Frustrated with good articles that aren't ranking well? 

It could be simple changes or techniques to deploy to get huge improvements in your rankings!  In this episode, we discuss 7 SEO tips you can employ today that are easy, cheap, and have big impact.

Links and Resources Mentioned

Lumen5
Videos – Human Proof Designs

Transcript

Bryon Brewer: Hello everyone! And welcome to another edition of Building Online Empires podcast. So today we're going to be covering a topic of seven easy and cheap SEO tricks you can do to get your site rankings improving. We get a lot of customers who ask us, do I need to add more content? Maybe I already have 100,000 words, 200,000 words or more do I need to do back link building yet?

But there's a lot of things you can do. That are relatively quick and can have a huge impact on the rankings of your site. So let's get started and talk about those.

[00:00:44] Use Emoticons in Page Titles

Bryon Brewer: So the first one maybe not as common, but is definitely something that Google supports is using emojis in your page titles.

These page titles are what appear in the Google search, right? And Google does support these they will be displayed in the search results. Only if they're relevant though. Google doesn't always show the emojicons or the emoticons. Sometimes they do get filtered out, especially if they're not really relevant to your content, if they look spammy or out of place. But in some articles that may make sense to, to really catch someone's attention and increase your click-through rates. I'll give you an example here. Let me share my screen. And show you. This is from one of the sites I run, you can see I'm ranked number two for discover the best multi Chrome nail Polish of 2020.

And I have the heart emoji icon right there on the search results. So you can see that actually grabs people at attention. This article is ranking number two and only has 400 words within this article. And part of it is because it does have a very good click through rate. And part of that, I attribute to using the emoji within the title.

So this could be a good strategy used for some of your articles. The way you do this, let me just share. A couple of ways to handle this. Number one is if you go to the, and I'll put this in the show notes, the URL DubDubDub www.amp-what.com at that website, you can find all the different icons that are available, and then there is an HTML code for each emoticon that you want to use.

And you'll just paste that into your title. So let me show you. How I do that on my site. So we'll go back over here to one of my posts. Now, this site I'm using rank math. So if you're using rank math or Yoast you do have a separate section where you can put an optimized SEO title. So in here I've got discover the best multi home nail Polish of 2020, and then the art emoji icon.

So if we go back over to this amp-what.com site and get the codes they are, which nearly every code that you might want to be able to use is going to be included here. So if I type in like smile and here, I want to use this one so we can click on it. There's the code right there. So we'll get that, we'll copy it. And then over here in the title, we'll just paste that code. It's going to start with the ampersand and then a number. And you see now in the title has that smiley icon. Okay. So you can experiment with this to see what kind of results you get. Like I said, Google, isn't always going to display these emojicons, but they will frequently.

And especially if it you know, this site does have the word heart and the URL and some of the articles lend itself more to using these icons but something where you, you know, it's like a wow article. You might be able to use an icon and get away with it in Google display it. All right. So that's tip number one.

[00:04:09] Use synonyms for your main keyword

Bryon Brewer: So let's go look at tip number two, which is using synonyms for your main keyword. So go through the existing articles that you have and determine where it makes sense. To use synonyms or related keywords. Now using the right keywords is super important for the SEO of an article. And for most of us, we spend lots of time trying to find the perfect key word that we want to use that we think we can rank for.

And we think why not use that over and over in the article to help it rank. But Google and really from a user perspective, variation is key. So an example here that Yoast provides is like an article around candy. We wouldn't want to use the word candy in every other sentence. It just doesn't sound natural.

And there's other terms we could use, like sweets or delicacy or other synonyms that we could replace candy with. And not only does that make the article flow better and sound more attractive. It's more engaging to our end-users, but from a SEO perspective, Google is going to understand the article better when we have different related terms being used for the primary keyword that we're targeting.

You still want to think about keyword density. You know, we still want to use that primary keyword a few times in the article, in the title, maybe in the first paragraph or the. The headers as well. You just don't want to use it too many times instead use some of these related keywords are sending the items.

Now, a question comes up is how often to use these synonyms. And there was no hard rule here. Just make sure your text is readable and appears to natural. Google has a very good understanding of reading through texts. So we don't want to make it use too much or seem unnatural, but you could use a tool like rank math or Yoast to help you determine how often do you use these synonyms, which rank math does have a field there where you can put in synonyms.

[00:06:06] Use Video

Bryon Brewer: Alright. Part three, number three, here is use video in your article. So more and more videos being used throughout the internet. Even we've seen Facebook is moving over to reels and this is now saying that's their most popular post type. 80% of consumer internet traffic now is video.

Another cool stat. Here is 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube every day. So videos, very, very engaging, very popular with users. And you'll see the Google includes video and a lot of the search results. Now the search results have gone from just plain texts to much richer with featured snippets, including images and photos and videos.

So this can certainly help articles that you have today that aren't ranking where you want them to be adding a video, can get those moved up. Potentially into higher spots within Google or featured video spots. So some suggestions of how you might use these is use you know, build how to videos and some of your informational articles you know, use descriptive keywords in your video.

And when you upload it to YouTube or your hosting provider make sure you use descriptive keywords to describe the video, which will help it rank. And then on your site as well, create a video site map. And so as you add videos to each of your articles you know, use a tool like Rank Math to create a separate site map just for your videos, which will help Google get those indexed.

There's lots of kind of easy ways that you can create videos don't require a lot of time and money investing and, you know, real production of a video. You do want to have unique video, just sharing video from someone else's YouTube on your article, isn't going to give you much SEO value. What we do and I'll show you some examples here at Human Proof Designs, we create videos for articles.

And in example, on this page here, like the ultimate camping guide. So we'll click on that. And these do have background music but if you can get an idea of basically how to choose a camp site, what's the essential camping gear. All of this content is actually taken from the article itself.

So we're not having to write any new content or come up with any new ideas. We just take the existing headings and then snippets from the article and use that as texts on top of images and video. And we compile all of that into a two or three minute long video. So you can use a number of tools like lumen five, I'll include a link to To create these videos. So they'll pull in your article and then help you compile in in build one of these videos. There's other tools as well out there that can help you do that.

[00:08:48] Optimize old content

Bryon Brewer: Okay. So let's move on here to number four, which is optimizing old content It's sometimes a decision of, should I add more content to get more rankings and, and improve my traffic. You may already have 200,000, 300,000 words. You still not getting the traffic levels that you're expecting. Then it's likely you need to go and optimize that older content.

What we do is look for pages that are ranking already on maybe page two or three of Google we'll prioritize and optimize those first. Those have the highest potential for improve rankings and getting to page one at Google. And so we're kind of prioritize those. And then as we get all of those that are ranking page two or three, a Google we'll move down the list and start to work on those articles that are ranking further down.

The best way to do this is really to run the article through a tool like Frase IO or through surfer SEO. And that will allow you to see how your article stacks up against your competition and those articles that are ranking in the top 20 of Google. So let's take a look here just quickly at how we do this within Frase.

So within Frase, you load up and give it a URL. So one of your existing articles that. You want to improve and you want to get better rankings for so this one is that nail Polish article we just looked at that has the heart emoji in the title. And then the keywords that I'm trying to rank here for is best multi Chrome nail Polish.

Okay. Now, when phrase analyzes this, you can see that it's given a word count of 474 in my article, the average for my competitive. Is about 1200 words and you can see the average has articles in the top 20 app headings to five links of seven images of 13. A mine you can see is somewhat low. I need to improve all of these aspects.

So I'm ranking pretty well for this article already, but if I wanted to maybe move it up to number one or keep you just keep it. I don't want the competitors to slowly outrank me. So I may want to make some proactive improvements to this article here. So this will help me understand what I need to do.

I can go in here and take a look at each competitor article and see what headings, what topics they're including. I mean, Nate may need to update my article to include. Some of the topics that they're including in their article. Obviously I need to make the article longer. I need to add some more sections to it.

I need to get some links to other related content. Potentially add some images or a video would be great for this this topic here. So you can see Frase really given me some good advice on what to need. I need to. You can also go to the optimized tab here and you can get an idea of the keywords and the keyword densities and how you stack up against the competition.

So Frase given me a 16%, which is a pretty low score. We're wanting to typically get these above 70%. So these are all the different keywords that my competitors are mentioning that potentially I'm not select Polish color. Is a good keyword. I mentioned at zero times, my competitors on average mentioned at one time, some of these you're I'm doing okay with a lot of these others here I need to improve upon.

So nail Polish for example, is being used 34 times by the competitors. I only mentioned at one time in my article. So certainly that could be an improvement. To this article. So go through update your article here as you update it, it's going to update your score in real time. So you can see how your article stacking up as you modify it.

And then when you're ready, copy this publish it into WordPress and then wait for your ranking changes to happen. Okay.

[00:12:41] Steal Ideas from Your Competitors

Bryon Brewer: All right. Let's look at SEO tip number five, which is basically stealing ideas from your competitors. If you really don't have the rankings you want it may be time to look at really the content you're targeting and see if there's content that you can target and easily rank for. And so looking at competitor articles is probably a good idea.

So let me show you how we do this. I'm going to go into Ahrefs. So you can use lots of different tools where you're using Ahrefs in this example here, and I've got my website pulled up here and I'm looking at, what I want to do is look at who are the competitors? So SEMrush does this. Ahrefs does this.

I can click on competing domains and I can see. You know what sites are competing for some of the same keywords. So frequently, these are going to be within the same niche. And I can see, for example, this one here, easy nail tech.com. So this is a good one. That's in the kind of the nail salon, a niche, and we have lots of keywords in common.

So if I see keywords unique to competitor, those are the keywords that I know. I need to rank for my competitors ranking for it. So if we look at easy nail tech here, we can see it as a domain rating of eight S somewhat low. We have a domain rating of 29. So ours is definitely an, a higher authority site.

They have about 1500 backlinks. Okay. So this is probably a good competitor to look at because they do have a lower domain authority. And lots of keywords that they're ranking for that. We're not. So let's just click on the keywords here. 16,000 keywords that they're ranking for that we are not now, this jumps over when you do this to the content gap and it shows the 16,000 keywords that we hard nails is not ranking for.

So let me scroll through here and look at this. So for example, I see the ranking number two for nail rap. So, you know, given that I have a much higher domain authority and I don't have content ranking for that at all, I could probably write an article, make sure I maybe run it through Frase and make sure I get a better article than they have in rank out, rank them in position one or two for that.

Some other ones down here. There's a cuticle remover. That would be a good one. Fake nail for kids 9,700 volume they're ranking number five. That would be a good one to target nail decals, a nail stamper, how to remove nail glue that has pretty high search volume and they're ranking number eight for yet.

So you see, I can come up with quite a bit of a list of just this one competitor. Articles that I could target and likely rank better for them since I do have a better domain authority. Okay. So that's a great idea is to kind of steal some of those ideas from your competitors. What we normally do is generate a list of all of those keywords that we want to target.

Put that into a spreadsheet, run the stats as far as search volume. And then determine which ones we want to do first, second, third, and prioritize those that are going to bring us the best return. And then we run those each keyword into Frase and then write an article and get that published. Okay.

[00:15:53] Internal Linking for pages not indexed

Bryon Brewer: All right. Tip number six. Internal linking for pages that are not indexed. So this can be a frustrating issue where we have. Pages that just are not indexed in Google, even though they're valid pages on our website and they're in your site map. So one of the easiest ways to determine this would be to just go into Google.

And if, you know, let's say you have a hundred posts you can do a search here. We are coming on and we're going to search and I can see that it says I have 236 results. So if you go look at your pages and posts and WordPress and realize that, Hey, maybe I have 300 posts and pages, but only 236 are showing up in.

You have some that are not indexed, you can also go into Google search console and, and get a list of those that are not indexed. Okay. And then from there you want to figure out what, what can I do to get those index now, probably first, want to check everything else out? Does it have a no index tag on it?

You know, maybe you, you check box that when you were drafting the article and that needs to be removed. Maybe it's not showing up you and your site map, and you want to check that maybe there's some other technical SEO issues on your page or your site that you need to look at first. So check out all of those things.

And if you, everything checks out, everything looks correct. This page should be getting indexed. Then it's some other issue that Google doesn't see that page as important, or maybe a duplicate. It is what it thinks. And so what you can do to kind of forced Google to get that indexed is number one, you can try adding some internal links to that page to help it increase its importance to the site.

So at you know, several internal links from relevant places on your site and do that the other thing you can also do is use some some backlink built. So get a guest post link or a quality PBN to increase the authority of that page. Once we typically, once we get those internal links in place or get a couple of back links on that page, then it will get indexed in Google will start picking that up.

So that those usually are the techniques you can use to get those pages ranking for you.

[00:18:05] Use schema

Bryon Brewer: All right. And number seven, use schema. Is super important today. Google is trying to provide more rich search results, more data. So schema markup is what helps Google to better understand the context of your page and understand the content within it.

It kind of parses it out better for Google to understand. So we can see that it's an article or here's a section that's an FAQ or here's the Arthur of the article. All those things would be spelled out within the scheme. And so you can get a richer search results that stand out more and Google get better conversion click-through rates using schema.

Typically a plugin like RankMath or Yoast are going to have settings that you can configure to set up your schema. So you'll want to run through those settings and get everything configured for your site. There's also some separate plugins available that are dedicated just to. An example of what this might look at, like is here's an, a good example of a few sites with schema.

So we see result number one here at the top best ever brownies. We've got the ratings here. We've got how many votes we've got, how long it takes. This is from a recipe on their site. We've got how many calories we've got a thumbnail photo and we've got a good description. So they're doing perfect with schema.

They're using the rating schema they're using the article schema. All of these aspects are implemented. It's we really get full detail. The next result here is starting to get some, you see that they have the thumbnail image but they don't have the schema for ratings set up at all. So we're not getting the ratings, the votes, the, the time, the calories, none of that information.

And then the last result here is lacking schema completely. You see, it has the standard title. And then the standard description, which is you're coming from the meta-description or from the first paragraph of the article. So they're not really able to control that without schema. So obviously when you look at these search results, this one here with schema implemented is more likely that you're going to click on it, especially the first two, because they have images compared to the third result.

So that's why the schema is so important. And if you can get the schema implemented, you're likely to see those click-through rates improve and as they do your rankings go up. All right.

[00:20:27] Summary

Bryon Brewer: So those are our seven tips to keep in mind pretty easy to implement. So just to review here use the emojis in your title. And we'll improve your click-through rates. Use synonyms throughout your article for your main keyword. Try to use video. You can use tools like lumen five to do those pretty quickly and use to just existing content. You already have to generate those videos optimize old content to get it ranking better steal ideas from your competitors.

Taking articles that they're ranking for writing similar articles and outranking them and then internal linking for pages that are not indexed. You've put all that work into an article. You want to make sure it gets indexed. And then lastly use schema which you can do pretty quickly, but just standing up the plugin.

All right. Hopefully these tips help you. If you have questions, please leave some comments like the video, and we will talk to you next week.

Have a site you were going to grow, but haven't done anything with it in months — or maybe years? It can be recovered!  

Charles Joyner joins us this week with a great case study on recovering a neglected site his brother purchased for $27,000 — and then it sat for many months without attention until all the revenues and traffic were gone.  Charles has recovered this site and is now earning $4,000+ per month with over 60,000 pageviews monthly!

A neglected site can be a goldmine — Google likes to rank content and URLs that have history — it can be easier to rank an aged site than starting from scratch.

Learn how he did it — and what you can do to recover a neglected site you have.

Links and Resources Mentioned

LinkMoney
KGR Keyword Packs – Human Proof Designs

Transcript

Bryon Brewer: All right. Welcome everyone to the Building Online Empires podcast. Today, we are joined by Charles Joyner, who Charles is actually just a few miles away from me here outside of Dallas, Texas. And so we're gonna go through a little bit of his background and understand what he's been doing and a little bit about a growth he's taken a site, basically from scratch to almost 60,000 page views a month in a period of a year. So it'll be interesting to hear a little bit about how he's done that and what he's learned on the way. So welcome Charles.

Charles Joyner: Hello, Bryon.

Bryon Brewer: Good to see you again. So before we get into kind of what you've been working on and, and how you've had this, this success, tell us a little bit about your background and in, in how you got started into online business.

Charles Joyner: Yeah. So My background is in software and I've been doing it for years. And about 2018, my brother had bought a site and he was telling me, you know, Amazon affiliate marketing, Amazon really it's big. It's, it's huge. Right. And at the time I was working on different project I came from the video game background that I made apps and then I'm an application data and I'm focused on that. And he bought the site. I think it was generated about $800 a month. We paid about 27,000 for it. And so he got it and he tells me about it and then it just sat there. And so I just sat and sat and sat and pretty much lost all the traffic and all its revenue.

And he would tell me he needs to do something with it. And I would listen, you know but I wasn't really that interested. And then about January, February, 2020, when COVID hit it my business has already started to slow down a little bit. Right. So not gets foresee, y'all know this is some dunes coming here.

I looked at it again and I said, okay, you know what, maybe we can do that. So I would say At that point, I began to look at it and I didn't know anything about it. I'm not, I'm familiar with WordPress by I've just built some sites. And I can fumble at the time I could fumble around with it. But it looks doable and can kind of interesting.

So sort of watching a lot of videos reading a lot and the Cunningham videos, the fat stacks your videos. I started looking at things and started going, you know, actually I think this is, I think we can do this. And so we also thought if we could figure this out and I'm, I'm a process person, if we can figure this out, we can do, we can make several sites. And then at the end here, let's just figure it out and and go. So I officially jumped in the pool in July of 2020. That's when I officially, I did my background and did all the research and lots of, you know, lots of stuff. And July, 2020, I had jumped in. And then at the time the site was about 300 page views per week.

Bryon Brewer: Oh, wow. So you came from a technology background. I think we have a lot of who start in technology and end up getting into online businesses, SEO, digital marketing. Do you think there was any aspects of your technology background that helped you with this? Or was this basically starting from scratch?

