One of the more grey hat things I have been looking at is extracting keyword data from Facebook Groups.

The basic process is as follows:

• Scrape all of the post titels from a relevant Facebook group
• Export all of the posts to an Excel file
• Do topic clustering

By doing this, you are able to get a pretty decent amount of nice, natural-language queries.

The trick here is using an AI-based scraper that will get the job done in a storm.

I have now decided on an extremely simple content strategy for my website.

I have five basic building blocks from an SEO point of view.

Comparison of products

These are my money pages. Goal: money

Guides

These will be extremely in-depth guides written by trustworthy authorities. I will make these pages the best evergreen content on the subject, period. Goal: traffic

Calculators

I will make sure these are the best calculators, period. Goal: backlinks

Press releases

Here I will put up entertaining, interesting and immediately useful articles. Goal: press coverage

This is extremely simple but sometimes simple works.

For some reason I am too busy to find out Semrush has decided not to show competitor backlink data by pages.

I needed this data for aroung a hundred pages so here is what I did:

• Show all the backlink data on screen
• Pasting the page data into Notepad
• Organizing lines of data into columns

To get the lines of data into columns, I used the Excel formula for OFFSET. I am in a really weird locale so for me the formula is =OFFSET($A$1;(ROW(A1)*6)-1;0). Here the multiplies is the nth row I wanna put into column. The -1 tells me which is my starting line (-6 for first row, -5 for second row etc.)

I also needed to do some trick to manage the automatic formatting of data like 5.45 into a date. I did a manual replace where I replaced all commas and dots in the raw text file with a placeholder. I then did a search and replace for them when they were neatly in columns.

To finish off my data, I sorted it by an index that was (amount of backlinks / maximum backlink) * (amount of traffic / maximum traffic). This gave me a neat way to see where the competitor is extremely strong.

Competitor backlink analysis

Yesterday I did some analysis of the links my organic competitors have. The competitors had very few linking domains in general. As for the links that I could find:

• influencer marketing links
• dofollow-links from content marketing campaigns
• a surprising amount of links from basic comment spamming

I could also see how some competitors had built their own PBN. I can see how some of these links might generate some traffic. Others, not so much.

Content strategy for SEO

The second and more interesting thing I looked into were strategies for content marketing.

My main ideas from this process are:

• I have mostly gotten links and traffic to blog posts where I have either made a long-form guide or done the skyscraper method of making something better and more thoroughly than anyone else
• I could definitely go for the “stats and data” approach. I read a ton of research and I should probably incorporate this into my posts. For example, I love Vanguard white papers.
• One more thing I understood is that as people read things on mobile, I have to get them to their goal as fast as possible.

I was also looking into the general strategies of producing content. The strategies I saw were:

• Find your own tilt. I love how Mr. Money Mustache has done this in the personal finance space. He has found his own tilt and then produces content around this.
• Minimal content for maximum effect. This is kind of similar in that you will try to be really careful of what you write.
• Skyscraper method. This is a very opportunistic way of content production where you do better what is known to generate backlinks.
• Pillars and clusters. In this method, you try to produce content around a semantic map instead of keywords per se. The idea is that one long-form content could catch multiple keywords.
• Keyword-based hierarchical exact match. Here you are really going for a clear search intent behind a keyword and then try to grab that one keyword. Here you might miss out on a lot of hidden intent that is never put in as a Google search query.

I don’t know if I miss out on any major ones here. For some reason I am not quite satisfied with any of them. I do however know that implementing any single one of these will get me in a better position than where I am currently.

Some nice sources:

• https://moz.com/blog/build-content-marketing-strategy (Tilt)
• https://neilpatel.com/blog/44-content-marketing-resources/
• https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/guides/ultimate-guide-to-remarkable-content/part-0/
• https://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique
• https://fizzle.co/sparkline/50k-in-first-month
• https://www.quicksprout.com/blogging/

Plotting a website as a graph

I was also looking into how I could plot my site (and competing sites) as a graph to get a sense of the topic clusters.

My idea here was to make a plot with:

• page
• backlink strength
• main keywords (LSI)
• links to other content

This could give me a nice plot of the content strategy utilized by the competition. I could do with the Gephi, albeit badly. I found a presentation from five years ago where someone tried something similar: https://www.slideshare.net/paradigmatecnologico/analysis-of-websites-as-graphs-for-seo-v1

I have now a pretty clear template for how to move forward with my site.

As for the philosophy of the site, this is where I stand:

• The site will be commercial. I will try to make money.
• The site will be subjective. I will show my name and face.
• The site will be educational. I will try to educate the readers.

I tried (for almost ten years) to avoid making money with the site. I now understand there is no nobility in being poor. Without income, there is no way for me to fulfill the visions I have set for myself.

The basic gameplan is simple.

1. produce content
2. get links
3. improve the design

The site now adhers to the model that was popular ten years ago. I picked keywords and then built content around those keywords. This will need to be scrapped.

The basic building blocks for me will be topic clusters. This approach has its problems (intent mismatch). I will still go for it. I will choose seven pillar contents and then build content clusters around those pillars.

