How I Do Authority Sites Now – Mixing SEO, PPC & Social Traffic

So I’ve been thinking about other sources of traffic besides SEO. If you guys did not know, a site like thelinkback.com originally had all it’s traffic from forums, probably around 3 that we were active in. Anyway, while I still think”only”  SEO can work I don’t think you want to mass produce links nowadays to your main site (however, for now, tier 2 links can work. If you don’t know what I mean, refer to my previous post on tiered link building). However, I also think tiered linking will eventually stop working because currently almost everyone is saying to do it, and if I learned any valuable SEO lesson in the past 3 years is that anytime most people say something works and it’s low effort enough that everyone now does it, it stops being as effective sooner or later. Profile links, forum links, bookmarking, blog networks all went there.

Alright, so currently I’m working on 3 ways to promote my new blogs and I’ll show you an example of a new site (with URL) I’m doing which will have traffic from SEO (as usual) mixed with PPC & Social traffic.

Over the years since I’ve been able to have a lot of free time on my hands thanks to working when I want, I really got into nutrition/general health stuff and was keeping large notes that I wrote myself on my computer.. I figured why not make it into a blog, I might meet like minded folks like how this website helped me meet other IMs. So I created my nutrition/health blog at peakmodernliving.com.

Below is how I plan to use all these traffic sources for this particular site over time, and how I already am using it. Not sure if that blog will make sizable $$ one day but I already write a lot on my computer about this topic so why not. It’s an interesting experiment for me and honestly, if I can use it as a portal to meet other nutrition/fitness nerds that enjoy doing stuff like getting massively drunk with minimal hangovers or take ice cold showers (look at all the likes for a new site – NOT fake. explained below) so I can go outside with minimal clothing during the winter… Why not? 😉

Combining SEO with PPC and social media trafficPS: Reduced the size of this image that I made from 80kb to ~40kb using riot from my last post on image resizing 😉

SEO

I still think SEO can work but definitely only guest posts are safe in the long term (and maybe your OWN PRIVATE network with relevant content). I’m not even 100% sure yet I can rank websites only using postrunner but I’m giving it a try on a few of my new niche sites, slowly. Either way, I use guest posts from postrunner for now and eventually I’ll be hiring a VA to search for websites in my niche that I can do guest posts on. I’ll most likely be writing those myself for my nutrition site, but hire ppl for the other sites that I care less about.

Honestly I think SEO is more about short term vision or long term currently.

Do you want to rank a website fast but most likely get owned in the next update or build something long term? The short term vision is worth it for me in a few niches that when I reach #1 I was making $200-1000/month for THAT keyword alone, but definitely not for this health site that I intend to work on for many years, nor would it make enough money in 1-3 months for the time investment I put into it already considering I write all the articles and they take me 1hour + because I like to make sure I link to references and other useful sites for those wanting more information on topics I don’t want to elaborate on personally.

PPC

Alright so, I’m doing a lot of PPC currently as I think it’s something important to learn for me at this point now that I have money but limited time. I may or may not make posts on my strategies on this in the future… Let me know if you are interested in the comments.

While I was promoting offers I found out how I could use PPC traffic to help my own blogs. Instead of direct linking to other affiliates, what if you link to a squeeze page and build an email list and link them to your blog for more information on the topic? You can not only offer more value to the list this way but they might become blog readers. ALSO, while promoting the product to your list, if you find the conversion rates are good you can then make your own product on that topic and promote it directly for PPC traffic & to your usual visitors on your blog. Basically I would send an auto responder series about the product, try to sell it and then future emails would be about my blog with perhaps a few more “soft” sales of the initial product.

Social Media

So, everyone is all about social. But how do you do it? Obviously making a Facebook/Twitter/Youtube account is the basics but I think linking out and building relationships with other people in your niche IS A MUST! For example, look at this page on my new blog on cold showers that I mentioned before. One of the people I linked out in this post who was part of the inspiration that lead me to trying this tweeted out my link and I got about 500+ visitors within a day on my blog which resulted in those 50+ likes instantly! Some other people re tweeted the link too! I was debating for a while to write about my health experiments instead of only my knowledge on nutrition and it turned out to be a good idea… Eventually, once I have more free time after getting a better idea of PPC and a few profitable campaigns, I hope to travel again and between going to marketing conferences for affiliates I want to go to health conferences and meet interesting people there. Most likely some of them have blogs and we can link to each other when relevant.

Here are other ways I am planning on expanding my traffic from social places:

  • Other social sites: Beyond this, I’m gonna eventually post some of my articles on sites like reddit and stumbleupon.
  • Guest Blogging: This is also why guest blogging on REAL sites with traffic would be useful and why I want to make sure I write those articles myself and make them 100% unique & awesome.
  • Forums: Finally, be involved in forums in your niche! As I mentioned at the top, the LB was built on forum traffic. I go visit TONS of health forums weekly, I’ll definitely share my links when relevant.

 

So hopefully this post sparks some ideas for you guys to use on your own site. I’m personally currently focusing 70% on PPC, 10% on this blog, 10% on my new health site and 10% on my other SEO only niche sites currently. Hopefully I have more time to put on my health site soon and share results of how I did it with you guys, but it’s probably going to take a few months to a year to really flesh it out because PPC is consuming a lot of my time and where I envision I will make my $$$ in 2013, unlike my health site which is more of a “sharing my passion” site for now that I will use my marketing skills on in the future to make an alternate income stream.

Back to re-submitting my denied advertisements on facebook I go 😉 (PS: FU facebook advertisement team, stop denying my ads while allowing competitors to have them wtf!)