My First Blogging Journey!

[Aquinas]

Hi Guys.

Introduction

I've been lurking on this forum for a while. I'm a university student whose currently got nothing to do for 6 months due to coronavirus and I thought I would finally attempt to get something done! A few years back I attempted to jump onto various money making strategies on the forum but I never had the endurance to go past reading the guide and then just assuming that it was "too saturated". I'm investing the money that I made with various other activities (Matched betting, clickworker, usertesting) into a pet niche blog that I'm hoping will generate enough money to at least cover the expenses.

Expectations

I'm not hoping to get anything huge, simply experience and possibly something to put on my CV when I'm applying for graduate jobs! My dream has always been to own a small apartment in my favourite village in Southern Greece (around £50,000), I'm not expecting to earn that with anything related to blogging but I'm hoping to gain the skills that may enable me to boost my earnings in the future.

What I've done so far

So far I've bought a domain and hosted it on Siteground, I've installed wordpress and I'm currently uploading a paid-for theme onto my blog. Furthermore, I've used Fiverr to get a decent minimalist logo in the hopes of building a few social media accounts with links back to the blog. I searched a few keywords that I believed would be popular and I've noted quite a few competitors, however a lot of these are quite broad blogs that are aimed at a lot of pets whilst my blog is specialising on a single species. I'm hoping this means that I can rank a bit further ahead. Furthermore, these blogs don't seem to have any form of social media presence.

Plans for Today

Today I'm hoping to get the Wordpress theme working, design the site to my specifications and research more on the forum. I'm still clueless when it comes to linkbuilding and keywords. I get the jist of on-site SEO but there's still a lot of research to be done. I have a lot to learn but I'm hoping that keeping this journal will stop me from quitting.

If there's any tips that people can give me that would be fantastic!

 

[Fuazii]

Good luck man, I saw your 'welcome' thread. It looks like you've made a good start. Check out other peoples journeys on here, there are some incredibly beneficial ones out there, especially on blogging.

 

[ger81948]

Yes check out some of the other journeys. You'll get knowledge and just as important, inspiration to continue. Don't worry about saturation. Your market is the world and saturation is all about shortage and limitations. Think in terms of abundance and no limits and you'll succeed. Best wishes and stay safe.

 

[Aquinas]

Yes check out some of the other journeys. You'll get knowledge and just as important, inspiration to continue. Don't worry about saturation. Your market is the world and saturation is all about shortage and limitations. Think in terms of abundance and no limits and you'll succeed. Best wishes and stay safe.

Good luck man, I saw your 'welcome' thread. It looks like you've made a good start. Check out other peoples journeys on here, there are some incredibly beneficial ones out there, especially on blogging.

Thank you!!!

First Day

Spent most of my allocated time trying to sort out the logo and the banner. Don't know any CSS and I am desperately trying to get my category headings to align properly. Honestly doubt that my current heading is something that would ruin user experience but I've just been trying to make sure. I doubt that any user is going to have the same OCD that I have about it so I'm just going to leave it for now. The logo is fine and my friends have told me that it wouldn't put them off so that's that I guess.

My main aim has been attempting to make the blog look less like any standard blog, which has been hard. I understand that content is often king though, I have been looking at competitors and many of them have not put any effort into the design but have large amounts of articles covering pretty much every area of the niche humanly possible.

Plans for Tomorrow

I'm aiming to finish the website design tomorrow and spend the rest of my time researching and trying to understand on-page SEO more in prep for writing my first articles. I'm not sure if I am meant to monetise straight away or wait for increased traffic. Going to look at more journeys as well, it can be hard to understand though and I'm trying to find journeys that have started on the same level that I have.

 

[Trained Wolf]

Good luck with your Journey

 

[Mr Positive]

Good luck use good cache plugin like wp rocket and autonomise, build long form content and read various seo guides out here

 

[BlackMinded]

All the best for your journey.

 

[gorillano2]

Good luck for your journey

 

[fasttrak]

Spent most of my allocated time trying to sort out the logo and the banner. Don't know any CSS and I am desperately trying to get my category headings to align properly. Honestly doubt that my current heading is something that would ruin user experience but I've just been trying to make sure. I doubt that any user is going to have the same OCD that I have about it so I'm just going to leave it for now. The logo is fine and my friends have told me that it wouldn't put them off so that's that I guess.

^ this is me

It has taken me years to learn that all you need to do is get it OK and live. I spent far too long making tiny adjustments so that my sites were aesthetically pleasing, and wasted time, subsequently losing income because of 'trying to make it look good'.

I came to the conclusion that the general buyer will not even notice those small details, all they want is the info and the product! Only people like you and I care, and we are not buying!

