Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
Thanks
[Journey] Building an Authority Site from Scratch
- Thread starter Rufai
- Start date
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
July 2022 Update, One Month of the Journey / Month 6
I think this is great considering my plan was to publish at least one article per day, so we can say that I have been able to follow the plan even though I have not been able to publish articles on some days, but there are days where I published 2 or 3 articles.
Goals Achieved
Traffic
July vs June 2022
Traffic has been increasing steadily and has almost doubled (+71%), with google bringing the majority of the traffic, followed by Bing, DuckDuckgo, and Yahoo.
However, nearly 80% of the traffic is from the top 5 articles which are ranking in the top 3 and were all published 6 months ago when I started the website.
Hopefully, I will achieve my goal of 5k page views in the next couple of days.
Plan
Now I'm going to migrate the site to a Vultr VPS in the next 2 or 3 days. Hopefully, it should solve the downtimes issue.
That's it for now guys.
If you have any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to ask.
- Articles published: 25
- Total number of articles: 60
I think this is great considering my plan was to publish at least one article per day, so we can say that I have been able to follow the plan even though I have not been able to publish articles on some days, but there are days where I published 2 or 3 articles.
Goals Achieved
- 50 published articles
Traffic
- Analytics: 4,565 (+1,906 compared to last month)
July vs June 2022
- GSC: 2,690 clicks (+1,050 compared to last month)
- Bing: 468 (+116 compared to last month)
Traffic has been increasing steadily and has almost doubled (+71%), with google bringing the majority of the traffic, followed by Bing, DuckDuckgo, and Yahoo.
However, nearly 80% of the traffic is from the top 5 articles which are ranking in the top 3 and were all published 6 months ago when I started the website.
Hopefully, I will achieve my goal of 5k page views in the next couple of days.
Plan
- Keep publishing at least one article per day
- Migrate to a VPS Hosting
Now I'm going to migrate the site to a Vultr VPS in the next 2 or 3 days. Hopefully, it should solve the downtimes issue.
That's it for now guys.
If you have any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to ask.
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
I forgot to add the earnings. Here are the earnings for July 2022:
Earnings
The site has been accepted on Ezoic but disapproved for Google Ads Manager because I have 2 Adsense accounts and I'll need to close 1 before they can approve me.
Now the problem is, that the other account has some earnings to it and I have to complete identity and address verification before I can close the account. I have already verified my ID and I'm now waiting for the Adsense pin to arrive so I can complete the address verification.
Earnings
- Adsense: $18.90
- RPM: $3.69
The site has been accepted on Ezoic but disapproved for Google Ads Manager because I have 2 Adsense accounts and I'll need to close 1 before they can approve me.
Now the problem is, that the other account has some earnings to it and I have to complete identity and address verification before I can close the account. I have already verified my ID and I'm now waiting for the Adsense pin to arrive so I can complete the address verification.
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
Weekly Update, 3rd Week of the Journey
Analytics
GSC
Bing
What I Have Done
Published 10 Articles: Thia is 4 articles short of my initial plan to publish at least one article per day. This is because there were so many things going on (including transferring the site to a self-hosted VPS) that were all beyond my control. But I hope I will be able to keep up with the pace and stick to the plan.
Migrated to VPS Hosting: As I mentioned in my last update, I have successfully migrated the website to a self-hosted VPS (Vultr High Frequency).
This was not as easy as I thought as I encountered a lot of difficulties during the migration process. I followed a tutorial video from YouTube and everything went smoothly until I tried to upload the backup file I took using All-in-One WP Migration plugin.
The upload process kept failing over and over again and the website was down for more than 24 hours (the reason for the sudden dip in traffic on August 8).
I was really worried that it could affect my rankings and traffic considering how the site is performing but luckily it didn't have any negative effect and everything looks good.
I went through several articles on Google and tried different solutions but all in vain. So I just pointed the site back to my previous hosting in the meantime before I figured out where the problem was.
Yesterday, I deployed a new server, installed cPanel, downloaded a fresh backup, and successfully uploaded the file without issues and the whole process took me less than 2 hours.
So I think the problem was with the first backup file I downloaded that prevented it from uploading because both the download and upload (which always failed) processes were very slow and took a lot of time (hours) while this one took minutes.
