How To Grow Sites Over 100K Without Link Building

In this TL;DW Series (TL;DW – Too Long; Didn’t Watch), we’ll be dissecting into this Niche Pursuits podcast on – How Nick Jordan Grows Sites to Over 100k Organic Views a Month Without Link Building.

I’m a huge fan of Spencer Haws and his Niche Pursuits. Learn tons of great stuff from him and his website. I’m totally hooked to him when he shared his journey of building niche sites from scratch on how he built the sites, the traffic, how he monetize and earnings.

The most striking indelible aha moment was over the months he was sharing all these, even for tier-1 guru-level expert level like him, there was literally no results – in terms of traffic and earnings; as a matter of fact, it’s miserably trickling … for like 6-9 months!

That’s when I realised that even if you do it all RIGHT ie. content generation, SEO … and so on, it take time for Google to love you before you see the (exponential) growth of your traffic and monetization. And from my further research, that period could be sometime between 6 months to 2 years.

Now, if you intend to start a website and expect money to roll in next month – this wishful hope is not realistic. It is not difficult to start a website or blog, but it is hard to maintain and persist when one see literally zero results in months. In my opinion, most people would have gave up within 3 months seeing their efforts having null payoff – why I know? Because I too gave up many websites and online projects along the way. (Sidetrack: I’m restarting and restructuring my entire SYSTEM; do join me in a journey to build a portfolio of online businesses to 5-figure side income)

Back to this TL;DW series, I’m also a subscriber of Niche Pursuits YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/@niche-pursuits – as an avid fan, I followed most of its podcasts interviewing many successful bloggers and webpreneurs, generously sharing the strategies and techniques on how they built successful websites.

But there is a problem.

While watching all those podcasts and videos, many of them are like 30-minute to an hour. I’m not sure about you but though I enjoyed and learnt a lot from such lengthy informational videos, I’ve a hard time to assimilating the gists and golden nuggets of them, hence, hard to model and execute them into own projects.

That’s why I’m creating this TL;DW Series to extract the “executive summary” out of these videos so as to make them more digestible and actionable.

So let’s dive into our very first TL;DW :

Contents hide

1 Title

1.1 How Nick Jordan Grows Sites to Over 100k Organic Views a Month Without Link BuildingVideo Length : 46-min 11-sec

2 Main character

2.1 Nick Jordan with Workello.com (content distribution; writers hiring)

3 TL;DW Executive Summary

4 TL;DW version @ YouTube

Title

How Nick Jordan Grows Sites to Over 100k Organic Views a Month Without Link Building

Video Length : 46-min 11-sec

Main character

Nick Jordan with Workello.com (content distribution; writers hiring)

TL;DW Executive Summary

Many factors in SEO but the one working for him is – content velocity!
We are talking about 800 articles a month for a website – that’s content at scale!
Keyword research process – keyword organization/structuring ie. when to merge keywords into one article etc.
An advantage of winning via authority by producing large volume of content is you can focus less in backlinking and internal linking.
It is important to create content centered around topical relevance; even for one who can’t pump out massive content ie. just 20 articles monthly, creating topical relevance is a must to build niche authority.
The need of having a framework around hiring (lots of) writers; it is important to start building your team of (good) writers.
Currently have 45 people in the team (with ~15 editors/seniors to ensure content quality); reiterated on the importance of hiring the right team. Gave an example that they test and evaluate 200 at one go and only select the best out of them.
Before this, he was employee #8 in a bootstrapped company of 200 people … left his cushy tech job … decided to start on his own after he took his first project from zero to 100k .. in 13 months; even outrank big sites like Shopify and Instagram.
Despite producing content at scale, they have relentless focus on content quality; hence, the affordance to focus less on backlinks. Content quality drives ranking (and traffic). He shared an example of a 30-page website being able to be authoritative with this quality content concept.
Content publishing in a business model to make your visitors/customers happy … with a lot of good relevant content.
Shared on keyword grouping tools like https://keywordchef.com/, https://keywordcupid.com/ and https://contentdistribution.com/keyword-grouping-tool/ (Cluster AI).
It is important to structure the articles with appropriates H2s ie. whether to combine H2s to create a “mega” article or separate them for niched down articles.
Advice : Learn your mistakes along the way; continue to try.
Opinion on AI tools – he thinks that AI content is best used for productivity enablement.
TL;DR keywords : content velocity, content at scale, topical relevance building authority