So many people talk about starting a blog but very few take action on it. Of those that do, very few actually build something long term and ever “make it” with their blog.
Now I’m not going to claim to be some blogging guru by any means, just someone who has been on the battlefield long enough to have stacked some knowledge on this grind and how to do shit right. This guide is going to walk you through nearly everything I’ve done, also showing “under the hood” of my blog so you can attempt to replicate my exact setup.
Getting Started:
Before you write a single word, you better put in some serious research and make a plan for the actual direction of your blog. You see, with mine I never did that and my head is still hurting trying to figure that out. Hammer down your main focus areas and your angle/voice before you get rolling, seriously, don’t half ass this. Ask all those boring “who is your audience?” type questions, put in the research grind, and get ready for war.
Another important question, is your strategy sustainable? A problem I ran into here with my blog was setting the bar for always publishing really big guides on advanced SEO. I’d love to keep publishing this type of content regularly but it’s just not sustainable. For one it really hurts the brain trying write really long guides and two, it isn’t exactly a good business model from the SEO side to be giving out all the secret sauce ;-)
Contents
To summarize, you better have a Shark Tank caliber answer ready for each one of these areas:
- What the fuck are you going to write about (content strategy)?
- Who gives a shit (your audience)?
- Can you keep this shit going for the long haul (sustainability) ?
Got those bases covered?
Your answers should make Mark go like this:
Not like this:
And for the diehard SEOs, let’s get another thing through your thick algorithm filled skulls. If you’re taking this route, worry about content and building something cool first, keywords second. This is a critical shift you need to make at first, eventually once you get some traction you can throw your weight around and start intentionally targeting some specific keywords, but for now just worry about crushing it by creating.
But, but, but Jacob?! You’re getting all whitehat on us!!!
Shut up, this is business, it’s not about hanging out with the cool kids. Don’t make me punch you in the throat.
How do you crush it?
Ha, easier said than done. This guide is assuming you already have the ability to crush it and just want to build the best vehicle and strategy possible to achieve your goals. If you suck, no matter how good your site looks you’re still not getting traffic, because you suck. Harsh reality my friends, I’m sorry. Let’s listen to these wise words from Gary Vaynerchuk before moving forward.
Gary you’re a f**king beast dude!
Now let’s look at the actual traffic numbers my blog has received to date. I’ve done alright, not the 0-100k story you’re used to hearing about, but it’s a realistic picture of what can be attained with some hustle.
Traffic: 15k monthly visitors
Subscribers: 4,500 growing at ~20 per day
Earning: $2-$3k per month affiliate earnings
Here is a screen shot from Google analytics of my lifetime traffic, as you can see my first ever posting was in July of 2012, so about 3 years ago.
You see that period of time for about a year where hardly anyone visited the blog? Yeah that’s because it was a piece of shit, seriously. Things didn’t really start happening until I put my foot on the gas in 2013 and dropped the SEO assholes stunt, then started putting up some decent posts over time.
Fun story actually, this is how I met my good friend Robert Neu who created that and built this custom theme for me. We bumped into each other somehow on Twitter and wanted to chat about some SEO related stuff on Skype. After candidly discussing some things for about 15 minutes, I can’t remember exactly how it came out but Robert said something along the lines of “Thanks for the advice Jacob, you’re not like most of those SEO assholes out there.”
Then my joke idea light bulb went off and I replied, “dude you know what would be really funny, if I had a page where you could vote for all the top SEO people who are the biggest assholes.”
Robert fires back, “yeah that would be hilarious actually, I could build something like that pretty easy.”
Me: No shit? Umm well if you’re feeling up to it lol.
Robert: Well it just so happens I built a voting plugin for a another project recently, it should work perfect.
The rest is history, I watched 150+ people hit the site real time and several thousand over a few days. Also annoyed the shit out of some popular SEO people, it was pretty fun. I still am actually, #seoassholes lives on.
