[JOURNEY] A content-driven adventure

So I see a lot of people looking to make $XX/day or even $XXX/day as their journey. That's great and all, and I don't disagree that I'm here to try and earn some cash. But for me this journey is going to be a little different. Most people look at content as a means to making money. In my case, I'm actually somewhat passionate about my content, and I'm curious to see how I can turn that into some earnings.

Here's a little more about me and what I'm up to. I'm 24 years old, and currently working on an MD. Since that makes me a relative expert on health, obviously I'm going to be focusing more on the health niche. As I stated before, my content is important to me. I pride myself on providing quality information. This is a double-edged sword, however. While I can speak with a lot of authority on a topic, that isn't always the best sales tactic. I'm not comfortable endorsing a product that isn't any good just because it will make me a good commission.

So far, I've been monetizing with adsense and Amazon. I've also added a couple Clickbank products where relevant, but haven't really aggressively promoted on that end.

As you can probably guess from my join date, I'm still very much a noob when it comes to IM. As a result, I've picked what I believe to be a fairly small and low-competition niche. I want to build an authority-type site (I'm calling it authority-type since I don't think it's realistic for me to write as many articles as a true authority site, and I'm not comfortable outsourcing my content since I pride myself on the quality of advice I'm giving).

Where I'm at so far:

My site has been live for just over a month. I'm averaging a touch under 20 UV/day. Given the low volume, it's no surprise that I've only made a few bucks my first month. Here's hoping things get better with time.

I have been struggling a bit with my site going offline for unclear reasons. It has definitely affected my visits (on days I find my site is having hiccups, the number of visitors plummets). After a few hiccups the past few days, I found my google ranks dropped significantly. I'm hoping that's just temporary, and (assuming I've resolved the issue) things will bounce back.

So far I've purchased a few BSTs here and done some linkbuilding myself as well. I'm not sure if it's allowed for me to specifically state which BSTs I purchased, but if it is (can someone let me know either way?), then I'll keep a running list for others' reference.

Including domain, hosting, and BSTs, I've spent $41.79 so far. I've earned $4.77 from Amazon so far and $4.22 from Adsense. Here's hoping I can build on that. =)

I'd love any advice you might have to offer, or questions for me. This is partly to document my process and partly to get advice that is targeted specifically at what I'm doing. I understand if this isn't as flashy as some others are up to, but at least you can expect regular updates, so you'll know how it all turned out.

I'll make a new post shortly detailing what I have planned in the near future.

Some things I have planned:

I already have a facebook fan page where I post a new status each time I write an article. Unfortunately, this page has exactly zero fans. I usually end my posts with a request to share the post or subscribe to my email list, but maybe I can switch things up and sometimes remind users to visit the fan page. I think I can also hunt down some "like"-worthy images and intersperse them with my posts on the page.

I have a pinterest account for the site but I'm not really sure what to do with it. I posted my one product review, and I figure I can post others when I write them, but I'm not sure what else I'd put up. I guess again I could do a similar thing as with the facebook page and just find pictures that people would want to repin.

I am working on a Hubpages account so that I can eventually apply for their apprenticeship. The (small) income I can pull in from that can be reinvested into this site for some more linkbuilding, etc.

Once I've built up my site a bit more, I'm hoping to do a press release. I've seen some affordable BSTs, including one where you can write the release and they'll distribute it. Since they offer input on how to write the release, I think that will work well for me.

One last thing I want to do is build up my youtube channel. Currently, I only have one video, which was graciously made by BHW user Deleted member 364366. It's just a quick promotional video, but it looks nice. What I want to add is quick reviews and tidbits of info, which then tell the viewer to visit my site for more. Since plenty of fiverr gigs are by the minute, I'm thinking I'll just make each vid roughly a minute long. I'd love to hear some input about whether that's too short of a length.

Ok, that's what I've got in mind so far. I'd love to hear anyone's input! Thanks for reading!

So judging from some recent posts here on BHW, it looks like I started up this journey thread right as Google made some algo tweaks. Explains the drop my site had in the SERPs. Some of it is recovering, but definitely not all the way. I'm not surprised, since people mentioned it's hitting whitehat sites harder than blackhat (go figure). My conspiracy theory take is that Google is laying some bait. Make it seem like blackhat works better than ever and then catch the people who really crank up the blackhat linking and slap them to oblivion. Whether or not that's true, I plan on just staying the course for now. Some manual linkbuilding here and there, and probably a couple more BSTs in the near future.

One disappointing piece of news is that Hubpages recently closed their apprenticeship to new applicants while they audit their program. The implication is that it will reopen in the near future, but it looks like I'm going to have to look elsewhere for startup cash. I lack the tools (or really the know-how) to offer any fiverr SEO gigs, so it looks like I'll be doing things by hand even more than I had originally planned.

Yesterday my site recovered quite nicely. Unfortunately, I had made a number of changes so it's hard to know what the exact cause was (could have been the BST I ordered, could have been the new theme I installed, could've just been random chance, who knows?). Still, it's nice to see that I'm ranking even higher than before. Naturally, this is translating into my highest traffic days in the history of this site.

My new theme is a magazine-style theme (NewspaperTimes by Magazine3), and I think it really works well with my content-heavy focus. I'm hoping it improves reader engagement simply because with the mass of content on the front page, I'm sure people will find *something* they're interested in.

So with that in mind, I think my highest priority focus is going to be churning out some more good quality content. I'm hitting a bit of a wall in terms of inspiration, so I'll probably search around my niche and see what others are writing about. I actually read a post a little while back about how you can use Alexa rankings and total index count to figure out which sites produce really interesting and shareable content. While the goal of that thread was then to scrape and spin the content from these sites, I think I'll just use them to help me figure out what people in my niche want to know, and continue to hand-make my posts.

I've also picked up a little more Amazon and Adsense income, so we'll just wait and see what it looks like by the end of the month. It still won't be much, but I'm hoping that with the increased traffic, things will start to trend upwards.

Looks like an interesting journey. Different from others. Hope that you will update it from time to time.