Back to my 9-to-5 after over two years of both COVID-19 unemployment and maternity leave (thanks to the great welfare system of Norway, I still got paid for all these days staying at home), it was really exhausting for me to catch up with the big corp life and commuting and everything in between.
Therefore, I decided that it was time to take a break and focus on my growing my own sites, sites that poured my heart and soul into but unfortunately had no to little time to actually care for. One of them is the site I’m about to share with you right now in this case study!
I bought the domain in late 2020 with the idea of creating something like an online magazine for women only. This site should cover topics like lifestyle, travel, food, relationships, etc.—so you get the picture: just an average women’s magazine. The idea was to create an online magazine but also an online community, where women can connect and share stories, advice, experiences, etc. I wanted this site to be more than just a blog—something with opportunities to discuss topics, network and help each other out!
However, it just didn’t work. Or at least, I didn’t try that hard that time to make it work. The site got some decent traffic in the beginning, mostly because I talked about it A LOT on my personal Facebook and asked people if they would like to write for it. But then the traffic died down, and I just didn’t have enough time to make it grow.
So here we are—a few years later—and I’m finally giving this project another chance. This time, with a little bit of help from my VA, we decided to take this project more seriously and try to make a success out of it.
Enter Project Lifestyle Magazine – The #1 Issue
General Information
- Domain: A general .com domain registered in November 2020 (2+ years as of Feb 2023). There’s nothing special about the domain to mention here.
- Niche: Women’s lifestyle, but in form of an online magazine.
- Budget: This one is tricky since I’m relying on my skills & resources. I estimated around $150/month for unexpected expenses.
- Project goal: I got inspiration from Niche Pursuit to publish 1,000 blog posts in one year, so yeah, this will be the goal for this project.
My Content Strategy
The site has been sitting there for a good while now, and it needs a content strategy so it can finally start growing. In the past, I used to upload a lot of (very) low-quality PLR articles in the hope that would make it grow. But that didn’t work at all, so now I’m aiming for a new, more structured strategy.
In case you’re wondering, I bought these low-quality PLR articles from some link saying like $99 for 9 million articles—what a great deal, right? It wasn’t!
In fact, I’ve been a subscriber to many high-quality PLR article providers, for example, Piggy Makes Bank, Health and Wellness PLR, and many others. Their products are great, and they will save you a lot of time drafting, outlining, and writing your content.
But that very time, I just decided to dump over 1,000 poorly written PLR articles in hopes of the magic happening. Well, it didn’t happen, and today I’m sitting here writing this case study after I deleted 90% of those articles from the site. They were all over the place, from potty training for kids to genital wards to dog training and even lawn mowing, and scanning through those 1,000 articles to delete them was an exhausting task. So now, the site has just a bit over 160 PLR articles.
Now, the rest of the work is to rewrite all these articles using RankIQ and Keysearch for keywords and Jasper for writing. The plus side of using PLR is that the outline is already there, so I’ll just have to find keywords that fit in the article and edit it a bit. This will take some time but it’s definitely worth it, since it saves so much time! But if you’re curious, here are the step-by-step strategy I’m taking to create content for the site:
1. Find the right keywords from RankIQ
I used to ignore SEO for many years and tried to focus on Pinterest instead, especially when most of my blogs fall into niches that can easily fit Pinterest (for example, parenting, gardening, etc.).
But I noticed that if I use RankIQ to find keywords that have the “Ultra Fast” ranking time, then either run a report from the app or opt for Keysearch report to see the keyword difficulty and search volume, I can quickly create content that will (hopefully) rank without much effort.
2. Run reports on Keysearch
Once I have the keywords from RankIQ I will use Keysearch to further analyze the keywords and see which one I should go for depending on the search volume, difficulty, etc.
This step will include running that keyword from step #1 in Keysearch for further analysis. As you can see from the screenshot, the color of the Score will tell how difficult that keyword is to rank. The lighter (light blue) the faster and vice versa (red).
If the chosen keyword has a medium to high score of difficulty, I’ll look at the right-hand side of the report and see if there are any related terms (aka LSI keywords—Latent Semantic Indexing) that I can use for the article. Ideally, those LSI keywords should be from light blue to light green, meaning they’re easy to rank.
Currently, I have 16 reports per month on RankIQ, while on Keysearch, my quota is 200 keywords per day, so for sites like this one, I’ll just combine both of them to have higher accuracy.
3. Rewrite the PLR article using Jasper
As soon as I have my keywords ready (step 1 + 2), I’ll use Jasper to rewrite the PLR article. This tool will not only help me to save a lot of time re-writing and proofreading my content, but it will also help me to have a better structure with the keywords in mind.
Of course, not all the time I’ll use PLR. I only use PLR when the content is not time-sensitive, like gardening or parenting. But for other case studies, for example, where most of the sites are product- or experienced-related, then I’ll just opt to write the article from scratch and use RankIQ/Keysearch/Jasper as my tools.
What I’ve Done So Far
Oh, if deleting over 900 trashy articles counts then I guess I did a lot.
But in all seriousness, what I have done so far is only research keywords and rewrite some articles using Jasper. The content rewriting process has been quite slow because I’m still testing everything out to see what works, but as soon as all the pieces fall into place, then I’ll be able to write and rank content much faster.
At the end of the day, I’m not here to write mediocre content that won’t get me anywhere. I’m here to create quality content that will stand out and bring value to my readers—which is why it’s taking me some time to go through all the steps of researching keywords, rewriting, and proofreading.
Luckily, I’ll have my VA take care of the blog formatting, on-site SEO, all Google stuff, and Pinterest handle since I don’t think it’s the best use of my time. By the end of the day, I still have a full-time job that requires my attention and I can’t spend all my time writing content.
But this doesn’t mean that I’m not devoted to making the best out of this project. Thus, spending some extra time researching keywords, rewriting articles, and proofreading is worth it since it means higher quality content and better ranking.
What’s Next with Project Lifestyle Magazine?
My content strategy for Project Lifestyle Magazine is to focus on high-quality topics that attract women’s interest and are entertaining to read. I’ll be researching keywords, rewriting PLR articles, and publishing new content on a daily basis, while my VA will take good care of our social media handles.
Since I only have about 160 articles now, once they’re all done and published, we’ll need to go through a deeper keyword research strategy to find more content ideas to keep the blog fresh and interesting, and ultimately, reach my goal by the next 12 months. Eventually, we’ll also make it to Mediavine at some point, but that’s a topic for another post.
Wrapping Up
We don’t aim too high to skyrocket our ranking overnight, but with our previous first-hand experience with this content approach, we know that eventually, we’ll get there. It’s just a matter of time and dedication.
This content strategy may not work for all types of websites, but so far it has worked quite well for Project Lifestyle Magazine—and I’m sure with a few adjustments here and there, this kind of approach can be applied to other sites, too.
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