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Even the great pyramids were built brick by brick
And that’s what I’ve done so far. I’ve put a brick on the ground, and soon others will rest on top.
Any website, especially a brand new one, starts at a significant disadvantage compared to it’s competition.
It has no authority, no trust, no brand recognition, no… well, anything.
40HourFreedom has a significant hill to climb as well.
The traffic I’m after is competitive – and it won’t be easy to earn my spot amongst the big names like NerdWallet, Forbes, and others hanging out on page 1 of Google right now.
But you have to start somewhere – and for me, it’s with one really long tail keyword.
Earning a prerequisite rankings (i.e. bricks on the bottom of the pyramid)
In order to eventually get traffic from things like “make money online” as a query, I have to earn trust in keywords that have WAY less search volume, but are also related.
The first post on the site aims to target “how long does it take to make money online?”
3 times as many words as ‘make money online’, but infinitely less competition.
Google suggests only about 10 people search this phrase every month (but it’s growing 100% year over year). Compare that to 74,000/mo for ‘make money online’ and it’s obvious how much smaller it is.
But since it’s smaller, it should also be easier to rank for.
It also aligns directly with the theme of 40HourFreedom. My answer to the question at hand, is 40 hours or less. So let’s put that stake in the ground at the very beginning, and prove it along the way.
Writing the content so it can actually earn traffic
The point isn’t just to ‘write’ and ‘hope’. It’s to create content that serves 2 purposes:
- Makes it clear and obvious what the page is about (for search engines)
- Provides tremendous value to the person who finds it & reads it
Ultimately, the latter is more important, but the former gets us traffic.
If you take a look at the page I’ve aptly titled “How long does it take to make money online?” (see the keyword in title?), here are a few things you should notice.
- Where I have a question as a headline, I have an IMMEDIATE answer proceeding it.
- The questions I answer on this page are identical to questions that show up in Google’s “People also ask” section when you search the key phrase itself.
- There’s no clickbait. No ‘click to see more’ or ‘download this thing’ – it’s all laid out there, easy to see.
“If you write it, they will come” – *Field of dreams voice* (but also, not really)
Once the page is published, we have to go and tell search engines about it.
Both Google & Bing provide free tools in order to help request indexing of content, and understand if it’s being shown, or not.
Google calls it “Search Console”, Bing calls it “Webmaster Tools”.
Outside of reporting, there are 2 key activities to do here:
- Index sitemaps (i.e. the map of your entire site for the engines to crawl/read). If you’re using WordPress – a plugin called “Yoast” will generate a sitemap link for you
- Request indexing for individual page URLs as you write/update them
Doing so tells Google/Bing your site and your pages exist, and encourages them to crawl them significantly sooner – than if you just ‘hope’ they find you.
They can/will find your site, if other sites are linking to you and those links are being clicked on – chances are, though, for a brand new site, that’s not happening.
Going and playing the game (i.e. telling them about yourself) is the fastest way to do it.
“Ok so I’ve done all that – what’s next?” – You
Simply, more content.
Back to the pyramid visual – in order to rank for a broad, competitive term (think, the tip of the pyramid) you need to earn many rankings for much more specific subsets of that ultimate term.
Great places to start include:
- “How to” style articles
- FAQ & research style articles
- Targeting long, 5-7 word key phrases
- Search volumes (per Google Keyword Tool) below 20/mo
Write, publish, submit, repeat.
Once impressions and traffic start showing and coming in, then we can start talking about how to analyze that data & pivot our content strategies accordingly.
Until then, the goal remains – get from 0 → 1 visitor.
In the next newsletter…
- We’ll cover a bit more of the technical strategy used behind the scenes of each post
- We’ll catch up on any rankings/data/progress from these first 2 pieces
- We’ll talk in more detail about the keyword/niche topic research and how to get started.
Until next time,
Josh