From newbie to (something) in 4 years

Louey37

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Hey people,

My name's Louey and I'm (kind of) new to this place. I started in IM 4 years ago and kept a journal on WF of just about everything I went through. It's too big to reproduce here, but you can read it if you want here: http://www.wickedfire.com/newbie-questions/128294-loueys-journal.html

Long story short: I went from knowing nothing to driving 6,000 visitors/day to my main site and have built two affiliate projects from nothing to mid-to-high 6 figure companies.

For one (black-hat SEO in declining niche), we had 14 staff (customer service, SEO, web dev, content writers) in 5 countries and maxed out at low 6 figures per month. We eventually closed that down and in the last 12 month, I've built another one with a partner (white hat SEO in growing niche) to 16 staff (US based white-hat SEO Team), doing about $40k/month so far. The market cap is about $200k - $300k/month and there's little enough competition for us to see a clear path to taking most of that.

I'm just starting to venture into local SEO with a partner and the goal of setting up a local services company. We're starting out with lead gen and then (hopefully) switching over to managing our own subcontractors within 6 months time.

I'm also in the process of selling another SEO based affiliate site to one of the offers I was working for. Negotiating right now and hoping to push it through for between $250k - $350k, but realistically, it'll probably go for $200k.

Keen to get involved and help out in any way I can and will be getting more involved as the months go by. Hit me up if you have any questions.



Louey37
 
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Awesome man.

Care to elaborate on the roles and functions of your 16 man team? We are looking to scale in a niche and looking for smart ways to use a team.
 
Sure mate.

We've got four full-time outreach staff who're generating leads. 3 are working on low-level sites doing cold outreach for guest posts and one's working on high-level (DA60+) sites doing relationship building guest post outreach.

We've got 3 full-time writers writing the guest posts and we have another 3 or 4 part-time writers we use on an 'as needed' basis. To ensure we get consistently high-level content, we have an article editor that edits all articles before they're sent off to the various websites. For the high-end sites, we use a journalist to write the content as none of our current team of writers can produce the kind of quality we need. This journalist, plus one more, write content for our site so that when people we're pitching to for guest posts check the site to see if the quality of the articles, they see the best we can do.

We currently have one person dedicated to producing high-end, link bait style content for our website. These are big, well-research projects that can take up to a month to produce.

To manage this whole process, we have an admin person. She manages the Trello board and reporting to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

On top of this, my partner's in charge on making sure we're constantly innovating. He's got a HUGE list of tests we can run and we've always got a test running to improve our processes in every area of the business.

I've taken the role of CEO / General Manager to ensure the whole thing runs smoothly.

What are you guys currently doing and what are you looking to do?
 
That's some next level stuff there man. Kudos! It must be on the verge of a mega brand site at that level.

We are early doors on our big brand site with a small team of writers and graphics people. Haven't even thought about outreach yet tbh.

It seems to be a major part of your teams work though which is interesting.
 
When it comes to learning SEO. Where would you start?
 
MrMedia said:
We are early doors on our big brand site with a small team of writers and graphics people. Haven't even thought about outreach yet tbh. It seems to be a major part of your teams work though which is interesting.
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It's about 90% of what we're doing right now, and the other 10% is just getting us ready to do more outreach. Everything is built around outreach.

I've done the whole 'build great content and links will just come flooding in' and I know how bullshit it is. If you want links, especially at scale, you need to go out and get them.

built said:
When it comes to learning SEO. Where would you start?
Click to expand...

For white-hat stuff, I would start with http://backlinko.com/. That's how I started with outreach.

Once you've gone through his stuff, I would get onto this asap: https://s3.amazonaws.com/gettingsta...uide+to+Content+Promotion+from+BuzzStream.pdf

This will take your shit to the next level.
 
When you first started out with your team what position was the first that you hired?
 
We started with article writers. We used them to fill up our site so that when we did outreach, the site looked legit.

Once the site started looking solid, the next person was an outreach team member. Then it was more writers and outreach staff.

Once things started to pick up, we got an admin person to oversee the whole operation, then an editor to lift the quality of the content.

Now we're putting the senior staff into management roles and getting more staff underneath them.
 
What is the thought process like when you start a new site? Do you have a system in place?
 
dgenius said:
What is the thought process like when you start a new site? Do you have a system in place?
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Not sure what you mean mate. Thought process around what? Niche? Staff? Tactics? Design? Monetisation?

Can you be a little more specific?
 
I Enjoyed your story! If you start today with low capital, what would you pick, blackhat or authority whitehat road?
 
Whitehat, 100%. It's not about capital though, it's about time. If you need cash NOW, black hat works. If you can wait, go white-hat.

My standard system is to buy a dropped domain with a crazy link profile (Niche specific, DA50+) and then repurpose it. Seems to work well at the moment for me.
 
Louey37 said:
Whitehat, 100%. It's not about capital though, it's about time. If you need cash NOW, black hat works. If you can wait, go white-hat.

My standard system is to buy a dropped domain with a crazy link profile (Niche specific, DA50+) and then repurpose it. Seems to work well at the moment for me.
Click to expand...

Thank you Louey37. I am going whithat. I can wait. A question: generally, how long can I get my site DA50+? A year or two years? I know it may be hard to say.
 
XZhi said:
Thank you Louey37. I am going whithat. I can wait. A question: generally, how long can I get my site DA50+? A year or two years? I know it may be hard to say.
Click to expand...

Impossible to say mate. It's all about what you do in that time frame, not about an arbitrary number.

You're FAR better off buying one. I bought a DA60 with the most ridiculous backlink profile for just over $1k. That's FAR easier and cheaper than doing outreach for 4 years.
 
the price are higher on Godaddy auctions. flippa and sedo may be the right place to find domains. You also can contact the domain owner directly. Sometimes you will buy a domain at a very low price in case of the owner is going to sell it.
 
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