First Blogging Journey. Lets do this...

[Sagardixit123]

I saved the thread.....keep updating. Don't give up.

 

[incription]

This is Really, Thanks for sharing your Journey.
I recently started an Finance Blog and it would be great if I can get more tips and I will try to follow this thread too.

THanks & Regards

 

[popbradley]

It has been over 2 months since I updated but figured id give an update on what is happening ( or lack thereof rather)

Since the last time, I posted the site seemed to be increasing nicely but has then just stalled out over the last month and a half. I was increasing at a nice steady slow pace but then out of nowhere, it's like everything flatlined. My search console was also dipping and then climbing back up and dipping again, over and over. Here are some screenshots to show what I mean.



Search Console





The site is now 1 year and 17 days old.

Since I last updated I have been very consistent with adding articles. I started targeting articles that matched similar criteria of all these other articles I had written that had started to rank but have had no real luck with them yet.

The site is now at 378 posts, 656 thousand words, and a total of 64 posts published in September and October.

I also monetized the site with Ezoic in September and made 59 dollars in September and made roughly 90 in October. My Empv is pretty dang low which honestly I did not expect. I am in one of the higher paying niches ezoic advertises but I am only getting about a 8 dollar epmv currently. I keep hoping it will one day increase as Ezoic learns my site more but I am more currently trying to figure out why the site seems to just be in this constant stuck state.

I honestly would feel like with how things were slowly starting to climb that I would have kept seeing a nice slow increase in traffic but that has not been the case clearly. Plus, adding another 64+ articles would make one assume that traffic would be up as well but nope.

I am also up to 42 keywords in the top 3 but that has not seemed to of done a single thing to help me climb. I do think some of that is because a few keywords bringing traffic do seem to be a tad seasonal but even then, it was only maybe 1 or 2.

I just kept seeing people say I will see this nice massive increase in traffic out of nowhere and will be glad I did not quit. I am still waiting for that day. I heard it was around month 6 but it was just nice and slow since then. Then I heard its around month 12 and soon as I am a year old my site is now stalling out. Makes me want to pull my hair out but all I can do is keep hoping the site will one day just get out of this issue where content is being outranked by low DA sites and quit having awful indexing issues. I have content from February that has not been indexed one time and I have found no errors with the existing content.

Also, what I mean by low DA sites is I have noticed some of the keywords I targeted (that are page 2 or 3) are being beaten by a site that is literally only 6 months old and is a DA 2. My site has climbed all the way up to DA 30.

I have also quit adding new links to the site as the articles I even was linking to have not budged one bit. The keywords are not even that high of competition but they just refuse to rank so have put that on hold for now.

I will say that the ONLY thing that I can think of (which I am sure is just a major coincidence) is that about the time I added Ezoic to the site it has completely stopped growing and just has held its ground. I am sure this has had nothing to do with impacting the growth but seems rather strange. I might eventually take it off after December if I have seen no new growth.

So that is currently where I am sitting now. I haven't quit this site, not by a long shot, but it's hard to update something when it seems to be pretty damn stagnant for how much content I am adding.

 

[ANewBeginning]

It has been over 2 months since I updated but figured id give an update on what is happening ( or lack thereof rather)

Since the last time, I posted the site seemed to be increasing nicely but has then just stalled out over the last month and a half. I was increasing at a nice steady slow pace but then out of nowhere, it's like everything flatlined. My search console was also dipping and then climbing back up and dipping again, over and over. Here are some screenshots to show what I mean.

View attachment 190707

Search Console

View attachment 190708



The site is now 1 year and 17 days old.

Since I last updated I have been very consistent with adding articles. I started targeting articles that matched similar criteria of all these other articles I had written that had started to rank but have had no real luck with them yet.

The site is now at 378 posts, 656 thousand words, and a total of 64 posts published in September and October.

I also monetized the site with Ezoic in September and made 59 dollars in September and made roughly 90 in October. My Empv is pretty dang low which honestly I did not expect. I am in one of the higher paying niches ezoic advertises but I am only getting about a 8 dollar epmv currently. I keep hoping it will one day increase as Ezoic learns my site more but I am more currently trying to figure out why the site seems to just be in this constant stuck state.

I honestly would feel like with how things were slowly starting to climb that I would have kept seeing a nice slow increase in traffic but that has not been the case clearly. Plus, adding another 64+ articles would make one assume that traffic would be up as well but nope.

I am also up to 42 keywords in the top 3 but that has not seemed to of done a single thing to help me climb. I do think some of that is because a few keywords bringing traffic do seem to be a tad seasonal but even then, it was only maybe 1 or 2.

