At my first corporate job, I was miserably sitting at my desk, as my first website milaonsupplements.com got banned from the hosting company (back then, it was Weebly).
Yes, Weebly banned my account, and I had no access to the backend of my website, contacts, content, etc.
Back then, I was in a team with a brilliant marketing start-up guy with a successful exit. He saw my moody look, and he politely asked if there was something wrong.
I shared with him that my website got banned from the hosting platform. I have basically lost all of my work for the past two years.
I clearly remember how he looked at me, and with a very smooth, encouraging voice, he told me:
"Mila…Mila…if you haven't been banned from everywhere; it means that you haven't tried hard enough for your dream."
Those words stung me like a mother bee.
Later in the afternoon, that same day, I read Weebly's TAC policy, found their weak spot, and told them that I hadn't violated anything according to their TAC policy. I pointed out all the reasons I think they are wrong, and in 2 hours, they agreed to give me back access to my websites.
The moral of the story: don't be afraid to f*cked things up; just make sure that you find a way to fix things and move on quickly.
I learned that life doesn't tolerate two things: half-hearted things and self-pitying people.
Okay, now, let's see where I am with my semi-public projects.
These are the stats I reported on Twitter two weeks ago.
From the screenshot above, you can see that this website has 54 referring domains. They are all naturally acquired. I haven't built a single one. You can tell that from the URL rank - it is higher than the domain rank. Usually, such a difference means that more links were built to the internal pages instead of the root domain.
Naturally, people link back to informative posts, not to your root domain. However, when you actively build links, you will also link to your root domain.
At the time of this screenshot, the website had 20 articles published in three silos.
Here is how I plan to grow this website:
First, I will work in batches. Working in batches is one of the best things that Kanban teaches you.
How's that? Through quick feedback loop.
Here is an example: I want to order 100 articles. I make the order from one platform. However, not only they delayed my order, but the quality of the content is so bad that I have to edit every article.
If I have ordered these articles in small batches of 10, I would have seen in the first batch of 10 that the quality isn't right.
So instead of editing 100 articles, I will have to edit only 10.
Also, the time to see that the agency doesn't hold up to a higher standard will be 10 times shorter for the small batch of 10 articles. You don't have to see 100 low-quality articles in a batch to understand that a given service isn't right.
- Content - following the example above, I am ordering five articles in a single batch from two different platforms. When the articles are ready, I upload, edit, and optimize [fanatically] them. Note that I wait for all articles to be completed before starting that work. Why? Because I batch similar work. It is more productive, you are in a state of flow, and you don't have to switch work context.
- Link building - once I finish uploading a whole silo of articles, I will start a link building campaign. I will use the following methods:
- Targeted guest post outreach
- HARO
- Skyscraper method
I will neatly gather all this information in a free course format, so you can have a better timeline for each week about the work I did and the results itself.
Experiments In-Progress
1) I've implemented Brian Dean's recommendations to embed videos on blog posts in order to improve UX signals. I've embedded videos on one long-format article to see if this will improve that blog post's rankings.
2) I've implemented schema and structured data markups on all articles. Let's see if this will help my website to gain some "zero" positions in the SERP.
I will let you know how these two experiments are going in at least two weeks.
Off-topic
The weather in Sofia is a bit cold and rainy, but I will go biking through the city after I hit the send button. I cannot stress out how important it is to eat good food and stay active during solopreneurship (and in general).
Don't neglect your health. If you haven't moved today, go outside, walk, bike, and breathe.
Books I Am Reading
- Currently, I am re-reading Grit by Angela Duckworth. You can see lots of excerpts from the book if you follow me on Twitter or Instagram. I bet that you will enjoy it! It is indeed gritty :)
Okay, I am hitting the send button and disappearing from here :)
Own your future, Friends!
Mila 💌
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