Charles Joyner: It probably did. I mean, everything that we use online, there's a tool that has a lot of services out there. And the understanding of how it works. Just the understanding of it probably did, but I don't think you have to be high tech to do this. It's, there's going to be a barrier to entry when you first start, because if you don't know anything about WordPress, you'll need to know something about WordPress. And I use online tools like SEMrush and other things, and anything you get into your app to go study it. You're going to have to learn what it does. Right, but I think it did, but I don't think you have to have.

Bryon Brewer: Okay. Yeah. I, you know, it's the technology background is, is helpful. I can show you the basics, but a lot of this is, is really needed around SEO. So, so you took a site that kind of had, had crashed and. Your job was to recover it. Right. So, you know, tell me, kind of tell me how you started, you know, you mentioned you, you watched lots of videos online, you read up, you kind of studied the industry looked at case studies.

So where do you w what did you do to start with a site? Cause I think we've all have sites that we bought and had good intention. And then life happened and we got really busy and maybe we bought too many sites and we've got a few on the back burner and we're wondering, what should I do with these?

So I'd just get rid of 'em. Should I shut them down? Can I sell them? Are they worth anything or should I try to recover them? And then if I do. Where do I start to start trying to recover a site? Where did you start?

Charles Joyner: Okay, so kind of the very beginning. So the site when, when I got it was it had a ton of old plugins. WordPress was completely outdated. Hadn't been touched, you know, what that looks like when you were plugging in spring, right? It was just a big red light. And I also ran it on GT metrics and it got straight F's. So I, when I personally, I did, I cleaned up the site or I should say I cleaned it up and sped it up and it was the very first thing.

So I got rid of, you know, all these plugins, you gotta figure out which ones are what. You know but I think it went from maybe 30 plug-ins and maybe a little exaggeration, but a lot of them down to almost eight. So I got rid of a lot of plugins and then I put it on a faster server. I use green geeks.

I love green geeks, but also very nerdy and I'm nerdy and their support is excellent. But all my sites now are on green weeks. Absolutely fast. And then also later I use CloudFlare and I have a pro account with them, like $20 a month. And also there was no Google analytics. There's no Google search.

There was no Google anything. Right. Get all that taken care of. Funny is, is I applied for Google adsense. And that's when I learned, but all my content was crap. At that point I learned I had never read an article. I had to sign, I knew all this stuff, whatever. I never picked up an article and Google AdSense basically sends me an email. I've got to find it, but it's, it's well-written but it says all of your content is junk and we're not going to give you an account. And so that's where I was. I had a nice site. Everything's running fine. My speed's going, everything's fine. And you know, read my first article and it was like opening program, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, oh, this is awful. Right. I got 183 of those articles like that.

Bryon Brewer: So you had 183 articles on the site when you started? Yes. Okay. And Google had since rejected you, so basically your first steps were to do kind of clean up at the site site speed, remove plugins. Kind of that kind of stuff.

And then did you, do, did, did you tackle content next or did you do kind of technical SEO, run it through an audit and clean it up? Or what did you do? Yeah, so

Charles Joyner: That's what I knew. I had a big project in my hand and I know that I had a big problem, but when I knew the content was bad, but I needed to know more than just bad content and what Google told me, I need to know that the insights I've got, so what the problems were.

And so that's when I dug into that found a simple. And I've dug into that. And they have a ton of videos and classes. I wouldn't say I watched everything, but I watched the gut, the bulk of it. Right. Really understood the software. And that's when I got my first SEO perspective. This the, the site was missing.

It had no meta descriptions on every article. Plus all my learned Yoast is all red faces are great faces on everything. The site content was missing a lot of keywords, similar. There's a nice little thing called I think it's called a page audit and you can kind of it gives you ideas, whatever you needed to see, it just lit up with.

Bunches of broken links. And many other things, SEMrush has kind of a, kind of a health audit, a little circle there with a number on it. And I think it was around 50 something when I got it and with some work and speed and whatever I got up to mid nineties. But at that point I knew what, what what the project and problem was.

And I knew at that point is gonna be a pretty big project to fix.

Bryon Brewer: Gotcha. Okay. So did you ever think at that point it would be better just to start from scratch? You know, what, what led you to believe that, Hey, I can take this site and get it to 60,000 page views?

Charles Joyner: Well, so from my research and stuff, I learned that an article that's already been there for awhile baked into, if you update it, you get the results back fast that a new content. So my initial thought was I'm going to take about 50 or so articles and I'm going to optimize them and get them in as fast as I can. And then see if what I'm doing is working. So. Basically, that's a whole process. I'm an air table person. So I'm a bit of a nerd like that.

You can do this, you can do stuff in, in, in Google sheets, but they'll never do when a project managers just to move in. So I set up an air table and you know, the first thing I had to do was get all my URLs. So you can get that. You can get all your URLs from your site map or use some plugins that will do that.

And the name of the article and kind of got all of my articles into it. Into an air table and then since SEMrush will offer those on-page keywords that are missing kind of ideas. I put a liquid that in the air table kind of suggestions. And there's, you know, air table has all these records.

So each record I could assign different things to it. And I got all that prepped out. I mean officially my each record had the name of the site, the URL, what category it's in, is it, you know, bicycles or whatever tag, WordPress, tags and categories, and so forth. All these things listed for each 183 times.

And then and, and, you know, both sides of my air tables. Once you get all this stuff set up, you can do things like change all your site from 2021 to 2022, by just adding in a field setting a filter. And then you've got your guys too often and they'll go do it. And before, you know, it everything's changed or you can bold all your internal links, you know, you could just do all different kinds of things once you have it all set up.

Bryon Brewer: Yeah. And I think what you mentioned there a minute ago about existing content that's been around for a while is easier to rank than a brand new article Ahrefs had a study, I think it was a month ago or so. Where something like 80% of the results that are on page one of course, Ahrefs has this data points that billions and billions of pages of information.

So 80% of those that are on page one are content that's been around for five years or longer. So so it was just a good point that. It can be easier, even though it seems a little tough to take an existing site with content and get it to rank through optimization improvement, then it can be to just start from scratch.

Right, right. Even if it's an expired domain, it's still it's content that's been there. So

Charles Joyner: totally. And I watched it happen. I mean, it was real. And and I didn't know at the time I just, I heard these things, you know, a lot of stuff on the internet you hear? So I can verify that you take existing content, optimize it. You will get a pretty quick turnaround on get the index in your still, if you do a good job on it. Yeah, absolutely.

Bryon Brewer: So you're basically doing a content audit using air table. Put that content in there. And then you mentioned having some, you know, like change in 21 to 22 or updating the articles like that.

And, and having, having some of your guys to do that. Can you w what help did you have, tell us about your team? Who, what kind of skills were you looking for? What did you do yourself and what did you outsource?

Charles Joyner: So I ended up creating a team two different types of members, team members. One, I call a writer and then when I'd call an editor and obviously the writers write content and the editors do really, I morphed them into kind of the multiplayer person as a writer they would take so in that table and they would take, make sure they would write in my existing keywords that I wanted in the article. And then what I would do is I'd create a group of tasks for each rider and assign them that artifact. I basically have four different types of articles. I have a how to article, which is basically how to do something informational.

It's more of a, you know, specific on a subject, like what are the different types of bicycle tires? You know, informational buyer's guides and that's basically your best of our picks. Best 10, whatever it is. And then what I also call a single buyer's guide just one, one piece. And as a writer on assignment group tasks like to make sure that the, they have the H one H twos and threes in there they won't like, like for a buyer's guide.

I want product descriptions. I want product pros and cons and proposal cons. I would just have them go over. Amazon and read the reviews. Right. Great spot to find out what people are saying. And then also all the times I put in specifications, like weight size, stuff like that in there. And then that was my writers and I would set them up with tasks.

And then the second part, the editors. So the writers, if you're mentioning systems that you have upcoming I'm in progress. Well, the editors would take that, put it back in, in progress, and then they would go through and do their set of tasks. And there's actually 14 tasks that an editor will, will touch on on my, on one of my articles and that like, like they might split split paragraphs up.

I don't want more than two sentences for each, for the mobile reviews on each paragraph. That had two to three internal links, two to three external links and a video link. You know, all texts at any of the images that are all, all, all texted correctly. A lot of details in there properly WordPress categorized for my, you know, testimonies and my article, my blogs, and so forth and tag.

But there's a lot of things they do for each one. And so I would from, from writing from taking that, that from writing to editors, it's a lot of processes, but I kind of built a machine and. I initially did every single one of those things myself, because I didn't want, I wanted to understand the process.

I wanted to know how to optimize those processes and on, on each task that you would sign somebody. I went in and I love loom. I don't know if you've heard of loom, but I love, and I basically credited every time I have a task, I would create a loom and do it. So they at a question how to do it. And that kind of helped me onboard people.

And I eventually would learned my credit a, a starter kit like Onboarding into my environment. My environment is slack and air table, but they would go through kind of training and class. Right. They pass those things and so forth. So I created this kind of this machine and I haven't even started creating content yet.

This was just optimizing. And by the end of that, I'll have it here. So July. 2020, December 27th, 2020. I went from 300 a week to twenty seven hundred and ninety six. Right. So that was the jump from optimizing. So when people say, does it work or not, we're discussing that I can show you it went right just like that.

Bryon Brewer: What were you doing? Were you optimizing. Existing articles where you, where you trashing any content? What, tell me about that. Yeah.

Charles Joyner: So let me just tell you the articles were trash. Okay. So maybe I'm using the wrong word, Bryon let's just say I rewrote. A bunch of articles because every single product on Amazon was bad and outdated and on the text was bad.

I think there might've been some kind of creativity sitting there for the person writing it to start with, but there wasn't much left of that when we were done. And I typically like to have about 2000 words for information on how. And a single product and like about 4,000 words or a buyer's guide.

And so that, that we did all that. And then I had all those keywords, I make sure they're plugged in and all that work. And I was pretty amazed. I mean, I basically had. I get to not personnel, but I ended up with I went through a lot of people to get my team. I went initially I went through a Upwork and got them and I went through a lot of people.

If I would have everybody that would write for me, I would have them write 3 articles. Because you can get away with one, but it's hard to get away with three and if they were good, I move them into my environment. So it, and then we start there. So I had, I had to pay for those articles, by the way, if someone writes junk, it never goes to my site.

And it's a cost. But if you do that, you'll end up with, you know, pretty good team.

Bryon Brewer: So you know, when you look at it, you had 183 articles. You optimize those how much new content.

Charles Joyner: So when we had that success immediately, I'm like, I'm on, I'm on top of the world. Right? So in January of 2020, I went full blown new content mode.

I already had the team, right. I already have the processes. Right. And similar, there's a nice, a keyword tool that you can use in there to get your stuff. So I had all this. And I had all the riders. So I went full on new content mode and I basically had my, I had my Upwork team and then I had my, I actually also went to Textbroker and I can tell you that with Textbroker you gotta pay to play for that.

And what I mean by that is, is you kind of write these, you kind of write these creative briefs. And you throw them up and then people can take them. Right. And you can, in that creative brief, you can choose, you know, what what skill level they are, you know? And what I found with, with them is I love those guys that have four plus ratings are awful, but you got to pay for the article regardless.

Right. But what's nice is you can kind of favorite them and put them into a group. So over time you, you can pay to have this. And then after awhile I had about seven or so writers over there that were good. Right. And to me, a good writer is someone that puts a little energy into it. You know, there's, it's a little bit of maybe some slang out a little bit of work, and it was words in there, some feeling a little bit.

And I had this group, so I had about seven Upworks and about seven text brokers on that, by the way kind of the way I would do it is I would buy my KGRs from you. In our great, and basically I would take those KGRs. By the way I trained all this, those editors were my guys. Once I do it, I'd say, now you do it.

But that's the way my mind works is just trade it out, turn it out. So I'll take those KGRs. And then I would go through and I have internal works that I use. I don't, I don't know if the right words, but I would create pillars of content and Reese. And what that means to me is like bicycle tires is a pillar, right.

And I would go through your KGRs and I'd want all of the ones that go together that would link together, make a ring I want to like content to link to Lego is what I call it internally. So it all goes together. So I handpicked 50 to a hundred out of those on that. And then I'll make sure all of them are Lego mode.

Because if at that time I had a 99% bounce rate. And when I came out of that, I was an 81%. So I'd almost had a 20% drop in bounce. But if you have Google sees as an authority, that if you have people clicking around your site, that you have something interesting. So it raises your authority. It does all these good things for you.

Plus if you have ads, it's another serving of ads and so forth. So I'll take your KGR. Pillar then and read them and then have him have them written. I also bought content from Human Proof Designs, by the way. Great content. I think I bought 50 articles from you. You guys did a great job. So at that time I was like mass content, Textbroker writer content producers.

Right. And I think I added about 700 articles between January 2020 to April 2020 somewhere like there by 700 or

Bryon Brewer: so. What do you got up to? What about a million words of content or, yeah. All right. And so KGR, this is the keyword golden ratio. Keyword research method. So you you've got the KGR packages from Human Proof Designs.

And can you, so did you just use KGR did, can you tell us any other hints around keyword research that you use?

Charles Joyner: Yeah, so I would use KGRs and basically the process, this process of creating an article from a long tail keyword all the way through, get it published with, through editors and all that kind of stuff is I called my mojo right. So my mojo is get the KGR and then Semrush says a nice content creative tool that you can have in there, a yellow, be a pay a little more for it, but it will generate some keywords around that long tail that are relevant to that. And I would take those and then also some different lines in that you can just kind of do it over and over.

And I would get a group of keywords that are really going to hit that my strategy was to take an underserved content line from a KGR like you guys provide, and I want him to go after the bigger ones. Right. So I can just take a little bit of that. So I kind of joke internally, but I, I believe I could write, I could go after the, the article is going to be pizza, right.

Is great. Pepperoni's but I can turn it into a dishwasher page. Right? So like my keywords and I still exaggeration there, but you can kind of manipulate the content to kind of get a better, a bigger pool in there. So I'll just take your KGRs and then I'd run through some keyword tools that Semrush.

And I grabbed those and I'd take them over. And in my air table had my writers and I wanted all these keywords written. Does that content catch him?

Bryon Brewer: Very cool. Yeah, that's a great story. So tell us, what did, what's your plans going forward with the site? What are you working on next with it? And, and kind of, what are some lessons learned? Some struggles that you had in building the depth to what it is. Yeah.

Charles Joyner: The credit content and we're there's, there's monthly revenues from ads. I'll tell you that some lessons I've learned on ads is so basically Google I eventually reapply for Google ads since I, and I, and I got approved.

And I would say that Google AdSense pays okay. There's all cases about 30% more than you'll adsense. And then when I pass 50,000 views page views, I went to Mediavine and Mediavine pays about 20% more. Thinking about as though look is it will completely crash your secure, your page speed.

Right. It's just a horrible thing. And then the Mediavine, but their support is good. I always had a a hundred percent good experience with support. And Mediavine it's very fast. Right. I don't have any very little page speed. So, so what was interesting is along the way I noticed that like, Revenue was increasing with traffic.

Right. So but I, I noticed that the, the the Amazon revenue was not, it was kind of flat, right? All these people running content and all this stuff. Right. And so I know it was kind of flat. So then I started digging into that and I as a nerve, you know, you start digging around and looking for these things.

And I set up a custom event in Google analytics. I could see that I want to know the traffic from my website to Google, and I can see the traffic going over there. And then if you know anybody going to Amazon reports we can see the clicks and those two didn't match. So I wasn't obviously getting credit for a lot of these things.

So I sat down again using air table. I realized I had about 112,000 links on the side of that. And I had two people and I said, the rear table said, go click on every one of these and find out what's wrong. Right. And that doesn't last very long, because at some point it looks like mush and nobody can do that.

No human being can do that. Right. It very limited time. So I basically, at that point I wrote as a nerd, I kind of wrote a little piece of software that went and looked at. And and I found all these issues sort of having, and then as a nerd, I wrote software to fix those things. So basically in a very short time, I fixed them kind of all, all at one time.

And I knew that I could fix those links, all those Amazon links that are broken I'm going to make more money right then. Right. And I, and I immediately, I saw. About my Amazon report. I can show you the analytics. I actually track the KPIs and all that. And I can see to me like a spoon, just like that straight up.

Right. And I'm like, ah, there we go. Now. And then of course my Amazon revenue took off and I actually it works so well. I actually turned it into a product it's not out yet. It's called link money. If anybody wants to check it out, LinkMoneyApp.com. But basically it will automatically fix all these problems for you.

And it's just amazing, but my, I guess my, my biggest lessons or taken out of this is don't write crap content. Don't allow crap content. Google is getting smarter than ever. Right. And a lot of these articles can be around forever, or we call them evergreen. I believe it was the word. And just take the time, do it right.

And you'll pay benefits. I will tell you kind of like it's about $27,000. The site was bought for four in 2018, lost off money. And then I put about $12,000 into it starting in January. Right. And it took the site to almost four grand a month. Right. So that's, that investment is excellent. Right. And so we would take all of that content that money and put it right back.

And the site right now, I believe I have to check. I think it has 817 articles and we're looking to make, make you more, we've got to figure it out

Bryon Brewer: income stream. That's going to quickly pay back that 12 K. And then from there, it's just going to be

Charles Joyner: grown. It's already paid back, Ryan. Yeah. I just keep putting it back in.

You know, let's go to 2000 articles. Right. We, we were actually, you know, what I'm just doing is I'm trying to pick pillars that I can create new content, like, you know, what are those pillars to choose? So we choose them. So you'll probably be hearing from me soon. Come get some more KGRs and we'll do that.

What did that process again? You know, probably going to add another seven or 800 articles to it. This.

Bryon Brewer: Excellent. Yes. So David's gonna want a sight back. I think.

Charles Joyner: Well, we have a business field now, so yes. He's pretty convinced that now, right. That, that we know what we're doing and you know, the person putting as a nerd in David's an excellent business guy.

And so we track a lot of data because there's a lot of assumptions you can make in this kind of stuff. And we want to, we wanted to track every single increase, how we got it, what we did, I'm a documenter. So what those processes were and then video those processes great. The onboarding, you know, for our team members.