I just kept seeing people say I will see this nice massive increase in traffic out of nowhere and will be glad I did not quit. I am still waiting for that day. I heard it was around month 6 but it was just nice and slow since then. Then I heard its around month 12 and soon as I am a year old my site is now stalling out. Makes me want to pull my hair out but all I can do is keep hoping the site will one day just get out of this issue where content is being outranked by low DA sites and quit having awful indexing issues. I have content from February that has not been indexed one time and I have found no errors with the existing content.

Also, what I mean by low DA sites is I have noticed some of the keywords I targeted (that are page 2 or 3) are being beaten by a site that is literally only 6 months old and is a DA 2. My site has climbed all the way up to DA 30.

I have also quit adding new links to the site as the articles I even was linking to have not budged one bit. The keywords are not even that high of competition but they just refuse to rank so have put that on hold for now.

I will say that the ONLY thing that I can think of (which I am sure is just a major coincidence) is that about the time I added Ezoic to the site it has completely stopped growing and just has held its ground. I am sure this has had nothing to do with impacting the growth but seems rather strange. I might eventually take it off after December if I have seen no new growth.

So that is currently where I am sitting now. I haven't quit this site, not by a long shot, but it's hard to update something when it seems to be pretty damn stagnant for how much content I am adding.

how much $$$ are you investing in content monthly nowadays?

Yeah, google is a bitch when it comes to whitehat sites. People work their ass off and get paid peanuts in return. If you don't want to go blackhat seo route, then I suggest trying advertising your site in social media sites; forums, etc.

 

[blogmen]

Plus, adding another 64+ articles would make one assume that traffic would be up as well but nope.

You added those in September and October so they need more time to rank. Probably dec-jan.

I have content from February that has not been indexed one time and I have found no errors with the existing content.

Did you try force indexing in GSC? If you did, maybe it's cannibalization. Do you have very similar article titles?

 

[NEWBIE MONEY EBOOKS]

Awesome I have a similar journey going on right now good luck

 

[popbradley]

You added those in September and October so they need more time to rank. Probably dec-jan.


Did you try force indexing in GSC? If you did, maybe it's cannibalization. Do you have very similar article titles?

Yah but a lot of my older stuff should really be ranking and bringing some traffic now and it’s not since I keep having indexing problems. 1/3rd of my articles are still not indexed. That or they index and deindex over and over.

ive gone over my articles and none of them are the same from what I can tell. I first thought it had something to do with them being amazon affiliate refiew style articles but at this point it’s half my review articles won’t index and half my informational stuff won’t index or stay indexed. Some of the articles are over a year old and still won’t index for more than a day.

 

[popbradley]

how much $$$ are you investing in content monthly nowadays?

Yeah, google is a bitch when it comes to whitehat sites. People work their ass off and get paid peanuts in return. If you don't want to go blackhat seo route, then I suggest trying advertising your site in social media sites; forums, etc.

I’d say roughly 400 to 500ish. It’s not a huge amount but sometimes could be a lot more. I’ve slowed it down a bit since I haven’t seen growth like I would have hoped yet. Or rather, no real growth for over a month now.

 

[blogmen]

ive gone over my articles and none of them are the same from what I can tell

Not the articles themselves, just the titles. Cannibalization happens if you use a title like for example
"Best marshmallow recipes for Halloween 2020" and then you write another article with the same title replacing 2020 with 2021. The 2nd article won't rank and will get deindexed.

 

[popbradley]

Not the articles themselves, just the titles. Cannibalization happens if you use a title like for example
"Best marshmallow recipes for Halloween 2020" and then you write another article with the same title replacing 2020 with 2021. The 2nd article won't rank and will get deindexed.

I have every article topic saved to an excel file and none of them are on the same topic.

 

[popbradley]

This is what a very large number of my articles are like. The really low dips is my site showing up lower for a category page for the keyword but google had deindexed and reindexd some of these particular posts over and over and over for almost a year.

Most of the ones that look like this are “best blank for blank” or “cheapest blank to blank” essentially review articles. its not all of the articles but it’s close to 40 of the 90+ that aren’t indexed are like this. I always kept thinking if I “gave it time” like people say then it would eventually correct itself but it never has.

I mean almost 100 articles out of 370 not indexing or staying indexed is rather bad.

 

[voica]

How is your site speed? Maybe that could cause a problem.

 

[blogmen]

I have every article topic saved to an excel file and none of them are on the same topic.

Ok, in this case it might be something else I'm thinking about. So, you said earlier in the thread that your niche is broad and now you say this.

It's possible that Google can't figure out what your niche is because there's no topical authority hence it won't rank you well.

How are you doing in the interlinking department? Are articles with relatively close topics linked?

 

[popbradley]

How is your site speed? Maybe that could cause a problem.

search console shows mobile and desktop are both in the green so it’s not that. My websites fast.

