Niche research:
I have chosen niches of my interest for some websites – 3, for other niche websites I have only checked whether they are hot or not.
I follow this criteria while choosing the niches-
Niche should be hot and have good amount of user base, I will check the trends as well
The niche should have at least 50 products to promote
There should be competition, I will check PPC. I treat competition as advantage, if there is no body making money in the niche then I will just ignore that niche and continue finding others.
The niche should not be too small, I should be able to write alot of content and expand my sites.
Keyword Research:
I will start with choosing 100 keywords first. I prefer to choose a general name that suits my niche and choose 100 relevant keywords. Each of these 100 keywords should have following -
Min 1000 Exact Searches
Low or Medium Competitive Keywords
I don’t consider Adsense CPC since I monetize my sites with affiliate products and direct ad sales.
Out of 100, I chose 40-50 keywords based on affiliate product names.
Content Creation:
Before designing the site, I first order articles from various writers available on forums.
I prefer only user engaging and the best content for product based keywords and above average quality articles for other keywords.
I will ask the writers to maintain 2-3% keyword density.
Design:
While the articles are getting ready, I start designing the site. I will try to keep the site simple and prefer either WordPress or Joomla.
I do not use free themes, I prefer only premium themes, I feel they are safe and provides more flexibility in designing the site.
Also, I install wordpress or any script manually and use custom table prefixes for security reasons.
Also, I will use premium plugins which i buy and don’t prefer to use nulled ones for security reasons. And also use a few free plugins available in the wordpress directory of plugins. Same for joomla as well.
Plugins I use for wordpress websites:
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast (for overall site SEO)
2. Akismet
3. W3 Total Cache
4. 404 Redirected
5. Backup Buddy
6. Contact Form 7 (most of the themes does have contact form built in, but still I prefer to use this plugin for advertiser forms, etc)
7. Really Simple Captcha
8. Google XML-Sitemaps
9. SEO Smart Links
10. Autoptimize
11. Auto Post Thumbnail (Some themes does have this feature in built, for those I don’t use this plugin)
12. Easy WP SEO (For individual articles)
13. Tubepress (some themes does have the ability to create video pages on the fly, in such cases we don’t need this plugin)
I may use other plugins if necessary depending on the requirements.
For Joomla:
1. JCE Editor
2. K2 or Easy Blog
3. Sh404SEF
4. Akeeba Backup pro (A must to have for joomla, most of the times we run out compatibility and other issues while installing and working on extensions etc, then we need to restore to previous state. With this ext, we can easily do that)
5. Admin Tools (for site security, though joomla is very secured compared to wordpress, having a security plugin will enhance security even more)
6. Jomsocial if you want to have some social stuff on your site.
I use Gavick, youjoomla and joomlart themes, so I get almost all needed extensions for design part of the site. For backend I use the above ones.
I will gather images from web or from stock photos for all the articles and start posting them.
I will first post 10 articles and then schedule the next 90 articles for the coming weeks. I set to post 2 or 3 articles a week.
While creating the posts, I will make sure that the onpage SEO score is at least 70 (Easy WP SEO).
I will make some custom changes to the plugin options to overcome over optimization.
Most of the themes have title as h1 tag, so no need to give h1 again as my main keyword will be in the tile. I will uncheck that option.
No external link with my main keyword, I will uncheck that option as well. I am not using this because I thought it may not help much but I occasionally link to authority sites but may or may not use the exact main keyword.
If you read this article carefully, you can observe that I concentrate more on security. previously my sites were hacked multiple times and my affiliate links were changed. Also, they are redirected and they were exploited in all possible ways. So, I take more care now while building the new sites.
Choosing WordPress or Joomla
If the sites are affiliate sites (purely product based) then I chose wordpress. If I plan to have 200-300 articles or even 500, then I will go with wordpress as its simple to use.
If I want more complex sites or membership sites and/or plan to have thousands of articles, I prefer to use Joomla. Also, if I want to have some social activity on the site, then Joomla is the best choice for me.
Once I complete the design of the site(In the meantime, I will not allow search engines to index my website while it is under construction. There is an option under settings in wordpress to disallow search engines to not to index website.)and have at least 10 articles on the site, I will let it get indexed. or The sites will surely get indexed as I will all my post pages on social accounts. I only use 4 social sites (G+, FB, Twitter, Pinterest) and planning to use more in the coming weeks.
I use buzz bundle to automate social sharing for all the posts.
I also setup dedicated social accounts on all of these 4 sites, just 1 for each.
After completing this initial setup process, I will promote them using the link building strategy laid out below.
Currently this is working for me and I constantly change the strategy if needed(depending on the rankings that I get for the keywords). One good habit that I have is, I keep track of everything that I do, track progress and make changes if needed.
SEO:
Tier 1:
I build backlinks mentioned below for every post/page/article and the links are spread through 1 month. Yes, I build backlinks starting from the first month itself after the site is indexed. While using some of the services here, for majority of the work, I depend on my inhouse team. I am a bit lazy to do manual stuff, designing sites is done by myself.
I first start with social shares
Over 100 social shares spread over G+, T, FB and Pin
1 Youtube video optimized for my main keyword.
5 High PR Blog Network links with unique content (I use 60% main keyword and the rest are phrases that contains my main keyword)
10 web2.0s (manual – I use 60% main keyword and the rest are phrases that contains my main keyword)
5 manual social bookmarks (I use 40% main keyword, 30% related keywords- may or may not contain exact keyword and the rest are phrases that contains my main keyword)
10 wiki backlinks
5 PDF links
Tier 2:
High PR blog comments for my Blog post links, web2.0s (scrapebox)
Forum profiles for all tier 1 links
Wiki blast (Wiki bomber) for all tier 1 links.
I use Lindexer for indexing.
I repeat the process for almost every article or post as they get posted, I build backlinks consistently and never stop. This is the general link building method that I follow, but I do change it if necessary. I occasionally do -
- Buy banner ads on Buy Sell Ads
- Youtube Traffic (from BHW marketplace)
- Guest posts
- Buy facebook ads to get likes for my pages
- Adwords/Bing PPC (occasionally)
Content is a key. If you are plan on building an autoblog then I got bad news for you. If you plan on getting engaging content then you can be set with pretty much minimalistic theme and no seo.
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