Everyone has more than one interest in life, and I’m no different. Spirituality, the invisible energies that surround us, meditation, and everything that has to do with evolving the self beyond the obvious material world.
Follow along for more on both my spiritual and blog-building journeys!
The Idea behind Camino Energetico
That’s why I created Camino Energético, a blog in Spanish where I share everything I know on “Cristales y Piedras energéticas, meditación y espiritualidad” (energy crystals and stones, meditation and spirituality).
The idea was to create a Niche site where I could share everything I know on topics such as “Amatista – Propiedades, Significado y Usos“, “Agata – Propiedades, Significado, Poderes y Usos” among many others.
My path with this one is different from other projects. I want to help people that might need my mastery and knowledge on the subject, as well as that of others, so I want this to become a mass success regardless of specific monetization strategies.
The Challenges
Spirituality and Reliability
When I speak about spirituality, energies, chakras, and much more I know what people think. It’s really hard to convey reliable, heart-driven (or higher self-driven) knowledge in a landscape full of scammers that do everything they can to take even the slightest resemblance of a penny in your pockets.
Mainly because we’re talking about the Spanish Speaker audience, the landscape is creeping with swindlers of all sizes and backgrounds, some of them very believable but scams all the same.
How do I get people to tell good intentions from dark spirits so they can get to my content instead of “Buy this magic soap and get 7 years of good luck”?
The Language
The website is meant to be written in Spanish, meaning some tasks such as writing effective and catchy posts are harder than in English (because Spanish is more complex than English).
It’s also harder to do effective SEO in Spanish given the search engine technology is not as predictable for that language as it is for English or others, which actually seems pretty offensive taking into account Spanish is the SECOND most used language in the world… don’t get me started on how unfair some situations are for the Spanish-speakers because I could go on and on and it wouldn’t be a nice spot to be in.
Sharing without a Name
This one goes sort of hand-in-hand with the Reliability part. At the moment, I’m not known as a spiritual guru, medium, or person who shares valuable insights into the world beyond matter.
As a matter of fact, I’ve been in touch with the energies and higher dimensions since I was a child but I never made it public to a massive audience, and only those whom I’ve got the pleasure to meet in real life and was able to help understand that at the very least I’m an empathetic person.
That gives my name and knowledge no leverage. Why would somebody read anything I publish? I know very well which powers a Green Jade has or how can you use amethyst to transmute lingering energies but I have no publicly recorded history of my spiritual journey.
SEO without Link Building
Link Building has gotten more and more challenging in the past few years, with the algorithms from Google becoming smarter and thus making some old tricks become as dead as a fish in the middle of the Sahara.
In a nutshell: You need to get High Authority, niche-related, language-related, and hopefully topically relevant backlinks to your content, or otherwise, the link won’t be so good.
Buying a generic backlink pack is not going to work because it just doesn’t work anymore.
Guest posting would be a great idea for Link Building but there are not a lot of authoritative websites on spirituality-related topics in Spanish that actually accept guest posts.
The catch here is that most authoritative sites are just generalist websites that publish a ton of content and actually want to charge you a good chunk of money for a link insertion. Worth it? Maybe, but it’s not the game I want to play, at least for now.
Monetization Strategy
The website’s key focus is informational content. That is due to both my goals with it and the search intent most people use when searching for the topics related to Camino Energetico.
The main monetization strategy for it will then be Ads since they are sensitive to the Volume of visits.
After the website builds a considerable audience, I’m going to look into offering high-quality and related affiliate products but I suspect, given the people’s intent, it’s not going to be a huge winner so I might just experiment with it a little bit.
Selling my own products could be an option for the future, but since I don’t have anything ATM (I know, a bummer right?), I’d rather have people stay and love the content rather than try to sell them a low-value photo album of my beautiful face
The Solutions
Down to the content strategy and how we are solving the problems stated above so that we can have a successful, popular niche site that offers great quality information and allows me to share with others that which I love: the knowledge on how to improve your life from spirituality.
Content Strategy
Mine is a very simple content strategy. I found a very nice keyword cluster in Spanish that has low to moderate competition and not a lot of authoritative websites ranking for them. Plus it’s a decent volume overall (about 2 million searches per month).
So, the first step is to gain topical relevance and thus topical authority. As you might know, talking a lot about a specific topic can give you an edge because Google understands you know and talk A LOT about that topic.
With that in mind, we want to cover all topics and subtopics on the cluster to gain momentum through high-quality content that is also good for Google.
SEO Silos for the Win
Yes, gaining topical authority is a game of creating a good SEO Silo that makes your website be loved by Google because it makes it so easy for it to understand what you’re talking about.
Two-way linking between topics and subtopics is the best way to implement SEO Silos and in this case, because some sub-topics are also horizontally related, we’re going to link them together as well.
So, Instead of a tree structure, it looks way more like a graph, where all nodes are reachable at a minimal distance (average 2-3 jumps) so it can be traveled through easily.
Reliability and Building a Name
The best way to earn reliability on a topic these days is through social networks and by building a naturally growing social proof based not on quoted testimonies but on actual social engagement.
People in this niche love sharing their interests with others in their own network so if you do great with content and people start believing in you they will naturally share it with their friends.
Having a few social accounts where it’s relevant (initially, we’re trying with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) and getting people to follow through sheer likable content (no ads, no false claims, just an organic community) raises our chances of people going into the website.
It’s easier to build Authority and a Name for the brand than it is for me as a person, so I’m going to aim at that to generate trust in my audience.
The Language
For those who don’t speak Spanish, a warning: There are many, many, and I mean many ways to say the exact same way with completely different words in Spanish. Even the names of things really change a lot from one country to another.
So we need to be strategic and use words that can rank for the most relevant keywords and in the most relevant way they are written! We need to leave behind some obscure ways to refer to certain terms and just understand we might leave a few pennies on the table.
That’s it, plain Spanish with little variations here and there depending on the main market for each keyword or set of keywords and done.
Link Building
Didn’t I say “No Link Building”? Well, it’s true, but given my website is a net new domain it has ZERO Authority, ZERO DR, ZERO Trust from Google and other Search Engines, and is bound to be put in Sandbox mode.
How do I get it out of there ASAP without building links? Topical Authority helps but we need to at least get some links in, like it or not.
Did I mention Social Profiles? Well, those should be your first links for any new domain anyways so I’m back linking from the social profiles.
I’m also creating entries for Camino Energetico around Maps, Foursquare and those typical places you usually register to when you want your customers to find you physically.
All those are no-follow links but they are very trustable, thus causing you to gain even more trust from Google really quickly.
Last, but not least, I’m going to build a few backlinks when the website is making some money (meaning, I pay for them with that money).
The Results
[Updated Sep 26th, 2022]
So far I’m 2 weeks into building the website. I’ve added more than 20 articles and I’m already ranking 11th on Google for some of the juiciest terms as well as some other longtail versions.
No Page 1 so far but hey, it’s a work in progress and I bet you don’t know many cases of net new websites that rank as good and as fast as this one while still being in Sandbox Mode!
Final Words
I hope you’ve enjoyed this story. Follow it through from Zero to Mass Success by coming to this article often as I’m sharing more and more of my progress as time passes.
That’s all, happy money making and see you soon!