Growing my tech blog to $5,000 per month

[Stitches and Burns]

Hello once again, I'm back with a new journey, this time to build my blog to $5,000 a month.

First of all, I would like to thank the fine people of BlackHatWorld. I've learned a lot of stuff not only about blogging but also SEO, writing, digital marketing. Without BHW I don't think I would have had any kind of success online.

I had an earlier journey before with my tech blog in which I started with 20,000 visitors and now I'm having more or less 300,000 visitors a month. You can read it here: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/my-journey-to-1-000-a-month-from-blogging.1046929/

I moved to Ezoic because I'm not happy with my Adsense earnings, especially that most of my audience is from developing countries so the CPC/RPM are low. Now I'm earning more than 3x what I used to earn with Adsense.

This got me excited and motivated so I'm thinking about how to reach $5,000 a month. $1,500 a month is already a princely sum here in my place but I'm not yet satisfied. I have dreams to build my own house, tour around Europe and save enough money for my wedding. $5,000 a month is good enough for me to attain those dreams.

If I were to triple my blog traffic and attract more readers from Tier 1 countries, then I would reach my goal of $5,000 a month. Of course, I would need to work hard to achieve it.

My Goals

1. Reach 1 million unique visitors per month.
2. Earn $5,000 profit per month.
3. Hire my first writer.

My Current Situation

My tech blog is currently earning an average of $60 per day from advertising.

This doesn't include fees from sponsored posts. I think I will no longer accept sponsored posts and just work to increase my advertising revenues.

I'm not earning anything from affiliate marketing yet. Amazon Associates is not yet feasible because most of my readers don't buy from Amazon. I'm an affiliate of several web hosting companies though.

My blog is a one-man operation.

I get anywhere from 250,000 to 400,000 visitors per month. Nearly 90% of that is from Google.

My social media is not so good. I only have 1,500 likes on my Facebook page and about 30 followers on Twitter.

What I Will Do

I have researched other tech blogs using Ahrefs. I will write about topics that have decent search traffic and also give me a chance to rank in the first page. I already have first page rankings for some tech-related keywords but they have easy competition.

I have a backlog of 20 topics that are mostly targeted to readers in my country. Low RPMs sure but they're relatively easier to rank. After I've written these articles, I will focus more on topics/keywords that are more US/international in scope. This will hopefully earn me more income with less traffic.

As for SEO, I will build backlinks manually using info found in this forum. I might also perform blogger outreach and write guest posts.

I will also put up a large printed reminder near my computer to remind me of my goals. I feel lazy at times and wake up late. Gotta work on my discipline.

That's all for now. I will be posting regular updates unlike with my previous journey where I only posted once in a blue moon. Hopefully this BHW journey thread will be some sort of an "accountability partner" that keeps me from slacking.

Thanks for reading!

 

[B22]

Interesting! Good luck for your new journey.

 

[JohnnyPCK]

Watching your journey as well! I think you'd fair quite well! It would be great if you could share everything you did along the way so others may possibly use your methods as well that serves a different niche moving forward

 

[Almighty Pull]

fairly detailed plan mate, wish you success.
Following

 

[Mark32]

such a nice post

 

[PowerFlux]

Interesting journey. Wish you good luck.
Questions:
1) How do you search for technology trends in a country?
2) Did you use wordpress? If so, what cheap but reliable hosting can you suggest?
3) What type of SEO strategies did you use to rank your site and your posts (PBNs, 2.0 etc)?
4) How much did it take you to get from no traffic to the current traffic reach?
Thank you and safe journey ^-^

 

[Purush]

moved to Ezoic because I'm not happy with my Adsense earnings, especially that most of my audience is from developing countries so the CPC/RPM are low. Now I'm earning more than 3x what I used to earn with Adsense.

Hi , Ezoic is only adsense partner, they are showing adsense ads then how its improved you earning so much. pls explain. By the way. good luck. You motivated to me as well.

 

[Dropdown]

Hi , Ezoic is only adsense partner, they are showing adsense ads then how its improved you earning so much. pls explain. By the way. good luck. You motivated to me as well.

