The site is
live and building.
Watch what happens.
I'm building alistairvermaak.com in public — documenting every decision, every metric, and every result. Weekly updates here. Monthly video reports on YouTube and Pinterest. No polished hindsight.
published
rate
impressions
this month
Weekly Build Updates
Every week I document what I built, what moved, what broke, and what I learned. Published here as a running log — raw, dated, and honest.
Monthly Video Reports
End-of-month traffic, email, and revenue numbers. Published as a video on YouTube and repurposed as a Pinterest carousel. Metrics, not stories.
The System Running Live
This page is the proof of concept. The content engine I sell is the same one building this site — so you can see exactly how it performs before you buy anything.
What's actually happening.
Dated entries, real numbers, honest commentary. Each update covers what I built, what moved, and what I'd do differently.
- First post ranking on page 2 for the primary keyword — three weeks after publishing
- Email welcome sequence sent to all subscribers. 41% open rate on the first email
- Pinterest repurposing live — one blog post converted to 6 pins, 340 impressions in 5 days
- Homepage v3 live — full warm-up stack with POV manifesto, BIP section, newsletter
- Watch Me Build page (this page)
- Sender.net email sequence: 5 emails, 3-day spacing
- Pinterest board structure — 4 boards mapped to content pillars
The Pinterest speed surprised me — I expected weeks before any impressions. The keyword ranking is early and unstable, but the trajectory is right. The site isn't pretty from a traffic standpoint yet, but the system is working structurally. Next week is about volume — two more posts, Quora answers live, YouTube intro video drafted.
- Posts 1 and 2 indexed by Google — no rankings yet but crawled within 48 hours
- Sender.net 5-email welcome sequence live and tested end to end
- DIY Content OS sales page updated with new product positioning
- Writing posts one at a time is too slow — moving to a batch of 3 drafts per session
- Need a content calendar template before publishing more — gaps appearing in topic coverage
- Pinterest setup took 4 hours — should have had a template. Adding it to the Systems Pack.
- First blog post published: AI content differentiation and the 5-layer prompt framework
- Homepage rebuilt with dark-first design system — Fraunces + Space Grotesk, teal/gold palette
- Sender.net account setup, first list live, opt-in form wired to homepage
- Setup takes twice as long as expected — allocate a full day just for email platform config
- Keyword research should precede all writing — I wrote first and did SEO second. Wrong order.
- The site needed 6 structural fixes before any content would convert. Audit was worth it.
End-of-month numbers.
No spin. Just data.
At the end of every month I publish a full report: traffic, email list size, open rates, product sales, what the system actually produced. Posted as a video on YouTube, repurposed as a carousel on Pinterest.
Raw thinking.
Ongoing reference.
Running notes from the build — decisions made, things I'd do differently, and the infrastructure choices that underpin everything. Updated as the build evolves.
How to use this section: These are Alistair's working notes — not polished articles. They're here to show the thinking behind the system, not a finished strategy. If something here solves a problem you have, there's a product built around it.
Blog-first. One post per week minimum. Each post feeds: Quora (one answer per post, answer links back), Pinterest (4–6 pins per post, same images as blog), YouTube (post becomes script outline), email (post summary goes to list). The feed is one-directional — blog is the source of truth, everything else is downstream.
I don't post natively on each platform and then cross-link. I repurpose. Big difference in time cost.
Organic sessions (Google Search Console), keyword rankings (GSC), email list size + open rate (Sender.net), Pinterest impressions and link clicks, YouTube subscribers and watch time. Revenue tracked by product SKU — I want to know which channel converts, not just which drives traffic.
I'm not tracking vanity metrics. Followers and likes don't pay for themselves.
The site runs a six-tier product ecosystem: free Starter Kit → $27 DIY Content OS → $97 DIY Systems Pack → $297/mo Systems Accelerator → $497 Content Intelligence System → $1,500/qtr Systems Lab. Each tier is a more built-out version of the same system. The blog drives free opt-ins; email nurtures toward the paid tiers.
Keyword research before writing — I inverted this in Week 1 and had to retrofit SEO onto a finished post. Painful. Starting with the email platform before launch — I had no list capture running for the first two days after publish. And: don't launch the site until the first two posts are ready to go live immediately after, so Google sees activity from day one.
- Find 3 keyword targets using GSC + search suggestions
- Shortlist 1 primary, 2 secondary
- Map intent — informational, navigational, commercial
- Check top 5 ranking pages for format and depth signals
- Draft outline — H2/H3 structure keyed to intent
- Write in one session, edit in the next — never same-day
- Add internal links to relevant product pages
- Publish with a clear CTA — usually free Starter Kit
- Quora: one answer derived from the post, direct quote + link
- Pinterest: 4–6 pins using post imagery and headers as text overlay
- Email: 150-word summary with link, plain text format
- YouTube script: post outline → talking points → record
Duplicate any note-card block above and paste your own content. Each card takes: a title, an icon glyph, a colour class (teal / gold / mid / dim), and either paragraph text or a bullet list inside a note-block. The full-width layout uses class="note-card [colour] full".
Monthly reports hit
these channels first.
Every end-of-month I publish the full numbers — traffic, list growth, revenue, and what I'm changing. Subscribe on either platform to catch it live.
Monthly Report Videos
Report Carousels