You shouldn't. My name is Philip and I'm a software engineer. I am not some kind of guru, nor am I an expert in SEO, content marketing, or marketing of any kind. However, I am a decent web developer. This challenge is my first attempt at monetizing, marketing, and growing a site beyond just design and development.
Three reasons:
1. As a kick in the ass. There's nothing more motivating than the possibility of failing publicly.
2. To inspire others. I used to love reading people's case studies or journey threads of their online ventures. It made me think: "If they can do it, so can I." My hope is that someone will follow my challenge and realize that they can do this too.
3. To meet smarter people. I'm hoping that one or two of you smart SEO/content-marketing folks would subscribe and call me out when I say something stupid.
Whether you have a successful online business or have yet to start, you'll get value from learning from my successes and failures.
I have a feeling that I'm going to have to be pretty damn creative to 10x my site in a year. Since this is a case study and I'm actually doing everything in real time, every email will be packed with practical and actionable tactics. Too many of the SEO and content-marketing articles out there talk about strategies so abstractly that it's hard to figure out how to actually apply the advice. This won't be the case here.
Kind of. I'm going to share everything except for the URL (for now). Why? Well my authority is still a fragile little thing and people online can be dicks. I've followed case studies in which the person revealed their site and then soon after got steamrolled by people who straight up copied their entire site. I know none of you will do that, but I'd rather be over-cautious starting out. I do plan on eventually (maybe once I hit $3k/month) revealing my site.
But in the meantime this is what I will be sharing: the niche; all the weekly/monthly stats (including traffic/revenue/costs); the exact keyword research and content marketing strategies I'm using; how I'm building links; my thought process behind everything I'm doing.
And if you want to know more, just respond to one of my weekly emails and I'll most likely answer any questions.