 

[popbradley]

Ok, in this case it might be something else I'm thinking about. So, you said earlier in the thread that your niche is broad and now you say this.

It's possible that Google can't figure out what your niche is because there's no topical authority hence it won't rank you well.

How are you doing in the interlinking department? Are articles with relatively close topics linked?

oh well I don’t really recall saying it was broad but it’s all in the exact same niche. It’s pretty much if I was writing on “cars” instead of just a specific kind of car.

I interlink all relevant articles with link whisper. the first 100 articles on my site where all centered around one type of “car” but those articles do even worse than my more general “cars” articles currently so I have no idea but maybe that’s it.

So think of it this way. First 100 articles on mustangs, then the rest of the articles are just on cars in general mixed with more “mustang“ articles here and there.

I follow a guy on YouTube who has a site that’s almost 12 months old with 100s of articles in abroad niche and he is only getting a few hundred visitors a month. He’s thinking it might take longer since the niche is so broad but I don’t think my niche is THAT broad really. It’s not like I’m writing about all forms of transportation but it is broader than just a specific car the whole time.

hope all that makes sense.

 

[leit]

Hi mate, a few questions

How many items do you have?
What percentage of articles are between 6-7 months old?
How do you know if a keyword is easy?
How often do you mention the kw in your article?
How fast is the page speed? (In GSC your posts are classified as bad, poor or good?)

I see you have ezoic, I recommend you to remove the ads from the header, this will increase your performance in terms of speed, and although it may seem surprising to you, the ePMV and your income will not vary (tested beforehand on my site and my brother's).


Sorry if I overwhelmed you with questions, but I would like to help as much as possible.

I can't think of any more questions for now, but I am interested in your answer on how you rank whether the keyword is easy or not, since 80% (I would like to say 90%, but I don't want to be extreme) depends on the site's performance.

Good luck on your Journey, I'll keep an eye on it.

 

[popbradley]

Hi mate, a few questions

How many items do you have?
What percentage of articles are between 6-7 months old?
How do you know if a keyword is easy?
How often do you mention the kw in your article?
How fast is the page speed? (In GSC your posts are classified as bad, poor or good?)

I see you have ezoic, I recommend you to remove the ads from the header, this will increase your performance in terms of speed, and although it may seem surprising to you, the ePMV and your income will not vary (tested beforehand on my site and my brother's).


Sorry if I overwhelmed you with questions, but I would like to help as much as possible.

I can't think of any more questions for now, but I am interested in your answer on how you rank whether the keyword is easy or not, since 80% (I would like to say 90%, but I don't want to be extreme) depends on the site's performance.

Good luck on your Journey, I'll keep an eye on it.

ill try and answer in order.

1. not sure what you mean exactly by items but I assume articles. If not you can correct me but I have roughly 380 posted now.

2. close to 200 articles where posted from may back to November of last year. A lot of those articles where never indexed or kept dropping from the serps over and over. So percentage wise close to 50% fall into that time frame.

3.I assume a keywords easy by a few things. If the articles in the top 10 are filled with results that are not fully on topic. If the top 3 results have at least 2 sites DA 22 or lower (my sites DA 30). I also consider it low comp if the top results in the serps are forums or QA sites. A rather large chunk of my articles have niche related QA sites and forums as the top 1 and 2 results. I mostly started targeting them after seeing I can outrank them with other articles.

4.I honestly mention the keyword in the header, in a h2 header and maybe once or twice within the article itself. It varies greatly.

5. these are what my speeds show in GSC.





you can see where it is red and then yellow when I added ezoic but it eventually went back green when I made some tweaks.

 

[popbradley]

Also, not sure I mentioned it before but the time the site completely stopped growing is really close to the time I added ezoic. I thought maybe it had something to do with the actual speeds being messed up but those are fine now but still no change.

 

[leit]

Yes, sorry, it was articles (post) not items, I'm a bit of a moron with English.

And technically I don't see anything wrong, and yes, unfortunately when you integrate ezoic the rankings tend to go down, since practically ezoic injects some script to the template (I don't know why it does that) and the Google bot sees it as if you made a change.

Indexing is a problem, and more when you find out late that a post is not indexed, let's give it time and see what happens, since you have a good amount of posts created.

 

[popbradley]

I am really behind in posting updates but will give an update right now as I have some time.

site wordcount:718k words
number of article:417

TRAFFIC LAST 28 DAYS




SEARCH CONSOLE ALL-TIME




My site has started to grow again over the last month. I am happy it has started to grow again but still really am not too satisfied with how many visits I am getting with the amount of content that is on the site. I have given it a lot of time and have learned a lot of things that I might have mentioned already but will mention again.

