[Journey] A serious attempt at a blog

Roger Marquez said:

WebPageTest is the best speed and performance audit tool on the market

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Never heard or used WebPageTest until right now, it does give much more information!

Ran a few tests with it and am still very happy with my performance, things will obviously improve once I start using a CDN and then once again when I move to a quicker hosting provider as currently the slowest part of my page is First Byte Time.

Even without a CDN and using shared hosting, I've compared my website to various different competitors and I have most of them beat, with only one or two that are lighting quick haha

GenesisOne said:

This is going to be a successful journey and you're going to learn a lot.
Best of luck op!

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Thanks mate!

SoloZS said:

I love having analytics and stats in front of me, it makes everything easy to measure and ensure things are working. Although, it sometimes is a downfall as I can get lost in the data for days without doing anything actionable.

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It can happen to me as well, though I typically take action once I find something interesting in the data.
Now you have 1K PV/month and already can get lost for days in the data. Imagine once you have 500K+ page views/month like me .

Hi everyone watching this thread, I'm just wondering if anyone of you know an extension on Google Chrome that show the DA of each domain in the results of Google., I know it exists but I can't find it, tried to install many extensions but now one has this feature.

Tarik Elhatimi said:

Hi everyone watching this thread, I'm just wondering if anyone of you know an extension on Google Chrome that show the DA of each domain in the results of Google., I know it exists but I can't find it, tried to install many extensions but now one has this feature.

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Hey mate, Moz Toolbar is what I used in the past, it allows you to see the DA and PA on all the SERP pages without having to manually click into each link.

Update #3 - January 17th to 23rd

Not going to lie to you guys, this week was rough. It was a combination of work being super busy and me being lazy but the thought of having to post an update saying I didn't hit my goal of 5 articles this week made me grind out an article and I posted it about 5 minutes before writing this. So I guess this journey is working to keep me accountable.

I hit my goal of 5 articles, word count ranging from 600 to 820 words.

While I struggled to get to my 5 articles this week, if I take the time to reflect on my week I could have easily gotten them all done long before today. I found myself procrastinating a lot over the week which all added up, so I will improve upon that next week.

I've noticed my traffic slowly creeping up, so things are looking promising.

Problems/Concerns/Questions/General Notes

- Last week when I removed a few plugins to speed up my website, I removed one that allowed me to build a nice looking homepage. This left my homepage completely blank, other than a menu and hero image. I thought no one would click through to my homepage... I was wrong, I'm noticing more and more people click onto it, so I think I'll spend an hour just making something a little bit respectable without the need of a page builder plugin.

- I'm still spending too much time looking at my analytics, I'm trying to stop but am finding myself looking at it on autopilot.

- Another busy work week is upcoming but I proved to myself I could do this week, so why not next!


Goals For Next Week

- Write 5 articles
- Fix homepage - nothing major, don't waste too much time on it.

Goals For 2022

- Cover the $286 AUD expenses
- Earn $500/m

Where do I begin....

Shortly after my last post above, work became unbelievably busy, and considering it was my main source of income, I had to focus on it.
Between the end of January and October, I occasionally added an article here and there.

During this time I noticed that I really struggled to write about this niche. It didn't interest me, some topics required far too much research and involved concepts and terms well above my knowledge. This makes writing even harder than it already is.

Start of October, I was searching around on google and stumbled upon a niche I'm relatively knowledgeable on with potential articles involving minimal research as most of it I know and understand. I performed a little bit of keyword research and noticed a large chunk of keywords, I could rank for.

Within 24 hours, I purchased a VPS, domain name and set up WordPress, and began writing.

I went with a VPS because my first site is hosted on shared hosting and is unbelievably slow, so I thought I'd skip any future upgrade/transfer and start on a VPS with this site.

Mid-October, I decided to set up Ezoic on my first site this way, even with the little income it generates I could use it to pay off my VPS.

Site 1:

My plan for site 1, for now, is to keep it on the shared hosting plan until it expires mid-January, and then I will move it onto my VPS. This also allows me not to make major changes that could affect rankings during the season people spend more.

Currently, I have no motivation to add more articles to this site.


Site 2:

The plan for this site is to smash out as much content as possible. The site went live mid-late October and other than content there isn't much else to add.


Problems/Concerns/Questions/General Notes

- This second site is much easier to write for, I'm easily able to smash out 1000+ word articles involving minimal research, hopefully, it begins to rank and gains traction quickly.

- My current workflow is to write 5 articles and then do something easier to fix/add to the site, eg. write 5 articles and then add the about us page, write another 5 and then add the contact us page.
It seems stupid but so far it seems to be working for me.

- It's really sad to see one of the journeys that motivated me to begin, and now restart coming to an end. Kikerinka, if you happen to read this I'm sorry for what you're going through and I wish you all the best with what you decide to do next.