Long Term Native Strategy (7)

Hi, everyone. I've been running native since April of 2020. I started my native journey with a course on Udemy and have not looked back since. My previous follow along is called "Kill it or continue?". I've run offers in many verticals and on many networks. I've struggled and have learned a lot of lessons over the last 8-9 months. It has not been cheap, but it's been worth it. I have not been unable to get anything to work on a consistent basis, yet.

A few months back, I watched the AWA 2019 replay with Anthony Sarandrea and a seed was planted. In that video Anthony discusses the idea of building long term customers from your traffic rather than one time sales. As I've meditated over the months on what Anthony was trying to say, I realized that this is exactly what has been missing from my native strategy.

I've spent thousands and thousands of dollars over the last 8-9 months on traffic and I have nothing long term to show for it. I've given brands and products plenty of recognition with millions upon millions of impressions and I've provided networks with valuable customer data - all while little to no benefit on my part besides a commission here and there.

With this being said, I've decided to launch a website around an affinity in which I can collect customer data and build a long term customer base. I've hired writers and we are in the process of fleshing out the website with content at the moment. My goal is to fill the website with as much value as possible. I will then use native to drive traffic to my site and FIRST focus on collecting user data and SECOND on showing them an offer that is relevant within the affinity. If the traffic does not convert on the first interaction, that is ok.

This is a long term play. My goal is to build trust and authority within the niche I'm operating. I'm looking to build long term customers and brand equity. How nice does it sound to build a real, sellable asset while running your traffic?

I love STM and would love nothing more than to bring you all along my journey. Thanks for reading.

Love it man!

I think your perspective is spot on!

We are trying something very similar

Extremely excited to see how things go for you and watch the follow along progress!

I'm preparing a website myself, right now I had enough of promoting just others peoples brands as well

It's funny how it all goes in circles... building websites and working with my audience for the long terms, has been how I started in the online business in the first place. Then when google made it more complicated to get organic traffic, I switched to the paid model and performance campaigns. And now I feel like I need to get back to the basics and start building something that would be MINE

Looking forward to your journey!

I started this project at the beginning of this month. No... it was not a New Year's Resolution lol. I wanted to write an update and explain what I've accomplished so far and the lessons I've learned.

I started off by picking a niche that I know intimately. I then began brainstorming a domain name for the site. I asked some people close to me to come up with some ideas and I ended up going with one of their ideas. I registered the domain name and got it set up with my hosting. I installed Wordpress and decided to purchase a theme. I really want this to look professional and not like some "fly by night" affiliate site. I went with the Newspaper X theme. Very worth the purchase (no this is not sponsored lol).

Once I set up the web site and had the shell - I decided it was time to flesh out the website with some VALUABLE, ORIGINAL content. I do not have the patience to sit down and flesh out an entire site with written content. I decided I was going to outsource the content writing. This is where the first "real" lesson learning began. I went to Fiverr and started to hire random writers who advertised "blog writing". I rapidly hired around 5 writers with all different price ranges and countries of origin. I figured this would be a good way to see what quality I could live with and what the best "bang" for my buck would be. I quickly discovered that just because something is advertised as original, passes a plagiarism test and has keywords does not mean it is readable, lol. There are plenty of services on Fiverr that are $5 and get 500 - 1,000 words, but they will require so much editing on your behalf that it makes it not worth doing in the first place. I also hired someone who was $30 per 500 words and I wasn't really impressed with that either. I hired on all ends of the spectrum. I finally found someone who has done an incredible job and she has received all of the projects since. She does it for a super reasonable price, writes amazing quality content, finds images, has quick delivery and great communication. I will continue to buy from her as long as she is in business. I've taken these articles and have begun adding them to the website and interchanging the pictures and formatting of the site. Then I've had my girlfriend who has her Master's Degree in English read through an edit. Lucky me! We are about to hit 20 articles. I do not want to begin driving traffic to the site until there is plenty of valuable content.

My friend is a professional graphic designer so he gave me the hookup on a great logo and favicon.

After having all of this content written, I decided it was probably a good idea to start doing some keyword research . If I'm going to run native traffic I might as well get some SEO traffic for free if it won't really take any additional effort on my part. I'm of the philosophy of taking action now and allowing the details to work themself out with time. I've been on the other end where you wait for all of the details to get figured out first and it's a sucky place to be stuck. I know keyword research should've been done first, but we have to start somewhere. I hired someone to do keyword research for me and to my surprise a lot of the keywords were already things we were targeting. That's the beautiful thing about operating in a niche that you know intimately! There were also some keywords that we have not yet targeted that I will have my writer write about.

Lastly, I registered a new LLC for this site in the state of Wyoming. This is also not sponsored, but I used a services for Northwest Registered Agent and I thought the concept was pretty cool. They let you pay monthly for the state fees instead of everything up front and they do everything for you; Articles, Operating Agreement, EIN, etc.

