There comes a point in time when running a single site isn’t enough to produce the income levels you’re trying to hit, but when you think about running more than one site you find yourself getting bogged down in the details.
This is especially true when you find yourself running more than a few different sites and are ready to start scaling them all at the same time.
Many niche marketers are fine when they’re working on one project at a time, but that isn’t conducive to really scaling your income. When you really want to grow your income and do it without losing your mind, there’s one thing you’re going to need...
You Need Systems In Place.
If there’s one guaranteed way to ensure that you get frustrated as you start to manage more than one site, it’s to try and reinvent the wheel every time you get back to work and try moving forward.
Without having systems in place, and repeatable processes, you’re going to spend more time trying to get organized than you will spend on actually growing the traffic and revenue.
If you’re not familiar with the types of systems you can use to grow your site’s traffic and revenue, we’re going to help you figure it out.
There is a fair amount of work involved up front, but once you document the processes you use on a regular basis and eliminate extra work that isn’t necessarily required, you’re going to spend less time growing your business in the long run.
Having documented processes in place will also make it easier for you to hire people to help you grow your business and be able to hand off training manuals so they can get up to speed quickly.
Since hiring people is one of the biggest causes of frustration for business owners, it only makes sense that the less time you spend getting people acclimated with how you operate, and figuring out what you expect from them, the better and less stressful your life is going to be.
To get started, there’re 5 types of systems you need to implement into your business if you expect to scale your income and traffic without having the scale the amount of hours you’re devoting to the process.
- A system for launching new sites
- A system for creating content
- A system for building your first set of links
- A system for obtaining new links automatically
- A system for optimizing your content as the site ages
Here’s how to start growing your business, quickly and effectively.
Step #1: Build a System For Building Out New Sites
When you’re starting a new site, there are certain steps you’re going to take that can be easily repeated and outsourced -- if you document what’s required.
Stop and think about what you typically do when thinking about building out a new site.
You’re going to research keywords to find out if the niche is worth getting into. You’re also going to use the keywords you’ve found to start planning a content foundation and category structure of the site.
Then, you’re going to purchase a domain for the site, and install WordPress on your hosting account. Once WordPress is installed, you’ll need to change the theme and install the plugins you’re going to be using.
The site is then going to need a quick redesign, a header or logo image, your plugins and theme options configured, and email account created.
After all of that has been completed, you will need to tie the site into your Analytics account and Webmaster Tools dashboard.
Fairly straightforward, right? This process gets repeated on nearly every site you’ll build out.
Now, you may have certain steps that you add into your own process, or even steps that we’ve outlined here that you might not go through when you’re building out a site that aren’t going to end up in your system.
Regardless what steps you take while you’re building out a new site, you will want to document the process so that you can either create to do lists that allow you to quickly and effectively work through building out a new site without having to think too much about it.
How To Document The Process
There’s two ways you can go about it, depending on whether you are going to continue doing the work yourself or if you’re going to work with freelancers to help scale your business.
You can either write down what you do into a Word document that can be printed and checked off as you work through it whenever you want to start a new site, or you can record videos that help your freelancers figure out what you expect from them while they’re building out the site for you.
If you’re going to record videos that you can use to hire freelancers to help with the setup process, you can use desktop recording software like Jing or CamStudio. Both make it easy to record training videos.
If you prefer avoiding the camera and microphone, you can also document your entire process in a Word document.
Include each step you take, no matter how small you think it may be.
Getting the minor details down into the Word doc will make it easier for you to build new sites out yourself, while also ensuring that you have the processes ready to go if you do happen to hire someone down the road or outsource the process to a freelancer.
Once the site is built out, you’re going to need to start working on filling it with content.
Step #2: Build a System For a Steady Flow of Content
As you’re performing keyword research in the previous step, you should be preparing to lay the foundation of content that’s going to get your site off the ground.
You can do this by grouping keywords together, visiting the SERPs for each keyword you intend to target, and figuring out the types of content that Google wants to see. You can expand on this content to make your site the authority on the subject.
Since you should already have successful sites under your belt, you should have a general idea of the types of content that your visitors are going to want to see. This content can be put into templates that are easy to pick up and repurpose into other niches.