So create a real machine. I mean, right now I can create most of my writers can write between five and seven articles. a week. And I've got about, let's say let's just call it a solid 14 and I can span on that. So let's do the math, how fast you can create content content. There's a lot of content and pretty reasonably priced too.

I I've got writers that are excellent. That cost me $20 an article right now I'm talking about top line. And then I think my most expensive person. Is a hundred dollars an article and they write, I have them write some buyers, guides, big, long buyer's guides. That sounds like a lot, but that buyer's guide is going to make you some money right down the road.

So, and I don't use them at all that often, but also times come in and go, this is a specific thing, and I want a beauty piece. Right. And this guy is just amazing, right. Beautiful piece, right. Forty-five hundred 4,700 word article. And then I take that you know, just kind of use them from time to time, but my range is usually around 20 to $30.

Bryon Brewer: So are you using any tools like Frase.IO or surfer or you kind of got your own process for figuring out the length of the article and optimizing

Charles Joyner: it? Well, I, I dug into Frase and I used that, bought their tool about their AI tool with as well. And I messed around with is I wanted to be familiar with it.

You had actually had mentioned it a long time ago and I wouldn't check it out at that point when I bought a service and I had it for about six months and I was screwing around with it and I like it. So I don't really care if they use Frase or not. I don't mind. I know one of my, some of I know one for sure does.

And there's some really cool things and Frase that I've come up with that I like, I like the fact that it gives you kind of ideas. Of content. Then you can throw those into your becoming your creative brief and given information and kind of rewrite it. I haven't liked the AI tool now from, as, from someone who watched star Trek, my AI tools like make me an article 2000 links on butterfly, and I want it to come out with images and links and everything.

It is not like that. So but I think it's the future. And I think they're putting time into it. To make it better. Cause I've seen it. I kind of saw it grow over time, going to get a little better stumbling at first and now it's getting better. What I want is from a writer, I don't mind them using those kind of tools is I still want that personality in there.

I'm not just blah right? People don't read that. And by the way, I bumped all my font sizes up on my site to 20. I think you a 16, just because we're a little bit bigger. And if you track your analytics almost everything's coming from a mobile phone, so I'd make sure that it's spaced out and big enough and looks nice.

First on a mobile phone. Second on a PC.

Bryon Brewer: Yeah.. So when you get to the size site, you have 800 plus articles. You mentioned this link money app that becomes a challenge, especially taking on a site that. Already has lots of content that you've got to update and change. Yeah. So link money is basically an app that's going to go through and I don't want to reveal all the details cause then know you're, you're about to launch that, but basic is going to help you manage all the links, update those links and make sure your Amazon. All your hands-on links are perfect.

Charles Joyner: Yeah. So it's and this was the biggest revenue hit a boom. And I had, because I remember the ad revenue was going up with, with traffic. It just goes up. And when, when I fixed my Amazon links, all of a sudden I got really hit. I don't want to say what site is, but I have some big, so some of my articles have sell really big, expensive.

Right. And when those sell a lot of commissions, right. Not everything, but there's some. And so when I started realized on actually selling those, so what link money does it basically goes through? And, you know, let's say you have a thousand page website, I don't know, 200 you know, whatever thousand, whatever it is.

And you're going to get the QA a lot of leaks, but what ends up happening is those links go back. Those links go for a four. You have you, if you're like me, you have a lot of contractors working on your site and they forget to put the store code in there. Or maybe even they put the wrong link in there.

It could just be a social link. Like maybe they were searching for pool equipment and they actually put the pool comment link in there. Link money will go through. And it will first scan to make sure I show you all the store codes or missing store codes you have on your site, which is important because I always thought that I had store codes that weren't mine.

I suspected it. And I think with and I did. And so how did that happen when a lot of people on my side and, and stuff, but why not throw one of their store codes in there? Right. Get a little money. So it's a lot of peace of mind, but it'll tell you all of it. And then obesity change every single one of 'em out.

Right. It'll also do the Amazon shortlinks. Some people have used that in the past. That'll convert all the Amazon shortlinks to a regular affiliate links, if that's what you want to do. And there's a lot of things. It'll tell you all the problems that you're having with that. So if you go through and do all of that with link money, first of going to do a lot of it for.

But there are some things you're going to need to do. Cause a bot and my AI can't tell exactly what you meant by it. If it's not much. Also I have a revert, let's say you say it like I sell the site to you and then you put your store code in it. So it's sitting in your inventory and then as you're going to sell it and sell it to a customer you can immediately turn all over to there.

So it's not one big movement, but up something happened. I don't want it. You can revert back right back. And so they can put it right back the way it was for any reason. So it's, it's, it's, it's a tool built by someone who does this and I'm completely anal Bryon about this kind of stuff and details.

This thing is exactly for us. It does nothing more and nothing less than fixing all your Amazon links.

Bryon Brewer: Yeah. I'm anxious for you to get that release because we you know, at Human Proof Designs, we buy multiple sites every month, sometimes. 200 or more articles and yeah, we do spend hours cleaning up and fixing links and your tool is a little different, cause it's not going to just tell you what's broken.

It's going to actually go through your site and fix it. So looking forward to that and we're very cool. Charles, appreciate your time today. Very cool story about your site. So and with link money coming out, so we'll keep an eye on. I appreciate your time

Charles Joyner: today, Charles. Well, Brian, I want everybody, I'll take a moment here to shout out.

Bryon runs a great business and I do business with him and you should do business with him. Everything that they've ever done is quality. And I do appreciate people like you, that actually pay attention to you. You care, right? And so if you need something for websites or KGR or content, you'll even make your whole site for it, if you want one, right.

And go to Bryon he's really good. I appreciate you.

Bryon Brewer: Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you, Charles. Thank you.

Charles Joyner: Take it easy.

Agility and non-linear career paths are key to success in today's world!  Hear some tips on navigating your way through your career — whether it be as an entrepreneur, corporate job, or a mixture of both of these at different times through your career.

Overview – The Squiggly Career

[00:00:00] The Squiggly Career
[00:26:38] SEO Weekly Tip – KGR Keywords

Links and Resources Mentioned

Amazon Book – The Squiggly Career
KGR Keyword Packs – Human Proof Designs

Transcript

Bryon Brewer: Hello and welcome! I am Bryon Brewer in today's podcast we're going to be covering a topic I read a book about recently called The Squiggly Career and a very timely as most of you know nowadays careers aren't so linear. They are increasingly becoming squiggly. You know, the typical staying with just one organization, thru retirement, being rewarded with a gold watch and a generous pension just rarely exist anymore. So today that's what we're going to be talking about and learning a little bit about how to navigate your way through this environment really kind of solo entrepreneurs who jump around between different careers jobs either for companies or for themselves.

The book is actually available on Amazon. I have the Kindle version here. You can see it is a $10 a book and it's from Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis. And lots of good tips here that we'll talk about. So a couple of stats here -throughout our lifetimes most of us are going to spend an average of 90,000 hours working.

So what we do and how we spend that time is important. As mentioned, careers are not so linear anymore. They've become increasingly squiggly lots of different twists and turns as you go through that path of your career. One thing though, that this does give us is it gives us a lot of freedom to decide what we're going do and how we're going to spend that time.

Used to careers would progress really through internal corporate structures and through various promotions you would get at your company. That's increasingly outdated. We see people are more dedicated to specific skills and roles within a company and not necessarily moving up or down and the average tenure at a company continues to drop.

So compared to previous generations, we have a lot more freedom to decide how our careers play out and what we want to do. According to a study from the management consulting firm, McKinsey and company as many as 375 million people will have to change their careers in the next 10 years. You know, especially with the pandemic and COVID this accelerated some of the change in industries worldwide.

So learning really to adapt to new technologies and industries to ensure that you have opportunity in the future is really important. And these changes are really leading to a lot more flexibility in how we work. A study that the Yuca did you know, indicated things like flexible working hours increased employee productivity by 72%.

We've seen that a lot, a lot over the last couple of years. But that flexibility brings its own challenge. Being remote can be lonely you know, lack of human interaction and then just getting plugged into an organization as well. And we experienced that too, kind of in, in the, in the world of entrepreneurship where a lot of the work is done independently.

And how do we keep ourselves moving forward? So we're going to identify some practical changes you can make to kind of squiggle your way through a rewarding career, whether it's working for you on your own or working at a company. So first kind of tips here, identify your strengths and focus on what you're good at.

One thing to note is you can't be good at everything, so you don't want to spread yourself too thin. You know, be honest with yourself and try to determine what are the skills that I'm really good at. You know, what, what are the, what are the things that I like to do, and then focus on developing and mastering those strengths.

And, and really your, your strengths are going to be a combination of talent experience your attitude and your behavior. So it's more than just your kind of built in talent. Your strengths can also play into the experience that you've, that you've had in the past. The Arthur in this squiggly book recommends that people spend about 80% of their time enhancing their strengths.

And so that just leaves 20% of your time to identify and tackle the weaknesses. That get in the way of your performance. So really we're spending nearly all the time, all of our time increasing and working on our strengths and just 20% on those weaknesses that we have in this book interesting calls out what they call super which super strengths are those qualities that your friends, your family, your colleagues would associate you with when you're not in the room? What, what do people generally think you're really good at? You're not just good at them. You're, you're really good at them. And these super strength should be used frequently visibily throughout your career.

And you want to let people, you know, know what you're good at. And make sure that your current work is harnessing those super strengths you have. You know, my background, I have always been good at technology and figuring out how to make things work if it's programming code or debugging application software and then also around project management and operations.

So those are really been my super You know has his marketing or networking those, those things my strengths? No. So I have to play into what I'm really good at and then work a bit on those things that I can improve and then build a network around me that compliments those weaknesses that I have.

You also want to think about, as you navigate through your career is integrating your values into your work. Is the work meaningful and interesting to you? You know, sometimes I get questions from potential clients who are looking to start up a business. You know, do I need to be passionate about the work?

Do I need to like the niche that I'm going into? And I always tell people, well, it's going to make it a whole lot easier if it's meaningful or interesting to you, not to say that you can't be successful in a niche that you're not interested in, but it certainly is going to make it easier for you to be successful.

And really those who go into something where they have passionate interest in tend to be the most successful. So I, I recommend, and just like this book says is, you know, integrate really your interests your values into the work that you're planning to do. Does it align with your values and goals for life?

You know, if you're looking for you know, where you can stay home with your kids involved in local sports or activities. Yet the job you're looking at involves lots of travel. That's not going to integrate well with your value. So all of those components need to be taken into consideration.

You know, the, the, the book here breaks out three different phases of life values, the imprint, which is birth to seven years as we kind of learn what our values are. From our parents then copycat eight to 13 where we kind of mimic or model a lot of the values that we see around us. And then the rebel phase, teenage years, where we questioned those values, we've learned and try to integrate the differences that we believe with what we have learned.

So it's probably a good exercise to kind of spend a little bit of time and understanding what your values are and what you're looking for in your career. Now, you know, it's, as you, as you look at a squiggly career, one thing is it takes, it takes a lot of confidence to move around to a new job.

You're you, you have to kind of reprove yourself. You, you need to you've got a whole nother set of, of peers that you're working with and clients and supervisors that don't know you. So it can be hard in this kind of new environment that we work in to have confidence, especially if that doesn't come natural to you.

We we all do have moments of self doubt, so that's not going to be unusual. I think everybody experiences that, but you know, one thing some people believe is that confidence is something that is just built into you. That some people are confident. Some people are not the truth is, is that confidence can be learned.

And improve through practice. You know, when I when I first started my career I went into I worked at a number of different jobs in the technology field. And eventually I decided I wanted to go into consulting. And mainly because I wanted to get over my fear of speaking publicly in front of a group.

And kind of doing presentations in front of executives and, and colleagues. And so I felt like, you know, consulting is going to force me to get in front of a group of folks and do a presentation to do a proposal to do all those things that I was kind of scared to do. And so when I was in my mid twenties, I left the job that I was working at, went into a consulting firm, doing it consulting and you know, immediately the first the first job I had was in Oklahoma city working with a nationwide florist company and had to do presentations on how to revamp some of their processes and systems.

And over time, I was able to increase my confidence and did that for 15 years and became very, very good at that. So confidence can be learned. You have to practice it, practice it though. So you want to think about what are, you know, what are the, the fears that are stifling your potential? What gremlins do you have that are holding you back?

And you want to challenge. Figure out how you can integrate some of those gremlins into your daily work and address them, and then, you know, treat yourself when you do that. You know, make it a positive experience, reward yourself when you do face those gremlins and make some progress.

 Networking kind of in this new world, super important.

You know, it's not necessarily the number of people in your network. It's the quality of your network. Connections is super important. According to some research indicated in this book we can have a maximum of 150 casual friends 50 close friends and confidence and supporters. 50 close friends and then 15 confident confidence and supporters, and then five best friends.

So see the numbers can be low. Sometimes you go to LinkedIn, you see someone's connected to, you know, 5,000 people. Well the reality is, is that our network that's going to be valuable to us is going to be much smaller. And you don't necessarily need to be an extravert to be able to create and nurture a good networking in good relationships.

I've certainly would be considered more of an introvert but I'm able to develop those relationships over time and my own way and build up that network of different folks in different skills, in different industries that I've encountered that can help me. You know, the job I'm at for three years, I decided to move on and do something else.

Or if I'm looking at starting up a new venture who has some experience in that field that could help me in your network becomes super valuable for that. One other thing to know is if you do, if you are looking especially if you're looking to expand your skills into other industries and other areas, maybe that your career hasn't taken you yet.

And looking for a mentor to help you is rather than vaguely asking someone to mentor you in that industry or that field is be specific in your requests. Let them know what you need help with and you know, where, what you're trying to do and you'll get a lot better help from a mentor when you're more specific.

We, we also want to change our mindset – we want to focus more on possibilities on the future possibilities. You know, the classic you know, education and then work and then retirement is rapidly going extinct. So when we want to look at what are other jobs or professions that you could see yourself taking on and you want to think about, of course you're super super strengths.

What are those other jobs or professions that also could benefit from those same super strengths that you have? And there's a few possibilities you could have your pivot possibility. Those you use your same skill set and super strengths, but just in a fresh way. So you pivot from, from one industry or career to another that's similar.

You also have your ambitious possibility. So something you've always considered but have decided against, for some reason. Maybe you have it, there's certain educational requirements or certain experience required. And so it's difficult to move in to that field. You know, one thing that I did w back when I graduated college is I thought, cause I had always been involved in it and technology even through college.

And I had some jobs through college doing that. But when I graduated college, I had a finance degree and I said, I want to be a stockbroker. I want to help people with their finances. And so I interviewed with Edward Jones investments and I was offered a position with them as a stock broker. And with that model, you will move and open up your own office.

And it's kind of like an independent entrepreneur you're responsible for opening that office, building your business and and you get paid a hundred percent commission. So there's no salary there except for the first year. So I did that. I moved from Texas to Virginia Beach and opened up an Edward Jones office.

And I quickly realized that it wasn't something that I liked. You know, I liked the consultative aspect of helping people plan for their retirement and their finances. But I didn't like the sales aspect of it, which is a big part of that. And so so it wasn't for me. I just, you know, made a, a a big, you know move across the country and opened up an Edward Jones office.

And within months decided that I didn't like it. And I was just. Like, you know, 22, 23 years old, right out of college. So I just pivoted back into it and picked up from there where I left off, basically. So so that was an ambitious possibility and something that I tried, but didn't necessarily want to do.

And then you have your, your dream possibility. So if you had nothing holding you back. What would you do? So keep, you know, kind of plan. What, what are the pivots that you could do in your career? What are the kind of more ambitious paths you could take? What does that dream possibility look like as well?

And then decide what's important to you and why, and that's going to help you navigate kind of your career compass and figuring out as opportunity is around. How do you move across these different possibilities and making the right choices?

So curiosity, feedback and grit, important qualities to have as you navigate through your career. You know, curiosity is staying current on new trends and opportunities. Folks jumping around and moving to new careers and jobs every few years or more frequently. You need to stay up to date on what the current trends and the current opportunities are out there.

And, and, and, you know, enhance your skills to be able to use those trends that may be coming up see seek feedback from your current employers on what you can do better. And realize too, that natural talent, isn't everything. You know, I have a client yesterday that what is, is buying a new age domain site.

And they you know, they really want to, you know, make a success out of this. They've had. Some previous business to online businesses in the past that they never panned out. So it really working hard to make this one, a success. But you know, comment was, well, I see all these people on Facebook and they're, you know, they create this site or they do this or that, and they write.

Thousands of visitors are ranking high and they're making a thousand dollars a day on this and they've got this e-commerce product or this drop ship product, and all these things. I see all these people saying all these success they have. And you know, it gets you to kind of doubt your own confidence and your abilities and thinking, well, these people are, are, you know, they just do it and they naturally have talent for this, but by and large, that's simply not true. These people have worked for many years sometimes. Sometimes they, you know, especially our industry, they may not really be successful, but you know, we've got a lot of fakes. But those that are it's not necessarily natural talent, it's, it's hard work that they have put into it.

And so, you know, we use the word grit, the amount of effort you put into something, which is really a better gauge of success is, you know, how bad do you want it? How much work are you going to put into, into that effort. So grit is super important. I would say, you know, recognize what really fascinates you, what really interests you.

If you're going to put lots of effort into something, then you know, it needs to be something that's going to keep your interest in the head. You're really interested in and that's not to say that, you know, if you're going to create starting online business in the affiliate, That you need to love writing.

You may not you know, affiliate sites are all about content, so but you can outsource that. Maybe your thing is, is you love research. You love, you know, identifying what trends are happening in a niche or industry. So you can direct writers towards the right content that's going to rank. But you're not going to be the writer.

So that's. You know, deliberate practice every day to advance your skills. So things that you don't know watch podcasts join webinars take online courses do what you can to advance your skills and become norm more knowledgeable. You want your skills, your understanding, your education to continue to develop every week you know, identify a greater purpose for your goal.

