Scaling my non-english blog to 500 usd/month

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DurSharukin

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After a lot of hesitation, I have decided to create a journey about my non-English blog.
I think that the psychological support that I will receive from the comuntity here will beneficial.
I will keep an honest journal about what have I done. And I plan to publish monthly updates - this will keep the thread organized.

Little about me: a long-time lurker in the blackhat community, 29 years old, non-English speaker. After I had graduated from my university, I had worked both freelancing and full-time, switching various occupations. During that time I was investing my little income into various projects that weren't( successful (publishing ebooks in Amazon, like a noob I had bought websites in Flippa, decided to develop English blogs on my own / buying in the meantime questionable services in Blackhatworld marketplace). On top of that, from my point of view, I got scammed while I was running a company for a third person. Didn't get paid, had to pay significant company expenses.

Being broke, but having an amazing and supportive family, I had decided - to create a source of income. Now I do VA tasks for close relatives of mine. Don't get paid a lot by any standards. But the money is coming. And the amount might increase (after we get more customers).

So, in May 2020 I had created my non-English blog, writing the content myself in my native language. The idea was since my native language is part of a larger family group to translate the content into other languages. And although the translation is done automatically - the end result is goods. The foreign language users spend more than 1 minute reading the translated posts.

So, in my 14 month old blog I have:
- 313 posts in my native language
- 240 posts in Russian
- 240 posts in Ukrainian
- 238 posts in Serbian
- 224 posts in Macedonian

My blog is based on WordPress. And I use hosting from Namecheap, so-called EasyWP hosting (specialized WordPress hosting). The website has decent speed. (EasyWP has its own caching). I had bought Elementor. And I am using less than 15 plugins.
Right now I have around 1800 monthly users.
I know this amount is low for a blog at this age.
But I have made the following mistakes (and decisions):
- not knowing about YMYL, I had created my blog in this very hard niche. In my native language - a lot of keywords are shown from Ahrefs that are easy to rank. And sort of - it is. Right now I am ranking number one or two for "how to make money from cryptocurrencies" in my native language. But the volume of people that search that is way less.

- in the begging, not knowing that tags are not that good, I had created a lot. And I had set them to be indexable from Google. After that, I realized that this is a mistake. And it took more than 5 months to Google to deindex more than 2500 tags. (There are tags that are still waiting to be deindexed)
- in the beginning, after reading tutorials in blog set-up, I had submitted the wrong sitemap extension to Google. Instead of domain.com/sitemap.xml, I had submitted the sitemap of the category, of the post, etc. to Google. After months I had submitted the general one.
- I had decided to be cautious about the link building. I had submitted my website into few website directories in the first months (those that have some sort of authority in my country). And I had started to do link building in month 11.
Some sort of guest posts in websites with authority. And I had bought links in the following way: submitted articles in news sources in my country (it's very cheap to buy links in regional news sites). About the linking: I had linked to my home page. And few other pages.
The anchor text is not an exact match.
Total referring domains: around 35

About how I plan to earn with the website: I had my own twist.
I have Adsense enabled but nothing serious so far.
Invested: around 1120 euros.
Earned: less than 20 euros so far.

Wish me luck, dudes!
 
Last edited:
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DurSharukin said:
After a lot of hesitation, I have decided to create a journey about my non-English blog.
I think that the psychological support that I will receive from the comuntity here will beneficial.
I will keep an honest journal about what have I done. And I plan to publish monthly updates - this will keep the thread organized.

Little about me: a long-time lurker in the blackhat community, 29 years old, non-English speaker. After I had graduated from my university, I had worked both freelancing and full-time, switching various occupations. During that time I was investing my little income into various projects that weren't( successful (publishing ebooks in Amazon, like a noob I had bought websites in Flippa, decided to develop English blogs on my own / buying in the meantime questionable services in Blackhatworld marketplace). On top of that, from my point of view, I got scammed while I was running a company for a third person. Didn't get paid, had to pay significant company expenses.

Being broke, but having an amazing and supportive family, I had decided - to create a source of income. Now I do VA tasks for close relatives of mine. Don't get paid a lot by any standards. But the money is coming. And the amount might increase (after we get more customers).