If you don’t already have templates for your content, here are a few different types that work great for driving traffic (and links) to your sites.
Template Type #1 - Infographics
If there’s one type of content you should be creating for every site you own, it’s an infographic.
In case you’re not familiar with what infographics are, take a look at this blog post.
At the top of the page, you’ll see a huge graphic full of information -- hence the name, infographic. The info included in it is short and easy to consume, which makes it simple for people to skim through and pick up some quick tips.
Infographics also get linked to from other sites quite often.
They’re one of the easiest ways to automatically generate new links to your site, and easy use in your outreach strategy.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to create a new infographic, either. In fact, you can have a designer put together a basic template that you can reuse for each new site you build.
With a templated infographic, you can insert new icons, add some text and tips, and publish it to your blog so it’s ready to be used in your promotional strategies.
With more and more people using infographics, though, you’re going to need to make sure that you’re providing unique, quality information that isn’t readily available everywhere else.
The more time you put into your infographic upfront, the better it’s going to perform over time.
Upwork is a great platform for finding a graphic designer that can help you
Template Type #2 - “Best Of” Posts
“Best Of” style posts work great for just about every type of site, but they really work well for sites based on Amazon’s Associates affiliate platform.
You can use WordPress plugins like TablePress to build out lists of recommended products and give your visitors the ability to sort the list by certain metrics, to help them find the best product for the problem that they’re having.
You don’t necessarily have to promote products inside of your Best Of posts, either.
Creating content around the best of the best in the niche that you’re targeting, without actually promoting products inside of the content, is a great way to generate new links.
Template Type #3 - Product Reviews
If you want to make money from your sites, you’re going to need product reviews.
They’re one of the easiest ways to uncover new, low competition keywords and tend to have the highest conversion rates out of any other type of content you can create.
Creating a template for product review style content is simple when you look back and realize that most of the reviews you’ve written in the past probably all follow the same similar layout.
In case you don’t already have a template, here’s a quick and dirty one you can use either for your own records, or to help freelance writers figure out exactly what you’re looking for:
- Introduction / Summarize the problem
- Agitate the problem
- Name the product
- Sum up the features, and tie them into benefits
- List objective cons (if there are any)
- Re-introduce the problem
- Use a call to action
Every product under the sun can be reviewed using that basic formula. Using it will also keep your content consistent across the entire site.
Template Type #4 - Rants & Raves
Nothing generates links quite like a rant or rave that resonates with people in your audience.
Unfortunately, because rant & rave style posts require original thoughts, you can’t really create a template that can be reused over, and over again.
Instead, you’re going to need to rely on your own experience and intuition to create this type of content. If you’re hiring a freelance writer, you are going to need to make sure that they’re experienced in the topic and can produce their own original thoughts.
Opinion based pieces like rants and raves are good fodder for your link builder to promote, and they have a high rate of going viral if the opinions included inside resonate with your audience or tap into their heart strings in some way.
Template Type #5 - How To’s & Tutorials
Another great way to create content that gets links is to actually purchase the products that you’re going to be promoting and create content around them.
Creating how to’s and tutorials allows you to take unique photos of the products, and figure out problems that your visitors may have, or unique ways for them to use the products that they may not have already thought about.
This type of content does require you to make an extra investment into your site when you’re building out a new one, but will instantly set you apart from your competition if they’re relying on stock photos and pictures from Amazon’s product pages.
The goal with your content strategy is to make it easy for you to build links and keep your visitors on your site when they land there from the search results pages.
Learning how to create each type of content yourself will pay off dividends, and even though most of them can’t be templated, once you create each type a couple different times, and have a list of the different types of content you can create, your job will get substantially easier.
It will also make it that much easier for you to walk a freelance writer through the process of creating the content for you, and help the understand exactly what you’re trying to achieve.
If you have examples on other sites you own, you can show them to the writer to give them an even better idea, and make it that much easier for them to produce the specific type of content you’re looking for.
Putting together a foundation on your site when you have each of these types of posts can be repeated for each additional site that you start in the future. They can also be used when you need to scale an existing site and are comi