I'm starting a new AI content site from scratch (day 1 progress)

You may have heard about Spencer Haws’ new AI content site challenge. If not, then sign up for his community to read all the details. That’ll get you up to speed.

I joined the challenge yesterday.

If you want in, there’s still time to join. The application window will close sometime tomorrow (Friday) according to his email yesterday:

The kickoff call is at 10am PST which means applications will likely close soon after. So there’s not much time left.

Anyway, yesterday was the official first day of the challenge, where competitors could register their domains and start working on their sites. And that’s exactly what I did.

More details:

Niche Selection

I chose a niche I’m interested in that also is great for AI content. I plan to reveal the niche (and maybe even my URL) down the road, but for now I’ll just say it’s one of the niches listed in Curated Niches.

It was nice to see Matt, a fellow competitor, also used Curated Niches for this challenge:

I list a few niches in Curated Niches that are perfect for AI content, so I think anyone who has Curated Niches has an “unfair” advantage in this challenge. I could be wrong and of course I’m biased cause it’s my product, but it’ll definitely be interesting to see how it all shakes out in the end!

Domain Registration

I registered my domain yesterday. I tried using ChatGPT with the Domain Finder AI plugin to find available domains in my niche, but I didn’t care for any of the suggestions.

I ended up just thinking of domain ideas on my own and checking their availability using Instant Domain Search (I love that tool). I found one pretty quickly that was so good, I could hardly believe it was available!

Action Plan

Rather than just winging it, I decided to follow an action plan for my new site. I also thought of a bunch of unique experiments to try on my site, and noted those down so I don’t forget them in the fog of war that this challenge will be.

A few items from my action plan:

• Loosely follow the SEO Avalanche technique.

• Front-load the site with high-quality articles before it gets indexed (site quality at first index is anecdotally very important - see here).

• Ensure publication velocity slowly increases over time to encourage increased crawl frequency (ok ok. In simple English, an example of this would be publishing one article a day, increasing to two a day a month later, then three a day another month later, and so on in order to encourage Googlebot to come back and crawl the site more often).

• Start an email list right away so I’m not 100% reliant on search engine traffic.

• Add more features to the site so it’s not just a pure content site. In the age of AI, it’s more important than ever before to build a BRAND and have a REASON for people to visit your site (simply ranking in Google doesn’t count as a reason).

Keyword Research

First, I found a few low-domain authority sites in my niche.

Then, I gathered all the keywords they rank in the top 10 for. This amounted to almost 3,000 keywords.

Next, I cleaned out irrelevant keywords using ChatGPT (Advanced Data Analysis).

Next, I uploaded the list to lowfruits and analyzed the keywords (there were some absolute GEMS as you can see):

Lastly, I exported the list and scored the keywords based on likelihood to rank on a brand new site using a proprietary keyword scoring calculation I recently made with the help of ChatGPT. 😎

I only need to cluster them now, which I’ll likely do with the help of ChatGPT Advanced Data Analysis.

All told, I’ve got around 2,500 potential keywords to target, many of which are uncompetitive.

Prompt Engineering

I’m using ChatGPT to create the content, at least for now.

I tried a few AI writers, but they didn’t work for the very specific content format I plan to publish.

AI writers are great for most use cases, but in this situation I had to make a custom prompt to get my desired output. So, ChatGPT it is.

The prompt I came up with is nearly 1,000 words long and took several hours to create. But it works like a charm! I can now create a complete 1,000+ word article that follows my template to a T in less than a minute using ChatGPT.

Whew!

That was day one. I don’t usually have that much time on my hands though with running Curated Keywords and managing a few other niche sites.

But I’m very competitive, so I’ll definitely be doing my best to win in the limited time I have.

I’m also competing in the other challenge, "Growing an EXISTING Site with AI Content”.

For that challenge, I’ll be growing the site I started in 2021 as an AI content experiment. I don’t expect to come anywhere close to winning that one, which is fine. I just want a kick in the behind to grow that site as much as possible.

A new idea…

I’ve had this idea floating around in my head for the last couple months and wanted to share it with y’all to get some feedback.

Should I start a premium community where I:

• Set up a Discord or something for members to ask questions, share strategies and learnings, etc.

• Share all the AI prompts I use for niche sites/SEO

• Share more niche and keyword ideas

• Reveal ALL my strategies AND the URL to the site I’m building for this challenge

• Will be available to answer any questions, take a look at peoples’ sites and give feedback, etc.

I’m thinking the price would be $15/mo or $150/year. Is that something you would pay for if I launched it?

If you have any thoughts on the community idea, please reply and let me know! I’d really love your feedback.

Thanks!

Ian

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