[Content affiliate] Journey to 2000 USD/month

Hello guys, time for a new journey.

I had one journey previously, which you can read by clicking here. That was a website in the "outdoor niche" that was recently sold for 10k+++ USD.

Now I'm ready to take on another project.

What we have:

- A domain name that has been used for 5-6 years already, but had only garbage content on it.
- A business partner who is very capable of creating loads of links.
- Connected with two affiliate programs that we will use for this journey.

Niche:

Can't tell too much about the niche. The website is in one of the Scandinavian languages. Broadly spoken, the niche is somehow in the pet niche. That's all I can say.

But again, that's not too accurate.

Current stats:



What's the idea?

I have already started to update all the old articles. My business partner is busy building high-quality backlinks. I'll continue to do that until all the articles on the website are OK and all internal links built perfectly.

And THEN I'm gonna start writing new articles.

Once we hit our first 2000 USD/month mark, I'm ending this journey. That hopefully shouldn't take too long.

Good luck with your journey

Great that someone is doing a site that is not written in English.
Best of luck in your journey.

Interesting.

Good luck on your journey!

Update - work, work, work!

It's all about laying a fantastic foundation for this website now. About two months ago, I marked ~120 articles that needed to be updated. About 70 % of them have been updated with fresh pictures, internal links, external authority links, Youtube videos, bullet points, FAQs and super useful information.

BOOM!

Now we start to see that things are happening in terms of traffic:



Today I did:

- Update 1 money article (full buyer's guide)
- Update 3 info articles that support the money articles (internal links)

And tomorrow I got a lot of plans to do the same. Hope to do at least 5 articles tomorrow. I am super motivated to do this and get this easily to 2k/month. However, living in Bangkok as a (somehow) young foreigner is tough. All these social things you can do all the time. It's just about limiting the "fun" to one or maybe two days per week - and keep professional the rest of the week.

It's not long until we got the first sale on this website. I'm 100 % sure about that.

GenesisOne said:

Great that someone is doing a site that is not written in English.
Best of luck in your journey.

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Absolutely. It's so easy to run a non-norwegian website.

Let's say I want to write about "best computer chair". Then I simply go into Google, type in "Best computer chair" and see what ranks in English. Then I can just steal the best elements from all these top articles, translate them directly and I have my complete buyer's guide in "no time" .

Good luck!

Interesting,
I like to know the result

I'm thinking to do the same but in French with the help of (deepl) and I'm planning to have my friend change the content little bit

Following

Good luck! I also translate the best English articles and it is working great for me.

I do the same thing too.
So do you do link building?
Link building for non-eng languages is tricky

September update - Traffic growth and a S*** ton of work done​

Guys, I'm only gonna update this thread once per month. After all, the main goal is to achieve 2000 USD/month. And the month I've done that will also be the last time I update this thread.

Traffic:



As you can see, it's slowly starting to pick up. I'm happy to see that.

So what's behind this small growth? More work than what you can imagine.

Workload done in September

- First, I identified 133 articles that needed to be "refreshed". These were all information type of content. I added pictures, added paragraphs (typically added between 200-700 words), added Youtube videos, added FAQ and made LOADS of internal links.

All done.

- There was about 25 articles on the website that can be used as typical "money articles". I have now changed 12 of these to be 100 % perfect money articles. We can already see the clicks coming in, but no sales so far.

A big part of the workload next month will be to finalize all 25 money articles.

- I have also identified 15 articles in English that I will translate and put my personal touch on. I also hope to have at least 4-5 of those published during October.

- My business partner (who owns 30 % of the website) has created about 40 links and will create 100 more in the near future.

Personal life

I am going to move to a new place next week. Right now I'm staying at a very nice hotel, but living in a hotel isn't the best for productivity. I can't wait to move to a smaller place for Q4 to squeeze out the most of November and December sales.

But that's not going to slow down my progress on this website.

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abdelkaderfarm said:

I'm thinking to do the same but in French with the help of (deepl) and I'm planning to have my friend change the content little bit

Click to expand...

Yes, it works! But please remember to make a personal touch on the articles.

MlodyG said:

Good luck! I also translate the best English articles and it is working great for me.

Click to expand...

Cool! Which language?

ColdAndDark said:

I do the same thing too.
So do you do link building?
Link building for non-eng languages is tricky

Click to expand...

My friend does all the link building. He has access to loads of websites through his work.

pleb1 said:

Yes, it works! But please remember to make a personal touch on the articles.

Click to expand...

yes, i'm thinking to rewrite it in English first before translation then fix the grammar and maybe reword it so it's 100% new content

Update - first sale and traffic increase

We had our first sale (3 USD! wohoo!!) and we're seeing some great traction in regard to traffic.



I just arrived Chiang Mai and will make friends and go on XX Tinder dates over the next two weeks, but I also hope to get some stuff done as I planned. Q4 incoming after all. =)

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abdelkaderfarm said:

yes, i'm thinking to rewrite it in English first before translation then fix the grammar and maybe reword it so it's 100% new content

Click to expand...

Exactly what I'm doing for several of my articles. It's just about getting the job done, mate.

