First Blogging Journey. Lets do this...

[popbradley]

Hello everyone,

I am starting this blogging journey to keep myself accountable and keep track of the progress I have made and hopefully become a success with this blog.

A little about myself

I joined blackhatworld about 11 years ago. I came across this website trying to start my own website and making every single newbie mistake you could make. I picked the stupidest niche and picked a really stupid domain name that was catchy but completely irrelevant. Needless to say, that website failed miserably.

I was impatient and kept going after new ideas. All of which ultimately ended up failing. I almost quit but then had some success with youtube in the "cracks" niche. It was the first time I made some serious money and fell in love with IM. Waking up to that money every single day was something I could never describe to anyone I knew. The pure joy of seeing your hard work pay off just beats working a 9-5 where you make the same amount of pay every single day. Having to answer to someone who really could care less about you, that just isn't for me. Sadly, That didn't last long. I ended up wasting all that money partying with my girlfriend for weeks at a time. Then the videos got banned and it became impossible to work in the hacks niche again.

Sadly, After many years of Internet marketing and trying various methods I failed more than I ended up succeeding. The worst part about all of this was my sister ended up joining in about a year after me and grew a very successful blog by pure dumb luck. She ended up flipping it for 30 grand 6 years later. I was very happy for her but I would be lying if I didn't say I was jealous of her success after I failed over and over again. After selling that website she had a domain she was working on in the same time frame and it is now doing pretty well. The thing is her website is now 10+ years old and brings in a little under 1k a month. I would be more than happy to bring that kind of money in with a website but accomplishing that over 10 years is way too long for me.

Why a blog now?

I am doing a blog now as I just love the whole idea behind it. It takes a lot of work and time/money but can end up paying off for years on end. I will be graduating with my bachelor's in computer science in a couple of months and before I force myself to get a job in a related field. I am not sure my heart is completely in what I have gone to school for. As a result, I am giving myself 1 year from now to actually make this blog somewhat of a success.

I am mirroring some of the more successful blog journeys on here and hoping to accomplish even half of what some of these other members have accomplished.

Purchasing a website.

I purchased a domain/website from a member on here for about 2500. I will not say who it is until everything on the website is complete. I have moments where I completely regret it as it has been such a hassle in some areas that I am forced to try and work on the domain myself. Content being published has been very slow and some article's quality is a lot lower than what I had seen previously. I even had an issue where a good chunk of the articles ended up being plagiarised. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed off. It was addressed somewhat but the articles were never replaced. Also, Communication skills with the seller are pretty poor. Countless promises made which are then completely forgotten about later down the road.

The whole reason I am even putting a lot of my own effort into this website myself is since January of this year, articles were supposed to be uploaded at a rate of 5 articles a week. Since January, about 10 articles have been posted in total. That is just way too slow for me to grow a website to the scale I imagine growing it too.

What I have done so far myself

1. Gathered 150 keywords using the google alphabet soup method. I spent days cross-referencing websites and picking out some I thought would be good based on various guides I had found on the method.
2. I analyzed my competitors and found one guy who is just killing it. He structures his articles in a way that I have begun to mimic. He ranks for 100's of snippets and keywords on page one. I figure if it's working for him, it will work for me with other keywords.
3. Hired 2 writers. I have one writer I primarily use on BHW and one I found on Upwork. My writer on Upwork is someone I just hired this last week to see how well she can follow my directions. I feel like she will be a good fit if I can train her properly, as she has 15 years of experience in the niche I am in. Having a professional writing for you would be absolutely amazing. I pay about 20 bucks per 1500 words.
4. Purchased about 2k worth of backlinks. almost all backlinks point to the root domain and are branded, generic, or naked URLs. I purchased almost all of them from this forum but recently started doing my own outreach. It proves challenging in some areas but the money you save is worth it a lot of the time.
5. Published about 42 articles myself over the past 2-3 months. I would like to get that up but If I can have 5 new articles posted a week to my website I believe I can reach my goal by the end of the year.

What is my ultimate goal with this website?

I want to get this website to a million words by the end of the year. I won't be doing it completely alone as the person I purchased the website from will be providing me with about 300k words themselves before all is said and done. (hopefully)

I want to get this website large enough so that I can get into Mediavine. That will require 50k sessions a month. I would like to make 1k a month off this website by the end of the year but I am assuming if I can get into Mediavine I will easily meet that goal.

Things I am currently doing

1. Publishing new articles I get from my two writers on a daily basis. I posted 4 today and have 8 more I need to go through and edit, add images too, and then publish to my blog.
2. Do more outreach or purchase backlinks to my inner pages to start to get them to rank better. I am still in that limbo of where articles will rank ok one minute and then totally vanish from the SERPs the next. Google also keeps randomly deindexing and reindexing my pages, which is frustrating.
3. Do more keyword research as I will need more keywords if I am to hit a million words by the end of this year.

