Next Month
The Month In Review
Due to business issues unrelated to the case study, I could not dedicate the full month to the website. Originally I had plans to aim for another 60 or so posts, to bring the pages on my website to 200.
I would have loved to give my site more time this month as the downtime will be detrimental to its growth. But I just couldn’t be in two places at once. So I just chipped away in the few hours I could spare.
So I shifted my focus. Adding 14 pages to the website this month would have been marginal help. So I decided to focus on backlinks. Spending a week on backlinks will give a MUCH greater boost to the site over the course of the month than adding such a small amount of content. Just to clarify, I probably spent 30-35 hours on this over the course of the month.
There is no secret to building links. It’s a numbers game. It’s boring. But if your website is adding value then half the battle is won. No one wants to link to a spammy website.
All the techniques I used can be found here:
https://backlinko.com/link-building-strategies
So how did I do?
Much better than the first time I attempted it. With my site starting to have a more coherent category structure rather than just random products, link building went smoother. Given that I still have another hundred or so pages of content to add where it will be at the point that it is a genuinely useful resource IMO (at the moment it is missing products to completely fill out whole categories), the future is looking good. Given my Canadian search problem, I focused solely on backlinks from websites that targeted the USA.So I managed to nab 32 backlinks all up.
Here’s where they came from:
Folks, remember this was from 2016. In 2021, outreach has been done TO DEATH and the success rate is abysmal. Comments also no longer pass link guice. I’ve striked these out.
Vlad
- HARO (Help a reporter out): Found a request on a topic that one of the products on my site loosely ties into. Got lucky and was able to bluff my way through posing as an expert on the topic, which landed me an awesome in-content link on a popular news site. But it wasn’t all success, I sent off another three responses that were ignored.
Competitors: I dropped the $99 on a subscription to AHREFS this month and had a look at the different sites competing for “best [product]” and “[product] review” As well as other modifiers. Since many of these sites are old-school crap, like the type that Spencer and Perrin spit out, I was able to nab 13 backlinks from emailing the sites linking to them and telling them about my superior content. The competitor loses a backlink, I gain one. My favorite method of link building.- Broken Link Building: While searching for companies filing for bankruptcy, a gem popped out it was entirely relevant to a few of the categories on my website. Unfortunately, the website was still up. So I kept checking. And checking. And checking. Mid-April the website was taken down, which caused all 2000 + inbound links to become broken. Running the site through Ahrefs revealed out of the 2000 only half of that were worth chasing and of that, only 200 or so were relevant to my website. So I sent an email blast out and I managed to score 15 links just by informing the sites in question that their link was broken and that I had the perfect replacement page.
- Comments: I don’t normally chase comment links but since I was time-strapped I nabbed two on
relevant blogs. I did this by debunking the article. The articles in question contained misinformation on the product so I wrote a 600-word comment saying why this was false and if they wanted more information to email me directly. I didn’t come across overly negative and praised the author for the bits that he got right. And just like that, I am an expert on a well-trafficked competitor’s blog post. (I tested to see whether comments were auto-approved before writing the 600 words). I did this twice on pages I deemed were popular enough to justify the effort. One of the two even amended his article and linked it to my site in the resource section below the post. - Content theft There is a microniche who has been stealing my original photos from a category. Now I was lucky that the site in question isn’t all that bad as far as small websites go, was actually ranking for some decent terms and had somehow managed to score some good backlinks himself. So I said that I had no issue with him using the photos as long as he credits the source in a do-follow link. The alternative was to waste my time sending a DMCA which doesn’t really benefit either of us. An easy backlink here.
Looks simple huh?
I sent 653 initial emails out for those 32 backlinks. I may get lucky and nab a couple of more links since there is still some back and forth going with a few of the prospects. But it’s a numbers game. A google spreadsheet will be your best friend. Link building is essentially relationship building. Those that accept your backlink advances for the first time will be much more open to guest post pitches and collaboration in the future. Record everything.
From the pages linked to I then used internal linking to spread the “link juice” across as much of my site as possible, where it made sense of course.
Ranking
For the first two weeks of April, I still had the problem with Google not recognizing my site is targeting the USA. I have spoken to numerous experts who have never seen this problem before. Around Mid-April the problem corrected itself, whether this is because I changed the geographic target a couple of hundred times or the backlinks were starting to work, I have no idea and am still puzzled as to what could have caused this. Regardless, I am back on track now.
In terms of ranking, the site is on the up and up. I have a few good keywords climbing page 2 with one even teetering on crossing over to the front page. When this happens you will see the earnings spike rather than the slow trail of long tails that have been bringing in traffic. I am excited for the end of May because I believe I will be able to show you the impact that backlinks make on your search position and as result traffic and earnings. Now obviously this is speculation and it might not happen at all, but you can often see results 1-3 months (although sometimes longer) after a good handful of links hit your site.
Earnings
Earnings remained fairly constant this month. Given that no thought has been given to conversions with affiliate links buried deep in the posts and little work done on the site this month, this was to be expected. After all, you only get out what you put in.
You can see the traffic spike on the last day of the month as my Haro submission got published. That won’t remain constant.
Those of you who followed along with my last case study will note that I was earning more by month 4 there than I have here. It’s largely to do with the competition of the niche. In order to hopefully reach 50k/month, I am aiming for some higher dollar value products than I did with my previous case study. As you are no doubt aware: the more expensive the product, the higher the commission, the higher the competition. While I have no doubt I can rank for these more competitive products, time is an issue in terms of my 12-month goal. The reason these products are being targeted earlier in the year is that they generally take longer to rank for. At month 6 I can always chase down lower competition products and rank for them in half the time.
With my site back in Google US search I have a good feeling about May.
Expense Report
Just the added cost of the Ahrefs subscription this month of $99.
- Expenses to date: $690.77
- This month’s earnings: $100.75
- Earnings to date: $252.13
- Total: – 438.64
Nothing overly surprising here. Still in the red.
Next Month
I need to get back on track with rounding out my site before I can knuckle down and do some serious outreach. Another boring month with a target of 60 pieces of content.