So, in May 2020 I had created my non-English blog, writing the content myself in my native language. The idea was since my native language is part of a larger family group to translate the content into other languages. And although the translation is done automatically - the end result is goods. The foreign language users spend more than 1 minute reading the translated posts.

So, in my 14 month old blog I have:
- 313 posts in my native language
- 240 posts in Russian
- 240 posts in Ukrainian
- 238 posts in Serbian
- 224 posts in Macedonian

My blog is based on WordPress. And I use hosting from Namecheap, so-called EasyWP hosting (specialized WordPress hosting). The website has decent speed. (EasyWP has its own caching). I had bought Elementor. And I am using less than 15 plugins.
Right now I have around 1800 monthly users.
I know this amount is low for a blog at this age.
But I have made the following mistakes (and decisions):
- not knowing about YMYL, I had created my blog in this very hard niche. In my native language - a lot of keywords are shown from Ahrefs that are easy to rank. And sort of - it is. Right now I am ranking number one or two for "how to make money from cryptocurrencies" in my native language. But the volume of people that search that is way less.

- in the begging, not knowing that tags are not that good, I had created a lot. And I had set them to be indexable from Google. After that, I realized that this is a mistake. And it took more than 5 months to Google to deindex more than 2500 tags. (There are tags that are still waiting to be deindexed)
- in the beginning, after reading tutorials in blog set-up, I had submitted the wrong sitemap extension to Google. Instead of domain.com/sitemap.xml, I had submitted the sitemap of the category, of the post, etc. to Google. After months I had submitted the general one.
- I had decided to be cautious about the link building. I had submitted my website into few website directories in the first months (those that have some sort of authority in my country). And I had started to do link building in month 11.
Some sort of guest posts in websites with authority. And I had bought links in the following way: submitted articles in news sources in my country (it's very cheap to buy links in regional news sites). About the linking: I had linked to my home page. And few other pages.
The anchor text is not an exact match.
Total referring domains: around 35

About how I plan to earn with the website: I had my own twist.
I have Adsense enabled but nothing serious so far.
Invested: around 1120 euros.
Earned: less than 20 euros so far.

Wish me luck, dudes!
Click to expand...
Wish you the best, keep up posted with updates, stats, and so on. I am sure that with this positive attitude + the effort you put in, you'll gonna make it. Good luck!
 
You have articles in several languages published on your site, is that same articles translated or they more or so separated but under same cryptocurrency topic/niche?
Wish you all the best and I'll be following.
 
Thanks for your replies.
You have articles in several languages published on your site, is that same articles translated or they more or so separated but under same cryptocurrency topic/niche?
Wish you all the best and I'll be following.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

I had translated the original posts into several languages. I didn't mention that this process started in months 8 or 9 to 14. So some of the translated articles are less than 5 months old.

I mentioned that I had published about cryptocurrencies as an example of YMYL. I wrote about other topics as well.
Like I had said, the weird part of writing in my native language is that most of the keywords are shown to be easily competitive. I rank number two for "how to make money from cryptocurrencies". Or I rank number ten for "affiliate marketing".(the translated term for my native language).
Apparently, the search volume is low in my native language.
When I had started, I was following Income school. And I was amazed by their examples - how they are pulling so much traffic with weird keywords such as "how to comfort dying hamster" or some sort. Well, more than 30 percent of the Internet traffic is in English, so I understand now this volume.
Once I had written articles for a client of mine in my native language about sushi. He is ranking in top 4 or 5.

So I am thinking when I reach about 4 or 5 thousand monthly searches, to add a section in my websites, that I am offering creative writing. Or I can dropship services. Maybe in this way, I will reach 500 usd/month.
 
Hello, followers of my journey,
I have decided to post my project update a little early. I have promised to post what I have done every month (and what results I have achieved).
I know that I had started this thread on 7.6.2021. And I can't post results from tools like Ubersuggest (at least - in the free version the results are updating several days). But judging on the trend in Google Analytics, Google search console, and the free version of Ahrefs - I can strongly say what the results are.
Anyway, here's what I have done:

  1. I had published only 2 (two) blog posts in July. I didn't give up. But currently, I have a good amount of already published or translated posts (1528) . Some of those posts Google search console is showing that they are crawled but not indexed. So in near future, I will be writing fewer posts than in the beginning of the project. But at least 2/month.
  2. I had written two blog posts and they were accepted in pretty reputable YMYL websites in my country. In one of the blog post, the backlink is pointed to my home page, in the other blog post - to the home page and a post.

