Back to Blogging. I Lucked Out on a Good Domain

[GNews]

So I wanted to get back to blogging.
I already had a subreddit community I had been working and decided to get the domain name
LUCKY! the domain name was available. r/BeforeFamous x BeforeFamous (dot) com

I like blogging b/c the income is less chase than the affiliate marketing business I have.

I know the guy who builds sites that are super search friendly but I need a great strategy to build out content. Make bios and add everything needed.

Though I also have other domain projects to build, I think this is probably the most lucrative because of the google trends with this set of keywords. More and more people getting famous, means more and more people searching for their 'before famous' content.

My question , to those others with web experiences.

How profitable can you all see this domain name & obviously relateable content being?

 

[Hercules]

I definitely see potential is something like this. I've actually included a "Before/After" section to my website because some of the search terms have a couple dozen to a few hundred searches, and almost no competition. Especially when you target very new celebrities. Create an entry on someone when they start blowing up on the internet/meme scene.

Additionally, you can target keywords like:

• Woah Vicky net worth
• Woah Vicky height
• Woah Vicky real name
• Woah Vicky age

And then traffic leak the hell out of this content. Post on bottom-of-the-barrel forums like IGN and say something like "Woah Vicky was born in 2000 and shes already worth a million dollars?? <link>" or something. I put zero thought into that.

 

[Ryuzaki]

It can work to some degree, with the "before they were famous" angle.

The problem with stuff like Net Worth, Height, Real Name, Age, Lyrics, and anything databased is Google actively destroyed sites like that by scraping their content to create Rich Snippets. Sites were given a choice to opt out, which meant that some competitor would agree and take the crumbs falling off the table while you died out.

You can pivot if you're good enough. Genius managed to take lyrics and still get traffic by adding annotations, but they also had insane financial backing from connected figures in the industry. Take a look at who backs them and you'll understand why they were able to do the largest and obscene obvious blackhat link building campaigns, get penalized, and get unpenalized within days (and still keep the benefits of the campaign, it seems).

I'm not sure though. I feel like your site, if you stick to the "before famous" angle, could have a pretty nice organic search presence over time. Not just music but any celebrity and Instagram star and anyone... it's wide open. You could even manufacture more demand for that kind of information with the right marketing. Seems ripe for "native advertisements" like Taboola and Outbrain, with CPM ads in the articles. Same with Facebook and buying boosted posts from big pages, etc.

 

[Zach]

I think you could have an interesting niche/content site going. It's a very juicy category for viral-esque articles and even paid advertising. Monetization probably will be adsense or other native ad networks.

Regarding the domain name: sure, it's nice, but that means very little vs the grind of your site content and promotion game.

Personally I would be more proactive in promotion of this site than others on this forum. There's loads of content you could build based around interesting/unique things celebs did before they were famous. Then advertise it.

Click-baiters literally run paid traffic campaigns around this concept. You don't even have to sit around waiting for organic ranks on this one. This topic IS MORE INTERESTING when you're showing people unknown details rather than waiting around for people to search about a specific celeb.

clickbaity title about celebs --> article + tons of ads --> hope user clicks an ad at some point in those 30 slides

Titles/ad campaigns:

"17 celebs who worked at McDonalds before becoming famous"
"These 25 Celebs were Homeless before scoring big"
"These celebs got masters degrees -- #7 you would've NEVER guessed!"
"6 celebs who lost it all and live back at home"
"9 little-known facts from Trump's Childhood that will leave you in awe"

Sub-strategy Process:

Monitor Google KW Trends for Breakout Celebs --> Release paid campaigns about their details especially if you can target demos that know who they are

Rappers, Athletes, Politicians........

Rappers: Look for breakout rappers and get details on their past life. Lots of targets here.
Athletes: Ditto for this
Politicians: Find the most polarizing politicians, and dig up details. For extra flavor here you can polarize your finds to theme the article as good OR bad.

Article with great details about Trump: promote towards repubs & watch em share
Article with shitty details about Trump: promote to dems & watch em share

 

[GNews]

Funny. I was starting all this, then i had a drop-shipping biz blow up on ebay.... So i left it on the ground.

Then paypal banned me for risk with high volume......... made me refund my earnings of a few thousand , which i had already planned out. And i lost my paypal account of like 8 years probably... over less money than I've had going in/out before........