- Published 10 articles
- Total published articles: 70
- Analytics: 5,063 pageviews (+498 compared to last month)
- GSC: 3.39k clicks (+300 compared to last month)
- Bing: 491 (+19 compared to last month)
- Avg. Time on page: 02:59 (-32 seconds compared to last month)
- 5k pageviews per month
Analytics
GSC
Bing
What I Have Done
Published 10 Articles: Thia is 4 articles short of my initial plan to publish at least one article per day. This is because there were so many things going on (including transferring the site to a self-hosted VPS) that were all beyond my control. But I hope I will be able to keep up with the pace and stick to the plan.
Migrated to VPS Hosting: As I mentioned in my last update, I have successfully migrated the website to a self-hosted VPS (Vultr High Frequency).
This was not as easy as I thought as I encountered a lot of difficulties during the migration process. I followed a tutorial video from YouTube and everything went smoothly until I tried to upload the backup file I took using All-in-One WP Migration plugin.
The upload process kept failing over and over again and the website was down for more than 24 hours (the reason for the sudden dip in traffic on August 8).
I was really worried that it could affect my rankings and traffic considering how the site is performing but luckily it didn't have any negative effect and everything looks good.
I went through several articles on Google and tried different solutions but all in vain. So I just pointed the site back to my previous hosting in the meantime before I figured out where the problem was.
Yesterday, I deployed a new server, installed cPanel, downloaded a fresh backup, and successfully uploaded the file without issues and the whole process took me less than 2 hours.
So I think the problem was with the first backup file I downloaded that prevented it from uploading because both the download and upload (which always failed) processes were very slow and took a lot of time (hours) while this one took minutes.
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
Weekly Update, 4th Week of the Journey
Bing
Analytics
As you can see, there was a sudden drop in traffic from August 15 to August 19. There was an issue with the site, the posts were not displaying and the homepage was displaying a fresh WordPress install (just another WordPress site) but they were showing on the dashboard and I could publish new articles.
I thought there was a problem was as due to the migration process (I migrated to a VPS server) so I pointed the site back to my old hosting. At first, everything was okay so I didn't bother to check it again or even check the analytics and just continued publishing content.
On August 18 while checking the analytics, I noticed the sudden drop in traffic and saw that the site was barely getting views for the past two days. I was really shocked and started regretting why I even migrated the site to another host instead of just sticking to my former hosting company because I felt it was a DNS issue.
I started looking for solutions on Google and went through tons of articles, videos, and forum posts but all the solutions didn't work for me. So I just sat down and started reflecting on the changes I made to the site and remembered that I integrated Ezoic (using Cloudflare integration) to the site.
So I removed Ezoic integration and waited for the DNS to propagate and everything was back to normal. The site was already integrated with Ezoic when I switched hosting, so I suspect that I didn't change the DNS records on Cloudflare correctly during the migration which resulted in this error.
But I'll leave it as it is for now and let everything stabilize.
That's it for now guys. Any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate.
- Published 5 articles
- Total published articles: 75
- Analytics: 4,574 pageviews (-489)
- GSC: 3.38k clicks (-10)
- Bing: 455 (-36)
Bing
Analytics
As you can see, there was a sudden drop in traffic from August 15 to August 19. There was an issue with the site, the posts were not displaying and the homepage was displaying a fresh WordPress install (just another WordPress site) but they were showing on the dashboard and I could publish new articles.
I thought there was a problem was as due to the migration process (I migrated to a VPS server) so I pointed the site back to my old hosting. At first, everything was okay so I didn't bother to check it again or even check the analytics and just continued publishing content.
On August 18 while checking the analytics, I noticed the sudden drop in traffic and saw that the site was barely getting views for the past two days. I was really shocked and started regretting why I even migrated the site to another host instead of just sticking to my former hosting company because I felt it was a DNS issue.
I started looking for solutions on Google and went through tons of articles, videos, and forum posts but all the solutions didn't work for me. So I just sat down and started reflecting on the changes I made to the site and remembered that I integrated Ezoic (using Cloudflare integration) to the site.
So I removed Ezoic integration and waited for the DNS to propagate and everything was back to normal. The site was already integrated with Ezoic when I switched hosting, so I suspect that I didn't change the DNS records on Cloudflare correctly during the migration which resulted in this error.
But I'll leave it as it is for now and let everything stabilize.
That's it for now guys. Any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate.
3bisu
Elite Member
- Nov 29, 2014
- 2,249
- 1,061
I didn't move the website but when i used ezoic i had many DNS issues too and in the end, i just removed them
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
I would say 4 months. Crossed 1k (1.3k) pageviews in May which was the 4th month
Yeah, I saw many people reporting DNS issues/sudden drop in traffic after integrating Ezoic. Seems it's a general problem and that's why I used Cloudflare integration instead of using Ezoic Nameservers but still couldn't escape it.