What I have accomplished:
  1. Ahrefs rank of the website had increased from 20 598 227 to 18 135 695. That's 2 462 532 difference.
  2. The keywords that are ranking in Ahrefs have increased from 525 to 756 (in various positions).
  3. In July, according to Google Analytics, I have 1968 users compared to 1686 in June.
  4. Pageviews have increased as well - 3405 in July compared to 2620 in June.

Mistakes I have made:

Driven from curiosity and little greed I have decided to apply for Ezoic. I was accepted - after changing nameservers, linking my Adsense account, taking their course, passing the test, etc.
Ezoic recommends turning off all caching. They have also their own CDN system. To this moment, I was using the free CDN from my hosting - Namecheap. I have tried to turn of my CDN from Namecheap. And my website went offline. It turns out that my hosting plan - managed WordPress hosting called EasyWP was working only with Namecheap DNS settings. How I managed to implement Ezoic - I don't know. Being in stress, I have decided to turn off Ezoic. And restored the DNS settings to the premium ones. Two to three days my website was having issues until the DNS propagation. So far - so good. I have decided to restore the free CDN from Namecheap. And again I had a technical problem. With every EasyWp plan, you get a free SSL sertificate. This certificate was unable to "sync" with Namecheap CDN service (called Supersonic). This CDN service also does some sort of change in the DNS settings. I was so frustrated and scared that my website was unreachable and was unaware too when this will be fixed from the support. So In the second day of the problem (when the website was online but without SSL) I had bought a custom SSL certificate.
But my website had tech issies at least 4 days in July. From the trend - I don't see a negative effect, except for the lost traffic off course.


Invested: 1130 euros (plus SSL certificate)


What I lack: I have a lot of content. What I lack so far is more aggressive link bulding. I had around 270 euros which I had saved from my VA job. I will appreciate every comment on how I should do the link building. At least, in the next 7+ months, I will be doing guest posts in local (to my country) news websites. I know that the other language sections of my website are neglected in backlinking. But current backlinks, at least to my knowledge, are "safe". I don't indent do buy backlinks here, in Blackhat. I have done that before in the past. And I think now that those backlinks are useless (but back there I even left excellent reviews for the vendors).
So what you guys think? How link building must be made? I will appreciate examples with some soft of ratio (x amount of backlinks to home page, Y amount of backlinks to posts). What kind of anchor text will work, the ratio of anchor text)
Due to Google updates - I am afraid of doing blog comments links, web 2.0, PBNs. I think I will stick with guests posts.
 
Last edited:
Hello, followers of my journey,
It is time for another monthly update.

What I have done in August:

- I had accepted the first guest post into my blog. The short story is months ago I had published a guest post and now was the time to return the favor. The guest post is in the gambling niche, with only one backlink. It was nicely written and formatted. And I thought - I had to return the favor (the other guy will remove my backlink) and one post wouldn't harm my website.

I had written during August one post but due to a WordPress update (and crashing) - the post was gone due to backup restore.

- I had ordered 4 (four) backlinks from regional news websites. Two pointing to the homepage, two pointing to two particular blog posts.


What I have accomplished:
- My blog is 1 year and 3 months old.
-Total users in August 2021 is 2619 compared to 1968 in July.
- Pageviews in August 2021 is 4206 compared to 3405 in July.
- 764 keywords in Ahrefs in August compared to 756 in July.
- I had my first ranking in Alexa!
- In the end of August my blog had 16 583 130 rank in Ahrefs, compared to 18 135 695 in July.


What I lack: fricking backlinks. And patience. I see that there is a positive trend but things change slowly.
For example: the beginning of September there is one big public holiday in my country. And when you add Saturdays and Sundays - I always get a decrease in traffic.
The small amounts of users always are making me depressed.
I know that there are people in this forum that are investing thousands in backlinks and I can't expect miracles with 4 backlinks a month.
But, nevertheless, I feel like Wojak (from the memes) - I can't get out from the rat race, Bogdanoff (Google) is always dumping the market when I see some positive trends.

