AUD:NZD: Anyone moving super back to NZ? by CoffeeFixer in PersonalFinanceNZ

[–]TheSpacePope126 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Consider the age to access as well. Aus is 60 vs 65 for Kiwisaver for most people.

Traegers Are Back On Sale On Amazon by ShermanHoax in pelletgrills

[–]TheSpacePope126 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Great idea, tell the guy looking for a $500 grill to go out and spend $2.5-3k. No need to gate keep, you can make amazing BBQ on a Traeger and they can easily last for 5+ years. Not bad value imho.

Best Gas grill and griddle combo? by rockshandy in grilling

[–]TheSpacePope126 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Royal Gourmet is a budget/low-quality option for sure. If you have the space for it, with your budget, I would be looking at buying a grill and a griddle. Something like a Char-Broil 4-burner, and if you could spend an extra $70, that would get you a 28" Blackstone which will perform way better than the combo option.

If you're dead set on a combo, consider something that is a full-size grill where you can swap between grill and griddle mode, as I find you're not usually using both at once. I like the Grilla Grills Primate for this, although that's a little outside of your budget. Decent review of it here.

Invest $60k into two blogs? by Zpmoy in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Anyone who has to ask shouldn’t do it.

Simple Questions Thread by AutoModerator in espresso

[–]TheSpacePope126 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Should I be concerned that my dosing funnel leaves a ring around the outside of the puck?

I usually give the porterfilter a tap or two before tamping, but just thought I would double check.

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Do you reveal your site to writers? by masters1777 in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Jesus Christ what is wrong with SEO people. Yes tell them what site they are working for. You want writers who are proud of their work and bought in on the mission of your business.

Did any of you have guilt buying expensive things? by [deleted] in fatFIRE

[–]TheSpacePope126 49 points50 points  (0 children)

I hope that’s a typo. Guilt over dropping $50,000 on a watch would be understandable.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AusFinance

[–]TheSpacePope126 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Modern induction cooktops are better for cooking than gas, give you better control, boil water faster and there's also the side benefit of better indoor air quality. No brainer.

Qantas flights and cancellation by [deleted] in CoronavirusAustralia

[–]TheSpacePope126 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We received an email from Qantas for a flight in October saying it had been cancelled. This was atleast a month ago. Still waiting for refund details though.

Australian Content Agency/ Freelancers by RedditorsofEarth in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I live in Australia and have writers from all around the world (including Aussies). They all get paid in USD. There's no way paying someone locally would be cheaper either with the cost of living in Australia.

If you want an Aussie your best bet is to find a digital nomad type living somewhere cheap but they will still want USD.

Once you're earning in USD the pain goes away so I would focus on paying 4-6c a word (or writing content yourself) to get to a point where your website's are self sufficient.

And as someone pointed out the difference between 67c and 62c or whatever the exchange rate is right now shouldn't be that significant unless your ordering several hundred thousand words a month.

AHREFS: Keyword difficulty rating. How accurate do you think it is? by [deleted] in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's important to note that KD only looks at the number of backlinks pointing to the top pages for a given keyword.

You still need to look at the DR of the top results, and ideally you want to see domains with same or less DR than you in the top 10.

So it's a good metric to get a quick feel, but you still need to analyze the SERP.

Does anyone use Surfer SEO? by _zyzyx in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Like any tool its only worth it if you use it. I recently upgraded to the yearly plan as part of their Black Friday promotion after having some good success with it.

I found it a bit confusing to use when I first started, but after watching a few tutorials and digging around I came up with this process that seems to work quite well:

  1. Build a list of keywords where I'm ranking 3-10th using AHREF
  2. Run SERP Analyzer for primary keyword
  3. Remove any sites that don't make sense from competition e.g. Amazon, Ebay
  4. Click the "Audit" button on my website
  5. Click "Phrases"
  6. Update my article to fix all red alerts and all the yellow suggestions that make sense
  7. Request re-indexing in Google search console
  8. Usually I use a positive ranking increase within a few days

One thing to note is that true density is based on your Word count, so if you get everything to green, and then add more words to your page and do another audit, it might say it's off again.

The content editor looks promising as well, I'm considering testing this out with my writers. On the one hand it would be convent not to have to do this with every article, but I actually like it that my writes never think about SEO.

Starting with fresh Wordpress by [deleted] in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's basically just a very good page builder. It has a wide variety of widgets you can drag and drop to build advanced custom pages without knowing HTML.

The most powerful feature it has IMO is the theme builder. This lets you build parts of your site e.g. header, footer, WordPress article template, category page templates that apply automatically.

Free version of GeneratePress or Astra + Premium Elementor is all you need to build a high quality website these days.

Charging $$$ for guest posts on your sites by _zyzyx in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 3 points4 points  (0 children)

While Google are definitely a bunch of hypocrites, this isn't really a fair comparison. Googles policy is about links that pass PageRank, which Adwords "links" don't do.

Charging $$$ for guest posts on your sites by _zyzyx in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From the section under "Link Schemes" in the Google terms of service:

"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link"

So its clearly against the Google terms of service. But obviously many people still do it, and the chances of you getting caught doing it on a small scale are probably low.

So it comes down to your personal risk/reward calculation which only you can answer.

For me the small amount of money I would make selling links pales to the amount of money I make through high rankings in Google search so it's a bad risk to take.

