Road to $1500 per month from blogging.

WEEK 4 UPDATE

Hi everyone.

Not been a great week this week.

For some reason, Google has been de-indexing a lot of my pages, so the impressions have dropped off significantly, but more on that later.

This week I have written another 5 blog posts and I have uploaded an unpublished post I wrote last week.

As I mentioned last week, I have changed my strategy to write longer blog posts ~2000 words, instead of 1000, which I have done for most of the posts uploaded this week (I don't want to add unnecessary words so 1 -2 ended up being around 15000 words).

Overall, I'm relatively content with the amount of posts I have uploaded this week as I now sit at 35 blog posts, which is only 5 away from my October target of 40.

I probably would have wrote more blog posts, however, I have been very demotivated by the deindexing of many of my posts.

I think it's just due to my domain being new as my content is better and more detailed than many of the other blog posts for the same topic, however, I don't want to suffer from denial, so I have been updating some of the better performing blogs today in hopes of regaining some of that lost traffic.

Here is my google search console for the last 3 months, the drop off this week has been ridiculous.

I'm still a little unsure why the click through rate is so low as most of my blogs are targeted towards direct search questions and my meta titles often match the exact search query listed by the searcher. My guess is that my pages are appearing lower on the search so the people scrolling past are either clicking on a result above mine, or are looking for something different. However, I will look into this if I'm still getting such a low click through rate once my impressions have gone back up.

Next Week
By this time next week, I would like to have another 4-5 good blog posts uploaded on my blog so that I can hit the 40 blog post target for October.

I don't really want to set an impressions goal as it's a little out of my control, however, it would be good to see the impressions go back up above what it is now.

General thoughts
A little demotivated by the Google de-indexing. Not really bothered if it's just normal for a new blog to have this happen, but if it's a quality or some other type of issue then this would be a massive blow as I felt like I put a decent amount of time into these blog posts.

If anyone has experienced similar things in their blogging journey, please enlighten me!

Thanks

Keep it up mate, I remember when I started my journey some months ago. You should create a few small milestones as well, since its so cool when you manage to complete each milestone

Matta28 said:

Keep it up mate, I remember when I started my journey some months ago. You should create a few small milestones as well, since its so cool when you manage to complete each milestone

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Good advice, I'll try to think of some short-term milestones this week! 100 visitors in a month would be one for sure!

eillo247 said:

Good advice, I'll try to think of some short-term milestones this week! 100 visitors in a month would be one for sure!

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I had like two few weeks ago my first 100 visitors in a day. That was a huge one for me

Matta28 said:

I had like two few weeks ago my first 100 visitors in a day. That was a huge one for me

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Damn, well done mate. Decent niche for earnings or quite low?

Good luck
keep us updated

WEEK 5 UPDATE

I've been both busy and lazy this week, so I haven't made as much progress as I would have liked.

I was aiming to write around 4-5 new blog posts this week, however, I only ended up writing one new post.

Although, it was by far my longest post as it is over 8000 words long and it did take a number of days to write.

I have good hopes for this article, as it is for a relatively popular search term so any first page rankings would bring in a very good amount of traffic.

I'm hoping that I can achieve this by providing the most in depth answer, but only time will tell. I hope I haven't wasted my time.

Google Search Console


As you can see in the screenshot above, my impressions for the last 7 days have still not recovered to anywhere near what they were before I had the indexing issue. I hope this is just an example of the Google dance, and not a reflection on the quality of my content.

As my site is still very new, and I feel as though my content is of a good enough quality, I'm still going to focus on writing new posts for the time being. However, if my impressions are still very low in 1 months time, I will need to investigate this issue further to see how I can resolve this.

If you have experienced something similar with any of your sites, I would love to hear how things turned out and any advice you may have.

Next Week

I am a little disappointed in the amount of work I produced last week, so I would like to publish another 3-5 articles next week.

I am still of the mindset that I need to write quality over quantity though, so if an article takes me a long time to write, then so be it.

I also understand that it's somewhat pointless to add analytics based goals, but it would be good if I can have a day with over 75 impressions this week, which would be the highest I've had since mid October.

General Thoughts

I am constantly finding myself switching between being highly motivated and then having no motivation, so I need to find a way of staying motivated consistently.

As I mentioned in the opening post, I am highly motivated by growth, even if it's small. As you can imagine, the decline in impressions has caused a lot of the demotivation, but i just need to stick it out and come out the other side as I wasn't expecting it to be a smooth journey.