Concentrate on getting your content up, as it is going to take a while to rank, then go back to the design when you are waiting.

As soon as I got my head working this way, I made way more money.

Looking forward to seeing how you get on and wish you all the best.

 

[Aquinas]

Good luck with your Journey

Good luck use good cache plugin like wp rocket and autonomise, build long form content and read various seo guides out here

All the best for your journey.

Good luck for your journey

^ this is me

It has taken me years to learn that all you need to do is get it OK and live. I spent far too long making tiny adjustments so that my sites were aesthetically pleasing, and wasted time, subsequently losing income because of 'trying to make it look good'.

I came to the conclusion that the general buyer will not even notice those small details, all they want is the info and the product! Only people like you and I care, and we are not buying!

Concentrate on getting your content up, as it is going to take a while to rank, then go back to the design when you are waiting.

As soon as I got my head working this way, I made way more money.

Looking forward to seeing how you get on and wish you all the best.

Thank you!!!

Day 2

Worked out how to create dropdown boxes and have therefore pretty much sorted out everything that I want on the site. 6 headers, all with lots of potential for wide-ranging amounts of content. I've been using semrush and I have found some keywords that might be useful. The pet name and then "facts" is obviously quite saturated but it has a key amount of volume. However a breed of the pet and then facts has less competition, obviously though it has less volume.

I'm half way through finishing my first article. It's a simple "top 10 facts" article about the pet. The Yoast SEO plugin seems to find it acceptable so far, I've also put a good youtube video in part of the text in an attempt to get some outbound links, apparently that's good as well. I'm trying to put a picture every few facts in order to make it less plain.

Bit disheartened when looking at the competition. They seem to have much better websites but that might be because of the amount of content that is populating it right now. I'm sure it's not my theme, it's the way I'm using it. Hopefully I'll be able to improve this after my first few articles.

How long does it take for Google to acknowledge your articles existence? One of the things I'm hoping to enjoy from this is slowly seeing my page rise in relevance as I get to grips with SEO, hopefully it will get a bit addictive.

Plans for tomorrow

Going to finish the first article and publish it. Then I will spend the rest of my time educating myself on keywords.

 

[Sam Zadworny]

Best of luck with your journey! Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint, so be patient

 

[microbean]

As you study, persistence is very important !

 

[Aquinas]

Best of luck with your journey! Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint, so be patient

As you study, persistence is very important !

Cheers!

Day 3

Finished my first article and also managed to finish my second article. I used semrush and noticed that there was a gap in my competitors sites when it came to a certain (longtail I think) keyword, it only had a KD% in the 70s so I popped out a second article about it. Linked to it from my first article so that I had some internal links as well. My site is looking a bit more full now due to the increased amount of article so I'm not feeling as anxious about its look. If there's any Good Samaritans on here who wouldn't mind looking at my site really quickly (just to see if it isn't complete ****) then I would be incredibly grateful to you. I'm getting more used to semrush and using filters to get the best keywords possible.

Plan for tomorrow

Going to push out another article. So far I'm deciding my articles through looking at internal links. I've just pushed out an article about keeping the pet species fit so I put in a little heading saying that if someone thought that their pet was fat then to go to this page for advice. So I'm going to work on the fat page tomorrow.

 

[Elvlin]

Best of luck in your journey.
SO you plan to monetize with ads? or aff?

 

[Aquinas]

Best of luck in your journey.
SO you plan to monetize with ads? or aff?

I'm hoping to get a proof of concept first by getting a bit of traffic. My competitors generally seem to use aff more than anything else, they have info pages about a certain product and then use it to funnel people onto aff links or pages that feature a lot of aff links. I'm currently running some articles that I think would be easy to rank and then finding ways to get some links in there to get people onto content such as "top ten best..." which will have links to all of the products.

 

[Aquinas]

Good luck with your journey

Thank you!

Happy Holy Saturday all.

Day 4

Wrote another article. I'm getting a lot better at these articles and they are starting to look like something I would read. The sidebar now has popular articles there as well so the page is looking a lot more fuller. Studied my competitors more, they really have some gaps in some key areas. I'm noticing that a lot of them only get traffic from a few specific keyword searches which put them at the top of that result. Going to sneak into the gaps and see what happens.

Hoping that Google will index me soon, been looking at some ways to speed that up.

Plans for tomorrow

It's Easter tomorrow so I'm planning quite a relaxed day. No new article but I will be writing my "about me" section to try and personalise the page. Might also look at some keywords but I'm not going to write an article on Easter.

 

[yetim0n7]

My best wishes
Do your best!

 

[Ranking Expert]

good luck man, i really like journeys

 

[Lady Trieu]

Best of luck with your journey.

 

[RankStellar]

All the best man. Discipline is the Key