The step-by-step guide to making a living from SEO in Latin American niches

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First of all, I want to thank Dean for being kind enough to invite me to the most read SEO blog in the Spanish-speaking world, which has been visited by some of the best people in the digital marketing world.

Today, it is an honor for me to feel like one of them.

Of course, dear reader, it would be wrong of me not to greet you warmly with the immense wish that things will go well despite the situation we are living at the moment.

Leaving aside the usual protocols. I'm at my computer at 3:30 a.m. to start my day and I want to spend the first two hours of the day writing this article you're reading.

However, I want to find the most elegant way possible to explain my journey in this world of SEO.

I could obviously start with the basics: .....

My name is Juan Carlos Pérez and I was born in the Dominican Republic.

I will explain here the different phases I went through to be able to live from my niches today.

Free Telegram channel

As you may know, we have launched mentoriaseo.com. I would like to leave here the link to a new Telegram channel we have created: https://t.me/mentoriaseo

This will be a different channel than the ones that already exist. I'll be talking about the business of SEO by showing numbers and real-time monetization strategies, as well as my habits as CEO of several start-ups in this sector.

And Aro and Pichu will also post different things about their working methods and projects.

Table of contents

  • 1 My beginnings in the world of SEO
  • 2 2020: a promising future
    • 2.1 CTC Niches: The great opportunity to monetize with Adsense
    • 2.2 How I managed to earn almost 3k with a viral post
    • 2. 3 Optimize monetized niches with Amazon Affiliates
      • 2.3.1 The 80/20 rule
      • 2.3.2 Improving the ROC
      • 2.3.3 Update content and improve copy
      • 2.3.4 Detection of opportunity keywords in Search Console
  • 3 Creating many or few niches? Personal opinion
  • 4 Last thoughts

My beginnings in the world of SEO

First of all, I would like to briefly tell you what I was doing before I started creating digital projects.

I worked for 8 years in the judicial system of my country and, during my stay in this institution, I managed to complete my higher education, i.e. a diploma in systems engineering.

One of my main goals upon graduation was to work in the technology department; however, that opportunity never presented itself and I made the drastic decision to quit.

At that time, I had already graduated 3 years ago with a degree in systems engineering.

You can't imagine the pain I went through because I was financially dependent on my parents for over a year.

I was in a deep depression because no company in my country would hire me.

In early 2016, a good friend contacted me to create a website for a church.

The truth is that I had no idea how to create a website, but since my friend didn't know either and he was working, since I didn't have a job, I did all the research I could on the Internet to create this site.

While doing some relevant research on the net and by pure chance, I discovered through several blogs how they generate income by simply using a computer from their home; this caught my attention.

It just so happens that one of the blogs I discovered was Blogger3cero and I tried to soak up the subject matter until, a few months later, I launched my first blog: consultdom.com, whose theme was law.

A month later, I managed to open an Adsense account. However, I still didn't know how to increase the number of visits to the site, as it was a very competitive niche and I couldn't afford to invest in links, let alone content.

Despite this, I continued to consume the articles that were published on Blogger3cero until I found an article by a guest author called María Jesús that was a turning point for me: Why I quit my job to make a living from Google Adsense.

This led to a radical change in my mindset and I immediately opened two niches focused on sports streaming and managed to position them in 3 months.

Six months after setting up these two sites, I was generating just over $300 a month with Adsense and kept it that way for two years.

After that, I decided to try another area of monetization, which I will explain below.

2020: a promising future

In the middle of 2019, I set a goal of creating at least 2 websites per month to monetize with the Amazon affiliate program and I managed to set up about 8 websites.

To give you an idea of how much income I generated in total in 2019, I'll show you a screenshot of the Amazon Affiliate Report:

Captura Informe Ingresos año 2019

Capture of the 2019 revenue report

As you can see, I had a lot of work ahead of me to continue improving these sites.

During the last quarter, I could hear very loudly in my head that Dean was about to launch the SEOWarriors membership, so I was looking forward to that moment so I could sign up as soon as it was available.

The truth, dear reader, was the best decision I've made in a long time and I'll explain why in a moment.

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CTC niches: the great opportunity to monetize with Adsense

Although I have several websites monetizing with Adsense, I made a drastic decision not to create any more websites monetizing with Google's advertising system; I was going to focus solely on creating niches to generate income with Amazon's affiliate system.

But as soon as I signed up for membership, one of the new features that caught my eye was the "Nichera Storm" contest, where Dean and his team provided an excel with a number of keywords geared toward different LATAM countries.

I was still skeptical about creating other niches to monetize with Adsense, but to test what it was all about, I created two websites with the keywords: CUIT from Argentina and DICOM from Chile.

My intention was to win one of the cash prizes awarded during the three-month contest. However, it didn't go well

In the fourth month, one of the websites was gaining places in the SERPs without investing in link building. When I saw this positive evolution of the niche, I thought of the idea offurther research on how to detect this type of keywords to set up several websites in the following months.

At that time, a very powerful SEO named Russ Madrigal came out of the shadows and explained on his Youtube channel how to find these golden nuggets.

Thanks to his methodology, I have been able to set up a few websites that are experiencing a very positive evolution in just a few months. I recommend you to follow him on his Youtube channel, he is a real crack in what he does.