So this will help you keep that effort going when you can see, you know, what is that long range goal you have is that goal to replace income from a current job? Is it to pay for college for your kids? Is it, you know, what is that goal? That's going to keep you moving. And then always adopt a growth mindset.

Don't be happy with just where you're at. You know, figure out what do I do need to do to take it to the next level? What am I going to do to grow this? If you're not growing it, then it's going to slowly die away. Alright. So examine your options as you move through. And you have opportunities that come up.

Maybe the opportunity you're at right now is just, is perfect. Is the grass really greener on the other side? Do you need to make a move? Okay. You want to consider, are you happy and still learning a lot at the current endeavor? If it's a, if it's a business you're running or a car, you know, a job you have are you learning, are you growing?

There will a new role use your super strengths and help you live your values. Yeah, we talked about an IBM study says that folks are 12 times more likely to quit if they were not growing their skills and experience. So if you feel stagnant you're not going to be very productive and 12 times more likely to quit, get into something that you like and that you're growing inside projects to you can, you know, not necessarily leave your current opportunity.

But start up a side project that may be, can provide you with valuable experience and an outlet to explore and grow your skills while still keeping your existing opportunity that you have.

So I'm summarizing here identify and employ your strengths. 80% of the time you're working, working on growing your strengths and 20% on your weaknesses build mutually beneficial networks. These are going to help you kind of, as we go through this crazy, you know career of, of, you know, many, many different jobs or businesses that you may be running throughout your career work on boosting your confidence which can be done through training and practice, and then make sure to integrate your value.

So advice for this week and kind of from this book that I got was kind of actionable advice you can take is document your successes each week. Or you can try reflecting on what are the steps forward that I took. What are things that I learned if I did better you know, things that went well.

And then what were the steps. What were the things that didn't go well and then, you know, look at it. Are you moving forward? Are you taking, taking more steps forward? Then you are taking steps backward. We want to make sure we're moving forward. All right. So get, you know, I think this this book has you know, especially in today's times is very valuable and has some great tips here.

So hopefully giving you some of those. And if not you can get the book and read the full thing. So let's move on.

[00:26:38] Weekly SEO Tip – KGR Keywords

Bryon Brewer: We're going to talk about our weekly SEO tip. And this week we're tapping about KGR keywords, which stands for keyword golden ratio. And what this is, is this is a data-driven method for finding keywords that rank high in Google.

And usually very quickly sometimes the same day or just a few days, we can have an article ranking by using the KGR method. These keywords are typically underserved on the internet, so there's not a lot of content out there. And so Google is going to reward you for providing quality content on that topic.

So let's look at the formula here. So the KGR formula is the number of Google results that have the keyword phrase in the page title. So if your keyword phrase is best kayaks for teenagers, then that would be in the page title. Okay. So we're looking for results that have that full keyword phrase in the page title, and then divided by the monthly search volume.

Where that search volume is less than two 50. So we're really just looking for keywords that have search volumes of two 50 or less. And then that keyword phrases in the page title. So you can see the formula here is KGR equals the number of all entitled results. So how do you get. A, a search result where that keyword is in the page title.

Cause otherwise you can just do a regular search is going to return back all kinds of results where it's maybe in that in, in the first paragraph or somewhere in the body of the text or wherever it could be anywhere. But we want to end the title. So if you used this qualifier all in title, Results are all entitled then.

And then the key word is Google is going to give you those keywords that are only in the title. So we're going to take that, that result. Let's say we best kayaks for teenagers and we get back 200 results. Okay. And then we're going to divide that by the search volume. How much search volume does that have?

So let's say that there's a hundred search volume. So it would be divide 200 by a hundred. Okay. Now that ratio that comes up, if it is less than 0.25, then that is KGR compliant. And that's great. If it's between 0.2, five and one, then it's not quite KGR compliant. It might work. It might be good. But you're getting farther away from it being great.

Okay. So you could consider, especially if you're getting very few. That are 0.2, five or below, then you could consider going up a little bit. And then if it's above one ratio, then it's not KGR compliant. It's not going to be, you know, low competition. So you should stay away from that and focus on those that have the lower ratios.

So that's the KGR ratio there and I will show you how to do this here. So let's pull up Google.

All right. So we've got our screen up here and let's go to Google. And what we're going to do is do all in title and then let's do best kayaks for teenagers. Okay. Okay, so you see there's none in there. Let's try like fishing, that's kayaks for fishing. All right. So we do have some where that's in the title.

So best fishing kayaks is in there and could see best fishing, kayak best fishing, kayaks, the, all of these have that best fishing kayak within the title. Okay. So now that came back 670 results here. So what we're going to do is we're going to look at the six 70, going back to the formula here.

Let's go back to that formula.

Okay, is all entitled results. So that's going to be six 70 divided by the search volume of this, which you could get from SemRush from Ahrefs from a number of tools to get the search volume for a particular keyword. And then that'll give us our ratio. Okay. Now you had to do that for each keyword phrase that you're wanting to research.

So. You know, 200 keyword phrases and you want to see which ones are KGR compliant. You'll need to do that. All entitled search for each one. Best way to create your spreadsheet. Put, put each keyword in there. Yeah. And then run you a search and just record all the results, the number of results, and then the search volume for each, and then do a calculated column there to get your ratio.

And then you can sort by that to see which ones are compliant. It is you know, we use KGR on a lot of our sites that we build and it it's, it's very successful. In most all cases. So here's a good example here of a site that started out on January with you know, very low traffic 5,000 in traffic.

And then over the period of a year of adding articles slowly each month using just the KGR method on this site and that's. We identified this key words, ran through the jar and got those ratios and focused on those. You can see that we had an 800% traffic increase from 5,000 to 42,000 in the period of 12 months.

So so we know it works and you'll find lots of research from other folks in the industry as well that this. Now, if you, if you are interested in doing KGR certainly can do it manual. You can also check out humanproofdesigns.com under the menu option, grow your site. We do have a KGR package.

You can order there, we take a thousand keywords in your niche and calculate the KGR ratio for all 1000 of them. And then we sort that give you all of the results. And then we guarantee that at least 50 of the. We'll be gate KGR compliant. If they're not, then we'll go find more keywords until we get you at least 50, typically in a batch of a thousand that we analyze, we'll find about 200 to 250.

They're going to be KGR compliance is going to vary per niche. But that's pretty typical of the number you'll get. And so you could consider getting the KGR pack from human proof designs. I was saying to you lots and lots of. All right. So that is it for this week. We will talk to you next week.

Thank you.

From a failed investment with the Income Store, to successful online Amazon FBA and affiliates sites, we'll hear about the importance of persistence – especially when trying to have success with online business! Blair Quane has many years of experience in business — both failures and successes. We'll also cover this week's SEO tip — placement of keywords in your blog articles and pages.

Overview – Persistence in Online Business

[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:00:51] Interview with Blair Quane
[00:29:43] SEO Weekly Tip – Keyword Placement

Links and Resources Mentioned

EmilyAndBlair.com

Transcript

[00:00:00] Introduction

Bryon Brewer: Welcome. I'm Bryon Brewer. Welcome to the Building Online Empires podcast. Today we have a guest joining us with many years of experience operating online businesses from Amazon FBA to affiliate sites. So Blair Quane from the site emilyAndBlair.com will be giving us some great tips. And what I think are some important lessons. Being persistent, even when every venture you take on isn't necessarily a successful. And then we'll be covering this week's SEO tip on keyword placement. So where should I be putting my targeted or primary keywords in my articles for the best SEO value. So let's get started.

[00:00:51] Interview with Blair Quane

Bryon Brewer: All right. I want to introduce everyone to a Blair Quane. Blair is a long time customer of Human Proof Designs and has many years of experience in online business. And so we thought we'd bring him on today. Kind of let him give us a little bit rundown of some of his background, his experience, what he's been doing.

And then he does have a new venture emilyAndBlair.com that we want to talk about understand what it's about, what it does. So why, why is he's launched that venture? So welcome Blair.

Blair Quane: Thanks, Bryon. Good to be on.

Bryon Brewer: Good. So so yeah, so, you know, Blair, you've been working with human print designs for quite some time now.

And one thing I've always been impressed with you is the different ideas you come up with online businesses. And so what can you give us a little background of when you got involved with online business and why you started that?

Blair Quane: Yeah. Well I think my sort of the thing that I was doing before online was had a manufacturing business and you know, with staff, you know, we had 14, 15 staff and anyone that's done anything to do with manufacturing knows how stressful it can be trying to produce something physical.

And so went through that for about three years. Went through a bit of illness and decided that, that, you know, needed some significant life changes. So I was looking around, I really liked doing stuff online. And so basically look for online options to do. Initially I jumped into Amazon and Amazon FBA and yeah, got stuck into that.

That was kind of when it was really taking off I did about a year and a half, two years of, of Amazon and you know, it was pretty successful with it. I learned a heck of a lot about, you know, online selling, even though, you know, you're within Amazon's little platform, big platform. You know, you've got to stick to their roles and all the rest of it, which was kind of good because it sort of, it did kick things reasonably controlled.

And, you know, there was only a few ways you could do things which made it easy to get into. And I think that's what a lot of people like with Amazon. So I did that for a couple of years and then ended up selling those. I had two Amazon businesses, so I ended up selling those sort of done my dash with Amazon.

I'd wanted to have a bit more flexibility with what I was doing rather than sort of being constrained by them. So at that stage I went and bought a portfolio of businesses or websites that were, or are involved in the transportation. So in automotive category and we sell a digital product via those and we've got sites mainly in the Netherlands, but also in Canada and the U S as well.

So we basically set those up. I dunno, sort of run as a portfolio. They're reasonably passive which is nice. It's one of those hard to achieve words in online, but it gets thrown around a lot. So We were kind of keen to sit up you know, the background of, of portfolio of websites that would sort of keep us chugging along and allow us to do other developments in it's what we've been working with you guys on, which is the Emily and blair.com project, which we were doing.

Won't be doing it for just over a year, year and a half now. So yeah, it's been a good journey.

Bryon Brewer: All right. So you mentioned starting an Amazon FBA. So the, the online businesses you're running today, or you've been more focused on affiliate, or what model are you more focused on now.

Blair Quane: Yeah. So if I see an affiliate model, so we have these content websites obviously bring mainly organic traffic into them, provide them with information about the product we're selling and then you know, if they clicked through and they, they buy a report, that's a report, a digital report that we sell and that clicks through to an affiliate in. Yeah. And that's, and we get the kickback from them at the end of the month.

And it's a nice tidy little model that it's yeah. We like affiliate the affiliate model because it's you know, once you've got your content set up and you're ranking, well there is that element of income that comes along with that. And it's just a matter of updating the sites every now and again, you don't have to do a heap of work once you've, once you've ranking.

And so that, that kind of works with us you know, with the Amazon stuff, that was all very much physical products. So ordering product from China, having it shipped out, dealing with returns and all of that stuff. And so there's a real difference between that physical and digital products. And I definitely had a desire after doing those couple of years with Amazon to move towards more of a digital model than the physical product.

Bryon Brewer: Gotcha. So a lot of our customers and a lot of the audience listening today is focused really on English sites and the USA market. And you mentioned that you have some businesses that are focused on the Netherlands that we we've helped you work with.

And of course those are Dutch. They bring a whole nother set of challenges. So can you, can you tell the listeners any, any hints or advice on and why you, why you decided to target a non – non-English.

Blair Quane: Yeah. I mean, I think it was mainly the opportunity of this portfolio that we bought. I've always been a person that's been you know, I don't see barriers.

You know, that are going to stop your business. And so I never, when I was looking for these websites to buy, I never really worried too much about the, the language they were in or the country they were. And I was looking for the opportunity and yeah, there are challenges with you know, the science being in Dutch.

And I think probably one of the biggest recommendations I'd make to people is that if you are going to you know, set up business and in a country that's doing a different language or even another country that speaks English. You probably, if you using you know, subcontractors or freelances, depending on what it is that you're using them for, you want to make sure that if it's very specific to the language set, it's content writing a lot of the time, it's best to use. So for us, it was best to use Dutch freelances because we've used you know, multiple different languages in you know, in, in different freelance countries to do these Dutch sites. And we've had had a lot of issues. Over the past few years. And I think, you know, any of the stuff we've done with you guys, you know, you've actually sourced a Dutch content writer for us, you know, and that's, that works really well.

I think that's the key thing that people need to be aware of is that you need to be able to deal with people. You know, who are based generally in Europe, in that country, your, your selling into. But, I mean, the, yeah, the, the other side of it too, is that you get to, you know, the us market is very, very busy in, you know, saturated and a lot of niches.

So I think one of the things that I liked about the Netherlands and in this heaps of other countries where there's opportunities is that you were not dealing with the level of competition that you would be. You know, setting up an online business in the USA or Canada or, or any of the other big English countries.

So, you know, for me, one of those smaller European countries was was a good way to go. And there's definitely benefits of doing that. Although, as I said, there are, there are sort of challenges to work around, but

Bryon Brewer: Yeah, definitely there's some nuances with the culture of the country that If you don't have somebody local that understands that market, you can miss very easily, but it is the niches you're in there are very interesting because they are way over saturated here in the USA, but in the Netherlands, you're really just competing against a few players over there. So you have a lot better chance of making a successful run of.

Blair Quane: I think it comes also back to the you know, my Amazon, I guess beginnings was that when I started doing Amazon, they were launching out into different countries. And so you know, whilst the U S market was starting to get very saturated on Amazon, a lot of other sellers was then starting to push into Germany in Spain, you know, in the, in the likes to, to get that sort of less competitive environment.

And I suppose that's probably I guess a wee bit of where I was coming from is that I'd already had experienced through the Amazon platform and doing that and the nuances involved and sitting up in a different country, although doing it with Amazon was reasonably easy because they have all the systems in place to do that reasonably straightforward.

Bryon Brewer: Yeah. So, so one topic that I think our listeners deal with frequently is you know, how to stay motivated and how to be persistent. With online business, everything that you do is not necessarily going to be a success and there's learning opportunities all through the journey. And you've had sites that you've worked with us that haven't been a great hit, some have.

So you know, tell us how do you, how do you deal with that? How, how do, what keeps you going? To stay persistent, which I have to say, Blair is one most persistent patient. He truly is. So I admire that about you. You just very persistent. You can keep on, even when you, you invest money in adventure and it just doesn't work out.

And then others, you, you keep at it and eventually you see it through and you do have success. You have any advice for our viewers?

Blair Quane: Yeah, I think it's tricky if you haven't had any success. You know, and you're just starting out in a, you know, you're going to take hits. That's just the way it is.

But you know, that's the same in any business, any bricks and mortar business, you know, you jump into that. You know, you jumping into another whole set of challenges. So I've I've owned a couple of bricks and mortar businesses before this, and you know, that the manufacturing business I was talking to you about, it was very much a business that unless I got stuck into it, it was gonna, you know, I bought it as a turnaround business.

Like I bought it for a cheap price in if I didn't do massive changes to it and grow quickly it would, it would have folded within, you know, two or three months. So. I think with me, I've always had that sort of persistent and sort of character, but also you've just got to realize everything is a long game.

Like people, you know, there's so much online about, you know, getting rich quick and all this sort of stuff. And it's very rare that that actually happens. So you want to make sure that your, you know, whatever you're doing, you need to be realistic and be realistic with your goal. So if you're starting an online business, you need to go, right.

You know, this could be 12 months before you make any money. And you might've spent 50 or a hundred thousand dollars, you know, it's, it's unlikely that you're going to be able to grab a thousand dollars in, go and spin that. And. Build you know, the business churning out $10,000 a month. Well then within two or three months, that takes time because you've got to invest to get money back.

But I think one of the key things that I would say in something that I'm sort of pushing forward with more this year with myself is to Is set up systems in be organized. So just because you're working for yourself and you know, there's that heaps of stuff online just sort of takes your attention away from what you should be doing.

So, one thing I've started to do is block out certain blocks in the day. And I'm not talking about sort of eight hours a day. I'm talking about a couple of two hour blocks, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and that's probably three days a week. And I leave the other two days for random stuff that I have to do, which just pops up.

And in those blocks I'm doing regular reoccurring stuff each week. And the point of that as these are growth oriented tasks. And if I keep doing them for six months to 12 months or, or whatever, the timeframe I know I'm going to see the results I want. And so I think that's probably the key, I guess, suggestion or tip that I'd give people is set up a system that works for you, whether that's calendars or whatever, but have a regular reoccurring sort of list of tasks.

Doing each week because that's the best way to get growth consistently, because if you're just going about it, right. I'm going to do some content this month and then, you know, look at a bit of, I don't know, backlinks next month or whatever, you know? You're just not consistent enough to be hammering away at the algorithms.

Like you need to be, you know, if you're doing it each week, you're going to get noticed.

Bryon Brewer: Yeah. That's that's great advice. Okay. I have found myself sometimes getting caught up with you know, reading articles and researching the industry are other tasks that before I know my day's gone. And so this year I've made a more dedicated effort before lunch is operations of Human Proof Designs and all the work that goes into just running a company. And then after lunch has to be marketing and growing because too much of my day had always been spent in operations and just dealing with the day-to-day work of a company. And, and then you leave, you have no time for marketing and growth and what you do, you need to grow the company.

So so having a system in place is hugely important. And I, I liked that. You said it's a long game. A lot of people need to hear that. Cause it, you know, it's easy to you know, write a bunch of great articles and put content up there. And a month later you're not seeing what you thought was going to be on page one of Google and you get, you know, very disappointed.

But but it, it, it takes awhile and any kind of online business takes a while to grow. So. So that persistence is really important. And so you had, you had some knock downs, too. You got you were an investor in the the Income Store. And of course, most of our listeners know that company went under many people lost most, if not all of their investment from that, how do you, you know, what, w how did you recover from that? You know, what, what did you do after that to move on?

Blair Quane: Yeah, I think the Income Store was an interesting one because And I think one of the key lessons from it is that old saying, trust your gut. And my gut was sort of churning that whole year before that you know, that business collapse and I, I was actually you know, I was actually able to, I had a couple of portfolios with them and I actually sold one of them about a year before because of that feeling.