Concerns so far

I am now in month 5 of my website (The oldest article is about 4 months old) and I still don't have any keywords in the top 3. I had some fluctuation here and there but they constantly drop out of the SERPs. I am not sure why this is happening but my traffic is increasing so I am just hoping it is the mythical (google sandbox). Some people say it doesn't exist but I don't think anyone really knows for sure so I am praying my website continues to see a nice increase in traffic each month.

I am also concerned that my growth is a little slow compared to others with a website as large as mine. My niche is not exactly "easy" but I wouldn't call it impossibly hard either. I will just say it is probably more in the medium difficulty range if I had to guess.

Website stats so far

Website Age: 5 months (one month the website was just sitting there with nothing on it)

Current Word Count:



Traffic last 28:


Traffic last 7 days:


I will update this thread every Monday if I am able to. I think it would be better to give weekly updates as I have seen others post daily and get burned out pretty quickly.

Wish me luck!

Also, Any tips and advice are always welcome.

 

[Purush]

Great plan mate. Good luck

 

[rajiced]

Thats cool,share more about the SEO parts any daily/weekly task you follow and keyword research

 

[popbradley]

Week 1

Posts published:11
Wordcount per post:1500+



Traffic 7 days vs prior:



Search console for the week vs prior:



I had a slight decline in traffic and I have had several keywords completely vanish from the SERPs (including some top 10 keywords). I purchased some backlinks recently, and have had more get indexed, and I kind of expected this to be honest. The site just hit 5 months the other day so I am still very much in the sandbox (if you believe in that) so things will probably be back and forth for a good while.

I received 3 very nice 1800+ word articles from my writer on Upwork and I am waiting for the other article agency I work with to supply me with my remaining 6 articles I ordered. I keep having slight problems with the agency I order articles from as they keep trying to pass off non-native English writers and native English writers. It is very easy to tell when someone is not native English by the way they structure sentences and how poor their grammar is. I don't have the best grammar in the world but when sentences like (when it is to being good for them) are included in articles. It is very easy to spot garbage...

Really sucks because I just deposited about 500 into my account with them and my writer who exclusively works on my content was actually very good for the money. I am going to have to switch or find another full-time writer on Upwork if the problem persists.

If anyone is curious I pay 20 per 1000 words for my Upwork writer and about 20 dollars for 1500 words for my other articles. My Upwork writer is miles better than the agency I order from but she can only handle 3 articles a month or else I would exclusively use her. I try and shoot for at least 7 articles a week.

I still have to post the 3 articles I just received and will end up doing those tonight. Sometimes I get super lazy but keep telling myself I don't stick with things I will regret it.

I also purchased 3 new domains that I would like to start to build out this coming month just to let them age. I plan to set everything up and post 10 articles on each domain and let them age. Maybe add an article a week to keep them updated until they gain some authority.

Other than that things have just been coasting along nice and slow. I sometimes feel extremely impatient and sometimes feel scared I am wasting my time and money on something that is not going to pan out but I am sticking to it.

Backlinks purchased this week:

2 guest posts purchased for inner pages along with 10 forum posts per page. Each backlink consists of generic anchors, naked URLs, and one backlink targeting the exact keyword. I am trying to not use the keyword of the main article in just the strongest backlink (guest post) so google doesn't see it as suspicious. I don't know if that is a thing or not but I would assume it would be strange if my strongest backlinks are keywords while my weak backlinks are generic and naked URLs.

Next week I plan to continue with what I am doing. Slowly building backlinks to inner pages and posting at least 7 new articles a week.

 

[popbradley]

I am a little late on this post as I ran into a couple of problems for the week and forgot to post my weekly update.

WEEK 2

Posts Published:5
Word count per post:1500+



Traffic for the last 7 days:


Traffic is down this week but impressions on Google search console are up. I have seen a nice upward roller-coaster type trend in search consoles so far. I will link a picture below.




I believe my traffic is down for the week as the last week I got a lot of 3rd world country traffic out of nowhere. I was getting hits from Pakistan, and the Philippines almost equal to my U.S. Traffic. This week though my traffic is almost all U.S. Based, which has increased. So while traffic is down it's more quality traffic so I am ok with that.

I only was able to publish 5 articles this week as I have had a problem with another writer. I had 6 other articles submitted but they were complete trash. I would never add them to my site and sent them for revision. The articles not only sounded like complete rubbish, and were not native English, but also did not follow my instructions or guidelines at all.

I love my main writer but she still can only produce about 3 articles a week. We discussed her writing more for me if they go back into lockdown. First chance I get I will just have her write all the other articles I am trying to get produced weekly. I am still trying to find other writers on Upwork but it is a lengthy process and you have to weed through a lot of trash.

Keywords are still dancing up and down so no real talk on them right now.