I'm a bit exhausted. Luckily I had launched the product website but I just want to sell it all honestly.

Go back to my shell ..... what i was doing before.

 

[Hercules]

It's unfortunate that you had that PayPal junk to deal with.. hearing your story was the final straw for me with PayPal and I've pretty much changed my payment processing completely over to other platforms. (I still use my PayPal to send $2-3 to guys in India for micro-tasks, but that's about it)

That being said, there is still huge potential in your domain.. this guy on YouTube has around 3 million followers for showcasing celebrities "Before They Were Famous". HUGE potential. Drip content to your before famous website and then also work on diversifying on the side. It's best to put all of your effort into one project, but as soon as that project starts making $$$, I believe that it's time to start up another project on the side.

Best of luck!

 

[GNews]

It's unfortunate that you had that PayPal junk to deal with.. hearing your story was the final straw for me with PayPal and I've pretty much changed my payment processing completely over to other platforms. (I still use my PayPal to send $2-3 to guys in India for micro-tasks, but that's about it)

That being said, there is still huge potential in your domain.. this guy on YouTube has around 3 million followers for showcasing celebrities "Before They Were Famous". HUGE potential. Drip content to your before famous website and then also work on diversifying on the side. It's best to put all of your effort into one project, but as soon as that project starts making $$$, I believe that it's time to start up another project on the side.

Best of luck!

I'm going to roll with the eBay for now.

The problem with me doing Before Famous, the layout I'd probably need.

It definitely gets traffic though. no work, i get a little organic traffic daily.

I'd love to take some money, invest in writers to make real history write ups (original)... then some other cool features like mentioned above.

Put a beautiful, well-spoken female on YouTube, let her crush the traffic.

Pretty sure I could take it over in the niche. THe problem, just i need to stabilize and that's more of an investment for me.

 

[stackcash]

This is the process I would follow for any content site; including viral / trending sites.

Personally, I like to always create content around the available viable keyword set before working on viral/trending articles. This is just me.

I do this because of the nature of the viral/trending article. It's fleeting. I feel like it's just as much of a "chase" as anything else.

But, if I own the keyword set (or at least a portion of it), I know I'm going to have that organic traffic flowing each time a viral article dies down.

I suppose that you wouldn't want to wait until you're created and ranked all keyword inventory before working on viral/trending topics. So, you'd have to split your resources in a logical way at the beginning to do both at the same time. Again, personally, I would put the majority of my resources towards keyword-focused content first and then slowly shift that ratio as I ranked for more and more of the entire keyword set.

-----

The Process

1) Create Your Competitor List

Brainstorm as many competitors as possible. Plug each one of their domains into Ahrefs / SEMrush and use the similar site functions to find other competitors. I usually list out between 20 and 50 sites.

2) Grab their keyword rankings

Use the aforementioned tools to reverse engineer each of the sites on your list to grab the list of keywords they're currently ranking for, respectively.

3) Create your master keyword list

Combine all individual site keyword lists together and remove duplicates.

Next, run the master list through whatever (and as many) keyword tools as you want to pull extra "also rank for," "newly found," and any other keywords in the set that the competitor sites missed.

Remove dupes and arrive at your final master keyword set.

4) Create your virtual hub and spoke model / topic clusters

Since knowing the keywords to target is half the battle, it's time to map out your site architecture on paper.

I use the Hub & Spoke / Topic Cluster model:

• https://blog.hubspot.com/news-trends/topic-clusters-seo

It's now time to take your master list and figure out which page every keyword will be "mapped" to on your site. Large volume, short tail keywords will likely be target keywords for "hub" pages. Hub pages are generally for topical entities; people, places, or things. Smaller volume, long-tail keywords will either be target keyword for "spoke" pages OR secondary keywords that should not be target keywords.

This is a bit of an art form and will vary from vertical to vertical. But, it's essential if you'd like to keep money in your pocket.

5) Evaluate The Opportunities And Decide Where You'll Spend Your Resources

At this point, you're looking at a HUGE project. Assuming you're bootstrapping and don't yet have revenue flowing to the site, you probably don't want to use your own money to build out all of these hub and spoke pages.