I was just like, it just didn't. Yeah, I just wasn't getting the results that I was after. And, you know, I'm quite I can be quite pedantic about following up with certain things. And these guys just weren't giving me the information back. I was getting a lot of excuses and things, so I yeah, I think, I think the key thing was, you know, it, it was the, the income I had invested in it wasn't you know, Critical to my lifestyle in terms of, you know, it wasn't a loan that I was, you know, having to pay back to someone or a bank or something. So for me yeah, like it was a disappointment. I mean, we lost a significant amount of money through that. I mean, I've, I know a lot of other people that were investors in it, you know, there was a whole group of us that kind of went through a few conferences and, and, you know, and sort of got the sale and from Income Store and sort of the same time. I think there's about 800 of us. And so, you know, there's a lot of other guys there and girls that have lost more than me. So mine was, you know, it was survivable. And so I think the, the thing that I would look back on and go, right, you know, if it seems too good to be true, it generally is.

And the returns that they were giving were really good returns and. Very little was shown up front for the actual work they were doing. So I think that's, that's the key thing for people to do is, you know, and particularly like, you know, online, if you're looking to buy online business, you know, because I think they'll be, this is what they were doing.

They were buying websites and putting them under your portfolio, so to speak. You know, if you're going and looking at a website or a business to buy. You've got a dig in deep and trust you gut and look, try and look for those really, really key points that are possible red flags and if it doesn't look good, walk away, you know?

So for me, yeah. I guess a big decision after Income Store was to move on to a new project. And that was where EmilyAndBlair.com sort of came into the picture and, and through Emily and I wanting to do project together. And yeah, I mean, that was the easiest way to do the life is just a move on and, you know, you won't forget about it, but you know, there's no point in dwelling on it, learn from it and yeah then invest and better things. Yeah.

Bryon Brewer: Yeah. Excellent. Good advice. So Emily and Blair, so tell us about that. That's. So that you launched I believe last year. And can you tell us what it is, what that site's about?

Blair Quane: Yeah, so Emily Emily is my fiance. She's from Manchester in the UK. I'm in Christchurch, in New Zealand.

So we're on, we're on opposite sides of the world. She moved down here with me well, just over a year ago and we wanted to do you know, a joint project where we could both work from home, something she could be involved in something that I could use sort of my expertise with business on and something that she could sort of you know, use her expertise around sort of health and wellbeing and sort of connect the two together because I think that's key things about, you know, anything I've found on with my businesses that working by yourself and, and, you know, owning your own business, you need to balance that lifestyle and health with the stresses of, of, you know, launching and running a business. So we wanted to put together a, a web resource, which was Based along the lines of being able to provide a lot of content to people for free, they can come in and look at the overall process of how to start a business online. And so we sit this up with 13 steps effectively. So starting from right at the beginning, what you need to do to what, you know, what, why you should start an online business and what it's good for and who it's not, you know, because you need to ask yourself those questions before you jump on and right through all the steps, you know, sitting up a website or sitting up eCommerce store or, you know business model you want to run through in a right through to growing it, getting traffic and the right to the end of effectively selling it. So this is a resource that people can come to and they can use for free to step by step, go through it. And we really wanted to go step by step.

So then, you know, people can jump in at any stage that they're at and still use the website without sort of having to get stuck within a journey that's non flexible. So we, we wanted to do there and then also provide a long sort of side, all of those that journey we wanted to provide a whole lot of information and other stuff that you just need when you're starting business.

So like we've got a, you know, an education course pages. So if you need to upskill on through any education sites, you can go to that page and, and, and, you know, learn how to do SEO, learn how to do coding and things like that. You know, we wanted to provide a resource pages where, you know, there's you know, a whole heap of resources there that you can go and use. The coaches page, so you can have a look at what, some of the key sort of coaches that we've been involved with. And we would recommend. Books that we've read, you know, business books, you know, books about starting online and things. So that sort of things are, you know, right through products, you know, buying equipment for your home office.

Yeah, the list goes on and on and on you know, and the, but the key couple of other key areas was you know, providing some templates for people to use and make it easy for them. You know, if you're doing a business plan, we'll provide you with a free business plan template, download it for free and, you know, get stuck in.

And then checklists, you know, going through, and this is what. All about before using checklists to systemize your business and using checklists to systemize that journey that you go through as you're setting up your business you know, and then also providing a way for people to get connected with other people and that, you know examples of good podcasts to listen to good Facebook pages to join with, you know, a good YouTube channels to subscribe to it, you know, and the list goes on and you know, if your listeners can have a look at the site, they can go through and they can see all of this, but it was creating a big package of free information in resource for people to come to and be able to go through, to start a website or start a business online.

And we just, hadn't sort of seen that in the market, you know, these, these websites that give you this information, they give you this part of it and they give you that part of it, but it wasn't really anything that would give you the entire journey. And that was what we were kind of after, you know, being able to give back, but by, you know, providing that.

Bryon Brewer: Okay. So this side is really applicable for, for anyone even for affiliate marketers for Amazon FBA, for any type of way you might run an online business, right?

Blair Quane: Yup. Yeah. So it's universal it's you know, it covers all of the different business models like Amazon or affiliate marketing and you know, a lot of the things are all very relevant to whatever business model your own.

So these information about how to set up your, your company, you know, there's information about your legal requirements and tax and all that sort of stuff. So it's relevant across the board and that's what we wanted to do well. And to make sure that, you know, any of the customers or people coming to our site, you would find relevant information that was I guess, pertinent to where they were in their, their online business journey.

Bryon Brewer: Yeah, absolutely. And it, it, it does have a unique structure here that, that you know, the start your journey. And then as you go through that it, it steps you step-by-step into starting the business all the way through growing it branding it, monetizing it, getting customers to the exit to selling it. I think unique. You see a lot of sites, cover bits and pieces of this, but this really is the holistic view from start to finish. Which I think is it's a fantastic resource. If, if you're looking for any of these gaps and what you need to do with your business.

Blair Quane: Yeah, I think that was one of the key things we wanted to make sure was that, you know, as you can imagine, there's a there's a massive amount of content on the site. And so for us to make it easy and usable for people, we needed that navigator on the side and step by step and, and it just sort of breaks out open and opens up more indepth parts of each topic as you go through and you can click through from each article, you know, at the bottom, you've got, you know, a navigator as well. So it just had to be really usable for people to find where they were and know where they were in the process, as well as being able to jump into whatever stage they wanted to do.

Because, you know, at the end of the day, you know, people coming to our site aren't necessarily always going to be just at the start, you know, they might be halfway through and they want to focus on getting more customers, for example. So they go, they can go to that stage.

Bryon Brewer: Gotcha. Well so tell us Blair before we wrap up here, what, so what activities are you doing to grow this site now that you have it?

And I know you have a podcast as well that you're, you're using to promote.

Blair Quane: Yeah. So we've sort of developed up a marketing plan, I guess you'd call it, which covers off having so a podcast, which we started last year. We did, we did 91 episodes last year, so it was a reasonable, reasonable, work and then we also did a You know, like a social media plan.

So we were using a automated system to upload to all of our social media platforms, you know, content and, and you know, regular content throughout the week. And so we're working through doing that and, and, and. More information out on our social media so people can see, you know, what we're about and, and, you know, come to the site.

And this year we're, you know, we're going to have a look at driving some paid ads and, and just see if we can play around with A bit more traffic in some more users to the site because we want, we want plenty, more eyes on the site. And that's, that's one of our main goals this year is to do that.

We're going to tweak up our podcast a bit this year and change the format to be more aligned – last year it was sort of just a bit sporadic around the topics. You know, we were just touching on different topics and we sort of group smaller subtopics together, but there was no real consistent flow.

So this year we're going to follow up from the start to the, sort of the start of, of starting a business online. And basically like our website does, we're going to go through each step as we go through the year. So people can just jump in and, and again, With podcasts- the great thing is you've got a directory list, so you can jump in whatever step you like and, you know, use the website and the podcast in conjunction with each other at the same time and sort of just keep, keep aligned that way.

As well as obviously getting various guests along to, to give us insights and, and you know, keep, keep the the interest going, I guess.

Bryon Brewer: Yeah. Well, I love it. It has so much good information. And with your background years of experience here with online businesses is great that you shared and created a resource like this for the community.

So thank you Blair for your time today. Appreciate it. Look forward to your success with EmilyAndBlair.com.

Blair Quane: Awesome. Thanks, Brian. Appreciate it.

Bryon Brewer: All right. Thank you.

Blair Quane: Cheers.

[00:29:43] SEO Weekly Tip

Bryon Brewer: So let's jump over to our SEO tip for this week. So we're what we're going to be covering here is where should I use my target or primary keywords within an article that I'm launching. So this is going to help you rank your articles better and higher in the search engines. But it's important to get these targeted keywords in the right places.

So we're going to talk about the web page URL, the page title tag, the meta description, the first 100 words of your content, and then the subheading place. So first the website, a URL. This is also in WordPress called the perma link. So you can see here in this article I have Valentine's day nails. That's my primary keyword for this article here. And so in the perma link I've got best Valentine's day nails as words within the URL. So this is going to help you improve your ability to rank there, make sure there's primary keywords or in the actual URL of the page. Then you're also going to want to make sure it's in the page title tag.

So this is typically going to be the heading of your article. The title of the article is what Google is typically going to use. Now, in this particular site here, I'm using rank math and rank math does let you optimize the title. That's appears in Google, separate from the actual title of the article.

So while I have here Valentine's day nails, fill the love with these top three desires. I have a bit different title here in rank math. The reason being is I'm using an emoticon, that little heart icon within the result, which yeah, Google does sometimes display the emoticons within the title.

And that can increase your click-through rates. So where it makes sense to be able to use that we would use it, although it's, it's probably only about 5% of the time that Google will actually insert that and include it within your title. But we do have some good results on this site in using that.

So we've done it here and optimize that in ranking. Then in your meta-description, so this is the snippet, the description that's going to appear in the search results for your article. And so you'll want to include that description. Here in rank math, you could see, we have a separate area here where we're going to put in the description.

You don't want it to be too long, a couple of sentences up to around 160 characters. And then you also want to include those primary keywords within the first 100 words of your content. This helps to emphasize the importance of those keywords. And then finally, we want to include it in the subheadings.

Now, in this particular article here, I included the primary keywords Valentine's day nails within the heading of the first paragraph. So with it there, I didn't want to include it in the actual first one hundred words since it's already part of the first heading. You don't wanna, you don't want to use it too much, which gets to kind of the, a big rule here is don't over optimize.

So this particular article here Valentine's day nails, we have those primary keywords mentioned four times in the article. So you see, we don't mention it a lot, but we certainly have it included there in all the important places. So if you jumped back up here, we've included in the webpage URL, we've included in the page title. We included it in the meta description, and then we included it in one heading or subheading. So for this article, that's sufficient. So that should give you an idea where you want to put these tags at. Keep in mind just don't over-optimize all right. That's it for this week. See you next week.

Aged Domains can help you rank and grow niche websites faster than ever! However, you must do your research and avoid pitfalls that could harm your ability to rank. In this video, we'll help you understand what aged domains are, how to find them, and the important metrics to look at.

Overview

[00:01:10] What is an Aged Domain
[00:03:26] Why use an Aged Domain
[00:06:45] How to use an Aged Domain
[00:09:18] What to Watch Out For
[00:12:33] Important Metrics When Buying an Aged Domain
[00:20:25] Tools to Find an Aged Domain
[00:21:56] Case Studies
[00:33:26] Weekly SEO Tip – Video Content

Links and Resources Mentioned

Fast Website Growth with Aged Domains – Blog article
Human Proof Designs Aged Domains Site Packages

Transcript

Bryon Brewer: I'm Bryon Brewer. And today we are going to be covering age domains, what they are, why they're important, why you think you should think about using one to grow your website fast. We'll also cover this week's SEO tip and featured service for helping to grow your website.

You can find all the links and materials for this podcast on our website at humanproofdesigns.com. So let's go ahead and get started. So our agenda for today is really around what is an aged domain we'll discuss what they are, why you might want to use one, why other folks are using age domains.

We'll look at how to use it , some possible uses. And then some of the most important aspects we're going to look at today is really around what to watch out for. And what are the important metrics you should be looking at when buying an aged domain? I will also look at some of the tools for helping you find aged domains to use with your sites.

And then we'll also look at a couple of case studies.

[00:01:10] What is an Aged Domain

Bryon Brewer: So let's first get started with what an aged domain is. So anytime a domain owner fails to pay the renewal fee to their registrar, then the domains eventually going to expire. So that's what we mean by an aged domain or expire domain. Most of these have very little value, probably 150,000 or more domains expire every day.

And most of these have no value at all. Some are going to have some significant SEO value though, and that's what we're looking for with an aged or expire domain. If you can find an aged domain with a good quality backlink profile. As well as something that is relevant to the website niche that you're targeting, then it's possible that could be a good candidate to use as an aged domain. However, the top rule when looking at aged domain is really to do your research, understand the domain history and determine as quality based on the metrics that we're going to cover today. To make sure you're, you're buying something that's going to be safe for your site, you, the last thing you want to do is spend lots of effort building out a great niche website, and then find later that that domain you've built it on is going to prevent you from ranking well, or has some type of Google penalty associated with it. Now when can you grab a domain this chart that we've outlined in the podcast on our website outlines exactly when it's possible.

It's called the drop catch activity period. And those are typically when a domain is going into pending delete status, or once it has been released by the registrar. So pending delete will happen five days prior to it actually being released. Now, prior to that period the original owner has a redemption period where it goes into a grace multiple times they have opportunities to get that domain back. So while it's in grace those are probably not good candidates to start looking at right away. Those that are pending deletes though, are more than likely going to go to a delete status and then be available for reregistration.

So you can take a look and monitor those.

[00:03:26] Why use an Aged Domain

Bryon Brewer: So why don't we use an aged domain? A number of reasons here. First, we want to avoid the Google sandbox and get a jumpstart and building our site. When we say Google sandbox, we're talking about a brand new domain in the period of time, probably four to six months for a new domain where Google does not trust that and we're not going to get a lot of good rankings out of that domain. So it's, it's going to take time before we get out of that Google sandbox, before, we see our site traffic and organic rankings coming in. Lots of folks are don't want to wait. Especially when you're starting a new business that long to start getting traffic in revenues and profits coming in.

So an aged domain is going to help us skip that entire Google sandbox. So you get started much faster. Another good reason is powerful backlinks without the expensive costs. Now we do have the cost of acquiring the age domain. However many of you know, backlink building is a time-consuming process.

And it can be costly. Here at Human Proof Designs, we offer guest posts backlink building and those links can cost from a a hundred dollars up to over $200, depending on the domain authority of the site we're getting links from. So it's expensive. If you go and look at an age domain that already has say 200 backlinks, 500 back links to it, that could be in a very expensive endeavor to replicate that many backlinks.

So it can save you quite a bit of money in time. It can also give you a relevant backlink profile. So depending on the age domain and how relevant it is to your niche we may have some really good backlinks there that are relevant, that'll help us rank faster. So for example, if your site is maybe in the camping niche and you get a link from somebody like Bass Pro or Cabela's our REI those are all really strong websites that if you had a back link from them would really help Google understand what your site is about, provide you with a relevency. You may also get from an aged domain backlinks and brand mentions from well-known publications. Maybe the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or other large organizations like that, that could bring you some good authority to your website. And some of these links are nearly impossible to acquire naturally or through, through link building efforts.

So you know, if you can find a domain that has the, those types of backlink profiles it can have a huge advantage. To you ranking and growing your site to large numbers. And then domain age is also a ranking factor. We see that through numerous studies Ahrefs just published one this month that showed three millions of results they looked at those that are on page one of Google typically have domains that are five years or older. So domain age can have a big factor in how Google is ranking your site. So for all of these reasons aged domains are, can be a great asset in your toolbox for building your websites. And it's just going to help you get going faster. All right.

[00:06:45] How to use an Aged Domain

Bryon Brewer: So how do we use a an aged domain? So first we w we can use it obviously to build a branding niche authority website. So think about building. This could be an affiliate website. Certainly that is a very common use to using this, an aged domain with the right profile, the right metrics building a brand new site off of it.

So that would become your the domain of your site. You know, it can be tricky finding an age domain sometimes that has relevancy and the domain kind of makes sense from a branding standpoint for your website. But if you can find the right one they can be a huge benefit. It can work for not just affiliate sites, but also e-commerce sites.

E-commerce sites who are looking to gain more traffic from organic rankings and have less reliance on paid advertising. Then a age domain could give them that jump they need to get organic rankings. A second use of it could be to redirect a domain to your brand. So you already have an established website.

You already have a brand or even if you don't have an established website and you want to build off of a different domain. You can do that. You can register a new domain and redirect the age domain to your new domain, or use your existing brand and website and redirect the age domain to your existing website.

So we do that through 301 redirect, which allows us to redirect the domain to your branded website and let Google know to flow the link juice and domain authority of the age domain over to your domain. We'd also go into Google search console and let Google know about that so that they understand that that domain is been redirected.

So you can use it for that. That's going to give your existing site a big jump in authority based on the relevancy and backlink profile of that age domain. And then third, you could also, which a lot folks are doing is flipping domains. So you could buy and sell for a profit. If you can find an aged domain, that's just expire that has good SEO value. Purchase that for 10 bucks and turn around and sell it for say $2,000. It can be quite profitable. All right.

[00:09:18] What to Watch Out For

Bryon Brewer: So what are some things that you need to watch out for? So here's a list of some of the major things you want to think about. Number one is spammy links. The backlink profile is really what we're purchasing when we get an aged domain and spammy links are going to have a negative impact on your ability to rank well with a new site or if we redirect it to our existing site. So you want to look at that backlink profile, do your research and make sure that doesn't have a lot of spamy links. Now, keep in mind that every website out there just about is going to have some spammy links. It seems like there's robots and crawlers and other tools out there that are creating these types of spam links. And so it's inevitable that you're going to get some but overall we're looking for those that could indicate the site's been hacked or some other you know, trend that shows lots of spammy links coming. That could be a unnatural. Google penalties. We also want to check out that.

