS for ad/affiliate networks.
- Have an active and engaged email list.
- Have your own digital product to sell.
Hosting Theme CMS
Although I have been a big fan of Cloudways previously, the ease of use of Sitegounds has won me over so I have gone with Sitegrounds for this new domain as my host of choice. I have stuck with Namecheap as my domain registrar as I have used them for years and never had a problem with them to date and I like how you get free WhoIs protection with them too.
CMS wise, Wordpress was a no brainer due to having so much experience with the CMS from my other projects. The developer community behind Wordpress pretty much ensures that I always have a plugin or custom code that I can use to do anything I need with ease too.
Although I used to use Newspaper and Colormag as my go-to themes of choice, I have since moved over to Astra as it is so quick and easy to set up so I have gone with Astra as my theme of choice for this new domain too. Without the adsense code on the domain, it is giving me a page load time of around 0.6 seconds for a 2000 word article and around 2.5 seconds load time for the same page with the ad code on it.
This is the load times for a 2000 word article on the domain. The top left is Pingdom without having adsense code on the domain, the top right is Pingdom with adsense code on the domain and the bottom is GTMetrics with adsense code on the domain. GTMetrics were having issues on the day I set the domain up so I never managed to get a speed test before adding the adsense code with GTMetrics. The page sizes are different due to the compression from the autooptimize plugin covered below.
Plugins
AAWP
AAWP is a premium plugin that allows me to quickly and easily make product comparison table and link out to the items on Amazon. It also offers automatic geo-targeting for Amazon as well as a few other things but it does need access to the Amazon API so if you are brand new to this, the normal Amazon One Link system will probably be better and easier until you get your Amazon account approved and get access to their API calls.
If you are new to making affiliate blogs then I go over how you are able to make decent looking comparison tables here using free tools. If you don't have access to the API for Amazon or are on a budget for your blog then it might be worth checking out as you can make them look surprisingly good and they don't take too long to build.
Ads.txt Manager
Not a plugin that I usually use and there are a bunch that does the same thing but it basically allows me to quickly and easily edit my ads.txt file to add the different networks IDs to serve ads on my domain. As this new project is mainly going to be an informational content domain, display ads should make up a solid part of its income and I plan to switch ad networks as traffic grows so this should save me a little time in the future.
Autoptimize
One of my favorite free plugins and offers basic caching and lazy loading of images to help compress your pages and speed your pages up. It's very easy to set up and can help you improve your GTMetrix scores if you care about stuff like that while getting your page load times down. I actually purchased the WP Rocket plugin that is a premium plugin that does a similar job but refunded it and came back to Autoptimize as I personally had better results with it and its free.
Disable Comments
I’m not looking to build a community in the blog comments of this domain or attract bots/spammers so I just disable all comments on all posts with this plugin. Quick and easy and takes ten seconds to set up and can prevent a ton of heartache if you end up on some bot auto-accept bot list.
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
I use this to automatically inject the analytics tracking code for Google Analytics for my domains. Although it is easy enough to do it yourself and manually add it to your theme's header, you have to remember to re-add it every time you update your theme if you do it manually so I just use a plugin to keep things easy.
Google XML Sitemaps
I have seen mixed reports about sitemaps and if it's even worth using them anymore, I still do but it's mainly out of habit rather than knowing if Google still needs them or just crawls your domain. This plugin lets you quickly and easily build out a constant sitemap with a few seconds of adding it to your domain.
Insert Headers and Footers
Pretty sure you can use this to auto inject your Google Analytics code to your header if needed instead of Monster Insights but I have never tried it. I use it to inject the Google Adsense auto ads code to the header of my pages to show their display ads, quick and easy, and offers the same advantage of you not having to go back in and re-add it after each theme update.
Pretty Links
A few uses but the main thing that I use it for is to add place holder links as I publish my content to later turn into affiliate links on the back end once I get approved to different programs. Make sure that the TOS for any affiliate program you apply to actually allows you to do this, it's a grey area with Amazon and a few other networks so be aware of that. It also lets you quickly and easily flip your links from one network to another.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Another great tool although it is freemium but for the majority of bloggers, the 100 credits a month that you get for free should be more than enough. It basically compresses your images when you upload them and has one of the best compression systems going from what I can see. It can drastically reduce the size of your images without having much effect on the actual image quality. This means the don’t take as much space up on your hosting while needing less bandwidth to actually send on a page required letting your page load quicker too.
Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg
Made by the same team who make the Astra theme, solid plugin considering its free, basically ads some additional blocks for the Gutenberg editor in Wordpress to let you do a few other things with it.
WP Revisions Control
This lets you quickly and easily set a maximum number of revisions for each post to stop it clogging up your database on bigger sites. This plugin does have its negative sides as if you set it to only a small number of revisions then you may not be able to back up to an old version of the post if you make a mistake or something but I like it.
WP Word Count
Probably useless/nothing more than a vanity metric for most people but I use it to quickly and easily screenshot the total word count for my domains for YouTube videos/Forum/Reddit posts. Basically you click its tab and you can see the information like this as well as your monthly published content and a few other things.
Other Plugins
Although I am only using the plugins listed above for this domain I have this post going over these plugins in a little more detail as well as a few other plugins that I use for my other domains. If you are looking to set your first domain up then it might be worth checking out.
Keyword Research
I have my old keyword research method posted on Reddit but keep in mind, its three years old now and has not aged well to keep up with how modern Google works and serves its page results for a user search. It shares the same problems as the KGR method and my own personal method that I use has evolved a ton since then but if you are brand new then it might be worth checking out but I have no plans to publish a guide for my current keyword research method as its one of my best assets for moving forward.