So, you need to evaluate each "hub" as a whole, as well as each of the individual spokes within each hub to understand their ranking and revenue potential.

I do this because I don't want to spend time or money on hubs where I can't earn my spend back within 12 to 18 months. If I don't have the age or domain authority to realistically compete in 1 to 1.5 years, then I "niche down" within the site and focus on the hubs that do have that potential.

This will vary by niche, monetization method, and the skill level of your niche. Essentially, you want to get to this:

• (Monthly page revenue potential * 18) - total page production cost
  

If the resulting answer is a positive number, you can feel free to devote time and money to building the page. If it's a negative number, those pages and keywords get pushed to the side until you have more age and domain authority to compete for them (or until you have enough revenue flowing to the site to justify the spend).

6) Build Your Content

Now that you know which targets are worth it - you can go ahead an build and post that content.

7) Rank for those keywords

If the content doesn't rank on the first page by itself, you'll need to further optimize to improve your rankings. You can do this with:

• Internal links
• External links
• Traffic leaks
• Content repotimizations (TF*IDF)
• Social signals & shares

8) Shift the ratio

As time passes and your gain dominance over more and more of your keyword set, you can go ahead and start shifting more resources to your viral content.

-----

Again, this is just my personal opinion on how to approach this. You could totally be a traffic leaking and viral content wizard and get the site earning so much that you won't ever have to worry about keyword-focused content.

I just like to build a solid base of traffic via keyword content due to how consistent it will be once I own that real estate... even if that means pushing off revenue generation for a little while.

 

[paulcarl]

(Monthly page revenue potential * 18) - total page production cost

This entire post is gold but I'd like to elaborate on this point specifically.

You may want to add Stackcash's formula as a part of your keyword research process because it gives you a metric to prioritize which keywords/hubs you should go after first based on highest profit opportunity. I'm going to use some variables to make the math look cleaner. Here's the index:

FORMULA VARIABLES
monthly page revenue potential = R
total page production cost = C
profit = P
monthly search volume = V
website conversion rate = S
average conversion value = M

FORMULA
Here's the formula as presented by Stackcash:

(R * 18) - C = P
monthly page revenue potential times 18 months minus your costs of creating the page equals your profit.

I'm going to expand on R so we can estimate monthly profits from a page 1 ranking. The 0.10 constant is there to assume that you get 10% of the monthly search volume as actual web traffic on your site. This can be adjusted to whatever you think it should be.

R = ((V * 0.10) * S) * M
monthly page revenue is calculated by estimating page 1 traffic (V * 0.10) and then estimating conversions of that traffic using your conversion rate (S). When you calculate your conversions ((V * 0.10) * S) you multiply that number by the average conversion value (M).

Now let's combine it all (you can put these formulas into an Excel sheet easily):

(((V * 0.10) * S) * M) * 18) - C = P

I'll drop some constants in for some examples now. Let's assume Pillar Content costs you $1000 to produce and Cluster Content costs you $500 to produce. Your conversion rate is 2%. Your average conversion value is $100. Now the formula looks like this:

PILLAR CONTENT: (((V * 0.10) * 0.02) * 100) * 18) - 1000 = P
CLUSTER CONTENT: (((V * 0.10) * 0.02) * 100) * 18) - 500 = P

Let's plug in some keywords now. Format is Keyword (Search Volume)
Keyword A (10,000)
Keyword B (500)
Keyword C (100)

Keyword A (Pillar): (((10000 * 0.10) * 0.02) * 100) * 18) - 1000 = $35,000
Keyword B (Pillar): (((500 * 0.10) * 0.02) * 100) * 18) - 1000 = $800
Keyword C (Cluster): (((100 * 0.10) * 0.02) * 100) * 18) - 500 = -$140

Conclusion

To conclude, the formula is really easy to set up and you can have it automatically calculate it for your keyword list (assuming it has search volume) just by pasting the formula into a column. With that, you can sort the keywords by potential profit to prioritize creating the most profitable content first. You should put additional consideration into the difficulty/likelihood of your ranking on page 1. Perhaps also include SEO costs to cover the time you spend doing onpage, building links, and lurking on SEO forums.

Using the Stackcash Formula™ allows you to justify keyword priorities based on profitability data rather than just using your gut instinct or a guess.