Other than the slight hiccup with the other agency writers, Things are still trucking along nice and slow.

Lastly, The agency I ordered the website from, who are supposed to be adding articles here and there, have vanished... again. They love to make promises but don't deliver on those promises and lie lie lie. I am very frustrated with them and the lack of communication and unending lies. I am glad I took over this project as nothing would be getting done.

Backlinks:

I am still waiting on my order for the backlinks I ordered last week to be delivered. I have noticed a press release I purchased already had a bunch of links coming into my home page, so that's good. I did see one guest post get indexed into Ahrefs as well and was presently surprised to see it show up before the report.

Saying that I am a little upset by the article used to publish the post on the website. The article used is written in VERY broken English and I try and not have low-quality stuff like that pointing to my site. I only paid 60 for the link but I will contact the seller about it after I get the report. Hopefully, the other 2 links end up being placed in better articles.

I used this provider before and liked everything about it, so it sucks to see something like that.

Hopefully can get it resolved.

 

[wildfly]

Nice, share more about the SEO parts every day and every week, and study keywords

 

[popbradley]

Nice, share more about the SEO parts every day and every week, and study keywords

not much to the keyword research. I used various methods listed on here but primarily used my own variation of the “alphabet soup” method. You can find it from income school on YouTube. I pretty much do what they do but add my own twist to find more keywords and try and analyze the competition more in depth once I find keywords.

I did all my keyword research a couple months ago and have about 150 saved up for articles, will do more later when I need them.

as for seo, I built a few guest posts to the home page and some manual blog comments as well the second month. I didn’t touch it for a bit and have done some manual outreach, we well as pay people on here for guest posts and niche edits, primarily to the home page.

I also only used naked urls, branded and generic anchor text for all backlinks. I am now starting to build guest Posts, niche edits, and manual for posts to inner pages. most with naked, generic and branded anchors with a keyword sprinkled in here and there.

 

[popbradley]

Also, I forgot to mention in my weekly update I purchased link whisper and have gone through half my site already and added internal links to other posts. Plug-in is extremely handy and worth the price so far. Idk how good of an effect it’s going to have on my site but others swear by internal linking so I’m excited to see results with it.

I am Going to try and finish the rest of the internal linking tomorrow.

 

[jaerehan]

Great plan bro and also nice start. All the best for your goal. Don' t get frustrated bro. post article with high quality and also use high search volume and low competition keyword.

 

[popbradley]

WEEK 3

Posts Published:8
Word count of posts:1500+



Traffic Last 7 days:



Traffic is still fluctuating up and down but Search Console shows a constant rise in impressions week after week. So that's all that really matters to me currently. I still don't expect to see nice progress for another 3 or 4 months but could always take longer. Just trucking along.

I managed to publish 8 articles this week but I have about 10 more I need to edit, add images too and publish. I started another site in a similar niche, with less competition, and have put a lot of my focus into that site. I have about 10 posts uploaded for that site. I will upload maybe 10 to 20 more and let that one age. Just trying to spread things out a little more away from this site.

I have moments where I feel like everything is a huge waste of time and I am wasting money and time on something that's never going to kick off but I try and push past that and keep ongoing. I am just a very impatient person .

Most of the traffic is still not coming from google but on some days I do get random hits. I have noticed my clicks are more consistent. It may be a click or two days but it's up from a click every couple of days.

My backlinks still have not been delivered to me but I am noticing them show up in SERP results. I ordered forum links from 2 sellers on here and one is decent and the comments fit pretty well. The other, not so much. The comments are talking about the topic a little bit then tells them to check out the website. I would rather it fit more naturally within the comment but if it sticks then I guess it really doesn't matter much.

I will go back and check some of my older backlinks I placed orders for and make sure they are still around.

These weekly updates are a little boring as nothing substantial is happening really but it does force me to post more when I feel like being lazy and skipping it another day or two. So far it seems the thread is working for me lol.

Also, I just noticed I am almost at 300k words for the website. I still have a long way to go to get to half a million words for the website but still a nice milestone.

 

[doublequartz]

You have the motivation and the tools at your disposal! Best of luck mate

 

[popbradley]

WEEK 4

Posts published:7
Word Count of articles:1500+

I realized this doesn't give the exact word count for articles but all my articles uploaded are between 1500 to 2k words.



Traffic last 7 days:



Traffic still is up and down, and my session duration is a lot lower this week but GSC is climbing up nicely. If you looked at just the traffic stats you wouldn't think things are progressing but google search console has had a nice increase week over week. I also have noticed I am primarily getting traffic from just the USA, Canada, and the UK now.

Also, more and more traffic is coming in from Google. I've been averaging 1-2 clicks a day and I had 8 clicks one day and 9 clicks today already. As long as GSC shows I am getting more and more impressions that's what I am focusing on to see things are working.