Well, enough offtopic, I will be happy to reply if there are questions.
 
Hello, followers of my journey,
It's time for another monthly update - September 2021.

In my country (the primary source of traffic) in September there are two public holidays (held in regular business days) and the beginning of the school also starts in September (so it's a semi-official holiday). This is 3 days aditional to Friday, Saturday and Sunday in which I receive less traffic.

In this month:
I had added only two new blog posts.
I had bought 3 guest posts in regional news websites.
I had received a phone call from an editor from a big regional newspaper. She had viewed one of my not-so-popular blog post about starting a subscription box business. And she promised me that they will give me a free backlink. My first interview and free PR gain!
I had created few backlinks (mainly in websites that allow users to input biography) - such backlinks have some of my competitors as well.


My blog is almost one year and 5 months old.
There is a slight increase in Ahrefs rank - from 16 595 237 to 16 282 404.
Keywords tracked from Ahrefs had increased as well - to 828.
New record number of users and sessions - 2739 users and 4405 pageviews.
Increase in Adsense, few commissions/gained referrals here and there, nothing to brag about.
I know that in order to "turn the needle"- I need more backlinks (around 55 referring domains), my problem is my poor budget.
 
Good luck on your journey OP
 
Dear follower of my journey,
It is time for another update.
06.11.2021 my website will turn 1 year and 6 months old.

What I have did in October:
I have added 5 new blog posts.
Currently, I have (with November): 289 blog posts in my native language, 224 blog posts in Macedonian, 240 blog posts in Russian, 238 blog posts in Serbian, 240 blog posts in Ukrainian.

For the link building:
In October I had received the article and the backlink from the major regional newspaper.
I had received two backlinks after submission in major in my country directory (from subdomains, but still 2 backlinks with DR 56).
I had added some profile backlinks which I have seen here in Blackhatworld.
They are (I think) not indexed.

Technical work:
In the beginning of November, my hosting plan at Namecheap was due to expire.
So I have decided to move host.
I had chosen local to my country hosting.
They have a data centre here.
I had bought a plan for websites with up to 60 000 visits a month.
With the ""saved money" and the ability to use something different than the Namecheap caching I had bought WP rocket plugin.

As you can see from the images, now I have better web core (for the home page and random blog posts pages).
vitals scores.
home page.png
home.png
desctop.pngpost mobile.png

In mobile tests scores of the blog posts I sometimes receive worse results (I have formatted the blog posts, in the same way, using Elementor).

Per traffic:
There is a slight increase in Ahrefs rank - from 16 334 274 to 15 567 958
Keywords tracked from Ahrefs had increased as well - from somewhere around 828 to 895.
New record number of users and sessions - 3277 and 5 172 pageviews.
Increase in Adsense earnings - 12.72 euros.
Few commissions/gained referrals here and there, nothing to brag about.
Compared to other journeys - mine is showing slower growth.
This is because: I had created the blog in YMYL niche. With new domain.
And started link building with guest posts after month 8.
The translated content was added (around) after month 8.

Wish me luck dudes.
I am so anxious to see some serious numbers. Some days I even ask myself what is the point.
 
DurSharukin said:
After a lot of hesitation, I have decided to create a journey about my non-English blog.
I think that the psychological support that I will receive from the comuntity here will beneficial.
I will keep an honest journal about what have I done. And I plan to publish monthly updates - this will keep the thread organized.

Little about me: a long-time lurker in the blackhat community, 29 years old, non-English speaker. After I had graduated from my university, I had worked both freelancing and full-time, switching various occupations. During that time I was investing my little income into various projects that weren't( successful (publishing ebooks in Amazon, like a noob I had bought websites in Flippa, decided to develop English blogs on my own / buying in the meantime questionable services in Blackhatworld marketplace). On top of that, from my point of view, I got scammed while I was running a company for a third person. Didn't get paid, had to pay significant company expenses.

Being broke, but having an amazing and supportive family, I had decided - to create a source of income. Now I do VA tasks for close relatives of mine. Don't get paid a lot by any standards. But the money is coming. And the amount might increase (after we get more customers).

