How Soon Is Too Soon to Launch a Niche Website?

[00:02] first a question from David Van adder that was posted on our YouTube we invite you to submit other questions on the YouTube live and we'll do a little bit of a QA on creating and launching your website so first question from David Van

[00:17] van adder is how often should you publish early on before you get traffic started to your website I hear you say that content is king so let's assume you can crank out killer content on demand what would be the ideal number of posts

[00:33] per week to get traffic started from zero we think well honestly I think that the more content you can post right off the bat at the very beginning the better

[00:48] the bat at the very beginning the better if you I think I even told this guy this if you could write 30 articles the first day like you can crank out killer day like you can crank out killer content like you said then you post

[01:00] content like you said then you post those 30 articles right now okay and the get that content up the quicker can start to rank on Google I think that after you've got a good foundation of content then establishing more of a a

[01:14] regularity of post is probably a good idea yeah I agree it's like if you were a farmer and you're like oh man I don't want anybody to drive past my farm and make it look like a dumb little garden so I'm gonna wait until I can plant all

[01:27] so I'm gonna wait until I can plant all 50 acres at once that's kind of how we it's got to be perfect and then we launch it but what will happen is you and then you're like I'm gonna launch it and then just nothing happens you know

[01:45] when is the best time for the farmer to have planted his seed well six weeks ago you know and it's the same thing with with a website is you want those articles posted as soon as as you write them and likewise often we get people

[02:00] who are especially commenting on YouTube or things that are are saying oh I'm reveal what it is very but we always recommend like right from the beginning as soon as you have one post-its live put it live on the

[02:14] internet and tell people what you're working on and stuff the earlier you can start those good signals happening to Google the earlier the hockey stick is eventually going to come completely there could be some exceptions to that

[02:26] I'm like on YouTube for example YouTube really gives some benefit to regularity of posting and so if you record you know 10 YouTube videos in a night yeah it

[02:39] probably makes them make good sense to schedule them out so that they Auto post with regular pulse on an article I definitely I think just publish them

[02:51] definitely I think just publish them right away awesome cool another question that we had come in was about writer's block how do we keep ourselves from or what do we do once we get writer's block my answer that question is I don't

[03:06] really get writer's block and the reason I don't get writer's block is because I use what we call a hit list I out what articles I'm gonna write well in advance I'll usually take some time usually an hour or so and come up with

[03:20] just a list of posts using a lot of the techniques that we talked about Google autocomplete recommended searches that kind of stuff and I'll spend some time just brainstorming all at once until I have a good list then I'll take all

[03:33] those ideas and turn them into a good headline and then every time I sit down to write I already have something to write and if I ever sit down and I look stinks I don't want to write any of these things means it's time to work on

[03:45] about writing a post right now yeah when I started improved photography eight years ago I thought man I could probably write eight or 20 maybe articles and then I'm tapped that's about all I know and when I wrote those it just came up

[03:59] with more ideas and more and more and more and now my list is so long I could never even catch up with it I despite having written thousands on there now having written thousands on there now all right wallace knew Ana's says that

[04:12] we had talked about one of the sites that was messed up on the homepage and knife the web he's talking about his knife up calm I purchased this one if I remember Ida was in late 2014 I bought it off Empire

[04:28] flippers and it was listed for $30,000 so when I went to to the site I saw that so when I went to to the site I saw that on the home page the the it wasn't set up like a normal blog roll on a word normal WordPress site and it was the

[04:43] categories but there were literally hundreds of pages that you couldn't hundreds of pages that you couldn't navigate to from the home page and so as soon as I saw that when I was doing my due diligence looking at the site I

[04:57] thought I'm buying this one because when you see an obvious problem like that you know you can turn things around quickly and I did I Google had already found those pages Google will find your pages but because they weren't linked to there

[05:12] page obviously they were really hurt in terms of SEO and so when I made that change I mean it was just immediately within to much the traffic had gone way way way up yeah so that was the mistake yep

[05:27] Kendyl asks are you guys cousins we get we've actually been asked before for we're twins the answer's no as far back as we know we're not related no we're just friends and apparently

[05:42] have fairly similar features I guess bird asks when you start out I guess bird asks when you start out with a new site is the domain also new

[05:54] by new I guess yes it's new it's new to us doesn't mean it's never been registered before I guess mm-hmm but yeah we go register a new domain and you