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
September 2022 Update, 3 Months of the Journey / Month 8
This update is going to be short as I don't have much to say.
Milestone Achieved
The site has not been impacted by any of the previous Google updates.
Analytics
GSC
Bing
Ezoic
This update is going to be short as I don't have much to say.
- Articles published: 4
- Total number of articles: 85
- Analytics: 5,560
- Google: 3.52k
- Bing: 309
- Ezoic 12 days earnings: $24.16
- EMPV: $10.50
Milestone Achieved
- 5k pageviews/month
The site has not been impacted by any of the previous Google updates.
Analytics
GSC
Bing
Ezoic
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
Last edited:
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
Yes that's the plan
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
October 2022 Update, 4 Months of the Journey / Month 9
Not much has been done on the site.
Bing
Analytics
Ezoic
Not much has been done on the site.
- Articles published: 2
- Total number of articles: 87
- Analytics: 6,117
- Google: 3.78k
- Bing: 443
- Ezoic: $73.65
- EMPV: $13.8
Bing
Analytics
Ezoic
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
Not really, but will post a monthly update by the end of the month.
- May 17, 2010
- 1,655
- 633
okay great! I look forward to it!
Rufai
Supreme Member
- May 23, 2020
- 1,366
- 1,180
November 2022 Update, 5 Months of the Journey / Month 10
I analyzed the top sites in my niche which are getting 700k+ views and I found that they mainly focus on affiliate/news articles and their articles are stuffed with affiliate links all over the place. Seeing the amount of traffic these sites are getting, I decided to also start publishing news articles and see if they can help drive traffic to the site.
So I went ahead and created a news section on the website and published a couple of news articles. But I was not sure whether it was the right decision so I contacted @Kikerinka and asked if he could help provide me feedback and direction.
He gave me very detailed feedback to help me grow the website further and suggested me some areas to improve. Regarding affiliate articles, he told me that it is okay to write affiliate articles and Google does not penalize Affiliate sites, but only penalizes affiliate sites with thin content.
So I applied to amazon associates and one other major affiliate network in my niche and added affiliate links to some of my articles and have also started publishing affiliate articles.
I got a few sales from Amazon, but they rejected my application because I edited some images and used them as featured images and Amazon considered it an "unapproved use of Amazon-trademarked images". So I just deleted all the featured images on all my articles and applied again. Fortunately, today I just received an approval email from Amazon.
From now on, I'll be focusing on both affiliate and info articles.
That's it for now guys. Any questions or suggestions are welcomed. Screenshots below
Thanks
GSC
Bing
Analytics
Ezoic
- Articles published: 3
- Total number of articles: 90
- Analytics: 7902 (+1785)
- Google: 4.6k (+820)
- Bing: 475 (+32)
- Ezoic: $95.52
- EMPV: $13.59
I analyzed the top sites in my niche which are getting 700k+ views and I found that they mainly focus on affiliate/news articles and their articles are stuffed with affiliate links all over the place. Seeing the amount of traffic these sites are getting, I decided to also start publishing news articles and see if they can help drive traffic to the site.
So I went ahead and created a news section on the website and published a couple of news articles. But I was not sure whether it was the right decision so I contacted @Kikerinka and asked if he could help provide me feedback and direction.
He gave me very detailed feedback to help me grow the website further and suggested me some areas to improve. Regarding affiliate articles, he told me that it is okay to write affiliate articles and Google does not penalize Affiliate sites, but only penalizes affiliate sites with thin content.
So I applied to amazon associates and one other major affiliate network in my niche and added affiliate links to some of my articles and have also started publishing affiliate articles.
I got a few sales from Amazon, but they rejected my application because I edited some images and used them as featured images and Amazon considered it an "unapproved use of Amazon-trademarked images". So I just deleted all the featured images on all my articles and applied again. Fortunately, today I just received an approval email from Amazon.
From now on, I'll be focusing on both affiliate and info articles.
That's it for now guys. Any questions or suggestions are welcomed. Screenshots below
Thanks
GSC
Bing
Analytics
Ezoic
Kikerinka
Elite Member
- Dec 18, 2010
- 2,584
- 9,440
Hey mate, glad that I could help you a bit. It is amazing that with a lot of room for improvement on your website, your charts still look better month after month. It indicates there is a big potential in this niche and in your project.
Good luck to you, and looking forward to your next updates
