$100k Case Study Update #2 – The Setup

As month two rolls on, the case study project is coming along quite nicely.

In case you haven’t already seen the details of the project, you can check out the original case study post we’ve published by clicking here.

This website is part of an ongoing project where we show you exactly what it takes to build out a website that will earn on a monthly basis, and can be flipped for $100,000 or more at the end of 12 months. We’re building the site with a (initial) budget less than $4,000 total.

If you’re not already subscribed to our newsletter, make sure you enter your email below to get future updates to the case study, and be entered into a contest that we’re also holding.

At the end of 12 months, if we’re not able to flip the website for $100,000 or more, we’re going to give away 5 of our most expensive custom-built packages (each package is worth $4,000). You’ll also get to see the site live on the internet, because we’ll only be revealing the URL to our subscribers -- not here on the blog.

What’s Been Done, So Far

In case you haven’t checked out the previous case study post, here’s what has been accomplished on the site, so far.

Previously, we broke down for you how we chose a niche, and the tools we used to make sure the niche we were entering into had plenty of backlinking opportunities, while making sure it wasn’t too competitive.

We also introduced you to the monetization method we’re going to use, and showed you how we’re going to silo the content to make sure we stay relevant in the search engines and have a much easier time ranking quickly for the longtail keywords we’ve uncovered.

Since competing that work, we’ve also built out the foundation of the site, added new content, and linked it all together inside of the silos we created.

Here are the steps we’ve taken since the last update:

To get started, we knew that we needed to host the website on a fast server that wasn’t being shared with thousands of other websites.

When you’re on a shared hosting account, your website loads slower because the resources (bandwidth, memory, and processing power) on those servers are slower to begin with.

Then, when you add in the fact that there are thousands of other websites on the same server all trying to be accessed at the same time, it’s easy to see how your loading speeds suffer as a result.

On top of this, Google has what is considered to be the “bad neighborhood” rule, where they look at the sites that are sharing the same server you’re on, and whether they are considered to be legitimate, or not.

With shared hosting being so cheap, many spammers and black hat marketers keep their own “churn and burn” sites on those servers, and many other marketers used shared hosting accounts to house their private blog network sites.

In other words, by building your website on a shared server, you’re taking a risk by having it lumped in with all of the black/grey hat and PBN sites that could be knocked down for spam.

While this is rare, it can happen, and the possibility is baked into Google’s algorithm.

Even if it wasn’t for Google’s “bad neighborhood” rules, the fact is that your website will load slower on a shared hosting account than it will on a dedicated server with faster resources and less sites competing for those resources.

Your site load speed is another factor that is being considered by major search engines, because they understand that people hate waiting around for a site to fully load after they click through from the search results.

To remedy these problems, make sure our site isn’t landing in a bad neighborhood, and that it always loads quickly without requiring extensive optimization, we chose to go with WPX's VPS hosting.

VPS, for those of you that are unfamiliar, means a virtual private server. It’s a server inside of a server, and functions similarly to a shared hosting account.

Where a shared hosting account will provide you with a single physical server and store thousands of sites on the same hard drive, a VPS server separates your site from other sites.

You’re given a portion of a server that runs it’s own operating system and it’s own hardware resources, giving you the benefits of a fully dedicated server without the increased expenses that those servers tend to cost.

To help make sure that our site loads as quickly as possible, we made sure that the hosting account we built the site on uses solid state drives -- or SSDs. In terms of hard drives, normal drives have slow access times, while solid state drives can be accessed almost instantaneously.

That means instead of waiting extra milliseconds, or even hundreds of milliseconds for the site to be accessed on a regular hard drive, that time is saved and the site is loaded that much quicker because it’s actually being accessed on a solid state drive.

Again, SSDs do cost a bit more money to host your website, but the benefits greatly outweigh the cost.

Once you build a site on a virtual private server (or even a dedicated server) with a solid state drive, you’ll have a hard time going back to standard shared hosting accounts.

WordPress is also one of the best platforms for building these types of sites because the software makes it easy to manage and update content, create the silos that we’re going to use to rank our content higher, and properly maintain the site without worrying about security flaws.

We also installed and configured our essential plugins:

It's not a lot, but it's everything you really need in order to launch your website. 

Our Content Strategy Started Coming Together

When it comes to ranking highly in the search engines, especially for longtail keywords without a ton of heavy hitting backlinks, very few strategies work quite as well as “siloing” your content.

If you’re not familiar with what a silo is, we briefly covered the strategy in our last case study update.

Rather than completely reinvent the wheel, we’re going to direct to you one of the originators of the concept, Mr. Bruce Clay. You can visit his site on siloing by clicking here.

In a nutshell, building a silo with your content (or multiple silos) helps you maintain relevancy, and actually makes it easier for your visitors to find your way through the site, and locate the specific content that they’re looking for.

WordPress makes it incredibly easy to create silos.

By keeping your posts that are closely related inside of the same “Category”, you’re going to automatically build the silo structure without having to give too much thought to the process.

To give you an example, take a look at our previous case study update.

You can see from the picture how easy it is to keep your content relevant by using the WordPress Category feature. Keeping your closely related content inside of it’s own category also makes it easy to increase your relevancy to the search engine algorithms.

When it comes to ranking, the search engines want to display sites at the top of the results that are extremely relevant and helpful for the keywords that the visitor has searched for.

If your content is scattered throughout your site with no real organization, you may rank for some random keywords, but it’s going to be exponentially harder for you to compete with other sites that have implemented a proper silo structure on their site, and have interlinked their closely related content to make their site easy to navigate.

For our site, we’re using 8 different categories, and tackling them one at a time, as far as content and promotion goes.

This will help us build up authority in the beginning, and allow us to virtually “come out of nowhere” and show up near the top, leaving our competitors wondering where we’ve come from and how we’re doing so well.

Internal linking plays a critical role for increasing your relevance, and while WordPress Categories does a fairly good job of keeping your closely related content linked together, you can go one step further and manually link the posts on each category to one another.

In the image above, for instance, you would take each of the 3 different posts in the “Cordless Power Drills” category, and work in a way to link each of the posts together.

Most times, this would be a simple blurb or a few sentences added into the content that gives you the opportunity to link to the other 2 posts related to cordless power drills.

Related Posts plugins also work for interlinking, but for maximum effect you want to make sure that the links pointing to each of the other posts in the same category are contained inside of the content itself (contextual), and not at the bottom of the posts -- the way most Related Posts plugins create the links.

As we’re building the silos, we’re also going to be interlinking between the posts to help pass authority throughout the site. This helps keep down the amount of offsite promotion we need to perform, and makes it easier to rank each additional page that we create on the site.

How We Built The In