[06:06] yeah we go register a new domain and you say yeah we support all Wayne gray says do you suggest paying for high quality guest posts white hat it could work

[06:18] I mean it's fine it's just it's just not something that we're wasting our time on really if I want to pay for an article I just rather post it on my own website especially for new websites Google honestly is gonna think it's

[06:34] weird if a brand new website with 20 pages on it suddenly is starting to get a bunch of links from other websites it looks more weird than anything else it looks more weird than anything else to Google and so really if I pay for

[06:47] contact most of the time I think hey I'd rather just keep it myself and post it if it's good if those things gonna rank on Google I wanted to be on my site but you know if you get into a really competitive niche you've built up your

[06:59] website to a substantial point where it's doing a lot yeah ok could make some it's doing a lot yeah ok could make some sense to do some SEO reach out but for the vast majority of sites just just build your own content putting on your

[07:11] site is what I do anyway cool apparently people are curious to know about us as people so they want to know how old we are I'm 32 I'm 31 we're know how old we are I'm 32 I'm 31 we're about the same Wyoming says how long

[07:27] does it take you to write a 2,500 word article and would it be worth it to write really aren't long articles like 5,000 plus words it really depends on the topic of course if I have to do a lot of research and kind of how good of

[07:43] an article this is but really I'm just spending them the amount of time it takes me to create a better resource than anything out there on the web before I ever start writing an article I google it I look at the competition see

[07:59] what articles are out there and if it's just kind of really low-quality junky content then I'm probably gonna write something kind of short and just get a nice answer out there and put it out if I see there are some good writers who

[08:11] have done some good content here then maybe I'll spend 4 days on that 2,500 words and just write something that's just killer unique creative different etc somebody commented on YouTube the other day and said boy a lot of your

[08:24] articles on dirt bike planet are pretty short a lot of them are under 2,000 words and the reason is dirt biking is super it just has very low competition very hard to rank for these keywords that's why yep and about the 5,000 plus

[08:42] it absolutely can be worth your time not every post needs to be this but this long-form content can actually rank very very well and can enable you to rank for some larger keywords once your website's got a little bit of authority

[08:55] yeah only thing is if it gets super long and you're adding pictures in intermittent it just a big it's a heavy page it's going to take a while to load and that's not going to help so if it's over 3,500 words you may want to think

[09:08] about breaking this into two pages and they click to go to the next page of it just so it loads fast yeah all right inspired web developments asks do we monetization or casually text link products in your blog posts what's best

[09:23] yeah we we don't feature specific stores we we don't put in big pictures that look like big ads for the product we we like to use text links because they're they just make the website authentic and genuine I don't know people tend to skip

[09:39] their their eyes just look right past what looks like an ad success roller coaster says why do you add almost no images on your websites hmm I don't

[09:54] really think we do I think every post we write as every boss we write has at least one image and a lot of them have multiple but I do want to be very careful when we're putting images a lot of images on our posts you know

[10:07] something that's a very visual kind of thing just be careful that that page doesn't get too heavy I almost never have an image that's more than 150 have an image that's more than 150 kilobytes and and I really want to make

[10:20] sure it's size down so the site loads super fast even if you're on you know on mobile whatever I don't want that to hold any anybody back from seeing my hold any anybody back from seeing my site what are your thoughts on starting

[10:38] a site with an expired domain with good metrics that fits a good niche I think metrics that fits a good niche I think it could be fine yeah yeah I think it's it could be fine yeah yeah I think it's fine and we've I've once once or twice

[10:53] bought expired domains not because I thought oh it's an expired domain and they might have some extra link juice and it's still sending it to link juice and it's still sending it to me just because I thought oh cool name

[11:05] is just again we're not looking for tricky silver bullets we found that just a really straightforward just making helpful content and putting out there it's working so I just I don't feel like I need to be real trick right not that

[11:19] I need to be real trick right not that it isn't good to you know be as efficient as possible just I don't know it just works and I don't want to mess with the recipe that's working with us too much because I don't want to get

[11:31] penalized by Google so I just making them straightforward yeah no I have to another question that came in from general contractor do either of us have you find it hard to rank for affiliate sites but easy to rank for local