I think my click-through rate is fine for what my average position is but I do think I need to go back and fix some of my titles and make them more "attention-grabbing" most of my post titles are just the keyword. I am pretty sure adding "guide, info, answered, full details, etc" will get me a better click-through rate but I will worry about that later down the road.

WHAT I ACCOMPLISHED THIS WEEK:

I spent a large sum of time going and collecting new keywords. My niche is rather broad so I am able to collect some good keywords if I spend a lot of time on it. I was down to my last 20 but managed to collect another 200 in one night. Most keywords are either in the low comp or medium comp area. I also collected some keywords from competitors using Ahrefs to reverse search some lower DA competitors and essentially steal any keywords they ranked in the top 10 that were information related. I want to try and outrank, some of them as my domain seems to be stronger than theirs with backlinks already. The only ranking factor that pushes them to the top is how old their sites are. most are at least 2 years old while mine is going on 6 months. I think over time and with some more backlinks I will be able to take most of these keywords, but who knows.

I also managed to hire a new writer from Upwork. She is brand new to writing SEO-related articles and was brand new on Upwork, but she had very good writing skills for the price she was asking for. I assume she is wanting some experience and feedback from working with me. I am willing to train her to write exactly how I want her to write. I know it will take some time for her to learn but in the end, it is just worth it. Trying to use agencies sometimes is just a pain in the ass. You will get an amazing article one time and a totally bad article that didn't follow your guidelines at all, the next.

With the hiccups with these agencies, article posting is slow. I constantly feel hesitant to pay for articles for fear of me having to either edit them or have them fixed (which takes days). Still, posting 7 articles a week is not horrible but I would like it to be at least 10. Some of you on here are posting 4+ articles a day. Which is amazing and hard to believe.

BACKLINKS:


My order for my profile backlinks was completed a couple of days ago. Backlinks are fine, but not completely relevant, but I don't care. As long as they stick they still work. I will probably buy a couple more guest posts this week for some articles that need more of a push.

One of the articles I built backlinks to has vanished from SERPs for over a month. I am hoping that is a good sign in the end and it will show up higher than it was.

One thing I did notice was I have always been told to not use my main keyword too often with anchor text. I try and keep it every 10 to 20 backlinks of just generic anchors, branded, or naked URLs, and then maybe one backlink with my main keyword. I was checking a competitor though who is absolutely killing it in my niche. He ranks for several snippets and keyword page one. His site is about 2 years old and I know he gets a good amount of traffic to his blog because he is in mediavine. The thing I noticed on his site, which checking Ahrefs, is he using his main anchor text a LOT more than what others even recommend. He will have a page ranking for a keyword and will have 7-10 guest posts pointing to that keyword. almost all of them will be his main keyword or a variation of the keyword and maybe 1 will just be generic anchor text or a naked URL. So the rule doesn't seem to apply to him but maybe in the future Google will do an update and he will get slapped down for such practice. Who knows, google is so weird.

Things are pretty consistent over the past week and moving along nicely but nothing amazing has really happened. I would maybe lower these posts to once a month until things actually started to happen but it motivates me to post. Otherwise, I might skip uploading and editing some of my articles. I find it helps me keep accountable.


Until next week.

 

[popbradley]

didn't completely forget about this journey but did plan on just doing monthly updates since things are pretty much the same week over week. Don't want to clutter the forum with useless stuff weekly when not much is going on, just a slow steady incline. Still hoping for that random spike in traffic but still hasn't happened yet. I am still having a lot of problems with google actually indexing my pages and notice more and more pages are under "excluded" and less and less are under"indexed" which is strange since I post a few times a week.

I don't think I have any kind of penalty as my monthly impressions keep rising so who knows. If I can ever get past whatever the heck Google is doing with my site then I expect things to get even better.

So here are the screenshots for the last month.

articles posted

articles published for the month:



managed a post a day on average so happy with that. This month not going as good but I have about 12 articles I need to edit and post right now. I don't know how much I will be able to add this month as my one new writer decided they cannot do but one article a week.. I worked with them for a while just for them to tell me that. On top of that, They still haven't given me the first article because"works been busy". Can't really fathom why you'd even come on Upwork and apply for a position if you aren't even going to have time to do it. Some people are very strange. I will need to add someone else to replace her. That's the plan for this month. Hopefully not get another dude. takes a long time to find writers I actually like.

Traffic last 28 days:



up 40% from last month so I am ok with that. I was hoping for it to constantly be 100%+ each month but as long as it is increasing at a steady pace I am happy. Had my highest visit day yesterday at 43 visits. All organic. Still mostly bing, yahoo and duckduckgo but google is close now.

Oh and almost forgot to mention, one of the days my site was down for 12 hours. I only noticed because I went to log in and had a database corruption error. Took me a hour to figure out what had happened but got it fixed but only had a about half the normal hits from that day because of it.

