We’re trying something out right now. I’ll not go into detail on everything I’m experimenting with but I’ll disclose the generalities.
I’ve just set up a blog for one of my kids. We’ve repurposed an old, pr5 well established (gov’t and .edu backlinks) children related site for this. In the blog he’s going to do product reviews of things like toys and video games.
The intent? To get free stuff. At his age, that’s worth the work and is very exciting.
He’s writing some sample reviews right now to get the blog primed. After that I’ll show him how to approach toy and game manufacturers with a request for product reviews. Hopefully some of them will respond with some free stuff.
I’m curious to see how well this does. I think there’s some potential since we’re starting with a well established site and it’s very grassroots. What’s more grassroots than a kid reviewing the toys? I think there’s some potential that I may have to delve into social media as well to help him promote this. Not sure I have time to enter that arena, but will consider doing so later. It’s worth noting - this is one of the ways I learn things. Try stuff that’s outside of what I do. I don’t care if I win or fail on a lot of these things, I’m in it to learn. This project may lead me into social media, and area I don’t know anything about. And that may (or may not) have some spinoff in my main line of work.
I remember the first time I experimented. Previously I was too staid to do anything other than mainstream. But near the end of the digitalpoint network (I’ll let you google that - it was a grey hat technique from a few years ago that worked for a while) surge I finally got on board. I bought a large website for the ‘weight’ and bought another business related website to receive the return weight from the network. The end result? I made like $20-$30K in three months for an outlay of $1500. That wet my whistle, that’s for sure.
The network eventually died and I’ve let the sites sit after cleaning the network off. A few years later, I now have a really old directory website and a really old, not bad ranking, business website that I’m going to put back into production later this year or early next. Win win win.
So don’t be afraid to do the same thing. Grab an old domain name and try something goofy on it. What’ve you lost if it flunks? Not much.
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Update roughly a week later. Google loves this site, I’m glad I bought it and repurposed it. Google’s indexing the content the same day. Takes a bit longer to get it ranked, but not much - a few days. For most of my sites I figure a few weeks for the rankings to hit.
For the first review he did, about a week ago, he’s now ranking #4 in Google for the model of the toy. #1 is amazon, #2 is a professional review site, #3 is the manufacturer, and #4 is junior’s site.
Maybe I should’ve kept the domain for myself :).
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