Easily increase website ad revenue & improve visitor experiences by automatically adjusting ads, layouts, and content to fit visitors - Ezoic's tagline. AKA they help you improve earnings by split-testing ads, compared to Adsense that just shows ads.

 

[Stitches and Burns]

Watching your journey as well! I think you'd fair quite well! It would be great if you could share everything you did along the way so others may possibly use your methods as well that serves a different niche moving forward

Thanks buddy. I will try my best to share some of my methods for ranking.

Interesting! Good luck for your new journey.

fairly detailed plan mate, wish you success.
Following

such a nice post

Thanks a lot!

Interesting journey. Wish you good luck.
Questions:
1) How do you search for technology trends in a country?
2) Did you use wordpress? If so, what cheap but reliable hosting can you suggest?
3) What type of SEO strategies did you use to rank your site and your posts (PBNs, 2.0 etc)?
4) How much did it take you to get from no traffic to the current traffic reach?
Thank you and safe journey ^-^

Thank you.

1. I use Ahrefs to find the top performing pages for my competitors, then Google Keyword Planner to find the most searched keywords for the topics. For trending topics, I subscribe to other tech blogs via Feedly or use Google Trends.
2. Yes, I use WordPress. I suggest Namecheap for starting out but to move to Cloudways once you reach 20,000 or more visits per month.
3. Blog commenting manually, links from my other websites (I'm a web designer so I have other websites for my clients), answering Quora questions, autoposting to Tumblr and Blogspot (not the whole content but just an excerpt with a link back to my articles), and making backlinks manually on Web 2.0s and sites that allow links (some BHW members share their backlinking tactics).
4. I started my blog on December 2017. On August I had 20k visits and reached 100k visits by the end of 2018. Past 3 months I averaged 250k visits more or less.

Hi , Ezoic is only adsense partner, they are showing adsense ads then how its improved you earning so much. pls explain. By the way. good luck. You motivated to me as well.

Thanks. Ezoic serves not only Adsense but also other ad networks bidding on the Google Ad Exchange such as MGID. That's why the payout is higher.

Easily increase website ad revenue & improve visitor experiences by automatically adjusting ads, layouts, and content to fit visitors - Ezoic's tagline. AKA they help you improve earnings by split-testing ads, compared to Adsense that just shows ads.

You explained it well. Thanks!

 

[The Optimist]

It is very good to read....

 

[Stitches and Burns]

FIRST WEEK OF JUNE UPDATE:

Hi guys, been busy the past few days. I was only able to write 5 articles since I started this journey, but 2 of them are evergreen articles with 6,000 words between them. I've been feeling lazy lately but I've gotta fight it, I really want to achieve my goal.

I also created several backlinks using info from Lord of SEO. You can see his thread here and ask for it (dunno if he's still giving it away). Very useful.

I've been planning to create a collection of smartphones and gadgets where I will list the specs, price and reviews of each device. I got the idea from a competitor who is ranking for "(name of smartphone) (country) price." But making each page can be quite time-consuming. So I got a plugin from Codecanyon named Arena Products Store. It's a bit clunky and difficult to set up. But after struggling for hours I was able to set things up. Now I only need to input the information which I can get mostly from GSMArena. Now I won't be necessarily copying straight from GSMArena, because I organized the smartphone specs differently. It will be much easier to read than specs in GSMArena. I have no plans to compete with them, but I'm hoping to rank for localized searches such as "(name of smartphone) (country) price." Price comparison websites are mostly the ones ranking for it, but I saw 1 or 2 local blogs in the first page, so I think that I might have a chance too.

That's all for now.

MAY 2019 STATS:

No. of articles: 265
Visitors: 270,952
Pageviews: 425,174
Email subscribers: 365

Earnings: $1,802.39
Expenses: $30
Profit: $1,772.39
l

 

[kinyash]

You got yourself a solid and realistic plan. Keep us in the loop mate!

 

[userAnonyme]

How much volume are in top 5 keywords that you re ranking #1

 

[Dark Venge]

Hello once again, I'm back with a new journey, this time to build my blog to $5,000 a month.