Search console impressions last month:



Impressions are more than double so That is really all I care bout. I know with the impressions rising the traffic will keep increasing. That's why I assume I must not have some kind of Google penalty and instead some very strange google sandbox that is lasting longer than others. My average position has also gone up. I haven't built any new backlinks recently so need to get back on that. Still have posts I built backlinks to over a month ago still completely vanished for their keywords. They still rank for other keywords but not for the primary one. Maybe got some penalty on those posts but couldn't see how as I didn't even use the main keyword but one time out of 20+ backlinks.

Search console impressions over 6 months:



Again, Nice spike going up so hopefully, it continues at the pace it is going. One page is bringing in most of the clicks, which worries me, but I am hopeful the others will follow suit over time.

PLAN FOR THIS MONTH:


Just going to keep up the pace with articles if possible. I know I will have a harder time since I will probably be trying to find a new writer or two to replace the agency I use, but hopefully can find them quickly.

Also need to get a few more guest posts to some inner posts. At least a couple to keep things going at the pace they are.

 

[popbradley]

Here is what I am talking about with my posts if anyone is curious.





indexed pages keep dropping but excluded pages keep rising. I do check some of the pages that are excluded and some are like this.



So I guess it must just be some kind of glitch within Google search console. Who knows.

 

[popbradley]

Monthly Update:

Like I stated in my last update. I am going to do monthly updates until things have actually picked up substantially. Things are going to slow currently to do weekly updates in my opinion. Saying that, I found that I managed to slack a little bit this month.
I still had articles being written but I was lazy actually editing, structuring, collecting images, and publishing them. I am in college and just graduated after 4 long years. I don't know if I will even use my degrees anytime soon but it is super nice to have. I am actually the only one in my family to ever go to college. So getting away from that, I still have about 12 Left I need to publish from my writers but I will hopefully have those done by the end of this next week.

Anyways. Let's get to the stats for the month.

ARTICLES PUBLISHED FOR MAY:

Websites Total Blog Posts: 203
New Articles: 25
Average word count: 1851

SEARCH CONSOLE LAST 28 DAYS VS PREVIOUS:



ANALYTICS FOR THE LAST 28 DAYS:



As everyone can see. My website has increased pretty nicely over the last 28 days. I was still having indexing issues, even more, got deindexed down to 133, but I noticed that I had more articles pop up as indexed in search console, which was a good sign. Week over week more and more where deindexed until that, so that gives me hope I didn't have some weird kind of penalty. Google is just being, well, google lol. Site:website.com shows I have more and more pages indexed weekly. In fact, I went from google showing about 60 results to 104.


I for sure could of had way more posts published this week, but like I said, I got pretty lazy being discouraged with my site losing more and more pages. I feel a lot better seeing my website traffic has grown 100% over the last month though. Still not a crazy amount from google, and my average CTR is still low to me, but my average rankings are still not top 10. I have a problem where I want to check stats daily but in the end it just is an endless roller coaster so it's better to check it monthly instead.

The only thing that bothers me with the stats above is my session duration is way down. I think it's because I am ranking for more answer-related keywords now. Stuff like "why is the sky blue" People come to the page, get the answer and then bounce pretty quickly. I would love to at least have that to two minutes but still not sure how I could really get that to go up when they are just wanting one direct answer.

Here are my keyword stats for the last 30 days:



I still have a lot of articles that are not in the top 100 but I have noticed a few starting to pop up. The funny thing is they are articles I published back in January and even all the way to December. They are finally getting indexed and starting to rank.
A few of the keywords that are in the top 100 ( I think I counted 5) are actually my website's category page ranking instead of the actual article. Google still hasn't indexed those posts but I am hopeful that once they do get indexed they will rank much higher than just the category pages.

BACKLINKS FOR MAY:

I purchased 6 DA 50+ guest post backlinks in may. They were all delivered about a week ago. Not sure if it is because of these 6 new links alone but my website's DA went up to 12. I also purchased forum post links from two suppliers on here at the beginning of the month that has also been delivered. I placed a recent order for 100 manual forum backlinks from one of the sellers I liked. One seller's forum post links didn't really fit the topic super well, also, the anchor text did not actually flow well into the actual post. The one I ordered from had much better comments, links flowed a lot better, and seemed to be more niche relevant all around. That is why I went with them for this larger order.

I am hoping to get the same quality as I did the last order. I spread the links across 8 posts on my website that are already performing pretty well. Most are either generic anchors, naked URLs, and a long tail keyword here and there.

PLAN FOR JUNE:

I am still really liking my main writer who is an expert in the field. Her articles are always interesting to read and I managed to get her to up the number she produces for me up to 4 a week. My other writer produces very well content but still just doing one a week, if that. She's slow, makes a lot of excuses but I just let her work. I'd love to have her do way more but I don't exactly want to get rid of her at this point because even her one article a week is too good to just let go. I easily feel like I should be paying them 30 bucks per 1000 words or more. I have them both trained pretty well to the point the articles come out exactly how I want them to. I still have to edit them and make sure the grammar is perfect with Grammarly but I don't really have to give them tips anymore and explain how I want things. I just give them the keywords and they produce the article.