How I managed to charge nearly 3,000 $ with a viral post

I was so electrified (an expression borrowed from my sensei Dean Romero) that I was not only satisfied with the set up of the two websites to enter the contest, but I wanted also try other things.

If you've been following me so far, you'll remember that at the beginning, I told you about the first website I created to take my first steps in the SEO world: consultdom.com.

This site was totally abandoned and I took it over to create content on procedures oriented to the Dominican Republic. I published about 50 articles during the month of January.

In February, they were already positioned for some keywords in the TOP 10 of Google. At the beginning of April, a state of emergency was declared in my country due to the pandemic situation and we were quarantined due to the sudden number of infected people over the days.

The government, in order to help the most needy people, has created an assistance program called "stay at home to provide them with food. However, a large part of the population did not have a card to access this aid.

It turns out that I had an article positioned in the top 3 with the keyword"How do I know if I have obtained the solidarity card? "and this url went viral; everyone was frantically searching for information about it.

To give you an idea, I will leave you a screenshot of the traffic during this month:

Capturing viral traffic for the month of April

Because of this traffic spike, on some of those days in April, I charged nearly $3,000.

Capture of revenues generated in April with Adsense

It's proof that by trying and throwing yourself into the pool, you can achieve things, sometimes without expecting it.

Optimize monetized niches with Amazon Affiliates

First of all, I would like to thank Mijael Fandiño and Jesús León who gave me some of their precious time to indicate the improvements to be made to the niches. In addition, I have supplemented them with other ideas that I felt should be implemented.

In summary, my strategy focused on the following:

  1. Apply the 80/20 rule.
  2. Improve conversion.
  3. Update the content and improve the text.
  4. Detect opportunity keywords in Google Search Console.

Don't worry, I will explain each of the above step by step.

The 80/20 rule

Basically, I detected the 20 % of urls that were generating 80 % of my revenue. I did the process by hand. I downloaded from Amazon the report of the revenue generated in the last 3 months, to detect which products were selling the most in that period.

This process can be done automatically with Google Tag Manager, but this is something I didn't know at the time

Once I detected the urls that were generating the most revenue, I placed them in the navigation menu so that they would have the most authority to continue climbing the Google SERPs.

Improving the ROC

In early 2020, I had purchased the AAWP plugin, but the comparison charts I had created were barely above 2 % in conversion.

Thanks to the suggestions of Mijael and Jesús, I have made the necessary changes. If you want, you can take a look at mejorestanterias.com.

Update content and improve text

The vast majority of the content was outdated, as the products listed on the site were not available on Amazon, which had a negative impact on the user experience. So I proceeded to replace these products with others that were in stock.

Another very important aspect was to remove technical phrases or words that users didn't understand and I focused on highlighting the benefits that each product could bring them.

Detecting opportunity keywords in Search Console

Google Search Console is a very powerful tool and, above all, it is free. In my case, I can't afford at the moment to pay a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to track the keywords I position, and even less to detect the expressions or terms I don't attack in each of the niche urls.

I went into the performance report and filtered it by pages to detect keywords that were not appearing in the comparison guides.

This allowed niches to be ranked for a greater number of keywords, resulting in a significant increase in organic traffic.

Note: I implemented each of the strategies in February 2020. I waited about 3 months to see if the changes made would have a positive impact.

In the following report, you can see the income generated by 4 niches during the month of May.

Capture Revenue Report May 2020

Creating many or few niches? Personal opinion

If you are new to SEO or have a small budget, the he ideal is to have 2 or 3 niches at most and work on them little by little to see if they suit you.

I say this from my experience, of course.

I have about 27 websites to monetize with Adsense and Amazon affiliates and I can't afford to spend the time on each website

It's probably not representative of a lot of the B30 community, but for me, there are a lot of niches, because I'm kind of the one-man band right now, I have to do everything.

Since my time and financial resources are limited, I decided not to create new niches for the moment and to focus on improving the ones that are the most successful.

I made this decision several months ago and the results are already visible, the websites are better ranked in the SERPs.

I'm pretty sure that if you create several niches to monetize with Adsense or Amazon affiliates you will have faster results, because you will not disperse and you will focus all your resources to be positioned in Google.

Last thoughts

This has been my journey so far in the world of online income generation. I am aware that I still have a long way to go, but at least I have a clearer picture of where I want to go and what I want to achieve.

I hope this post can be helpful in some way.

However, I want to ask you something, don't take this post as a source of motivationbut rather as a reference that it is possible to make money by setting up digital projects.

Let me explain.

By the time you read this post, you'll probably be super motivated to take the plunge and create a website or resume the projects you've abandoned and stay that way for days.

As the days go by, your motivation will diminish, and then laziness, frustration or uncertainty about the effectiveness of what you are doing will set in.

This happened to me all the time, I was very fickle. As soon as something didn't work or I didn't see results for several months, I would abandon the project and I stayed in that state for several years.

That's why I asked you not to use motivation as the main source for moving forward with your projects, because most of the time you will do your tasks without wanting to.

It is best to make a commitment and a firm resolve to do "things that must be done in the time that must be done.

Finally, I'd like to end with a phrase Dean said in an interview with Jaime Sampere that gets hammered into my head at every turn:

The secret of success is something very simple that many people forget, it is to do the same thing every day.

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