What does a scalable White Hat campaign look like?

[MuffinS]

Moderator Note: Cut from a previous thread.

Not wanting to derail this conversation. But what is an example of white hat that is scalable?
What does a typical white hat campaign look like to you these days?
Starting from the lowest hanging fruit to the highest fruit?

 

[Ryuzaki]

This is all I do these days, SEO wise. It got too demoralizing for me in the past to keep losing assets, even if they made plenty of cash in the mean time. My goal was always a snowballing large asset that has a ton of passive income while I actively grind out more. Here's my take on it all, without being too long-winded.

Starting from the lowest hanging fruit to the highest fruit?

Some of my buddies do this. I do the opposite, in a sense, and exactly what you say in another. My big authority sites encompass an entire vertical. A poor example would be:

• Automobiles for Land, Air, & Water
• All Automobiles
• Cars or Trucks
• Toyota or Nissan

A lot of people might only work on a site for Nissan Sport Cars, ignoring their SUV's, trucks, vans, etc. I tend to work on the "All Automobiles" level, but I don't go as crazy as "land, air, and water," although it's certainly doable based on how you scale.

So within "All Automobiles" I might choose to start with Nissan as a category, pretending it's less competitive than Toyota as a brand. Then I cover everything related to all Nissan vehicles, starting with the most competitive terms.

So there I start with a "silo" if you will of the easiest sub-section of the easiest niche in the vertical, but I first pump out the hardest articles. The reason is so that they can age and I can target them with interlinks as I continue to support that silo. Then I move on to the next silo, which is the next hardest brand.

I don't work in the automotive industry nor do I structure my sites around brands, but it helps get the point across. To reiterate in another way, I take the lowest hanging sub-niche and then start at the hardest fruit to attain, working "backwards" to the easy stuff.

That's how I handle content. When it comes to links I start at the low hanging fruit because it's fast, easy to get, and voluminous. And I let all of that bake in while I later go for harder links. Eventually you start getting links of all types automatically by virtue of ranking in the top 3 and having exposure, although you should never stop marketing your site.

But what is an example of white hat that is scalable?

Content is scalable in the sense that you hire writers and an editor and it's automated and you can increase the speed by hiring more people.

Links, I wouldn't work on scale on a white hat site. When I say that, I mean that you don't want mass spam levels of scale where you're trying to get 1000 links a month or 10,000 in a day. Once you cover all the attainable basics yourself, the more time consuming ones start coming in on their own (like forum links). After that, the only thing to scale linkwise is outreach, and I outsource that. Scaling that either means building a system and doing it yourself or in house, or paying more money to someone with the system already.

Those are guaranteed links you can tend to aim where you want. The other ways to scale traffic and link acquisition is marketing, which should never stop. Social media, sites like Reddit, huge forums... one goal is to get your sites and "bait" posts in front of as many eyes as you can. These get you a lot of "casual" links on more forums, blog comments, blogs, shares, etc. The 2nd method is to put your highest quality content in front of small but tight niched communities to get the higher quality and higher relevancy links. You won't get as many but they pack a punch.

So at the end of the day, once you cover your basic white hat link building stuff, you scale outreach and marketing (marketing in the sense of getting better at it, you can't scale the amount you do on the same channels too much or you turn people off and get banned). And then you just scale content posting with hires.