I plan to just keep them going with articles, Try and increase my productivity and get the articles I am behind on all published by the end of this week. I still have 100 keywords left in my list of keywords but I have found it rather addicting to try and find more. I purchased Ahrefs again and will be going back through finding keywords. I have recently started to take a lot of my competitor's sites who have lower DA than me and started to take their top keywords for my own. I am not sure how moral that is to take a competitor's keywords but I have found some really nice keywords that I would never have considered targeting otherwise. I plan to continue doing this and doing this until I pretty much tap out my niche, which is gonna be hard. It's a pretty broad niche.

That's all for now. Until next month, or something crazy big happens .

 

[popbradley]

Monthly Update

Not sure anyone is reading this but I still love adding my thoughts and progress to this thread and hope in a year or two it will actually be nice to see how much progress I have made.

ARTICLES PUBLISHED FOR JUNE:

Total Articles:240
New articles: 37
Average Wordcount: 1793

Managed to post more articles than last month. I had a lot of articles saved up but managed to hammer all of them out and get every single one of them published. This month will probably have less articles published since I am down to just one writer still. I was trying to find a new writer but ended up not having enough time to really train someone off Upwork and decided to go with another agency but used them on new site. More on that later on.

SEARCH CONSOLE LAST 28 DAYS VS PREVIOUS



ANALYTICS FOR THE LAST 28 DAYS:



Traffic and impressions still increasing. Not as much as I had hoped but I still think the growth is nice nonetheless. The overall increase in traffic a week ago was almost 100% but has dropped as traffic seems to be pretty stagnant right now. I told myself when I started this site I was going to have 500 visits a day by July. Well, I am about 5x that off lol but I have faced a lot of challenges with the site getting indexed so I am sure in time everything will be ok. I have also started to realize some of my keyword research, while good, was a little off. I went back through many articles and couldn't really understand why I assumed the keywords I targeted were low competition. They were, in most cases, actually medium comp and would take a lot more authority and time to rank for. Luckily my keyword research is getting even better and more of my more recent articles have been ranking.

SERP ROBOT VS PREVIOUS 30 DAYS



2 Days ago this was actually MUCH better than it shows. I had 16 keywords in the top 3, 40+ in the top 10 and several more in the top 30 and 100. I think the new google update is currently rolling out and it seems to be making my keywords dance around a lot. In the morning I will have 70 to 80 keywords improved and then that same afternoon 80 to 90 will drop several places.

As for my indexing issues. I still see a very large number of articles not being indexed but I do notice most of the new content I publish does get indexed. Not all of it but most. Almost 70+ articles are from the original creator of my blog so I am writing it down to google just hating their content still. I contacted them about it and said they would look into it but still nothing really on that, and I don't expect much from it and will really only judge on the content I do myself.

BACKLINKS FOR JUNE

I only ordered 1 guest post in June but I ordered 100 forum posts because of something Shaunm is doing currently with them. I will be ordering more guest posts in the future but would like to see the impact of the forum posts I ordered first. Forums are still not complete but the guest post was completed and was on a really nice site and had one of the best articles I have seen in a guest post. Was very happy with it. Not sure the impact it will have yet, as it has just been completed a couple of days ago, but I expect some movements with it.

WHAT I GOT DONE IN JUNE:

I managed to reach my goal of getting all the articles I was behind on published. Took a while but I am all caught up. I interlinked more of my posts were possible with link whisperer and cleaned up a few posts I had on the site that started to get traffic. I have also started my 3rd site. I might add it to this journey, or start a new one with it, once it gets some age on it but it will naturally take some time. I got the blog up and running, including theme, plugins, all integrations, and logo on the site. It only took me a few hours to do but still took some time to get everything done.

I have also done a lot more keyword research. I have found that this is by far my favorite part of building a site and I become rather addicted to it. I now have an excess of 400 keywords for this site to use and almost 200 for the new site I started. Just from looking at these keywords as well, I can tell my secondary site is in a MUCH better niche than my first one. I have found several keywords, with almost triple the search volume as my first site, with almost no competition on them. In fact, out of 200 keywords I would say maybe 150 don't even have a single article written on the subject. In theory, they should all be pretty easy to hit page one on.

saying all that, I have also ordered 30 articles from a new agency I was trying. I used them in the past and liked their work and decided to try them again. It has only taken them 3 days to finish 25 of the articles. I have published 12 of the articles so far and I am shooting to get at least 40 articles up by the end of July. I have a feeling it is going to be very easy as I actually liked most of the articles they have given me. I haven't really had to change much with them. They have taken less time to edit than my upwork writers articles but are a good bit more expensive too.

