Fat Stacks Blog - a Podcast About Blogging and Email Newsletters

Struggling to grow or scale your blogging (aka niche site) publishing business.

This episode discusses one solution.

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What does it take to build up a successful niche site?  You might love or you might hate the answer. Listen to the analysis from a unique angle.

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This is the ultimate question: Do you like your own site?  Would you be happy with it if you landed on it as a visitor?

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I hate to break it to you but you're never going to figure everything out about blogging. Stop trying. Focus on what makes money.

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This episode discusses leveraging your hard-generated content across multiple sites you own (if you own multiple sites).

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This is the audio track from my video on this topic.  In this episode, I discuss whether and how Pinterest is good for SEO as in ranking your blog and niche sites?

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Learn more: Fat Stacks Training

I own a portfolio of lifestyle, tech and beauty blogs and niche and sites that earn $50K+ per month from ads and affiliate offers.  It's all organic search and Pinterest traffic.  I do NOT do any link building.

This detailed video steps you through the exact strategy that I deploy on every site.  

It's a highly scalable strategy.

This is not email marketing.  It has nothing to do with Fatstacksblog.com.

Most important it's a fun business.

Here's what's covered:
- Proof of revenue
- Keyword research / Content strategy (IMPORTANT)
- On-Site SEO
- Monetization
- Pinterest
- My lack of link-building strategy.

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Show Notes:

Keyword Research
Keyword research is almost always time well spent.
No matter how good your list, there are always better opportunities.
My strategy: find low competition keywords/topics and publish in volume.
Why? Fly under the radar and get traffic easily.

Improve Existing Content
Maybe you don’t feel like writing a new article but you have enough gas in you to update existing.
Updating and improving content is almost always time well spent.
Inject more keywords, add data, update information… improve it for readers and search.

Conversion Rate Optimization
Suppose you have a few pages with affiliate links that get a lot of traffic.
Improving click through rate and preselling can increase affiliate revenue considerably.
It may be adding buttons, more clear call-to-action, better product info or all of the above.

Add schema markup where applicable
If you have recipe, how-to, review, FAQ or other articles that qualify for a specific type of schema markup, adding it can be a very good thing to do.
Schema markup improves you search listing appearance which can help rankings and click through rate from the SERPs.
NOTE: Do NOT try to game schema.

Create some charts and tables for your site
Gathering data and creating charts is a very different activity than writing.
This type of content can dramatically improve your content.
It’s pretty easy to do and it’s fun making pretty charts.

Improve average time-on-site
I consider average time-on-site one of the most important metrics. 
Folks who stick around like your site.  That’s a good thing.
Increasing your average time-on-site is a good thing.

Seek out additional earning opportunities
Some days it’s worth surfing the web looking for better earning opportunities including high-paying affiliate offers for your niche.
If you don’t look, you’ll never find.
Skimlinks list of merchants is a good resource, but so is Google.

Experiment with different pin designs
If Pinterest is in your traffic bag of tricks, spend a day playing around with new pin design concepts.
I’ve spent many days doing this.
It’s worked out well for me having increased my Pinterest traffic to over 300K monthly visitors.

Write a fun opinion piece for your site
Let’s face it, a lot of content we publish isn’t the most exciting stuff to write.
But expressing our opinion and backing it up can be fun.
You can opine about products, trends, styles, events, etc.
Inject some personality into it.
This could be just the activity to break up your “evergreen content writing” doldrums.

Professional development
Many professions and careers have professional development days. 
These usually involve attending a seminar, workshop or conference.
It’s a nice break from the usual wear n’ tear.
There is no shortage of learning opps in our industry.  Take a day and see what’s new.  Just don’t do this every day.

Improve Site Speed
If you don’t have the bucks to hire someone to tweak out  your site, read up on the topic yourself and then apply.
Site speed is becoming more and more important.
Every second you shave is worth every minute, hour or dollar you put into it.

Guest posting outreach
If building a few high-powered “blow your site to the top of the SERPs” is something you want to do, take a day and contact the biggest, baddest, most authoritative sites in your niche and pitch them.
Take time to cater your pitch for them.
I don’t guest post but if I did, I’d focus on a few of the biggies and put my best foot forward with an irresistible offer.

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Learn more with Fat Stacks Courses

Show notes:

The 4 Firsts

1. First published blog post
2. First organic visitor
3. First revenue earned
4. First #1 ranking in Google

10,000 page views per month
$1,000 revenue per month
100,000 page views per month
$3,000 per month revenue
Going full time online
$10,000 revenue per month
$20,000 revenue per month
$35,110 per month income
$100K revenue per month
$1 million revenue per month

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Sponsored by Ezoic

Show Notes:

I've done the dumbest stuff imaginable in an effort to scoop up Google traffic.
Let me tell you about one example that if there were a Google penalty Darwin awards, I might just win.
The year was 2011.
I owned a couple niche sites making decent money. I even won a free treadmill for selling the most treadmills as an affiliate.
I've used it twice.

I spent more time spinning content for link building software than publishing good content.
Flush with success with spinners ad software, I decided to tackle something bigger. I was invincible; a visionary SEO.
The reverse phone lookup niche.
CPA affiliate offers were plentiful. All people had to do was fill in a form to look up cell phone numbers and I earned money. In theory that is.
I had a plan.

My eyes were bigger than my stomach.
My plan was to target every town and city in the US With 50,000 or more people. That amounted to hundreds of pages which you guessed it, would have the same content.
Surprise surprise the entire site was deindexed before it made a nickel.
That's my sad story for the day.
That is also how NOT to publish article clusters.

What is a cluster?
A series of articles that cover a topic in-depth.
Reader question:
Keyword cannibalism. You say to carpet bomb a popular topic. So if I have a post on, say, X, would it hurt to use the same keyword X in multiple posts? Do I need to use long tail keywords?I am confused because I have heard from others NOT to reuse the same keyword or your overall ranking for that post will drop.

Keyword cannibalization is bad.
Duplicate content (similar articles on the same site) is bad.
Publishing the most thorough, in-depth series of articles on a topic is good.
Short answer: It is perfectly okay to include the same seed keyword in multiple articles. The long tail aspect of it will determine whether the articles are the same or different.

How do you determine if two long tail keywords are the same or different?
The answer is you must assess user intent. Fancy words for a simple concept.
When I'm considering two long tail keywords and whether they are essentially the same or different I ask myself "when people search both phrases, are they essentially seeking the same information or is it totally different?"
Here's an example.
Seed keyword: Ice cream

That's a big keyword weighing in at 328,000 monthly searches. There are many long tails that could and should form many different articles.
But let's start with an example of two ice cream long tail keywords that are essentially the same based on intent:

• Ice cream recipe
• How to make ice cream

While those two phrases are different, the meaning is the same. One person searching for "ice cream recipe" is looking for the same thing as another person searching with "how to make ice cream".

Now, here are examples of long tail keywords, all with ice cream in it, that could be individual articles with no threat of cannibalization because they are very different topics.

• Ice cream recipe
• The history of ice cream
• Ice cream brands
• Gelato vs. Ice Cream
• Ice cream vs. Sorbet
• The best vegan ice cream
• Ice cream truck song lyrics
• How long does ice cream last?
• Can dogs eat vanilla ice cream?
• Can you have ice cream on keto?
• The best ice cream maker
• ​You get the point.

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