Another option would be what I call the Justin Guitar -approach. The point of a class is not to be “search engine fodder”. What drives people to this site is the fact that it is the best free resource for how to learn to play guitar.

Oh well.

I got a lot of things occupying my mind.

On my main blog, Tarkkamarkka, I set up a challenge for myself. I call this the hundred day hustle. The results so far have been very encouraging.

The three main things occupying my mind currently are:

A new layout for Tarkkamarkka pages

I really wanna increase the reliability of my main site, Tarkkamarkka. The way I vision doing this is borrowing something from:

• Wikipedia
• Neil Patel
• Money Saving Expert

The things I wanna borrow from Wikipedia and Neil Patel are a table of contents and good usage of sources.

From Money Saving Expert, I wanna get the way they do transparency. This would mean adding non-affiliate links and an explanation of how the site works at the end of each post. I also want to add a nice way to subscribe to my newsletter.

Week-by-week money saving 

I am currently struggling with how to keep the site up to date. In order to do this, I am visioning updating one key page every week. I first try to update one page every day but I just don’t have enough time for it by myself.

My idea here is to ask my readers for updates for one subject every week. Then, during the next week, I would introduce them to the updated ideas.

I also wanna make a yearly calendar of personal finance. I am pretty sure this would be doable. I would set up sort of a task for every week of what to do that week. I have written so many guides around these subjects. I especially had this information in my old newsletters which are now lost (sadly).

Home file

On a more personal level, I wanna get back to organizing the papers in my home. This is part saving money, part maintaining my sanity. I began this process last year. However, it all came to an abrupt halt when we lost our home.

The first part of this would be making a home file.

 

 

I attended a seminar over the weekend on weightlifting for crossfitters. The seminar was given by Laura Mäntylä of Speedsters Coaching.

My key takeaways came from the lecture part of the seminar.

I should walk 6 hours per week

According to Laura, most Crossfit enthusiasts don’t do enough training for basic endurance. If I understood her point correctly, Crossfit WODs deplete our capacity for recovery.

To counterbalance this effect, we should do more low-intensity workouts. An example of a low-intensity workout was brisk walking.

One of Laura’s coachees was a guy with skateboarding background. She told us that thanks to walking around 8-10 hours per day, this guy has insane capacity for aerobic training. Whereas other athletes get to anaerobic levels of heart rate, he can still operate aerobically.

If my resting morning heartbeat is 5-6 beats above average, I will skip WODs

Another tip from Laura was to check your morning resting heartbeat. My normal resting heartbeat is 49 bpm. So, if I am over 55 bpm, this indicates that I have not recovered properly. If this is the case, I will only due light cardiovascular work. I will probably be fully recovered with 1-2 days of extra rest. At the end, this should allow me to have more volume for my workouts.

I should fix my weak quads with extra bodybuilding exercises

From looking at my body position with clean / snatch, Laura was able to tell that my quads are too weak in relation to my other muscles.

To fix this, she recommended some basic bodybuilding type of exercises for my quads. I could also consider testing my muscle balance and doing more maintenance work.

The first thing I did was to book a full-body massage. This is actually where I am going right now. The time I have is for 14:00 and it is already 13:44.

How can you make your bucket-list dreams pay for themselves by sharing them?

I set up this blog to document my journey towards the goals / dreams / ambitions I currently have.

I have been documenting my financial journey in Finnish for 10 years (2008 – 2018). During this period I was able to get debt-free and to save enough cash to buy an apartment without a mortgage.

(There are three big caveats to this story. I never had much debt to begin with. Most of the cash came from selling stocks in a company I founded. And I never bought the apartment. I also never got into investing which in hindsight was a terrible move.)

I have also written other blogs about getting rid of back pain, search engine optimization, influencer marketing and entrepreneurship. All of these have been in Finnihs.

There are three reasons I have switched into English:

1. Many of my friends (who I think will be the only readers of this blog) are non-Finnish and can’t read my blogs.
2. The Finns I want to write for will probably understand English just as well as Finnish.
3. Writing in English seems like a nice challenge.

My current financial stretch goal is a net worth of 25 million euros. Is it a goal or a dream? Currently it is a dream. I am hoping to make it a goal.

In order to get to this goal, I hope to:

1. Achieve a pre-tax income of 250 000 euros per year. This should be very much doable.
2. Buy a house (500 000 euros) and an apartment (500 000 euros). Both should be bought without a mortgage.
3. Start investing in an ETF that tracks the whole market (either world or S&P 500).

My other bucket-list items include stuff like:

• Finding ways to earn money without destroying my health in the process.
• Creating some nice places and events for my friends where we can hang out.
• Visiting some interesting places I have been always wanted to visit, mainly China, Australia and Africa.
• Donating money to my university.
• Organizing a meetup for people interested in growing startups in Finland.
• Getting strong enough to deadlift 2.5 x my own weight.
• Doing some creative stuff like videos and podcasts.
• Learning to play one of my favourite songs with guitar.

So, a lot of random stuff.