PLANS FOR JULY

Same old same old with my current blog, publish content as it comes and order more guest posts to pages that are getting close to the top of page one. I will be ordering more articles and maybe trying to find a writer on upwork for this new blog but I am so confident that this new niche is vastly superior to my current one that I am wanting to get content out as soon as possible and may just keep using the article writing service just to get articles up on it as quickly as possible.

At the end of the month I will potentially build some backlinks to the new site and possibly build some social media profiles just to get some more trust with google. I don't know if haveing social media profiles helps but I don't think it hurts either.

Lastly, I am going to go over all the keywords I have saved up and make sure they are actually low comp and sort all the ones that are the lowest first and get content written on them as quickly as possible.

That's all for last month. Lets hope the growth continues!

 

[popbradley]

July Monthly Update

Seems I have a tendency to post 1 day after the start of the month lol. Better late than never I suppose.

My website is now 9 months old

ARTICLES PUBLISHED FOR JULY:

Total Articles:293
New articles: 62
Average Wordcount: 1400 words

Posted a lot more articles this month than I have for any of my previous months. I keep seeing conflicting arguments from some people saying website age matters the most but some say that articles will take several months, from the publication date, to actually start to rank.

I am not sure how true the second one is but I hope that is the case, as I still have a lot of articles that aren't really bringing in any traffic, as they do not rank yet. I have even pointed some guest posts at a decent number of these articles and some have seen no movement whatsoever. I recently purchased 5 more for a couple more articles and will potentially stop building links if these ones do not budge as well.


It could also be possible that the link juice is being spread through my whole site so the impact isn't as good as I would hope but it's more beneficial for all the articles on my site since I interlink so much. No idea.

GOOGLE UPDATE JULY

Sadly. I was hit with the google update in june/july. It knocked about 10 of my top 3 keywords down a few ranks. I was really upset about it but after a couple of weeks, I started to recover. it took until July 28th for me to actually gain a single new keyword in the top 3, from articles I had posted.



Since I had started to recover my impressions are more sporadic, as you can see.

SEARCH CONSOLE LAST 28 DAYS VS PREVIOUS:



ANALYTICS FOR THE LAST 28 DAYS:




Still not doing "crazy" numbers, especially in correlation to my post count, but a lot of my posts aren't that old honestly. I really hammered out 200 of them in the past 5 months. So hopefully that post-age thing I mentioned earlier matters lol. I am still seeing growth, so I am very grateful for that. Maybe in a year I will be where I want to be with this blog and will be able to flip it.

Also, My session duration still is really low but I found since I am targeting really specific terms like "are cars fast?" people don't tend to stay very long. my pageview duration is around 4 minutes but it's because my more guide style articles people stay for 8+ minutes while my lower end, to the point, articles get about 2+ minutes.

SERP ROBOT LAST 30 DAYS:



I believe this would have been even better but the google update in July really messed things up growth-wise for a couple of weeks. I had only 15 in the top 3 about 3 weeks ago.

EARNED:0

I still have not added any ads to the blog but told myself I will end up doing it once I am consistently at 200 hits a day. I don't think the low income would be worth it for the loss of user experience just yet. I get worried I will place the ads and my site will stop growing.

WHAT I GOT DONE IN JULY:

I got a lot done this month. I managed to interview a few new writers. I used a couple for a week or two but decided the quality just was just too low and it took me too long to edit the articles. I switched my main writer to my new site as I will probably not publish as much on it until I see more growth out of it, that or I hit 100 articles on the new blog to let it sit for a while. I have 23 posts published on the new site and have 20 more I have yet to publish. I now have 3 writers I use that I pay about the same (15 per 1000 words) the 2 new writers are a little slow but still produce about 3 pieces of content a week for me.

I also purchased 5 more guests posts in an attempt to see if they will help push a couple of these posts to page one. If they don't help much I will probably stop building new guest posts. I have not decided yet.

I have also spent a long time designing header images for my blogs using Canva. It makes it super easy and you can get some nice images created with them. I believe it also helps with the click-through rate on google, as I have had one win the snippet with an image and it is getting more traffic than my other snippets with a generic stock photo. I have done about 60 but have hundreds more to go lol.

PLANS FOR AUGUST:

I have all my writers writing for the new blog. I am going to try and hit 100 posts on it as quickly as possible. As soon as the site hits 2 months I will start building backlinks for it. I still have not created social media profiles for the site yet, As I feel getting articles done is more important and will publish the ones I have in the next coming days. I am not sure I will have to many posts published to the current main site, but if I see even more growth this month I will start writing more. I just want to see more growth out of it with the number of articles published. Again, I still consider 100 of them not "great" but still. Time will tell.

Until next month!

Ps.

I wasn't s sure were to put this but I have had more posts start to get out of "crawled currently not indexed" the manual requesting of the articles every single day might actually be working.