I still work a full time 8am - 5pm job so I have the advantage of having money to spend on things rather than time at this moment so I'm doing everything I can to outsource as much as possible. My goal is to be the captain. There are people out there that are better than me at most things; writing, graphic design, SEO, content strategy, etc. If you've ever read Think & Grow Rich you know that POWER is simply ORGANIZED EFFORT, and ORGANIZED EFFORT comes from creating a MASTER MIND in which you surround yourself with people that are the best at what they do and you steer the ship.

I know this was a very long post and if you've made it this far, thank you. I'm not sure how often I'm going to update this thread, but I'll try to make it any time there is something significant to actually update on OR if I have any questions.

Originally Posted by onticstein

I started this project at the beginning of this month. No... it was not a New Year's Resolution lol. I wanted to write an update and explain what I've accomplished so far and the lessons I've learned.

I started off by picking a niche that I know intimately. I then began brainstorming a domain name for the site. I asked some people close to me to come up with some ideas and I ended up going with one of their ideas. I registered the domain name and got it set up with my hosting. I installed Wordpress and decided to purchase a theme. I really want this to look professional and not like some "fly by night" affiliate site. I went with the Newspaper X theme. Very worth the purchase (no this is not sponsored lol).

Once I set up the web site and had the shell - I decided it was time to flesh out the website with some VALUABLE, ORIGINAL content. I do not have the patience to sit down and flesh out an entire site with written content. I decided I was going to outsource the content writing. This is where the first "real" lesson learning began. I went to Fiverr and started to hire random writers who advertised "blog writing". I rapidly hired around 5 writers with all different price ranges and countries of origin. I figured this would be a good way to see what quality I could live with and what the best "bang" for my buck would be. I quickly discovered that just because something is advertised as original, passes a plagiarism test and has keywords does not mean it is readable, lol. There are plenty of services on Fiverr that are $5 and get 500 - 1,000 words, but they will require so much editing on your behalf that it makes it not worth doing in the first place. I also hired someone who was $30 per 500 words and I wasn't really impressed with that either. I hired on all ends of the spectrum. I finally found someone who has done an incredible job and she has received all of the projects since. She does it for a super reasonable price, writes amazing quality content, finds images, has quick delivery and great communication. I will continue to buy from her as long as she is in business. I've taken these articles and have begun adding them to the website and interchanging the pictures and formatting of the site. Then I've had my girlfriend who has her Master's Degree in English read through an edit. Lucky me! We are about to hit 20 articles. I do not want to begin driving traffic to the site until there is plenty of valuable content.

My friend is a professional graphic designer so he gave me the hookup on a great logo and favicon.

After having all of this content written, I decided it was probably a good idea to start doing some keyword research . If I'm going to run native traffic I might as well get some SEO traffic for free if it won't really take any additional effort on my part. I'm of the philosophy of taking action now and allowing the details to work themself out with time. I've been on the other end where you wait for all of the details to get figured out first and it's a sucky place to be stuck. I know keyword research should've been done first, but we have to start somewhere. I hired someone to do keyword research for me and to my surprise a lot of the keywords were already things we were targeting. That's the beautiful thing about operating in a niche that you know intimately! There were also some keywords that we have not yet targeted that I will have my writer write about.

Lastly, I registered a new LLC for this site in the state of Wyoming. This is also not sponsored, but I used a services for Northwest Registered Agent and I thought the concept was pretty cool. They let you pay monthly for the state fees instead of everything up front and they do everything for you; Articles, Operating Agreement, EIN, etc.

I still work a full time 8am - 5pm job so I have the advantage of having money to spend on things rather than time at this moment so I'm doing everything I can to outsource as much as possible. My goal is to be the captain. There are people out there that are better than me at most things; writing, graphic design, SEO, content strategy, etc. If you've ever read Think & Grow Rich you know that POWER is simply ORGANIZED EFFORT, and ORGANIZED EFFORT comes from creating a MASTER MIND in which you surround yourself with people that are the best at what they do and you steer the ship.

I know this was a very long post and if you've made it this far, thank you. I'm not sure how often I'm going to update this thread, but I'll try to make it any time there is something significant to actually update on OR if I have any questions.

Thanks for the update

Originally Posted by matuloo

Thanks for the update



Do not lot her disappear! Good and reasonably priced writers are so hard to come by

Really looking forward to what you are building here, would you share the website once ready?

I'm in the middle of launching my site too... WP and theme all set, some content uploaded, more in the production (we shoot videos so it's fucking time consuming)... I need to look at some good KW research tools, for now it seems like ahrefs is the way to go. Several people recommended them to me already. I did the same mistake as you did, by not doing KW research upfront but since I'm also targeting a niche/vertical I love, the KWs should be in the text naturally

Once I'm fully online, I will likely write a post about it and post it here on the forum, maybe some members can learn a few things from that.