And it’s beating up the SERPs pretty good too. Irony?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not too proud of those graphs honestly, I wish I was killing it hitting 50-100k uniques per month, but I feel like it’s a fairly realistic representation of what can be accomplished minus the edge cases and click bait bullshit we see all the time. Alright, so those are my results, take it for what it is. One of my goals this year was to get the blog growth trending up again, so here I am ;-)
Let’s continue and now dive into the actual blog itself and its functions.
Don’t Use a Shitty Theme
I’m running the Genesis framework which is pretty popular for WordPress snobs like myself. It’s a quick SEO friendly framework to work with, then you use a child theme which runs on top of it. I was fortunate enough to have my boy Robert Nue who is a straight tank when it comes to WP development build me a custom theme. I got lucky there, but you should try to get a solid theme for your blog and not use some candy ass shit. You can have the best content in the world but if your blog looks like something your grandma would make it’s not going to get the recognition it deserves.
Don’t Use Shitty Plugins
Below is an exact list of ALL the plugins I use here. I separated the free and paid plugins. Most of them anybody can figure out how to configure, for the more involved plugins I created a quick video of my setup.
Freebies:
Akismet – Standard spam protection for forms.
Floating Social bar – This is one of my favorite social button plugins, you can float it or stick it, above or below post.
Limit login attempts – Might as well toss this on your prized site.
Q2w3 Fixed Widget – See that borderline annoying floating widget? This is how I make that happen.
Safe Redirect Manager – Occasionally you might have the need to create a redirect and don’t feel like pulling up FTP to modify your htaccess. You also might have a few affiliate links to put up, if you don’t have a ton this guide shows how to setup your links proper.
Simple Image Widget – If you have some resource you push or even a banner, nice widget to present the image clean.
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded – Pretty self explanatory, best solution I’ve found for notifying people of comment replies.
Table of Contents Plus – This plugin helps make a clean table of contents at the top of your post with a short code. It works based on header tags.
WordPress SEO – Ah good ole Yoast SEO, let’s take a look at how I have things setup. It’s video time, figured that would be better than a shitload of screenshots with arrows:
Paid Plugins:
Gravity Forms – This is probably my favorite plugin next to Yoast, I’ve use it to create every form on the blog. Even the contact page is using G forms. Here is a quick video so you can take a peak at the actual setup:
Gravity Forms zero spam – This is helpful if your blog gets comment spammed a lot like mine.
Thirsty affiliates – I use this tool to manage all of my affiliate links. If you run a small blog then you can just use safe redirect manager or redirection plugin like I mentioned above in free plugins. But if you have a lot of links then this is a great plugin for managing them. Basically it creates a new post type and allows you to categorize all your links. Also add one on the fly while writing a post.
WP Rocket – Using a caching plugin is important to improve the speed of your site, this one is premium but came highly recommended from my WordPress geek friends. The free alternative is W3 Total cache.
Don’t Use Shitty Hosting
Hosting is such a scammy ass confusing industry, holy shit. I’ve tried so many different hosts it’s insane, and as someone who builds lots of sites and builds PBNs I’ve dealt with probably over 100 different companies. After all these hosts, I’ve landed on SiteGround. This is the ultimate solution I’ve found for someone with my needs. For a while I was hosting on WPengine but this began to really piss me off when I started to get nailed with overage fees at 20k monthly visitors.
Generally speaking, it’s also a pain in the ass to migrate sites, and the more established and complex the site becomes only compounds things. So if you’re serious about growing your blog for the long haul, don’t be tossing it up on a $1 cpanel and thinking you’ll move it later. Start yourself somewhere right with room to grow, but make sure you’re not paying $100s for a new blog that isn’t making anything back. That’s why I like SiteGround.
Don’t Use Shitty Email Capture
You hear it all the time, “it’s all in the list!” Well, that’s because the dudes who figured it out can’t keep their mouthes shut. Yes, it’s that true. The amount of $$ and traffic that comes from good email capture is hugeeeeeeeeee and then you compare that to the ROI from noisy social traffic which might even cost money to hit (i.e. FB advertising to hit your audience you worked your balls off to get). Email is the bread and butter in so many industries, but we get lazy with it all the time. Trust me, if you like money, email capture is not the area you want to get lazy with.