Now Google penalties. The best way to detect these is if you own the domain is to go into Google search console and see, does it have a penalty applied a manual penalty applied from Google. However, if you don't own the domain, you cannot check Google search console. So we've included with this podcast in the link section, a couple of tools you can use to check, to see if a domain has any type of Google penalty.

We also go through the AdSense checker tool that will help you understand if that domain potentially has any Google penalty. Of course, if it does, it's a domain you want to skip, you want to stay away from if you do end up with an age domain that does have a Google penalty when once purchased it, you go in and you see in Google search console that it does, it's not the end of the world. What you're going to need to do is just submit a request to Google, to have that penalty removed. Let them know that you purchased this domain new. That all the offending content or whatever the penalty were is related to is gone and has been resolved and a likelihood is, is Google is then going to remove that penalty for you.

If it's previously been used as a PBN site, you also want to stay away from that domain. Typically PBN sites are going to have less natural link building to them. They're also typically going to have a lot more non-relevant content in the actual website, which you can go through the way back machine, the internet archive tool and take a look at the actual domain to determine if the content looks like it was used by a PBN or a public blog network. Alright. So keep, keep out, keep a watch out for those things. The other things you kind of want to understand too, is a Google, alogarithm update is something that could affect your age domain. And we always, you know, even new sites, existing sites can face that. All right.

[00:12:33] Important Metrics When Buying an Aged Domain

Bryon Brewer: So some of the important metrics when buying an aged domain.

So probably the very most important aspect here you want to look at is the topical relevancy of the backlinks. What we have experienced in building sites over the last number of years. , and some of those on age domains is we get, we don't get penalized and it doesn't affect us negatively. But if the age domain does not have relevancy to the content we're building, then we're basically getting no benefits, been wasted money on the age domain.

So you want to make sure that it has very high relevancy to what you're building. If you're, if you have a site that is around guitars, then you find an aged domain that maybe was selling guitars or had something really to guitars that would be of course, have a good match. You could also expand that a little bit.

Maybe it had guitars in it, but also other musical equipment. Maybe it had music lessons and those music lessons relate related to guitars. Then that would certainly all be relevant. If it was just a site based on pianos and you want to build one on guitar. Even though they're both musically related, it's going to be very questionable if that age domain is going to provide you value or not. So the, the tighter, the better the relevancy the more likely you're going to have success with that domain. So it's probably the most important metric you want to take a look at is scan through the relevancy of those backlinks and make sure they match.

Now, one tool that we use frequently is SEMrush. When you go into SemRush and look at the backlink analysis screen, it will categorize all the links into topics of what they fall into as well as the category or topic that the domain itself falls into. So you can get an idea of how SEMrush sees that site and what category or topic it puts it into.

And then what types of backlinks, what are all the different categories of backlinks it has. So that that'll give you a good indication of some of the topical relevancy. And then you can scan through all the backlinks, just manual, looking through the back links, to find ones that seem to have high relevancy to the niche website you want to build.

All right. You also want to look at the age of the domain. We're typically looking for domains that are at least five years or older when we're building on an age domain. You can start to get some that are, you know, less than five years. But five years from now tends to give us better results.

If it's site has a great backlink profile it's a very highly relevant and all the stats check out and it's a year old, I would tend to stay away from it. You know a domain that's only a year old still lacks the history that we're looking for. And when we jump in and put a new website on that domain it can confuse Google.

You can lose any kind of value that you thought you get out of that domain. So certainly look for those that are five years or older. Number of referring domains and number of backlinks. Now it is true that you know, backlinks can be manipulated. So that's not as an important metric, although it does have to some degree to help us understand you know, what is going to be the value of this domain? What power is it going to give to our new site? Certainly referring domains can be a better metric as well to look at since it's manipulated less. So look at those, we're looking for those that have at least 50 referring domains, and then we want to make sure that the majority of those referring domains have some relevance and providing good value to the backlink profile. All right. Trademarks, you certainly want to do a search on the trademark database to make sure that there are no trademarks on the name within the domain name. So if you have a trademark issue, you could build a site a year or two later, you could get hit with the lawsuit or some claim against your domain that it is violating someone else's trademark and then all the work that, and money and time that you spend on that website is going to be wasted because you'll lose that domain. So make sure before you go into buying any age domain that it has gone through a trademark search.

You may think something like thebestCrossFitequipment.com is a perfect domain for your fitness site, but the word CrossFit is a copy is a trademark term. And the owner of that trademark could come back in in place a claim against that domain. So we just stay away from anything that has any type of trademark somewhere inside of that domain.

Website quality. This is a big one as well with web star quality. What we typically do is go to the way back machine or internet archive, and we pull up the actual website. We take a look at the screenshots from the site itself and understand what was the site about? How was it built? What did it look like?

What kind of content did it have? And this tool is also going to help you understand you know, how, you know, when was the site active? Okay. How long ago was it that this site was launched and how long did it live? A domain authority is another important aspect. We're looking for those that have a domain authority of 10 or higher.

Domain authority as well as something that can be manipulated all though. Typically it does give us a good indication of the power of that domain if we use it on our website. So we're looking for those that are 10 or higher and certainly the higher, the better. It usually is an indication that the backlink profile is strong.

Citation flow. Now citation flow is giving us an idea of how popular are the websites that are linking to the age domain. Are they very, very popular sites? Are they, it doesn't give us an indication of quality of the links, but it is going to give us an indication if they are from larger sites with more traffic, which is going to lend to a better backlink profile search engine bans – we talked about that any type of Google penalty penalties are going to be important to look at. And then finally, the last date, the site was active. So when was this site last active? If it's been dead, meaning that the owner brought the site down, or for some reason, discontinued the website. We're looking, we're usually looking for sites that have been active within the last two years.

Sometimes you can go out a little bit farther, but the farther the site's been dead then the more likelihood is, is that Google is not going to give us the type of you know, link juice and power from the age domain that we expect. So the newer, the sooner that, that, that site has been live and active, the better.

Typically a lot of these are going to be dead for at least a year. Because the domain goes through a period of about a year when they allow the domain to expire, and then it goes through the process of grace period and finally deletion. So typically most are going to have at least a year, we'll go up to two years that we want to see the site being last active.

So these are all the metrics here that you want to pay attention to. You know, there's quite a few here. That's why the research is so important. If you find a great domain meets all of these requirements here, it could be a really good candidate for your site. All right.

[00:20:25] Tools to Find an Aged Domain

Bryon Brewer: So how do you go about finding these domains?

So of course Human Proof Designs here, we have kind of curated a list of aged domains that are offered with the domain and plus a site package to get you started. You can check out humanproofdesigns.com. Look under, start a business age domain packages or you can click on sites for sale and go through the inventory to see what we have available.

All of these domains of course have gone through due diligence to make sure they qualify and they meet all the requirements of the metrics we just went through. So you know that they're going to be quality if you're getting them from Human Proof Designs. Some other places you may want to look at Serp domains. They're a great partner of ours and SerpDomains.Com is a great resource to find quality domains that have already been vetted. Other ones that you may want to look at here SpamZilla. DynaDot and DomCop, expired domains.net as well. All four of those, you're not going to see that the domains have necessarily gone through a vetting process. So you're going to need to look at those go through their databases and then do your own due diligence on those. A domain coasters is one that I use a lot. They tend to have better quality domains, although you still need to vet all of those domains. And then of course, Google or auctions, you can look at GoDaddy to find those.

All right. So quite a few places you can look for them.

[00:21:56] Case Studies

Bryon Brewer: So I want to get into a case study. So how effective are. aged domains and are they going to be beneficial for you? So it can take a look at a couple of examples here. So the first one comes from our friends over at Serpdomains, and this is a site an aged domain that was purchased in the technology gaming products niche.

They built a brand new site off of this age domain with both informational, how to tutorial articles and money articles linking to affiliate products. Within just a few months of launching their website, they were receiving over 90,000 monthly page views and earning $3,500 or more per month on this website.

So. those that had been building a niche websites for many years is achieving that result within just a three month time period is not typical, but with an age domain, it certainly is possible with a brand new domain, we know that we take much longer typically to get to that earnings and page view level.

So this owner published two to three articles per week averaging 2,500 to 4,000 words each also added links through some guest posts links have continued that link building effort to get some fresh links on the site and then saw that huge growth within just two months. The first articles went live in December and revenue started in February and it's just been growing.

The total cost for this was for the domain and the content was just under $6,000. So pretty good results for the money spent. We can see here some of the stats on here had a DR of 44, 450 referring domains, and we can see the organic traffic here. Really, it just started peaking and going up here, we can see just in January and then February, it really starts to go up.

And then by mid year, by July, August timeframe, we're getting almost 70,000 views here and then organic keywords starting to, of course, almost nothing jumping all the way up to 21,000 within that six month time period. So pretty steep. And this is what is what we see a lot with age domains is these very, very steep increases in traffic after a few months of launch that typically is not going to be so steep with a new domain. It's going to take longer to get to that point. Now I have another case too. I mean, that, one's great. Another case story, this is a really pretty amazing story, and it's got a little of, a bit of a twist to it.

And you can read about this. This is actually in Wikipedia and is where I found this information. They mentioned that this site was purchased and, and, and reused by another buyer. So the domain was freedom251.Com and it was originally created in 2016 for an India company that was offering the world's cheapest smartphone.

Now, some of you may remember this story, but they were offering it for, in us dollars for like $7 or something really cheap like that. Regulators came in and thought this, something sound fishy about this, but they did offer this on a promotion. And at its peak this site that actually went down because it got so much traffic.

In crashed, it was getting nearly 45,000 visitors in February, 2016. And for the, a number of months following that it got lots of publicity in, in news organizations and everywhere had 188,000 backlinks and 10,000 referring domains. All really, because it went viral over this offering of a really cheap smartphone.

The site was shut down. Eventually the phones no longer for sale. It was shut down for about two and a half years. So from 2017, after they finished selling this phone through mid 2019, the domain expired and a new owner picked it up around March of 2019. So freedom251.com The new owner started up an Amazon affiliate site focused in the technology niche, particularly in laptops. So it wasn't phones, but somewhat close technology related and tp laptops. So you can see in the chart here, back in 2016, the monthly volume was hitting 54,000 monthly volume. And just for a short period of year during the month they were selling it.

And then we see in this chart as well, which you can get the links to all of this in the podcast notes that it went from basically zero in 2019 and had a huge steep incline up through 2020. All the way up to the end of 2020, it just kept growing and growing and growing over 300,000 monthly volume with the new owner on this domain selling laptops and it was all monetized through Amazon links or laptop purchases.

I would can see the corresponding increase here as well in the number of keywords. So pretty, pretty amazing growth off of an aged domain. And this owner was likely making you know, in lots of money you know, 10,000 or more per month on that amount of traffic selling laptops, kind of a higher dollar item as well.

So pretty good use probably got the domain very cheap, make tons of money off of this. Now the twist is you can see there's a drop. So within you know, within the year he had reached 300,000 and then we see that just at the end of 2020 in December of 20 20, a little over a year after it launched, there was a very, very steep drop.

So what happened here and why did this happen? Well, we don't know exactly, but more than likely this site was hit by a Google, a logarithm or a manual penalty. Now in December of 2020, there was a Google logarithm release that had a lot to do with backlink relevancy. So it's possible this site got hit by that a logarithm because although the site was related to technology, one of the things that we're seeing is that the original domain had nearly a hundred percent of its traffic from India and Saudi Arabia. And then the new site was built and was almost exclusively focused on USA traffic, and audience. That could be, that's a big red flag. When you're looking at an age domain, you want to go and look at where was the traffic coming from? The SEMrush backlinks analytics tool can give you that.

And typically we're looking for, if you're going to target a USA audience, then you want to have 50% or more of the traffic coming from USA historically on that domain, this one had almost no USA traffic. So Google would have eventually caught this and it's likely what happened to the site in December 2020 is that it was hit by either a penalty or that a alogrithm that was released and had a massive.

It should not really have been used as a US-based affiliate site now, was it a bad decision? That's kind of debatable because the owner probably did make tons of money on this. So it's not like he lost money. It's just that the site could have, if we'd had the right domain, could have grown and, and been steady and not have this decline and maybe be making lots of money to.

Another issue that we see with this site here is that it was based off of a single product. And so all the keyword rankings were really around the, the name of that product. And we've tried this before with other sites where they were single product based and the keyword rankings and the backlink profile were extremely tight around that one product is it then becomes a very difficult to rank and use that age domain for a broader set of products or keywords. So when we're looking at an age domain, we're looking for those that are going to have a little bit of a broad spectrum. If it's in the music industry you know, we don't want it to just be one particular model of guitar.

Because it's probably only going to ever rank for that. We're going to have a hard time expanding it. And that's exactly what we see here with this is that eventually you know, Google caught up with that and the site, the site traffic basically crashed. Now, there is a little bit of twist here. So if you check out the site today, you'll notice that freedom251 is now redirecting to laptop251.com. So the site is back and going as strong as ever. So after almost a year of sitting there, so back and basically in, in the first part of 2021, the site had no traffic. It was just about dead. All the rankings had been lost. So it's has set there for most of the year for 2021.

And in October of this year of 2021, laptop251.com was registered and freedom251.com was redirected over to laptop251 and now the traffic is going back up. It's almost back up to where it was at its peak of nearly 300,000 visitors a month. And and keyword rankings as well.

So it appears that letting the domain sit there for awhile, freedom251 and then redirecting it to a new domain. So we talked about redirecting domains to a new brand, a new domain. Is exactly what they've done. They've just done 301 redirects to laptop251 and built a site brand new site off of a brand new domain on laptops and have been able to recover. So freedom251 is passing over kind of that link juice of had, and that authority, but it's not passing over the penalty or the logarithm update that, that probably occurred on that domain. So it's an interesting twist that they are able to recover that.

And it's pretty clever. It's not something we would recommend because you know, the there's a huge risk in this and it's, it's something that's hard to replicate, so, but it's happened here. You can see just the power of these aged domains and exactly what they can do if you know what you're doing with them.

So they definitely can work. But you want to take your time and do the due diligence on these. All right. So I'd be kind of enjoyed those case study. And kind of understand that a little bit about what's occurred there. So before we wrap up today I do want to jump over and talk about our weekly SEO tip.

[00:33:26] Weekly SEO Tip – Video Content

Bryon Brewer: So moving on here, where weekly SEO tip this week is on using video. Lots of us are not doing anything with video today. We do have quite a few clients who have some good results with this. And it's something that is growing. So using video to rank your articles video is more valuable than ever.

If you notice the Google search results have gone from in the past year of very text-based to Google search results that are now much more richer, they have more images. More videos, more products photos and so forth. If Google shows a video thumbnail next to your search result , next to your article, and it does that for about 25% of search results users are going to be much more likely to click and read your articles. So you're going to get more traffic from it. It makes basically your article at rich snippet in the search results, and you will have higher click through rates. So video is going to help with a couple of things here.

One is the time on page or site you know, that's an SEO tactic to get a basic it's included in the Google logarithm of looking at how long is someone spending on your site? If you have video that time's going to go up because they're going to play that video spend more time than scanning through your article, potentially leaving with little time on your site.

So those metrics improve as well as the number of backlinks referring to your domain can improve. Obviously higher quality content tends to get more backlinks. So having video on your page, your article is going to increase the number of backlinks, increased time on site. All of those are going to have a positive effect for you in Google's a logarithm is increasingly prioritizing websites with with video content.

So I really highly encourage you to think about including video and it's, it's not going to give you a good SEO result if you're just you know, embedding someone else's YouTube video in your article needs to be unique content. Otherwise you're not really going to get credit. You're not going to get as much SEO value by just reusing other people's content.

You need to create unique video content. For this to work, but if you do, it's going to have, can have a huge impact from an SEO standpoint on your your rankings. So we do have a featured service here to mention today. This is our storyboard videos. So probably one of the easiest ways to create unique video for an article is to take that article and basically create a two to three minute long video that goes through the outline, the major topics within that article. And that's exactly what a storyboard video does it has animations, it has background music. It has photos. It takes content from your article, places that as text blurbs over the audio video and creates a compelling video that someone will watch to understand that can be embedded on your content plus share through social media. Post on your YouTube channel as well. That's going to be associated with your niche website. So the link to check this out is in the podcast notes as well. So check it out think about using more video within your content. All right. And that is it for today. Thanks everyone for listening.

And we'll be back next week.

Every day, thousands of domains expire — we are talking like 150,000+ per day. In fact, according to Digital Information Word, a staggering 70% of all domains are not renewed each year.  So just 30% are renewed.  Of the domains that were not renewed, 41% do actually expire, while 29% will be purchased/registered by someone else taking over the domain. 

Pretty amazing stats — this represents a lot of opportunity to grab high-value domains and reuse them to launch or grow sites for yourself.  

Domains expire for a lot of reasons.  Sometimes the owner forgets to renew (don't let this happen to you!), they could not make payment, they are no longer in business, they were acquired and merged into another site, they rebrand, etc…  

Read on to learn how to use aged domains to your advantage.

What is an Aged Domain?

Anytime a domain owner fails to pay the renewal fee to the registrar, the domain will eventually expire.  These domains become available for re-registration and there are folks who monitor these lists daily to snap up any domain that seems to be of value.  See the diagram below for details on the domain name lifecycle. Anytime a domain is “available for re-registration,” you have the opportunity to obtain the domain.

Most expired domains have little or no value.  But some will have significant SEO value.  That is what we are looking for in an aged domain.

An expired domain that has a quality backlink profile or is relevant to your website niche is worth buying.  

If you find an expired domain with a good quality backlink profile, it could be a great opportunity.  Or, if you see a domain with high relevance to your website niche, it could be worth buying.  These domains are highly sought after by SEO companies and are usually purchased quickly — so your best bet in finding these quality aged domains is via a reseller marketplace (see below).

Some expired domains are used for online scams or other types of spammy activity.  You want to avoid these.  There are tools to help you research the domain history, which we will mention later in this article.