1. The keyword research I did, in the beginning, was a total mess. I targeted some easy terms but 90% of them were rather hard and don't rank at all. I have a lot of new keywords ranked 7-10 that get decent searches but they get hardly any clicks since the top sites are massive authority sites I will end up never out ranking.

2. My recent strategy, while it brings very little traffic in terms of volume since I am targeting very low search volume terms, is actually getting me a decent amount of clicks when the articles rank AND they rank super fast. 90% of my new terms, when they do index, are page 1 right off the bat. I have had a few hit rank 3 and bring in trickles of traffic. Not much but every little bit counts.

3. Large articles are not exactly needed for a lot of these terms. I was having almost all my articles be written at 1500 words plus but a lot of my new articles are 1000 words and they rank just fine. Normally I wouldn't have even tried to use that low of a word count article but it works. This is allowing me to actually get more articles out faster and save a little money in the process.

4. My site was built off no real topical relevancy and this is making things take a LOT longer than they should to rank. I was throwing articles out on any topic in my niche and I should have actually built all articles in one area first then branched into other areas. I think in the long run it probably won't matter but who knows right now.

5. even if articles rank number 1-3 for some reason they slowly get traffic over time. Here is an example.



This article was ranked number 1 as soon as it was July 15th. It has never dropped. Over time though, however, the article has gotten more and more traffic daily. I think this is because I am ranking for related terms but it takes google a while to actually start to rank the article for all the related terms.

6. Outsourcing was a HUGE waste of time and I should have done everything myself instead of wasting capital trying to outsource the whole site creation. I would have been way farther by now If I had just outsourced articles and learned the keyword research myself. Let me show you what I mean. (I might have done this already but completely forgot so will do it again just in case.)

200+ articles are outsourced to a service on this forum.

These are my top 25 articles when it comes to pageviews daily.



The top page used to bring in almost all of the traffic but it slowly started to spread out. The article with 9 Pageviews I circled in red is the only article they wrote in the top 25 that gets traffic. The other 24 were all searched and written by MY writers. 95% of what they have posted gets 3-0 pageviews a day. Out of 400+ visits a day their articles bring in about 40 of the visits. If they wrote 200 articles themselves that's 0.02 visits per article they wrote a day. that is AWFUL. This is for one sole reason. The keyword research on the topics is horrible... What do I mean by that? Here is an example.

They write on keywords that are in the ballpark of stuff like "how to drive a car". Now, does this seem like an easy keyword to you or a hard-as-balls keyword that you will never rank for? Imagine the top results are cars . com, new york times, wikihow, etc. ALL targeting the term. Will you EVER go after a term like that? No? Didn't think so. That's because no one in their right mind would go after a term like this because they know they will never rank. they are using the KGR golden keyword ratio method and its trash.

So the moral of the story with all of this is to do everything yourself. Try and write the articles yourself but if you can do ANYTHING yourself, do the keyword research.

Now with all that out of the way. Let's show earnings for November.

EARNINGS FOR NOVEMBER

EZOIC



AMAZON: 18 sales, 14.57

My Ezoic earnings have gone up a lot but that is only because of it being the fourth quarter. I am already starting to see it drop but hopefully, it doesn't completely nose dive. I am making about 5+ a day. I don't think that's awful currently but I gotta say it does stink a little bit, as I cannot really grasp why my EPMV is so low. I have added a ton of ads to the site and set everything up in Ezoic to maximize earnings while not destroying the user experience.

My sister is in the EXACT same niche but makes about 25 to 40 a day with 600 daily visits. I do believe she has slightly more pageviews than I do on average but I have been averaging 400+ visits a day recently and fully expected to have consistent 10 dollar days at this point but I am doing slightly less than that. I am actually in Ezoics top paying niches according to them but my EPMV is still pretty low. Again, at 16.28 I think that is pretty fine but that is ONLY because it is November. My average is usually less than 10 dollars EPMV.

I am still not in Ezoic premium so I am sure that will help, but I have not yet been invited. I contacted support about it but have heard nothing yet. I believe I qualify to get in, so hopefully, get invited soon.

PLANS FOR DECEMBER:

I have 11 articles to post currently, as I took a break while family came down to visit. I will get those posted asap. I have a plethora of keywords saved based on my new method that seems to be working very well so am trying to produce short articles based on all these keywords. I completely stopped link building and did see a slow drop in referring domains on AHREFS but that has since stopped and started to climb up again while also showing up for more and more keywords in the top 3. What I am doing NOW is working, and while I do know at this point my niche is pretty dang competitive, I have learned a lot and still feel like I will one day be able to get this site into Mediavine.

Gonna keep trucking until I get there

Until next month! (If I remember to update lol)