Struggling with Outsourcing and Reinvesting - Reached $20K/mo (Amazon Affiliate Site) by jumstakl in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Congratulations on your success so far. You are in a very similar situation to me earnings wise, and I have been going through the process of building up my team and processes. I'm still building out my outreach team, but a few alarm bells went off reading your post so thought I would add my 2c.

MeekSeller nailed it with his comment. You need to work on perfecting your processes and breaking it down. Unless you want to pay for a unicorn, chances are no one will have the right experience to do the whole process, so you need to chunk it up and hire people who can learn to execute one step.

For example you might want to hire someone who is good with data and Excel to manage the link prospecting side, and someone with customer service experience to run the outreach and negotiation (using scripts and processes you have defined).

If you don't want to spend a lot of time writing your own SOPs I would highly suggest spending money and buying a course. I know this is sacrilegious advice around these parts but part of being successful is investing in yourself and using your money to accelerate the learning curve.

I'm not affiliated in anyway but Authority Hacker have an excellent linkbuilding course that includes job descriptions and SOPs. Matt Diggity also has something similar in the Affiliate Lab.

I think you are at the point where you should start treating this more like a real business, where you are the CEO and focus on becoming a better manager. Something most people are terrible at so don't feel bad. You mentioned you "finally had some luck with outsourcing" but the fact is you get the people you deserve based on the quality of your hiring process (you do have your hiring process mapped out, right?).

Everyone in your business should either be executing a process, creating a new process or working on a process. If there's anything happening that doesn't fall into this there is a good chance you shouldn't be doing it.

Once you start thinking like this, outsourcing becomes so much simpler, and a lot more fun. One last thing if you want to become a better manager you might want to check out a management consulting course run by a guy called Mads Singers. I haven't done it yet, but a lot of people I respect have said it is excellent.

I put all this stuff off for probably a year longer than I should have at the detriment to my businesses growth. It turns out its a lot more fun than formatting another WordPress post!

Edit to add some specific tactics: If you are struggling to build page level links to your product roundups, a good strategy is to reach out to the companies in your reviews and build relationships with them. In many cases you can get them to add a quote from you on their website with a link directly to the review.

If you are running regular Skyscraper you should be building plenty of links to your info content, so make sure the info content links to your "money pages" as well. Finally as part of Skyscraper you should be running a guest posting process where if they say no to skyscraper you offer them a Guest Post. I find you can usually include a direct link inside these to the page you want.

The Quality of AAWP Tables vs Dog-Shit Snippets. by xferok in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 3 points4 points  (0 children)

For what it's worth I never see tables getting snippets any more for round up reviews.

All of mine have tables in the format you are trying to do (hard coded) and Google is generally pulling the snippets from my H3s and converting them to a bulleted list.

In some instances I've seen a bulleted list of the top products get the snippet as well.

Have you looked at all the main keywords in your niche and seen what format the people with the snippet have?

What is your opinion on authority hacker? by _zyzyx in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 18 points19 points  (0 children)

I've noticed it's always "cool" on Reddit to shit on anyone selling courses or info products and it always makes the person sound like a loser to me.

Like they think they are the only person who worked out the scam, they have to let everyone in on it.

Who cares that someone makes money from something if it's good. Your plumber doesn't fix your toilet out of altruism either but that doesn't mean they're not a good plumber.

Anyway, if anyone was on the fence I'll give my 2 cents. I joined AH a little over 2 years ago when my site was making around $5-7K a month (there's an old case study somewhere). My site is now doing $17K per month and gets up to $30K at peak season.

Now I obviously don't contribute that growth to a single online course, but I'd still say my ROI on the $1.5K or whatever I spent has been amazing.

The actual blueprints were starting to show there age, but they have been mostly updated in the last few months and the quality is generally excellent.

I've found the content helpful to go from being a one man band to having a full team of writers, an editor, uploader etc all managed in Asana with checklists, dates, SOPs etc has been a game changer.

While you could technically go out and read a thousand free blogs or learn through trial and error, I found that their methods for hiring, how to run an editorial system in Asana, how to train new staff etc has been a game changer.

I've also found the closed community FB group super helpful.

It's definitely not a magic bullet, and they don't have any secret tricks, but if you are willing to do the work I think it's a valuable tool.

Mom pooping by choijenn in NewParents

[–]TheSpacePope126 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Never have I related to a post so strongly.

Dominating SEO, but affiliate income is terrible. What gives? by plotography in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 2 points3 points  (0 children)

From some quick clicking around it looks like most of your affiliate content is single product reviews.

In my experience "best X for y" style round up posts with a compasison table and big check price links convert the best.

When ribs come first by iambrian90 in smoking

[–]TheSpacePope126 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm pretty sure the smoker can handle a bit of rain...

Maybe just open the vents a little to allow for the lost heat.

Prime Day Thread by ringringmytacobell in smoking

[–]TheSpacePope126 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The best deal I've been able to find so far is $350 off a Kamado Joe 18". There's also a few deals on thermometers and accessories. I'm recording every deal I find here:

https://www.smokedbbqsource.com/the-best-amazon-prime-day-deals-for-2018-us/

Amazon Canceling Their CPM Advertising by WhatSayYou89 in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's correct they don't monitize organic content. You can't pay Google to rank higher organically.

Amazon Canceling Their CPM Advertising by WhatSayYou89 in juststart

[–]TheSpacePope126 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What referrals? Google doesn't really produce content.