The top rule when using an aged domain is do your research!  Understand the domain history and determine its quality based on the metrics we provide below. 

Why use an Aged Domain?

There are many reasons to use an aged domain.  Some of these are listed below.

Avoid the Google “Sandbox” and Get a Jump Start

Google tends not to trust a brand-new domain for a period of time.  This can range from 4 to 6 months.  During this time, you will see very little organic rankings and search traffic.  Once Google trusts your new domain, and you are out of this “sandbox” period, you'll see rankings improve pretty quickly.  So, if you want to build a profitable business fast, this is going to slow you down.  An aged domain doesn't go through the Google Sandbox, so you can start ranking much quicker.  This alone is a great reason to consider using an aged domain.

Get powerful links without the expensive cost

Backlink building can be time-consuming and costly.  Yes, many sites will grow and obtain backlinks naturally without any work.  But in today's competitive landscape, most sites engage in some type of backlink building strategy.  When you purchase an aged domain, you are getting perhaps years of backlink building that the previous site owner did for just the cost of the domain.  This can be a huge cost-saving, not to mention that many of the backlinks could be harder to obtain today.  If not impossible.  As an example, at Human Proof Designs, we provide a guest post backlink building service and each link is $100 or more.  An aged domain with 500 backlinks already built is going to easily pay for the cost of the domain.  In addition, you get the power of these links right away — no need to wait while you execute a long-term link building strategy.

Relevant Backlink Profile Already Built

Relevant backlinks are the most important benefit of an aged domain.  If your site is in the camping niche, and you can get a link from REI — that is a huge benefit.  REI is well known with a Domain Authority of 85+.  These types of niche relevant backlinks will jump-start your site rankings and help Google quickly understand what your site is about.

Get Backlinks and Brand Mentions from Publications

Sometimes, you will find that a large organization, such as the Wall Sreet Journal, has written a story about your site and linked to you.  When you find aged sites with links or mentions from these high-profile sites, it can dramatically improve your organic rankings.  These links can be hard to get — so an aged domain with these types of links can give your site lots of benefits.  

High Domain Reputation

Using an aged domain can provide you with a high domain reputation quickly.  This helps all of your content rank faster and higher in the search engines.  Domain authority is something built over time and you will get this advantage right away.

Domain Age is a Ranking Factor

Finally, the age of the domain is one of the factors Google uses in ranking sites.  We consistently see that those sites on page one of Google tend to be 5 years or older.  By purchasing an aged domain, you will have better chances of competing for those high-value page 1 Google rankings.

How to use an Aged Domain

After you purchase an aged domain, here are some ways you can utilize it:

1. Build a niche authority website – when you purchase a new domain and build a website on it, you have to work much harder to build up the domain authority.  And you will be in the “Google Sandbox” for a period of time – which means very little rankings and traffic until Google starts to trust your new domain.  With an aged domain, you get immediate domain authority from the existing reputation and backlink profile of the domain!  This helps you avoid the Google sandbox, and helps you rank much faster.  It is a shortcut to ranking your site.
2. Redirect domain to your brand – sometimes it can be hard to find an aged domain that accurately reflects the brand you want to build (or you may have an existing brand/website).  In that case, we would suggest finding an aged domain that is relevant to your niche and then doing 301 redirects to your existing domain or website.  That tells Google to transfer all the authority and link juice from the old domain to your domain.  With this method, you get to use your preferred domain while taking advantage of the aged domain power.  
3. Buy and sell for a profit – you could find great aged domains and sell them for a profit.  This is known as domain flipping and there are a number of marketplaces for selling domains.

What to Watch Out For

Buying aged domains for a new site, and/or using them to redirect to your site, is considered an advanced SEO strategy.  Here are some of the things you should watch out for when deciding what to purchase:

Spammy Links

Every site tends to get some spammy links.  There are crawlers and robots on the Internet that are constantly scraping and building directory sites or other spammy content and will link to your site.  However, there are also sites with bad intent that may link to you.  These sites have negative value and can lower the usefulness of an aged domain.  You can use tools like SemRush to get metrics on how many toxic backlinks a site has.  We can typically disavow these bad links, but when purchasing a domain, I would just move on if the toxic backlink score is too high.

Google Penalties

If the site has previously received a penalty, then it is of no use to us.  Site owners who get penalties will typically abandon the domain and register a new domain for their site.  So it is a high probability you'll encounter these types of domains.  Be sure to check its history. You can use this website to check for a Google ban, or you can also use the AdSense Sandbox Checker.  Please note that these checks are not 100%.  You won't really know until you get the domain and then look in Google Search Console.  It will list any penalties you've actually received.  If you do find this with a site you've acquired, just submit a request to reconsider to Google, letting them know you have acquired the site and all issues related to the penalty have been resolved.  

Previously Used as a PBN site

Finally, PBNs (public blog networks) are a popular SEO tactic for building links to your money site.  However, they typically have low-quality content and low relevancy to any one topic.  So avoid these.  Check the domain history in Wayback Machine Internet Archive.  If it appears to have lots of unrelated articles or doesn't appear to have been a real legitimate site, avoid it.

Google Algorithm Update

The much-feared Google algorithm — a change by Google could have a huge impact on your rankings.  Google is very much aware that the industry uses aged domains for the purpose of ranking a new site, or increasing the authority of an existing site.  However, there are very legitimate reasons for redirecting a domain or using an expired domain.  So Google does not have an issue with this unless it is used in an abusive way.  John Mueller at Google says look for when “people are trying to abuse the system by picking up domains that are totally unrelated to what they’ve been working on”.  So you have little risk (not zero — but little) as long as you build a site that is closely related to the topics of the original site or indicated by the backlink profile.

Important Metrics when Buying an Aged Domain

To be successful with an aged domain, you need to know what to look for in the domain — this is super important!  The success rate of aged domains can be quite low if you don't know what you are doing (good thing you are reading this article!).  So here are the most important metrics or attributes to look for when purchasing an aged domain:

1. Topical Relevancy of Backlinks – wow — this is the most important aspect to look at.  Is the domain backlink profile relevant to the content you want to rank?  What I do is look at the backlinks, sort by Domain Authority, and then look at each website link.  Do the topics of the linking website have a strong correlation to my site topic?  If the niche is guitars, you want other guitar sites in your backlink profile.  You can expand that a bit into general topics like music, music education, music equipment, etc…  A website that discusses pianos, though, has lower relevancy.  And a general news site would have low relevancy.  This is not to say that these low relevancy links are bad — sometimes they can be very high authority and helpful.  But we need the overall backlink profile to tell a story — and that story should show very quickly what the site is about.  
2. Age of the Domain – we are looking for established domains that are typically at least 3 years old — ideally more than 5 years old.  Numerous studies show that age matters — content ranks better and the first page of Google tends to be filled with sites that are 5 years or older.  Don't consider an expired domain that is just a year old with high authority to be a good candidate.
3. Number of Referring Domains – typically, a domain will have more authority with a larger count of referring domains.  We typically look for domains with at least 50 referring domains.  This is a general rule.  You also want to consider the quality — just about every site will have some junk backlinks, but ensure you see a significant percentage of quality sites linking.
4. Number of Backlinks – The count of backlinks is less important than the count of referring domains, but it is still a factor to be considered.  We want sites with at least 100 backlinks.  And make sure you don't see a huge percentage of spammy or low-quality links.  You can look for things like porn, phishing sites, hacked content, non-English sites, keyword stuffed sites, and duplicate content sites.
5. Types of Backlinks — What country are the backlinks coming from?  If you are building a USA targeted website, then you want the majority of backlinks to be USA based.  We usually look for 50% or more.  Also consider other metrics like how many are follow versus nofollow.  We want a natural pattern here.  There should be some nofollow — if all of them are follow links, it could be a PBN network or some other type of non-natural link building strategy.  In addition, you want a mixture of link types — text, images, etc…  The more natural the backlink profile, the more likely Google is going to reward your site with authority and rankings.
6. Trademarks – the last thing you want to do is invest in an aged domain, build a great website, get lots of traffic, and then have a trademark infringement claim brought against your site.  You'll lose all that hard work!  Be sure to search trademark databases for the words used in the domain to make sure there are no trademarked words used within the domain.  Example: “BestCrossfitTips.com” might seem like a great domain for a fitness site, but CrossFit is a registered trademark.  Don't use the domain — you will get sued.  You can use the U.S Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database to search for trademarks.  Their electronic system lets you search by brand name, common alternate spellings, and similar sounding names to find any potential violations.
7. Website Quality – when the domain was in use, did it have a quality website built on it?  You can check the Wayback Machine Internet Archive to get an idea of what the site looked like.  
8. Domain Authority – we are looking for sites with a domain authority of 10 or above.  Again, just a general rule.  Domain authority helps us understand the quality of the backlink profile and how the site compares in authority to the competition.
9. Citation Flow – this considers how popular are the websites in the backlink profile.  It doesn't consider quality — it looks more at traffic / popularity of the linking websites.  We are looking for sites with a citation flow of 10 or higher.
10. Search Engine Bans – Be absolutely sure the site hasn't been banned by a search engine — otherwise, none of the advice in this article will work.  
11. Last Date Site was Active – if a site has been dead or not active for a long time, the backlink profile is likely to have less power.  We are typically looking for sites that have been active within the past 2 years — sometimes you can expand that to 3 years if the other stats look great.  Use the Wayback Machine to look at the site over time to determine when it was last active.  You may also find that the website was down for periods of time.  You'll notice then when there are no snapshots of the site for an extended period of time.  You want sites that minimize downtime so that the link juice is not significantly affected.  

Tools to Find Aged Domains

Here are a few tools you can use to find aged or expired domains.  It can take a lot of work — you have to be patient and keep at it.

• Human Proof Designs Aged Domain Packages (the best source, of course!)
• SerpDomains
• SpamZilla
• DynaDot
• DomCop
• ExpiredDomains.net
• DomainCoasters (I find they have better quality than the others)
• Godaddy Auctions

Aged Domains from Human Proof Designs

Case Studies

Success Story

A great public study done by our friends at Serp.Domains shows just how profitable this strategy can be!  

The details:

1. Affiliate site in the tech / gaming products niche with How-To tutorials
2. Over 90,000 monthly page views
3. Earning $3,500 / monthly
4. Built on an aged domain
5. Mix of review-based articles and information-based articles
6. Published 2 or 3 articles per week and word count between 2500 to 4000
7. Adding links through guest posting links
8. Huge growth occurred within a couple months.  First articles went live in mid-December, and revenue started in February.
9. Total cost for domain and content was just under $6000

Stats and growth after site launch:

Great growth in under 6 months!

Mixed Success Story (with a twist)

This is really an amazing story!  With a few twists.  This deals with the site Freedom251.com.  This was originally created in 2016 for an Indian company offering the world's cheapest smartphone.  The phone was offered at a promotional price in mid-February 2016.  Traffic was so high on the website that it crashed the first day.  It garnered tons of attention, went viral, and gained thousands of backlinks.

At the site's peak, it had over 10,000 referring domains and 188,000 backlinks.  And during the initial ownership of the domain, it had 45,000 monthly search volume.  

You can learn about the history of this site from Wikipedia.

The site was shut down for 2.5 years (2017 through mid-2019), expired, and a new owner picked up the domain around March 2019.

The new owner started up an Amazon affiliate site focused in the technology niche — particularly laptops.

Here were the results:

That is some crazy growth!  Within six months, it had grown to over 280,000 monthly volume and likely earning five figures a month.  The new site had some topical relevancy — original site in cell phones, and the new site in laptops.  Technology related.  

So what happened?  Site traffic and rankings tanked in December 2020.

It appears this site was hit with either a Google penalty or the December 2020 algorithm update (which dealt with link relevancy).  

Our analysis — this site had nearly 100% traffic from India and Saudi Arabia.  The new site was targeting mostly a USA audience.  This was a big red flag — Google would have eventually caught this.  The site should not have been used for a USA-based affiliate.  Another issue — we have seen this happen before.  Sites based on a single product or single keyword are typically not a good candidate for a new website. With the India/Saudi audience, targeting USA traffic, and changing the niche, the site was at extreme risk.  While there was some topical relevancy, moving from a single cellphone product offering to a site around laptops reviews would cause an issue.   This site also had some legal issues related to the original site and product — you can read more about that in the Wikipedia article.

Now for the twist — the site is back and going strong! After almost a year of no traffic, the owners have redirected freedom251.com to laptop251.com (this domain is new – created in October 2021). This new domain doesn't suffer from the same history of freedom251, and appears the freedom251 domain is recovering and sending the link juice over to laptop251. Freedom251 is using a 301 redirect over to laptop251. Here are the stats for laptop251:

Wow! What a recovery! Laptop251 is at almost 300,000 monthly volume again within two months of starting over. This is such a good example of the power of domains. Now, I would not suggest you take the risky path this owner has. Do your research and you'll have a less stressful journey. But, this owner has used SEO to his advantage and is making lots of profit along the way.

Takeaway: Research aged domains and follow the guidance in this article — it will save you headaches down the road.

FAQs on Aged Domains

There you go, you can shut this page and go back to your kitten videos, or whatever else you were paying attention to before you opened this! 🙂

Oh, like, you want some actual proof and stuff?

Aaaaaaah. Ok, sure thing.

Or maybe you don’t even know what the Keyword Golden Ratio is. That’s fine, and hold yourself then because you’re in for a keyword treat.

For those of you who wonder what does “KGR” mean or where it comes from, here’s a quick rundown (for those of you who do know already, you can jump to “There's more than meets the eye” section straight away)

KGR keywords or The Keyword Golden Ratio is a term coined by our friend Doug Cunnington over at nichesiteproject.com. 

It essentially refers to keywords for which there aren’t sufficient sites in the entire internet targeting them for page 1 to be any competitive.

There’s an actual math behind it and here’s Doug's video for you to catch up on that.

We also recorded a podcast episode with him about the KGR method and here's part 1 and part 2.

Alright, let's delve into some details and uses. 

There's More Than Meets The Eye

Something we’ve discovered over time after researching massive amounts of these keywords, is that any keyword with less than 63 “all-in-title results” could potentially be a super easy win, even if the search volume is way above 250s/m. 

The ratio won’t work over 250 searches, but “capping” the max allintitle results at 63 will. Of course if you’ve watched the video now understand that 63 results is already 3 pages of search results targeting that exact keyword, but it’s cool because a good number will be forums, Q&A sites, and others you can easily outrank.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let me show you the rankings for all the KGR keywords I’ve personally targeted with one of my sites and what’s behind some of those “low search volumes”.  (So you can also see that we put our money where our mouth is).

Note: We like to use KW Finder and Ahrefs as our keyword tools.​​​

If you’ve paid close attention to the image, besides all the #1 ranks (for which I’m just lowkey bragging really), you’ll notice a few things:

1. It doesn’t always work.

Sometimes the keywords don’t rank page 1- 2 straight away. Almost 80-90% of the time they do, so long as the site has some authority and you’re leveraging topical relevance with good interlinking.

But sometimes they can take 3-4 months to move up.

Hence the baby icon. Gosh, I should be a designer.

2. Cannibalization.

It’s very easy to target keywords that are too similar and end up munching your own hand.  See the URL for one of the keywords that is ranking nowhere. It’s being cannibalized by other extremely similar article.

That’s a fail I’ll eat.

3. Search volume is still a joke.

This is about the two keywords at the beginning with the red box around the SV. So when you’re checking volume, your best bet to get something accurate is Ahrefs. This point deserves another capture to explain itself:

And

How are those pieces pulling so much traffic if the search volume is “low”? 

One is seasonality, which most keyword tools don’t take into account and just spit an average over 12 months (which doesn’t capture trends effectively either. Looking at you fidget spinners). 

The other one is simply ranking for a bajillion variations of the keyword.

Moral of the story: Don’t discard the whole KGR thing because it goes for “Low volume” stuff. You may surprise yourself how much s**t one single article can rank for and how much traffic it can get.

4. It’s smart to group similar keywords together.

The example I used is the xyz vs 2 vs 4 vs 5 abc keywords. There's’ like 4 combinations of those. 

I originally found just one: 2 vs 4 abc. I knew ABC was available on more sizes so I decided to create an article doing an “ultimate comparison” between ALL sizes and their use.

It’s a proper good article, written by an industry expert and it ranks for them all. Traffic is good. 

I link to my “best blabla” page for each size. Boss.

5. Notice the type of keywords.

 It’s mostly informational stuff besides some “Best Blabla” and some  “[Brand] [Product] review” ones.

I’ve purposely left the modifiers I use to find those keywords while filtering on ahrefs or semrush for you to get ideas when you do keyword research. I look for types, why, when, how, what, best way, problem, get rid of, sizes, list….

That’s pretty much all is there to say about the image above. Hope it served to explain why I was tempted to leave the article at just “Yes”.There’s however a few other things you should know.

Known Issues

It’s hard to find KGR keywords around products. The formula that works is “best ABC for XYZ”, but depending on the niche you’ll find just a handful. The smaller the niche the hardest. It’s a ton easier to find info keywords.

The money, green, moolah, cash, guita, pasta, parné…

Info content doesn't make money per se. Hmh… so how do we go around this?

I use KGR info keywords to support money pieces. 

So if I have an article about “best straight razors” and I find 4 or 5 KGR info stuff about shaving or straight razors, I’ll use them to increase my topical relevance and send some internal anchors to push that money piece. 

I also use some of them (the ones that don’t rank ha) as power/buffer pages.

Whenever I’m building links, instead of sending 20 links to my target page, I’ll send 10 and spread another 10 amongst support pieces.

Keeps things more natural, reduces the chances of getting slapped by breaking link velocity.

Alright, If you’ve liked this article, and ready to try implementing KGR keywords into your content plan, we got the solution to save you lots of time! Our KGR Keyword Pack will give you hundreds of good KGR-compliant keywords to target. This can literally save you hours or days of keyword research.

Have a good one!

It's pretty well known in the affiliate site business that SERPS where forums rank on page 1 are generally easy to rank for. If something like Reddit is on page one, you've got a good chance of getting there too.