I use Aweber as my email platform and the gravity forms plugin to create the clean forms you see here on my site. You’ve got the sidebar, after post, in post (see about page) and an exit intent popup.
Sidebar floating:
With the fixed widget ticked:
One area I have completely neglected is split testing, so if you’re thinking man Jacob must have split tested a ton to come up with all this genius copy you’re wrong. I’ve actually just changed it a shitload and have absolutely no idea which version worked the best. This is on my to-do list to set something up like this with split testing Gravity forms fields. You already have some good stats in the G forms backend, what you can do is add some code and have it randomly display the two fields you are split testing. If you’re a conversion geek, which anyone who likes money should be, this is very useful.
Now here is a recent hilarious addition, a popup that is completely ridiculous. The idea started from some good old fashioned Twitter banter, then once again Rob Neu comes through and handles business like a boss. See how much it helps to have friends?
It’s been up for about 3 weeks now, here are the results with G forms data.
Again, if I split tested it, could probably do even better. Not bad for a few weeks and I’m still cracking up when I see the thing.
The combo of Aweber, Gravity forms, and leadpages is the ultimate tool set for creating the best quality email captures across all your content and pages, hands down. And everything is fairly idiot proof which I also love, gravity forms makes you really look like you know what you’re doing.
Rules of Email Capture
Rule 1. ABC – Always Be Capturing, from day one. Don’t wait until your blog hits the front page of reddit and you’re telling all your friends about how cool it was to put up your email captures. Remember above when I showed the traffic SEO assholes brought? Yeah I think we put up an optin like the next day and got like 10 emails total, which brings us to rule 2.
Rule 2. Use generic shit, expect generic results. You need a compelling offer otherwise people aren’t going to fork over their email, simple.
Example a: Sign up for my email newsletter for updates!
Example b: Subscribe and Get my Free Guide on Pulling More Ladies with SEO
See the difference? Extreme yes, but hopefully hammers the point home. We see this shit all day long everyday, make your offer stand out and just maybe someone will actually cough up their email. Make it generic, and don’t come crying to me when you’re capturing 1 email per week and it’s a bot.
Rule 3. Use a Followup Series– Creating some sort of followup series is the icing on the cake for all your hard work. Traffic and sales on autopilot if you do it right. Recently I added a followup series here and it’s been going well. I created four small guides that I send one day apart after people subscribe, it accomplishes a few goals but mainly sends traffic back to the blog on autopilot, can’t beat that.
Don’t Write Shitty Content
Seriously, if you’re going to do all this work then back it up with the actual product, your blog content. Just like Rule #2 of email capture, if you write some bullshit don’t be surprised when nobody shows up to smear it in their eyes.
This is why I’m always so passionate about going full blackhat with your SEO vs walking the middle ground on something you’re not totally passionate about. “Make money hat SEO” as I like to call it. This guide is aimed at people trying to start that passion focused blog and crush it, because if you don’t have that it doesn’t matter what plugins or host you use, nobody is showing up for the party and nobody is talking about it.
Here is a screenshot of my top performing posts to date:
Shocker, the 10k word massively badass Scrapebox guide I made got the most traffic, go figure. Now behind an optin, why the hell not?
Next is my tools page, which is mostly because it’s always been linked in the top nav, people really like that page.
Then my post on tiered link building which is very revealing and a bit controversial. Surprise, surprise, it gets a lot of traffic.
The problem is it takes so much focus and patience to create a truly good post. Sometimes you might get lucky, but to get the real bangers (in my niche at least) requires a multi-day process which really hurts the brain. This is why most people don’t do it because they’re lazy as shit, but when you realize this you just put your head down and crush it. And it’s cliche time; Rome wasn’t built overnight and a blog is the same way, set yourself up with the proper framework and start filling in the walls one day at a time.