Update - traffic & sales boost!​

Many of you might have thought that this was a journey thread that would die out without any significant results. Just like 99 % of all journey threads on BHW.

Luckily, I'm different. I create results.

Traffic:​

I'm not TOO happy with the graph. I wish it was steeper. However, I'm quite sure that we will also see traffic growth in November and December if we keep working on the website.

Sales:​

This is the very first month that we had any sales at all.

Total number of sales: 14
Total revenue (converted to USD): 114 USD

In other words: almost no cash. Nothing to get me excited. But if we can 50-double this in the near future, I'll be excited.

Personal level:​

Two major things happened.

1) I quit my job. Finally going full-time on SEO/affiliate, which I probably should have done 6-9 months ago given my income level.

2) I got CCP Virus. Thank you Xi Jinping & the incompetence among the staff in the Wuhan lab - but I'll surive this!

Until next month.

Update - do you guys know what success looks like?

It looks like this:



Now this project has been going on for a bit more than two months and we are already seeing quite good results. I'm very happy for that. But I'm not surprised at all. The reason is that I am a person who works my a** off to get results in all projects I'm involved in.

Sales

In regards to sales, we have already had 17 sales this month - which is equal to what we had during the WHOLE October. Let's hope that we can manage to squeeze out at least 250-300 USD this month.

Book recommendation for success

I know for a fact that most people read these "journey threads" mostly to gain motivation and less to get knowledge about methods. So I'll give you some motivation.

I've come to where I am today (10,000-15,000 USD/month on affiliate/SEO) because of one simple skill: to keep myself motivated throughout hard times and be able to be consistent. I can work on a website SUPER HARD literally 8-12 hours per day for 90 days straight....without having ANY traffic.

If you want to learn how you can stop scrolling down every thread on BlackHatWorld for motivation and start to actually take action and create your own business...read this book. It's called "Atomic Habits" and is written by James Clear.




There are so many good points in that book that I won't start to break it down...but every page is literally a goldmine.

Congrats! This looks very good.

It's nice to see someone experienced going through the process so smoothly. I have a few questions:

1. Is your end-goal to sell this website when it reaches 2k/mo?
2. Do you target low comp keywords or you just rely on link building and don't care about keyword comp at all?
3. You said you make 10K-15K per month from affiliate/SEO. How many affiliate websites do you own?
4. What's your cost so far with this current website?
5. How can you stay motivated to translate so many articles when you're already making 10K-15K/mo instead of outsourcing everything?

blogmen said:

1. Is your end-goal to sell this website when it reaches 2k/mo?
2. Do you target low comp keywords or you just rely on link building and don't care about keyword comp at all?
3. You said you make 10K-15K per month from affiliate/SEO. How many affiliate websites do you own?
4. What's your cost so far with this current website?
5. How can you stay motivated to translate so many articles when you're already making 10K-15K/mo instead of outsourcing everything?

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Hi, thanks for your nice comment and very good questions. I'll answer them.

1. Nah, I can't sell this website. I only own 70 % of it and it has to be a mutual agreement, but I don't see why we would sell it.

Also, selling websites in a Scandinavian language is much harder compared to English websites.

2. As we are doing this in a small country, we don't have to pay much attention to the competition of the keywords. We can literally quite easily rank for all the main topics in our (quite limited) pet niche.

3. I do own 4 other websites at the moment - with this one being number 5.

4. Zero.

The thing is that I learned something when I worked for my first boss. He was cheap as f..., but extremely successful. He learned med that "if you don't have cost, you will never have any problem".

And that's something quite unique about my business. I am literally running on a "zero cost strategy" where hosting + domain is the only thing I pay for. And a keyword tool which I split together with a friend.

5. This is also related to number 4).

I am extremely motivated by having zero cost and not handing over any of my money to anything. If I wake up and see that I earned 300 USD yesterday - I know that this is a clean 300 USD profit. No editors to be paid. No writers to be paid.

Does this "stingy" strategy limit me from reaching 30,000-50,000 USD/month? Yes. At least in short-term.

Does this strategy help me sleep better at night? OH YES! Zero cost - zero risk.

When you earn 10,000-15,000 USD on your "side income" (remember: I have quit my job but still in the resignation period), it very quickly comes to a point where money has no practical value for a single 30-year-old. However, the emotional connection to money is weird. I would cut off my left arm to increase my income with 50 %. And would cry if my websites over night lost 50 % of traffic and income.

But regardless of the 50 % increase or 50 % dip.... I would live the exact same lifestyle over the next year. Living every day in 5 star hotels in South East Asia and enjoy everything life has to offer can easily be done at 5000 USD/month as 15,000 USD/month. So it's weird. Money is a weird emotional concept.

pleb1 said:

I would live the exact same lifestyle over the next year.

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I totally get this, I'd do the same. This lifestyle is glorified nowadays anyway, like that Zappos dude that lives in a trailer with his llama.

pleb1 said:

I would cut off my left arm to increase my income with 50 %

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Ok, so you're totally doing it for the money. Hopefully I'll be as addicted as you are at the money game when I reach your level. Seems fun.

Very cool stuff. I'm following this one.