[11:45] businesses you know in my experience the the reason for that is that you're dealing with a local audience it's easy to rank in a local area especially if you don't have a lot of other local business competition that also has

[11:58] websites I started a small business out in a rural town in Virginia and I mean I made a Google place and a week later I mean we were the top search result businesses with a website in the area and that's just what it is if you use

[12:12] the local Google place stuff and just make your site local it's gonna be able to rank pretty quickly locally yeah same thing with photography I've worked with a lot of photographers who are trying to rank on Google Local and usually it's

[12:27] not that hard if you just take kind of the same approach of just answering people's questions in a helpful way because most local businesses only have like five pages on their website and so if you just answer questions people are

[12:41] going to ask you know you're a you do paving for parking lots and stuff you know if you're the one who writes an article how much does it cost to get a article how much does it cost to get a parking lot repaved or whatever you know

[12:54] businesses who are doing that especially in your local market and so the chances of you ranking are really really high or you're a local photographer and instead of just sharing your pictures on social media over and over what if you write an

[13:08] article called 21 ways to look beautiful in your wedding photos well man that's gonna do great and you're gonna rank on Pinterest and get traffic probably nationally to your site but Google is gonna notice

[13:20] that a lot of people go to this website and it makes a big difference so it's really I think a lot of the same things just answer people's questions and be helpful and then some specific things to local like putting your nap on your

[13:34] website your name your address and your phone number needs to be all over the website so Google can be assured this is a local business and not a national business trying to look like local business cool manager waves asks us says

[13:48] someone said backlink is King not the content is it true that's a load of garbage and imagine you've got a backlink somebody clicks on the link get backlinks you're gonna rank high in Google in the short term and then people

[14:01] go to the website and the content is crumb is crummy it's crap what are they seize that bounce high bounce rate nobody stays on the page load time on the page and your rankings will drop I stupidly

[14:17] stupidly [Laughter] now I cannot tell you how many people have said ah you know you're doing okay

[14:31] but boy if you just do a little link building if you would just do that a little bit of this a little bit of that this new technique that's working right now and I can't tell you how many times I've run into those people later and

[14:45] they said everything was going great until one morning I woke up and my traffic was gone you know I just can't I can't tell you how many times I've heard that so don't build a business that can last

[14:57] 20 years a website that's just helpful and good and people will like it there will always be a market for helpful resources and and Google's job is to do

[15:09] go absolutely all right we're actually running short on time for tonight I apologize this can be a short video but one to kind of wrap it up somebody asked who are our SEO men

[15:21] or through the people that have been influential in sort of getting us where we are and who do we look up to today I kind of add it to that one you added to kind of add it to that one you added to I added to it oh what did you add who do

[15:36] we look up to today because you know yeah chase Reiner SEO has has a youtube that is really good it definitely wanted to go to go check out how I listen to all his videos he's got some some interesting stuff in there

[15:50] but I don't know I'm spending a lot more time focusing on how do I create the most helpful post and a lot less time on what we call it there have been lots of

[16:02] sort of mentors along the way I would say mostly because we're constantly trying to learn all the time and so when we when we you know I guess in the very beginning there were some people John Lee Dumas Pat Flynn kind of people that

[16:16] sort of start started as kind of on this path I would say and who have good information good good you know to this day they have good information but along dozens at least dozens of different people but yeah and I would say the

[16:34] YouTube channel that's kind of contrarian views to things is because we've learned a lot just by ourselves so just trying different things and seeing what article ranked and what article didn't rank doing that thousands of

[16:49] times and just saying what what were the factors that made that helped this one or that one to go John Angelo says what's the best way to good WordPress theme it'll do it for you automatically if you

[17:05] have a wordpress theme that doesn't have a good mobile responsive theme built into it you really do need to get a different thing you should not need to install plugins and stuff to make your website mobile responsive but any good

[17:20] website mobile responsive but any good theme will have that built in yep all them we have so many questions but thank you guys for posting we really you guys there is never a comment that we don't

[17:36] read I wish we could reply to all of them but we read everything and we have some cool stuff coming up for you guys which is what we need to end this to get which is what we need to end this to get working on some new cool things that we

[17:49] will call project 24 and we'll leave it that vague I've coming up in the next that vague I've coming up in the next couple weeks thanks everybody okay now I look like a dork cuz I don't know how to end it