Now Crush It
Be different, go the extra mile, be controversial, challenge the status quo, disrupt, blah bah blah. I might make myself puke here but this where the key is to figuring out how to make people pay attention to you. You can not be just another brick in the wall if you want to win the attention game but this requires effort and hustle, it doesn’t happen by accident. Now if you’ve been saying you’re going to start that __ blog forever but haven’t found the time, get off your ass an execute on that shit. If my experience motivates just one person to take that path and do it right I’ll be happy. Good luck on your journey!
Jacob, nobody makes me LOL like you. In fact, I think this is the only SEO site, and only blog, that guarantees a LOL with every new post. Refreshing honest and direct as usual, especially the headline for this post, which was the biggest chuckle of my day. Thumbs up!
Thanks Chris, waking up fresh, mass coffee, and just letting it roll. Laughter is good, life is good ;-)
Thanks for the post Jacob, really nice to see you sharing some insights into you own blog along side with screen-shots of your Google Analytics’s Account.
Guess you ain’t totally Black Hat as you using good old GA ;)
Shit, this is the ONLY site I use GA on, if that reduces my hat color then so be it.
Lol Dude I suppose you have WMT on here as well =P
Damn, I fucking love reading your shit. Straight to the point, put a few curse words in it and you have a great post. I note the plugins you’re using. Those will come quite handy in the near future. Keep these coming man.
Definitely gotta throw in the curse words, very important for search engines.
JK – What did you use before WP Rocket? Anything?
Currently I’m using Cloudflare with W3TC and it’s okay. I think at some points, it will be the host I’m on but I’m intrigued by the WP Rocket. Seems pretty easy where as W3TC needs YouTube videos to figure out the 900 options you can set that ultimately can break your site.
I had nothing at first then I used wprocket. Yeah w3 isn’t exactly a no brainer to setup unfortunately.
You keep on nailing it man! Might give the “Table of Contents Plus” plugin a try soon.
Thanks dude. Yeah that one is pretty clean for sure, helps on the big posts.
Aha very good as usual. Looks like your fan base loves some good ol cussin!
Regarding the WP migration to another host: This is actually pretty easy, as I’ve learned the hard way and thought it was a pain in the ass too. But found it’s easy if you do it like so.
In a nutshell, you first load that plugin “WP backup” and run that prior to migrating. Save the file to your computer.
Then copy (download) the entire “wp-content” folder to your computer via ftp.
Next, install fresh WP onto new server (host).
Connect to new server via ftp, and delete everything from the new “wp-content”, and then replace with one that you downloaded from initial site.
Then go into phpmyadmin, click on the database, click on “wp-options”, click “Import” at the top and import that file you saved from wp-backup.
Done.
Thanks Rich, that sounds like it would work for sure. I personally had some problems backing up my DB because I was running bbpress. Fortunately I wanted to get rid of the forum so it didn’t matter, this just stands out in my mind as a problem that delayed the migration. I used migrate db pro for it, there is also duplicator plugin which is free and works really well. You run it and grab the installer and zip file which you drop on the new server, create a mysql db and user, then run it. But then again I’ve had problems with this plugin on certain hosts lol. Either way thanks for dropping and I appreciate the info.
Hey Jacob, its crazy cause I have been reading your blog for over a year now and its just now that I stumbled this post: https://www.jacobking.com/seo-assholes (poor me)
Anyway, is the plugin for creating this kind of voting system available? :D
Funny you ask, Robert had considered packaging it and maybe selling it, but it wound up getting put on the back burner.
I follow you because you’re a good marketer and tell it like it is….. keep up the good work.
Dude, lol, you’re the king of writing epic shit. literally every post on this site is baller.
