So with all the SEO, content marketing, and blogging knowledge I’ve gotten recently, it was time to give it a spin.

I want to help others promote their blog and content marketing too, but why not make one my own as well?

Inspired by Neil Patel’s $100k challenge and nutritionsecrets.com, I want to challenge myself to make a blog from scratch, and grow it, as well.

I was thinking what I might know just a tiny bit about, and can write a bunch of stuff to help others. I decided to settle on, giving dating advice.

I plan to spend around 1 hour each day on this, 2-3 posts per week, and blog promotion.

Strategic Planning of my blog

1. Decide on an idea, and more importantly, an audience

I had been helping single christians find love with HKChristians, and I feel like I have some ideas about sharing good content to the crowd. My target audience is single people in Hong Kong, age likely between 30-50, both male and female. Probably feels lonely, want to meet someone, but having a hard time to do so.

Why this topic and audience?

It’s a topic and audience I’ve worked with for a few years, and also an audience that I do have a passion to help.

Why age 30-50?

Most people want to start ‘learning’ this stuff when they get desperate. People under 30, both men and women, probably aren’t desperate yet. Women starts to get there around 30, and men starts to get there around 40.

Why Hong Kong?

I hate that I have to write in formal Chinese, I’m slow at it. But I chose Hong Kong because I feel like it’d be easier to monetize the traffic down the road. More on that in the following point.

2. Target audience size, and target amount of traffic

Just some rough crapshoot… 7M people in HK. ~33% are age 30-50. probably 30% are still single. That leaves about 700k singles who are aged 30-50 and single.

Target for around 30-50k monthly visitors, around the same number in Facebook likes, which should be looking at around 4-7% marketing penetration. Sounds reasonable, given some will not need to ‘learn’ this stuff, and a lot of those who does might not be interested to anyways.

3. Revenue source

Here’s the ‘why hong kong’ part.

Dating Site – I already have a dating website and app for christians in Hong Kong, it’d be easily transferrable to start a regular dating site for everyone in Hong Kong. Or maybe I don’t want to bother with handling it, and just pawn off head counts to existing dating sites. Given 30k followers, I’d expect at least HK$10-30k from just doing online dating.

Offline single events – Speed dating, meet and mingle, etc. I don’t want to run them, but I can draw people to them. Given 30k followers, I can probably get at least 300-600 people per month to come to an event. HK$30-50 cut per person, and I’m looking at HK$10-30k income from just that.

 

Upsells – e-book and online course, the regular blogger’s meal. Cross-sell to matchmaking services. One-on-one coaching on dating. Coaching on dress and makeup.

Given 30k visitors, I’d expect to be able to generate HK$30-60k monthly income.

How to get traffic

I’ve been learning a lot from masters like Neil Patel, Brian Dean, etc.

Marketing tactics aside though, I will be doing my best to write GREAT content, things that I think truly will help my audience. I’ll encourage emails, comments, questions, to understand more about what my audience wants to hear about, and give great value in my posts to them.

Here is outline of my initial plan (numbers below are facebook likes / monthly blog traffic)

0-3k: paid ads. Facebook ads should offer great targeting regarding age, gender, relationship status, etc. Hopefully investing less than HK$1 per like at this point.

3-10k: probably slow down on paid ads. Will use various link-bait and share-bait methods to get more shares and links. Start building backlinks within related spheres, not sure where yet. Probably will connect with some dating event organizers and groups.

Shout-for-shout with FB groups who are around this status. Anyone that talks about relationship, dating, something related, etc. Have them promote my page and vice versa.

10k+: Keep up the great content, share-baits, backlink building. Probably won’t do shout-for-shout unless its big page to match. Expect to plateau around 30-50k.

Time to start monetizing as well.

Getting Started

I’ll try to post every month to update the traffic numbers, what I did, what seems to work/not work, and document my journey on this blog.

Month 1:

• buy domain (thinking sparklove.hk)
• setup wordpress
• setup analytics and conversion tracking (email subscribe / facebook like)
• put up 4 initial posts
• try to draw 500-1000 visitors to those posts with paid ads
• might leverage HKChristians audience

Will probably update mid-august.