There's never a guarantee of course, but experience tells me that finding these types of keywords is definitely a good thing.

The problem is, how exactly are you going to find a keyword with a forum (or two) on page 1? It would normally take an insane amount of trial and error to do so, which is why this tactic is so genius.

I put the strategy to the test right away with one of my niche sites, and found as many as twenty new article ideas from it. Not bad for an hour's work.

I then published the articles over the course of the next 3 weeks (1 post per day), and did nothing with them for a few more weeks. I didn't build any internal links to them, I didn't build any backlinks, I didn't even share them on social media. I wanted to see how well the strategy worked at the very basic level.

I'll summarize the strategy below:

1.) You find forums in your niche.

2.) You put those forums into semrush.com.

3.) You find all the keywords that the forum ranks on page 1 for.

4.) You pick and choose the ones you also want to rank for.

Finding Forums In Your Niche

Depending on how well you know your niche, you may or may not already know what forums are active in the space. If you don't, the easiest thing to do is just search in Google for something like “Niche + Forum” or “Keyword + Forum”. Do a few variations and you should find a couple of forums.

Note: It's better if you can find a forum that is hosted on a Top-Level-Domain rather than a subdomain. Semrush works much better when NOT used on a subdomain.

For example, a perfect forum would be something like “petsforum.com” (I made this up, though it probably does exist). A not-so-good example would be “forum.welovepets.com”.

You CAN still make it work with a subdomain forum, but the data is harder to read on Semrush.

Putting Those Forums Into Semrush

The strategy would probably work with Ahrefs as well, since that has a similar competitor keyword data tool now too. However, I have a semrush subscription, and that's the tool I used.

If you don't want to pay for Semrush, you can still get a few ideas by using the free version, but the data you get from the paid version is well worth it. If you have the budget, it might even be worth signing up for one month, getting as much use out of it as you can, then unsubscribing.

How to use Semrush for this purpose:

1.) Enter the domain name in the top and hit search. Note, it's better to remove the http:// first.

2.) Scroll down to where it says “Organic keywords”, and hit “Full report”.

3.) Click the “Pos” button to sort keywords by position. This will show all the keywords that the forum ranks position 1 for at the top.

4.) Ideally, the forum ranks for a LOT of keywords. Find all the ones that it ranks position 1-5 for. You can look for 1-10 if you want, but I'd rather focus on the ones where the forums rank high. You can also export this data, sort it in Excel, and delete all keywords position 6 onwards.

5.) Analyze these keywords to see whether you would want to rank for them too.

Fun Fact: Hidden Keywords

A lot of the keywords that you find won't show up in normal keyword tools, so you get to find a LOT of hidden keywords. When I did it for my niche site, I found some keywords with a moderate buying intent that had thousands of searches per month.

Bonus: Look For Keywords With More Than One Forum

Some of the keywords you find will actually have two or three forums ranking in the top five. Not only are these keywords going to be insanely easy to rank for, but you'll also have found some more forums. Put them into Semrush too and repeat the process!

How Did My Experiment Go?

As I explained at the beginning of this post, before I blogged about the strategy myself, I wanted to try it out so I could share the results.

In total I published 20 articles based on this strategy, which were targeting about 25 keywords between them.

It's now been about 6 weeks since all posts went live and got indexed, so what positions have they ended up in?

I'm not going to share the exact keywords with you, but let's take a look at where they ended up:

The keywords all have anywhere from 50 to 2,500 searches per month. They are mostly “review” keywords (it makes sense that forums rank well for some reviews). I deliberately chose keywords that were worth ranking for. Namely, they have searches, and they have buying intent.

As you can see, the results are pretty good considering that:

• No linking has been done (internal or external)
• No on page SEO has been done for the articles
• Each post is only around 500 words long.

Aside from targeting the keyword in the title and hitting the publish button, I didn't do anything else to get these results. Getting as many as two keywords to page 1 is fantastic, and the fact that more than half are on page 2 is equally great.

I've never before published 20 articles and had so many of them make positive moves.

How To Take The Next Step

Moving forward, I can start optimizing some of these pages more (put 1,000 words on the posts, add a few more keywords and meta descriptions) and then throw a few links their way too.

This is definitely a positive result and something I will be utilizing a lot more with all my sites.

Check out our keyword packs and content writing service if you want some help growing your niche site.

Or are they?

So many different definitions get thrown around that it's easy to get confused. You've got niche sites, authority sites, micro niche sites, affiliate sites, amazon sites, amazon review sites, adsense sites, blogs and of course, mini-micro-meta-sites-about-micro-machines.

I made that last one up.

Or did I?

For the most part, a lot of the definitions overlap. I'm definitely guilty of using some of these terms interchangeably. That said though, there ARE different types of sites, and different strategies that can be followed.

People can argue until they're blue in the face about which method is better, and ultimately they may all be correct. What I'm going to do in this post then, is look at some of the different types of sites, look at where those overlaps may lay, and weigh up some of the pros and cons of each.

Generally speaking, when people talk about an authority site or a niche site, they're referring to the scope of the site, and perhaps also the quality.

When you look at the definitions I've given above, it actually seems pretty clear. The problem is that it can lead to very binary thoughts. It's either an authority site or a niche site and that's not the way to think about building income generating sites.

I have never believed that niche sites and authority sites need to be mutually exclusive. Every authority site still operates as a “niche”, and at one point an authority site probably only had 10 articles on it anyway.

And who is to say a “niche” site can't be built out and expanded later? That's exactly what I do with my sites, and how we set up our done for you sites as well. Check out our last point here on silo stacking.

To understand a bit more about why these different definitions persist, let's look more at the history of how affiliate marketers built niche sites.

A Brief History Of Niche Sites

Years ago, you could buy an exact-match-domain, put up a few posts on it, and be at the top of Google within days, or even hours. Back when adsense used to pay a lot of money, affiliate marketers would churn out a lot of these sites and either rake in the money with Adsense, or build a few more pages on their site targeting products, and rake in affiliate commissions.

That loophole was closed in October 2012.

Still, it took a while before the notion of an “authority site” really started to spread. People would still build smaller 20 page sites, and make a lot of money with them.

This started to become less successful as Google made it harder to rank sites, and made the sandbox period more of a real thing. You couldn't just put a few hundred words onto a couple dozen pages and send some links to the site.

You now had to demonstrate that your site was an “authority”, or in other words, one of the best sites in the niche.

This is where the concept of an authority site was really born.

What I don't like about the definition is that it seems to suggest that smaller sites are not authoritative. Like these sites are just making things up about the topic to get a sale.

Which isn't the case at all.​

This type of low-quality affiliate site still exists in some niches, but that doesn't mean every small site is poor quality. You can have a 10 page site that is very comprehensive on a small topic, and would be worthy of the term authority.

Equally, you can have a large site that covers a lot of topics and has dozens of pages, but does that guarantee it is authoritative?

You can see how confusing this can get.

So I'll just summarize this section with this:

There is a clear trend towards sites being built out on a larger scale, with both longer articles, and more of them.

That said, there's no reason to automatically assume every site you build should be a huge 100 site monster. You can succeed nicely with a 10 to 50 page site that only covers a few related subniches. You don't need to keep churning out content every week unless you really want to.

BUILD YOUR OWN OR LET US BUILD IT FOR YOU.

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Niche Sites Vs. Authority Sites

In my definition above, I have attempted to point out that there are overlaps between authority sites and niche sites. While I've given a definition of each type, I've also said that they don't need to be mutually exclusive. Niche sites should be expanded over time, so that they can end up becoming authority sites.

So in essence, all authority sites are niche sites at the beginning. They're authority site babies in a way, but you have to start a niche site if you want to start an authority site.

With that said, the two types of sites do tend to involve different strategies because the site is at a different stage.

It also depends on the type of affiliate business you want to build.

For example, someone who wants to maintain a portfolio of sites and outsource a lot of it would be better suited to niche sites, while someone who only wants one site would eventually build an authority site.

I've actually talked about a lot of these things in an earlier post which you can read here, but I'll summarize again below.

Pros and Cons of Niche Sites

The basic strategy with a smaller site is to just build it out to a certain number of posts (I recommend 30-50) and then focus on link building from there.

If/when the site starts to become successful, you can then build it out even more and turn it into an authority site, or you can just leave it as it is, and move onto another site.

This strategy is much more suitable for somebody who has limited time, or wants to do a lot of outsourcing. You can build and promote your site in stages.

The sites that we build for our customers are in this style too, but we don't tell people to just leave them as they are. We encourage our customers to add more posts to their sites, and we choose domain names that don't force you to stay limited to just one niche. For example “Bestsafetyrazorhq.com” is a bad domain name that doesn't let you expand later.

This strategy is definitely appealing to a lot of people, but there must be some downside, otherwise why would people bother building out authority sites at all?

The answer is because an authority site has a much higher earnings ceiling. If you've created a site that dominates in its niche, you can add new products, move into new subniches, and leverage your existing authority. You could do a small amount of work to increase your income.

Niche sites on the other hand have much more linear growth. Yes, there's definitely a point where a niche site starts to be a lot more authoritative in Google's eyes and starts to get page 1 rankings more easily, but there is less opportunity to scale easily. Niche sites don't often bother with building loyal audiences or fanbases, and many don't even utilize an email list.

It's a lot easier to get to $10,000 per month with 1 authority site than it is to get to $5,000 per month with 2 niche sites.

This does assume that you have a lot of time to dedicate to one site though. If you only have a few hours free per week, you won't be suited to an authority site.

So to summarize, for niche sites you have:

• More ability to outsource and to some extent “set and forget”
• Much less time required (but you still need patience)
• An easier path to monetization
• The ability to rinse and repeat and build multiple sites out.
• The ability to expand to an authority site later, if desired.
• Can be more grey-hat.

But at the same time you have:

• A lower earning potential (but still high enough)
• Much less ability to leverage your audience later for easy scaling
• Less ability to create your own products/services.

Pros and Cons of Authority Sites

As already discussed above, authority sites are much more time intensive. Once you reach a certain level of success (or “authority” even), things get a lot easier. A site with an existing audience and fanbase, a site that gets people returning to read new content, will always be able to add new revenue streams with relative ease. It's a lot easier to start offering your own products, digital or physical, when you have an existing customer base to sell to.

The path to reach this stage can be long and arduous, especially as authority sites really only want to rank with white-hat link building techniques, but it's well worth it once you get there. We interviewed Doug Cunnington about this very specific topic – going white hat from gray hat.

Authority sites also needs to have much higher quality content. Niche sites don't need to be as good. I'm not saying a niche site can have poor content, but because you aren't trying to build a base of repeat customers, your content only needs to be good enough to earn commissions.

Authority sites want to be the best on the internet, so will need to write much better content. This is expensive if you are outsourcing the content, and will require you to be more strict when hiring.

It's harder for beginners to outsource content for authority sites, because as a beginner, you're less likely to know how to train writers, or how to spot good or bad content.

An authority site also requires you to focus on just that one site. This might be more frustrating for some people, especially if you're impatient like me! It is ultimately an advantage though, because focus always leads to more success.

As with niche sites, let's summarize here about authority sites:

• They have a higher earning potential
• Once you have traction, you can accelerate scaling
• Google loves bigger, more in-depth sites
• You can build more assets, such as email lists.

But equally

• They take a lot more time
• They are more difficult for beginners
• They cost more to run

So Which Is Best?

In case you hadn't realized by now, there is no correct way to skin this cat, but there are definitely going to be some people who are more suited to one style of site and others who go the other way.

My personal method is in building a site as a niche site, but leaving the door open for it to grow. I don't want to just pick a very narrow subniche that has limited potential, unless I know the site will rank all by itself. Which it won't. Not anymore.

For example, start with safety razors, then move into brushes, stands, other types of razors, and other grooming products.

This is exactly how we have designed our ready-made sites. We get you started in a subniche, but we really don't want you to just leave the site like that. Grow it, expand it, and get it successful.

We have customers that are stacking our niche sites together. Attacking the low competition keywords first in shoulder niches and then weaving them together. Makes a lot more sense than finding a low competition subniche and then moving up the same niche when your site is still too young to be favorable to Google.

But is one keyword really enough to decide to go ahead with a site? Can you choose a niche based purely on one search metric?

And more importantly, when you DO find a great keyword, how do you then turn it into a niche website that will one day make you money?

It's actually something that a lot of people struggle with. Most of the failed sites I started as a beginner were down to poor keyword research, but there were also a few sites where I just approached the site wrong after finding a good keyword.

I've seen plenty of sites started by others that have had the same issues, so today's post is going to cover some of the things that you can do differently, or if you've never started a site before, some of the things you should consider when planning your very first one.

First Off – What Kind Of Keyword Is Ideal?

As I'll show you later, no single keyword is ideal. You really want a whole group of keywords. However, to find the group, you first need to find one keyword.

That keyword could theoretically fall into various different categories, but I'll show you the type of keyword I usually start with when researching an Amazon or other niche site.

A good keyword should:

• Be a buying keyword
• Be popular
• Be rankable

Please note, I recommend KW Finder as an easy to use keyword research tool.

Buying Keywords

These don't have to contain the word “Buy” in them. A buying keyword is simply something somebody would type into Google if they're interested in maybe buying something.

Compare “running shoes,” which could be about anything with “best running shoes” and you'll see that the latter has much more buying intent with it.

Popularity

I like to start with a keyword that has over 1,000 searches, because this usually suggests there will be lots of other keywords and there will be interest in the niche. However, you could just as easily start with a keyword that has 500, or even 250 searches.

There are too many variables involved to just rely on search volume. What if the product gives a huge commission? What if there's virtually no competition? What if there are hundreds of different keywords you could rank for with the same site?

It's always worth doing further exploration, so don't rely solely on the popularity of one keyword.

Rankability

This may or may not be a real word, but the reason I choose “rankability” rather than “low competition” is because it's easier to measure. I've found keywords in the past with low competition that were still hard to rank for, and vice versa.

A classic example is when a keyword appears to have low competition, but that competition is all eCommerce sites. You're probably not going to get an affiliate site to rank alongside them.

Typically you want to find a keyword where the top sites are affiliate sites, or even authority sites with lower relevance.

So when I find a keyword and think “Ok, looks like a keyword that Google will rank affiliate sites for”, I don't immediately dismiss it based on the strength of competition.

Further analysis is needed later.

Good Keyword Examples

We've touched upon “best” keywords, and these ones are ironically enough, usually  the best to go for.

Here are some other good examples, using the running shoes term again:

– Top running shoes

– Running shoe reviews

– [brand] review (example: Nike air review)

– best [brand] (example: Best nike running shoe)

Depending on the niche, there will be other variants too. These examples are just to get you started. You can read some more about good vs bad keywords here.

Digging Deeper And Building The Site

Once you've found one or two keywords that look promising, it's time to think about how that might make a good niche site.

This is where people often go wrong. It's all too easy to find one keyword, and think “Yes!!” and then move forward with the site, when perhaps it wasn't the best plan.

Generally this is when the keyword is too narrow, and you build a whole site around it.

An example might be something like the term: “Best running shoes for plantar fasciitis”

This is a decent keyword and well worth further investigating. The mistake a lot of people make is to build an entire site around running shoes for plantar fasciitis.

You're only going to have so much success before you hit the ceiling on this site.

So here's how you move forward:

1.) Do additional research to find similar keywords and broaden the scope of the site. In this case, you could find other running shoe keywords, or even other plantar fasciitis keywords.

Maybe you can build a “footwear for plantar fasciitis” site or a “running shoe for different ailments” site.

The idea is to go broader, but not too broad where you've got a bunch of unrelated keywords.

2.) Do this research by putting your keywords into Long-Tail Pro, SEMRush, or even ubersuggest.org and seeing what other related keywords come up. Then analyze those keywords for their merits and strengths.

3.) Research products available and look for keywords related to them, such as “ review”. This gives you the ability to link to 5-10 products from one “best of” article.

4.) You can also find more informational keywords. You don't have to have EVERY keyword on the site as a buying keyword. If you could find things like “How to run with plantar fasciitis” then it would very much complement your other keyword.

Here's what the site might look like:

Plantar Fasciitis Angle:

– Best running shoes for plantar fasciitis

– Best hiking boots for plantar fasciitis

– Best shoes for plantar fasciitis

– How to run a marathon with plantar fasciitis

– Plantar fasciitis shoe review

Running Shoe Ailment Angle:

– Best running shoes for plantar fasciitis

– Best running shoes for flat feet

– Best running shoes for varicose veins

– Running shoes for verucas

– How to run with sore feet

I haven't checked the metrics of these keywords, they're here as examples.

Why This Is Better

Aside from the obvious reasons (more keywords = more content, more visitors, and more money), there are a few more things to consider:

1.) You're hedging your bets.

If you rely too much on one stellar keyword, and you never rank for it, what next? I have some sites where my favorite keyword just won't get beyond page 2, but the niche is wide enough that I still get thousands of visitors and make good money from that site.

2.) The old EMD strategy is dead.

The idea of finding one keyword and building a site around it comes from the days when people could buy a domain name to match the keyword, like bestshoesforplantarfasciitis.com. Google closed that loophole, which means there's no real advantage to choosing one keyword anymore.

3.) More content = more ranking.

The more content your site has, the better Google will view it. So even if you are building out content for other keywords, your original keyword will rank higher because it's on a more filled out site.

I typically launch a site with 8-10 pages, and once it starts to rank, build it out from there.

Final Tip – If You're Unsure What Content You'd Have, Drop It

If you have done the steps above and you're still unsure what content you'd build around a keyword, then chances are you haven't got enough to complement it.

As mentioned before, it's all too easy to rush into niche selection and go with a site idea purely because you found one or two good keywords.

Now, you CAN build sites without doing any keyword research at all, but you should still have a lot of content ideas. Without these, then no niche is really going to be broad enough to have the ROI you're looking for.

While there might be a handful of exceptions where a single keyword earns you a lot of money, experience tells me that it's best to stay away from single keyword sites.

And as always, if you'd prefer to get our help building a site for you, then you can learn more about that here.