Keep crushing it dude, looking forward to seeing where you take this thing
Nice work Jacob, keeping it real. I’ve been a subscriber for a while, always learn something from your posts. Will check out that table of contents plugin too. Cheers
Hi Jacob,
was a nice morning read; very motivating! I’m one of those lazy as shit wannabe bloggers. I think I have knowledge and experience to share, but I lack the drive to just sit down to it…
Do you think it’s possible to startfresh a blog in “online marketing / seo / blogging” niche nowadays and still succeed? I mean, the niche is pretty saturated at the moment, thousands of people writing about the same over and over. Thousands of “experts” and experts and gurus…
It usually comes to me it would be pretty hard to create something that others don’t have, something unique and of bigger value. All these doubts just put me down and block me from writing.
What would be your strategy if you were starting fresh now? With no recognition at all, just you knowledge at hand. Would you focus on case studies, “ultimate guides” first?
Yeah saturated with thousands of douchebags, it is possible you just need to have something to differentiate you amongst them. It’s a lot of time too, even if you are on the level to compete then you need to put in the time, which might not be worth it if you have other profitable endeavors which require your time.
If I had to do it all over I’d drop some case studies yes, mega link bait, then some big beefy guides def do well if you get em in front of the right eyes. But nothing worse then writing an enormous guide and hearing nothing but crickets after you launch it, so make sure you get the best bang for your buck there. My biggest recommendation would be to figure out your USP and differentiator from all the other morons, then work with that. Way I see it is there is just so much damn noise these days this a crucial part to getting out there.
I’ll soon be doing exactly this (creating an SEO blog), so I guess we’ll find out if it’s possible to succeed in a sea of spammy crap.
If I make it to your SEO assholes list, I’ll know I’ve truly made it.
Well hopefully you can use my experiences to your advantage. Hit me up when you have something up worth reading ;-)
Will do.
The problem is, I might have to copy your style, because I like the shit out of it. So, the question is, do I tone it down and go all PG (PG-13? – who knows? I’m English) or go full pelt and put the profanity on overdrive?
Decisions, decisions.
Yours sincerely,
Jacob King 2.0 (coming soon)
Haha, just be yourself is probably the best route. If the real you is pg-13, then do that. Personally I’m a bit more R rated, probably turns a good chunk of people away, but I don’t really give a fuck about them. I’m just writing like I would speak, at least that’s what I’m attempting when creating these things here called “posts”.
From experience, it’s a bit scary to say fuck and shit in your content because it’s not the norm and you don’t want to do poorly. You want to succeed otherwise why the hell would anyone blog in the first place. But the thing is, for every white hat with a stick up their ass, there is two down to earth SEOs who get a laugh from reading my shit, so I trudge on.
With a new post and email blast, I’ve literally received messages bitching about my “curse words” then got another message 2 seconds later saying how hilarious it was.
Is that a picture of Matt Waldman in your “SEO badass” basement dwellar pic? If so, LMAO.
Haha my boy Robert whipped that shit up, still loling when I see it.
why u alway cussing? hmm u make me angry grrr…
Just kidding.. but I gues thats part of you bad ass image grrr… supprised you dont get a penalty or get hit by some sort of google asshat filter for being a naughty boy!
Fuck off.
Why are you so nervous little boy? Internet hard man. LMFAO
Jacob, you are a Lol one!!!!
Just for this post you have create it , i assume you are the man behind the SEO.
When i watch tour content, the SEO’s force emerge inside me.
Thanks man!
You nailed it once again with such a massive post. Long Live Jacob!!!
Hi Jacob, what about a $9/month with a company like Hostgator?
Well, I don’t think you can look at it like what you get, but more what you need hosting wise. For example, if I were to take my blog here at the current traffic level and put it on Hostgator it would run like shit. That would be dumb as hell.
With a company like HG, you get a bite of the Mcdonalds of hosting. So like Mcdonalds, you have the worst meat and ingredients possible for a human to consume and not die, but it’s cheap and will fill you up.
If I need to rank a spam site this hosting is more than fine, but for something premium with decent traffic you want it to be running properly for that traffic it receives.