On a side note, I am looking to hire some writers for my blog. However, I don't have a huge budget to spend on expensive writers, nor do I want to waste my money on low quality content.

If anyone has experienced working with writers in the $10 - $30 per 1000 word range, please let me know any recommendations as I would be interested in trying them out.

If the level of content produced is very good, I would be willing to spend a little more, but I will not hire a writer if I feel as though I can produce better content on my own.

Thanks for reading! A little bit of a slow update this week, but hopefully something interesting will happen soon.

I'll be following this thread as I'm thinking long term money flow and blogs especially look more lucrative.

I like your monthly goal, looking forward to it's fulfilments.

WEEK 6 UPDATE

It's that time again. The depressing Sunday night...

My main inspiration behind creating this blogging journey - To escape the 9-5 life and be able to enjoy every day of my week.

In terms of updates, this week has been yet another slow week.



However, as you can see in the GSC screenshot above, it does look like the impressions are potentially building up again slowly, so I'm hopeful that next week will show an increase again!

Although I understand that the blogging journey is a slow one, I'll be a little frustrated if I'm still hitting 10-20 daily impressions in a few weeks time considering my blog started off by getting 100 impressions per day. But hey ho, can't control what Google does with my content, I can only control what I do about it.

In terms of content, I have written and published 3 new articles this week, which doesn't sound like much, but they totalled around 9000 words, so it was quite a lot of work to get them written and published.

I'm quite happy with how they've turned out, although I do think I have rushed the end of the last one a little bit today, trying to take income schools advise of 1 extra hour per post, but I haven't done this for the last one.

This brings the total to 39 blog posts on my blog and while I cannot see the exact word count for my site, I estimate it to be around 60,000 words or more.

Was going to download WPwordcount, but they now want £30 per year which is overpriced for what it is in my opinion. Anyone know any good word counters that are free? Don't want it to effect my site speed either.

Overall, feeling relatively optimistic about this week!

Next Week

Hopefully I'll be around the 40 impression per day mark next week, but I can't control this obviously.

In terms of posts, I would like to write and upload another 3 around the same length. Hopefully more, but I would rather 3 great blog posts than 12 crappy ones.

General thoughts

Feeling a mixture of motivated and demotivated this month. It comes and goes in phases, but I'm sure if I can see a little growth (even up to 40 impressions), then I'll start feeling a lot more motivated.

Overall, just gotta keep grinding!

Would love to hear some others blog journey's if anyone cares to share! (I've read most of the popular ones on here)

eillo247 said:

Damn, well done mate. Decent niche for earnings or quite low?

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Averaging $0.40 per day atm

Still a long way to go... Good luck for $50/day seems doable in long run.

Good luck on your journey and as an advice be consistent each day ,never give up and learn something new each day related to seo

charles133 said:

Good luck on your journey and as an advice be consistent each day ,never give up and learn something new each day related to seo

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Thanks for the advice! Trying to always improve upon my previous blog post has definitely improved my writing even in just 1 month.

Let's hope my traffic follows suit!

Following your journey

Educational niche, I rarely see this niche. Good luck.

invigorate said:

Educational niche, I rarely see this niche. Good luck.

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Thanks, it's sort of educational niche, sort of business. I may have picked a niche which is a little bit too competitive for a newbie but hey ho. We'll see what happens

WEEK 7 UPDATE

Nothing much has happened this week.

Going to step away from the blog for a few weeks as I have other things I need to do and I am slightly concerned that the previous owner of my domain may have had a penalty from Google.

Hopefully the impressions will pick up slightly over the coming weeks, but we'll see.

Not much else to say - will be back here posting shortly

That's the risk of buying used domains but hopefully it's just the regular G dance and your articles will start picking up impressions and clicks. Have you added your site to Bing webmasters also? That way you will get your site indexed faster in Bing as well.

Your journey is actually very motivating.. you don't see results and it feels at times that you are going backwards in terms of outcome but as long as you keep your motivation and goals on what YOU can achieve.. you are golden.

It think your posts just need time to age and then G will pick them up - it's really common.

Following

eillo247 said:

Going to step away from the blog for a few weeks as I have other things I need to do and I am slightly concerned that the previous owner of my domain may have had a penalty from Google.

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I don't think the domain had a penalty. I have a new blog and it's been doing the same thing, no clicks from google, regardless of how easy the keywords are, posts deindexed and so on. It's just the new google after all those updates, probably we're sandboxed for a longer period.

Even if you step away for a while, try to add at least 1 article per week. Make them smaller and no fluff.