 

[akunbajak]

I think it's better if you started to optimize your on page seo by internal linking and improve your correlational seo using surfer seo

Which page your guest post aimed to? Your homepage/root domain or your page? Some bhw user see better growth when the link go to the homepage

 

[popbradley]

I think it's better if you started to optimize your on page seo by internal linking and improve your correlational seo using surfer seo

Which page your guest post aimed to? Your homepage/root domain or your page? Some bhw user see better growth when the link go to the homepage

I have a large amount of links pointing the homepage and a lot pointing to individual posts. All my posts are interlinked using link whisper.

I've never used surfer seo. Heard mixed things about it. my on page is pretty decent from mimicking others. I also try and make sure the post is at least 25% longer than the longest post in the top 3.

 

[popbradley]

AUGUST UPDATE:

Articles Published:

Total Articles: 311
Articles Posted:18
Average words:1700

Didn't post nearly enough articles this month as I posted a lot more on my newer site to get it to 100 articles so it can sit there and age.

I am really obsessed with keyword research and feel like I get better and better so love doing it but can see so many flaws in the keywords I selected at the beginning.

I still don't see why some articles refuse to rank when the competition is super low but google is strange and when talking to Shaun I may potentially be in a weird sandbox as my niche seems to take longer to rank it seems. Who knows.

I did have an article index that I published on March 6th show up on the 28th of august for the keyword for a couple of days at rank 12. That means it took over 5 months to even index the article which is insane to me.


OVERALL SEARCH CONSOLE GROWTH

Had some issue in google that I think affected everyone that had a drop in traffic for one day. My search console impressions and clicks are still climbing but just really slowly and, again, I still have TONS of keywords that are nowhere near ranked but its still improving so that's good. Just not nearly as good as it should be I think.


SEARCH CONSOLE LAST 28 DAYS VS PREVIOUS:



ANALYTICS LAST 28 DAYS:



Almost 40% growth this month as well. I sure hope it keeps up like this because ill be at 10k sessions in the next couple of months. I am not sure it will happen though as I do notice the percentage goes down with each month but still hoping lol.

SERP ROBOT LAST 30 DAYS:




Most of the keywords that have jumped up (was 29 top 3 a couple of days ago) are older keywords. I still have a very hard time not thinking I am failing by watching others journeys who double the top 3 keywords month over month but I'm trying not to think like that.

I do have it broken down though pretty much why this is happening in most cases.

I checked most of my keywords and I am now pretty sure at least half of the site's keywords I will never rank for without substantial backlinks. This whole thing is a learning process so I have made a few mistakes but I am getting much better.

so the breakdown for the keywords is something like this (just a guess but seeing a pattern)

About 100 articles all have keywords that I thought were low competition, as the sites didn't target the exact term, but they are still closely related and are all sites that have DA 40+.

about 50ish articles have DA 20 or 30 sites in the top spots with substantially more age to their sites. I might beat them eventually but it might also take some links to these articles.

id say maybe 100 articles I have posted are generally low comp with DA 10 to 20 sites in the top or riddled with forums. I do have a lot of articles in this category that I keep thinking SHOULD be in the top 10 at least but still are nowhere near the top and I am just assuming it is an article age thing.

The rest of the articles are still not indexed. So crazy having so many articles published and maybe a third of them are nowhere in the serps. I hope google gives me some love one day lol.
INCOME:0

I have just initiated the process of adding Ezoic. I had no idea it would take 14 days for them to even review the site but I am in no rush. I said last month if I get 200 hits a day for over a week I will add them. I averaged 242 sessions a day for the last 7 days so passed that by a good chunk. Should have Ezoic installed by next month if they approve the site.

WHAT I GOT DONE IN AUGUST:

I didn't publish too many articles and was primarily focused on the other site. I only about 20 more articles before that site hits 100 articles. When that happens, I will let that site sit and post to it a couple of times a month until it ages in. I have researched other niches but really want these sites to be successful but keep thinking if i have more sites aging I will at least have one that is a massive success. It's good to diversify but it's also not good to spread yourself too thin.

I didn't purchase any backlinks this month, as I wanted to see the effects of the links I recently placed orders with, and to be honest, I am not really even sure those keywords moved in the slightest lol. I will wait a few more weeks before deciding if they have had any affect or not.

I also switched my main writer back to this blog and will keep her here until I decide it's time to move on to the next project. I still have my other writer finishing up the last 20 articles and will maybe use him for a couple of articles a week.

PLANS FOR SEPTEMBER:

My plans are pretty much the exact same as they are each month. I am going to keep pushing content out for both sites and will potentially buy more links in the middle of the month after checking if the last ones I have purchased have helped at all. They may not be helping as much as they could as I am super safe with keyword density. about 95% of the links are either generic anchors or branded.