Hostgator is the Mcdonalds cheeseburger, Siteground is like the grass fed beef burger with delicious toppings.
Go take your site on hostgator and pop it in here. You’ll be hosting your site with some straight dog shit, 50+ sites sharing the same IP and host.
Hey Jacob
You make me LOL to the point of getting a semi-chubby.
I’m your number one fanboy. Another great post.. Continue to shit, fuck, and fuck shit and use swear words.
Hey Jacob
Long-ass article there.
It;s also nice to see you keep your stuff updated on other posts of yours.
On topic of updates, bluehat has a new post, lol.
Check the link if you guys are lazy.
Ah cool, bout time lol.
heh, if I read another blog with “content is dah Pharaoh and magic happens with only mega uber alles content” I am going to puke out a communist manifesto, and start my own country. Thanks Jacob.
I was about to buy a membership at http://www.blackhatstacks.com/, but I stopped reading at “..over 12 years experience and have generated millions of dollars” lololololol. Didnd’t last 3 seconds in the tab.
Yeah you’re probably better off sticking with the 9-5.
Still a studen’ ma brotha. But yea, still better than claiming what hasn’t been done.
1. If you made millions you wouldn’t be charging such ridiculous amounts.
2. No one alive in this world is dumb enough to expose his/her methods for free nor for 0.01% of what she/he claims $ made.
3. The more in whatever scene, the less for you.
3. I don’t have time to make you this list longer since you already know what I’m talking about obviously.
The content was created by multiple SEOs, and combined we have made several million, yes.
I’ve personally made over a million dollars with SEO, but this is over 5+ years grinding. There is no silver bullet, but a cumulative effort with all the right moving parts gets the job done.
We charge a lot because it’s worth it, the cost of exclusivity.
I heard Moz has a lot of free training. They’ve made gazillions, so they give away all the best training for free. Even their API is free. WOWZA! Unlike active SEO’s who are currently ranking sites amid algo updates. They simply can’t afford, despite their outlandish earnings, to give it all up like Moz. Those Moz folks really know how to rank stuff. DA and PA are also very reliable metrics. Have you heard of Trust Flow? All the rage these days. I just can’t believe all these experienced seo’s trying to sell their knowledge. What a load of crap. After all they’ve made their money. The should just tell us all how it works and we can all be rich. I mean at least if it was free I’d have no risk that way if they suck, I haven’t lost anything, but if I make my millions, I can take all the credit and not have to invest in myself. Don’t even get me stated about college tuition. $40k to learn about bunch of stuff and not even get a job? I was about to sign up and then I realized if they’ve made all the millions, there isn’t any left for me!
Hey Jacob,
Just started my own blog and I’m using the BackWPup plug-in to backup my database files. It’s a pain in the ass, what do you use?
Well allow me to help you relieve that pain in your ass, Vaultpress ftw.
Rule 6 is the toughest rule to conform to. It’s easy to create and design a blog, but when it comes to writing great content that engages readers and helps them, most people suck. This blog is a good example of a blog that doesn’t contain shitty content. Seriously, I enjoyed every single post I’ve read on this blog.
Thanks Charles, like anything you have to put in the work. Put in the work with the actual content and behind the scenes learning SEO, people take notice. Put out some fluff expert roundup bullshit and get bullshit results.
Hi Jacob,
First thank you four your blog, i am a beginner and i am learning a lot on it.
I am little bit surprised in this article because you use google Analytics, i thought that was your number one enemy. So we can use G analytics when there is no backlinks ?
Thanking you in advance for your answer,
Antoine.
Yeah I use it for *this blog, but definitely none of my spam shit. I’m not doing anything manipulative here but blogging and more or less playing by their rules. Blogging about shit they hate…a bit of irony there aye?
Jacob, thanks for your posts, they are amazing, you really make me laugh) But nevertheless your posts are very useful)
Thanks dude, that is the point, so mission accomplished.
duude you make me laugh my ass off whatever I read your blog :D