First of all, I would like to thank the fine people of BlackHatWorld. I've learned a lot of stuff not only about blogging but also SEO, writing, digital marketing. Without BHW I don't think I would have had any kind of success online.

I had an earlier journey before with my tech blog in which I started with 20,000 visitors and now I'm having more or less 300,000 visitors a month. You can read it here: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/my-journey-to-1-000-a-month-from-blogging.1046929/

I moved to Ezoic because I'm not happy with my Adsense earnings, especially that most of my audience is from developing countries so the CPC/RPM are low. Now I'm earning more than 3x what I used to earn with Adsense.

This got me excited and motivated so I'm thinking about how to reach $5,000 a month. $1,500 a month is already a princely sum here in my place but I'm not yet satisfied. I have dreams to build my own house, tour around Europe and save enough money for my wedding. $5,000 a month is good enough for me to attain those dreams.

If I were to triple my blog traffic and attract more readers from Tier 1 countries, then I would reach my goal of $5,000 a month. Of course, I would need to work hard to achieve it.

My Goals

1. Reach 1 million unique visitors per month.
2. Earn $5,000 profit per month.
3. Hire my first writer.

My Current Situation

My tech blog is currently earning an average of $60 per day from advertising.

This doesn't include fees from sponsored posts. I think I will no longer accept sponsored posts and just work to increase my advertising revenues.

I'm not earning anything from affiliate marketing yet. Amazon Associates is not yet feasible because most of my readers don't buy from Amazon. I'm an affiliate of several web hosting companies though.

My blog is a one-man operation.

I get anywhere from 250,000 to 400,000 visitors per month. Nearly 90% of that is from Google.

My social media is not so good. I only have 1,500 likes on my Facebook page and about 30 followers on Twitter.

What I Will Do

I have researched other tech blogs using Ahrefs. I will write about topics that have decent search traffic and also give me a chance to rank in the first page. I already have first page rankings for some tech-related keywords but they have easy competition.

I have a backlog of 20 topics that are mostly targeted to readers in my country. Low RPMs sure but they're relatively easier to rank. After I've written these articles, I will focus more on topics/keywords that are more US/international in scope. This will hopefully earn me more income with less traffic.

As for SEO, I will build backlinks manually using info found in this forum. I might also perform blogger outreach and write guest posts.

I will also put up a large printed reminder near my computer to remind me of my goals. I feel lazy at times and wake up late. Gotta work on my discipline.

That's all for now. I will be posting regular updates unlike with my previous journey where I only posted once in a blue moon. Hopefully this BHW journey thread will be some sort of an "accountability partner" that keeps me from slacking.

Thanks for reading!

Can I guest post on your site?

 

[Purush]

Excellent journey. Did you hire a writer ?

 

[Verlineperez]

nice journey, I will follow your journey

 

[roblestuellend]

Wow you have so much traffic but yet earn so little from it. Don't get me wrong, $1,800/mo is a nice amount to earn every month. But with 300,000 visitors? That's a ton of hard work and and long time to reach such a large amount of organic visitors. I thought if I could even get to just 30,000 visitors per month then I would be earning as much as you already.

I am curious also how is it you are only attracting developing countries? More developed countries are not searching for the keywords you are targeting?

 

[Social God]

I’m starting the same journey as you except my goal is to hit 10,000 monthly visitors by the end of this year. I’m inspired by this thread already.

How many words per post?
And how many times do you post per week?

 

[roblestuellend]

I’m starting the same journey as you except my goal is to hit 10,000 monthly visitors by the end of this year. I’m inspired by this thread already.

How many words per post?
And how many times do you post per week?

If you have the same stats as the OP then 10,000 visitors/mo would only be $60. Maybe aim for a higher goal?

 

[Social God]

If you have the same stats as the OP then 10,000 visitors/mo would only be $60. Maybe aim for a higher goal?

I have to set small goals first to achieve bigger ones. I think 10,000 a month by the end of this year is more realistic for me considering I’m 5 months in and have only 300-400 visitors a month.