So, in May 2020 I had created my non-English blog, writing the content myself in my native language. The idea was since my native language is part of a larger family group to translate the content into other languages. And although the translation is done automatically - the end result is goods. The foreign language users spend more than 1 minute reading the translated posts.

So, in my 14 month old blog I have:
- 313 posts in my native language
- 240 posts in Russian
- 240 posts in Ukrainian
- 238 posts in Serbian
- 224 posts in Macedonian

My blog is based on WordPress. And I use hosting from Namecheap, so-called EasyWP hosting (specialized WordPress hosting). The website has decent speed. (EasyWP has its own caching). I had bought Elementor. And I am using less than 15 plugins.
Right now I have around 1800 monthly users.
I know this amount is low for a blog at this age.
But I have made the following mistakes (and decisions):
- not knowing about YMYL, I had created my blog in this very hard niche. In my native language - a lot of keywords are shown from Ahrefs that are easy to rank. And sort of - it is. Right now I am ranking number one or two for "how to make money from cryptocurrencies" in my native language. But the volume of people that search that is way less.

- in the begging, not knowing that tags are not that good, I had created a lot. And I had set them to be indexable from Google. After that, I realized that this is a mistake. And it took more than 5 months to Google to deindex more than 2500 tags. (There are tags that are still waiting to be deindexed)
- in the beginning, after reading tutorials in blog set-up, I had submitted the wrong sitemap extension to Google. Instead of domain.com/sitemap.xml, I had submitted the sitemap of the category, of the post, etc. to Google. After months I had submitted the general one.
- I had decided to be cautious about the link building. I had submitted my website into few website directories in the first months (those that have some sort of authority in my country). And I had started to do link building in month 11.
Some sort of guest posts in websites with authority. And I had bought links in the following way: submitted articles in news sources in my country (it's very cheap to buy links in regional news sites). About the linking: I had linked to my home page. And few other pages.
The anchor text is not an exact match.
Total referring domains: around 35

About how I plan to earn with the website: I had my own twist.
I have Adsense enabled but nothing serious so far.
Invested: around 1120 euros.
Earned: less than 20 euros so far.

Wish me luck, dudes!
Click to expand...
Good luck with that DurSharukin.
 
wish you good luck but keep in mind that in non english site have many difficulties.So you have to some skills with that
 
Is time for another update: for November 2021
In November 2021:

I had added 5 new blog posts.
I have added 1 (one) new guest post.
I have edited some old blog posts.
Total posts in various languages: 1527


There is new record of users: 3 959
New record of pageviews as well: 6057

New "record" of Adsense earnings: 14.44 euros.


During the November update I didn't saw decrease in traffic /I was having new daily records of users and pageviews).

The first days of December / having a major name day in my country) are not looking so good.
I am bit depressed.
Every time when there is some "light in the end of the tunnel" - days with some more optimistic stats, after them there are days with decreased traffic.
 
Nice growth. Somehow I missed this journey. You have a lot of articles.

How much does it earn you per month? From adsense earnings seems around 400 euro per month but maybe there's affiliate too.

How much did you get for the guest post?

Good luck!
 
Hi, blogmen,
I've been following your journey too. You got amazing stats, I dream to reach the visitors which you are currently getting.
Unfortunately, my progress is slower.
And I have made some of the following rookie mistakes:
- my blog covers mostly YMYL niches such as freelancing, how to start a home-based business, etc.
- some of my articles are in very difficult and not very searched (at least in my native language) topics. For example - I had written an article about government-guaranteed student loans in my country. My
- As I have written in the beginning of my journey - I translate some of my articles in other languages (such as Russian, Ukrainian, etc.). So "the new articles" are 8 months or less old.
- I have did (during the journey) a lot of technical mistakes (maybe submitting the wrong sitemap, not adjusting the sitemap itself correctly). And due to slow Google indexing - I have around 180 articles that wait to be indexed.
- My website has a decent but not great Google web score vitals score (I am talking about the article pages)
Previous month I had received some visitors.
According to Adsense - the earnings are normal for mostly tier 3 traffic.
14.44 euros for 6057 pageviews which seems normal.
In order to earn from Adsense 400 euros, I had to reach more than 300 000 pageviews.
Which is a lot.
 
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