Goals for Project Alpha

Goals for project alpha

Most SEO’ers think the amount of (organic) visitors are really important. I, however, don’t agree. More important to me is the value the visitors are bringing in.

If I could choose between a website with 300 visitors a month that generates € 1000 / month or a website with 15.000 visitors a month that generates only € 300 / month… Well, I would know what website I’d prefer.

Project Alpha will be an authority site. That means, unlike niche websites, it has huge potential that isn’t limited to a specific segment. With huge potential I’m talking about well over € 10.000 per month.

If I would be able to get Project Alpha make a consistent € 300/month after one year, I’d be happy with that. The ultimate goal though is to take this authority website to at least a consistent € 3.000/month and I’m convinced that this should be achievable after about 18 months.

I could fastforward my earnings if I would work with an expired domain. However, I prefer to work with a fresh, new and brandable domain name.

By the time this website hits €3.000/month, I’ll decide if I’ll keep the website in my portfolio to grow it further, or sell it. If I decide to sell, with the current multiples offered in the market, I should get paid between 70k and 100k.

As my time is limited, I won’t be doing all of the work myself. I’ll have to find a good ratio of doing things myself and outsourcing. Because next to limited time, my budget has it’s limits too 😉

Things I’ll do myself nonetheless:

  • Niche research
  • Keyword research
  • Website set-up
  • Persona creation (incl. social media profiles)
  • Blog/forum comments
  • Publish articles/pages
  • On-page optimalisation

Things I might consider to outsource:

  • Content creation
  • Basic graphical work (logo, social media headers …)
  • Outreach (I won’t do outreach myself but buy Fiverr gigs, guest post services, directory links etc)
  • Once the website starts to generate some money I might eventually hire a VA (Virtual Assistant) to do research, make briefings and do some editing work

Of course, I still have to keep some budget for paid links. Depending on the rankings I get, I’ll decide to put in more budget in linkbuilding or content creation. The first months though I’ll definitely focus on content.

All this doesn’t mean I won’t be writing any of the content myself. Since it’s not always that easy to find someone or a service that can produce some decent content for a reasonable price in foreign languages, and I sometimes put in more time to make a decent briefing and correct it afterwards than to write the content myself, writing the content myself is sometimes the easiest option.

For Project Alpha, I’d like to focus on the Netherlands with a .nl tld.. As the northern part of Belgium and Netherlands have the same language, I can consider to copy the website to a .be tld and use href lang tags. That will depend on the amount of organic traction this project gets.