As this domain is based around broad, informational content rather than laser-targeting buyer intent keywords like my affiliate projects, I have been having great results from the free version of answer the public due to using much broader initial terms when using the tool. It's well worth checking out as it's free and provided you are careful with your free credits, you can probably stick to the free plan to get a ton of keywords.
I am also using keyword sh*tter too as its an excellent free tool. Although I never logged the keyword source for this current project, I think that answer the public has probably produced more high search volume/low comp keywords for this new project than keyword sh*tter but when it comes to the lower search volume stuff, keyword sh*tter blows answer the public out of the water so try both out if you want to do this yourself.
I have seen so many people say that they want to outsource their keyword research and to date, I have not seen any services that actually offer good keywords. Although I made this going over a keyword research service from Fiverr, I have had similar results with other services charging much more for the keywords they sell you. In my experience, the people who are good at keyword research just outsource and article and use it for growing their own domains so don't be sucked in by flashy sales letters promising your high search volume, low competition keywords as in my experience they are far from it and a waste of money.
Content
Although I linked it earlier in the post, here is the launch content count for the domain. I basically spent two weeks or so churning out content for the project and leaving it in draft mode then published it all at once. I have nothing to back this up data wise or even a theory as to why I do it, I just prefer to have a big chunk of content on the domain when launching it.
I have chosen this parent niche as I know a few of the sub-niches within it pretty well so should be able to churn out a large amount of the content myself with ease. In addition to this, I am planning to bring a few freelance writers on to help me scale the project as quickly as possible to try and diversify my income sources between the Amazon Affiliate program and display ad networks as quickly as possible.
The majority of the articles on my other domains are usually between 1000 and 2500 words and I plan to do the same for this one. I will basically be looking at the first page of Google and checking the word counts of the keyword relevant pages already ranking and at least planning to match the word count of those pages. Different people have their own opinions on this but this will be my plan for word count moving forward.
If you are brand new to this type of thing then I think that for modern google, scaling into content is one of the best ways to get started and you should aim for something similar to what I cover in this screenshot. Although you will likely fail in a large number of the initial keywords that you target, it should put you on the right track to build out your own positive feedback loops as you move forward to improve your own keyword research and content creation methods.
Although I used to type my content directly into the Wordpress editor, I have been using the Surfer SEO content editor as it saves me a fair bit of time when prepping my articles and lets me build templates for the freelancer writers quickly and easily. Surfer SEO is far from essential for this though and I personally think that it is over prices for anyone who just uses it for its content editor. I managed to scale to $3500 a month with my current money site network without it so there's no need to run out and subscribe to it.
I have typed up millions of words of content over the years for various projects and I made this going over some of the main tips that I have picked up over the years. If you are new to blogging then this may be helpful, it’s not going to shave massive amounts of time off your content generation but every little helps and saving time on every article can quickly add up over the coming months as you churn your content out.
I also made this going over how you can easily optimize your images for your blog I would highly recommend people watch it as its one of the few things I really do wish I had known about years back. I got involved in this type of stuff back in 2013/2014 and only really started optimizing my images in January 2020 and it has managed to shave a bunch of time off my page load speeds and storage space requirements. Depending on where you source your images, it can potentially take your image file sizes from 4MB down to >100KB and takes about a minute to do per image if that. If you need sources to get images for your content that you are able to legally use then I made this going over the three main ways that I get free images for my content that may be helpful too.
Backlinks
Although I will be using backlinks for this domain, they are not essential if you are just starting and target keywords that are low enough competition. I got the project I cover here to around $350 a month without backlinks and the project I cover here to $800 a month before I started building backlinks for it. I will initially be focusing on guest posts, niche edits, and manual forum posts for this new project though, and may move into additional link type in the future with it all being outsourced via agencies.
I don’t give out recommendations for the backlinks services I use either as I was using one of the bigger services until a few months back when they tried to scam me by delivering a PBN link instead of the niche edit that I ordered that had a list price of over $300 if I remember rightly. Although it's not the main point of the video, I go over the various ways that you can check any links that you do choose to outsource in this video so you can at least double-check any links that you outsource for your own projects to see if they are just PBN links.
I know that some people like to wait a few months before they start to backlink their projects but I am planning to start backlinking right away as it worked so well for the domain that I started in August last year that made over $1700 last month. I basically use the guest posts and niche edits to pass link juice to help increase my domains strength and hopefully help my pages climb in the search results. Although the main reason for using the manual forum posts is to increase the referring domain count to my project and dilute the anchor text ratio, it does look like they can help for getting your pages to climb in the search results from some tests I did on the domain I started in August.
Also, just to be clear, these are not forum profile links where you make your profile on a niche related forum and just drop your link on your profile page for your account on the forum. These are links dropped in niche relevant threads that have a fair bit of content in the thread making them much easier to index and they tend to have a higher chance of being a do-follow link thank forum profile links too.
Budget
Current Budget Spend For The Project
As I am trying to scale this project as much as possible I am outsourcing a fair few of the tasks but this is not essential as I have typed up most of the content for my other projects myself with the two domains I mentioned above-having none/minimal link building too helping to keep their initial budget costs down. This thread on Reddit from a while back might be worth reading if you have a budget available for your project as it's from a guy asking for advice on how to spend his budget on his site. One of the users has deleted their account in the thread now though so you have to manually click on the + near the deleted account name to expand the full thread.
This video also goes over a number of different tools with the majority being free that I use to do various tasks for my money site network too. This can help you do a number of tasks without having to hike your budget spend up so it might be worth checking out too as it can keep your costs as low as possible.
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* This article was originally published here
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