Scaling my non-english blog to 500 usd/month

Dear followers of my journey,
Happy new year.
Its time for another monthly update.
My blog had turned 1 year and 8 months.

In December 2021:
- I had published 7 new articles.

In terms of traffic, I had fewer visitors in December - 3 748, compared to 3 959 in November.
I tried and integrated my blog into Ezoic.
I run ads for a few days, but the results were abysmal.
I think I will stick to Adsense.
Also tried (and paid) some Facebook promo (one lady is sharing my Facebook posts into her pages) but the results are bad as well. It's not normal, at least for me, from pages with tens of thousands of likes to get few clicks.
I think that most of her likes/followers are bots. This scam cost me around 20 euros.
I will stick to buying guest posts on local news websites in the future (when I have the money).

January is looking more promising so far.
The problem is that majority of my traffic is coming from blog posts in my native language.
And in holidays (including name ays) I am getting fewer visitors.
The translated content will bring more visitors in the future.
 
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In my opinion the best thing you can do is start a facebook page thats gonna be based around politics and finance. You will upload translated post from big news sites to your website and share them on your facebook page. All the small countries are preoccupied with politics so this is the topic that will get you the most visits

To gain visitors on your facebook page i recommend creating new facebook accounts and slowly adding people as friends. This will help you promote your facebook page and your website.

With this your social media presence will increase and you will rank better on google and you will make money from ads.

Anyways, good luck and dont give up.
 
Dear followers of my journey,
It is time for another monthly update.
For January 2022.
My website had turned 1 year and 9 months.
In January I had added 12 to 13 new articles.
In January I had achieved new records in terms of daily (first 347 users in a single day) users and monthly users - 5 435 users.
The page views have increased as well - 7,824.
What I lack for bigger growth are backlinks and referring domains.
I have 55 referring domains so far due to my conservative view of backlinking.
If you, dudes, remember, I have done mostly paid guest posting in local news websites (aged, with authority, and actual visits).
Right now I am saving money from my salary as VA and I can't afford payments for guest posting.
Maybe at the end of the year, I can afford new guest posts.
So I have decided, since my website is dedicated to freelancing, making money online, creating blogs, etc, to approach people in the field and offer them interviews (creating a special section/category) on my website. In return, they must link back to me.
Also, I am planning to attend a big event in the digital market industry in my country. This event will be Q3 or Q4 in this year. (there I will offer interviews and potentially paid guest posting on my website).

The interview opportunity (with link exchange) is also valid for Blackhat members.
If certain conditions are met, obliviously.
The activity of the member must be legal. And certain ethical standards must be met also.
And he/she must appear in the interview with their real name.
He/she must have a website or a blog.
PM me. And we can start.
 
Dear followers of my journey,
Being busy at my main job - I didn't have time to post an update for February.
All of the stats were well until the war in Ukraine happened.
Huge traffic loss - from visitors in Russia and Ukraine.
From 5500 average predicted monthly visitors in January to 4100 now (in March).
But first and foremost, I hope that this madness with the war ends soon.
I will try to build more backlinks.
I hope that someone here, in the forum, can help me with that /with suggestions/.
Stay safe.
 
Dear followers of my journey,
I didn't post anything in April and May.
This is because I was busy at my main job, I was feeling exhausted when I had free time or during this free time I was doing something in the blog.
My blog had turned in June two years and one month.
I am pleased to say that my traffic had started to recover. And I think I wasn't hit by the latest Google core update
And in June I will receive with this level of traffic around 5500+ visitors.
I had started to reach other bloggers/freelancers with websites and offered them link exchanges.
The created backlinks surely contributed to the growth (because I had so few referring domains to my blog).
I will continue with this strategy because I can't afford backlinking services this year.
So this journey will become a slow grind towards my goal of achieving financial freedom with this blog.
 
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 for your journey wi will with you..........
 
I like your work ethics.

Is it not possible to implement affiliate links to your content? Adsense is not paying much over here in EU/Asia.
 
Zbigniew said:
I like your work ethics.

Is it not possible to implement affiliate links to your content? Adsense is not paying much over here in EU/Asia.
Click to expand...
Hi,
Adsense doesn't pay badly for my traffic, there are days in which RPM is 8 and something US dollars.
Which I think is good (when you see the demographic of my audience and the number of visitors).

I have some affiliate links/referral links in my content.
Like I have said at the beginning of this journey - I am doing affilate/referral promotion with a twist.
For example - I have written a detailed article about Payoneer. If someone in my audience joins Payoneer he/she can get a bonus (and me as well)
My plan is:
- become authority
- sell banner spaces in future
- dropship services
- sell paid publications
I know that - its a matter of time to turn the needle and achieve what I am hoping


AlbinKurti said:
You focus too much on backlinks instead of content
Click to expand...

Like I had said in the beginning of this journey - I had plenty of content /more than 300 articles), and now I am uploading interviews.
Some of the content is translated into other languages - so I have more than 1400 articles overall.
With two years old domain (with which I had started), I think I need more backlinks.
I have around 70+ referring domains, most of them are local /to my country/ news websites. With traffic, age and ranking.
Now I am doing interviews with people who have websites with some traffic and ranking.
 
Good luck with your business. I hope everything works out for you. The main thing is not to give up and remember what you started it for and what you wanted to get out of it. Keep these two notions in mind and then you will succeed.
 
Eupensel said:
Do your translated articles rank well?
Click to expand...

I have added the translated articles in the end of the first year. They are in Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Macedonian. My original content is in Bulgarian.
They are ranking. I am seeing improvement.
I am planning maybe after year and half to buy Sape links (from other sources).
 
DurSharukin said:
I have added the translated articles in the end of the first year. They are in Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Macedonian. My original content is in Bulgarian.
They are ranking. I am seeing improvement.
I am planning maybe after year and half to buy Sape links (from other sources).
Click to expand...
Alright, do you automatically translate your original content using a translator? Or do you manually translate it?
 
Eupensel said:
Alright, do you automatically translate your original content using a translator? Or do you manually translate it?
Click to expand...

Automatic translation
(via the paid WPML plugin) but the translation quality is good, because the languages have similarities (and the visitors who are visiting are spending 2 to 3 minutes/and sometimes more/ reading the content which is ranked)
 
DurSharukin said:
Automatic translation
(via the paid WPML plugin) but the translation quality is good, because the languages have similarities (and the visitors who are visiting are spending 2 to 3 minutes/and sometimes more/ reading the content which is ranked)
Click to expand...
Great! After automatically translating the content, there's no need to do any manual edits right?
 
Eupensel said:
Great! After automatically translating the content, there's no need to do any manual edits right?
Click to expand...

Maybe there are errors which needs editing.
A relative of mine is Russian language teacher. She had said to me that even manual Google translate from Bulgarian to Russian produces text which makes sense during reading.
The strange thing is that I receive the majority of traffic from Google.
To me, Yandex, the Russian search engine prefers websites with more baclinks from the Russian websites.
That's why I plan to buy Sape links (but afer one, two or more years, when I have the money)
 
Eupensel said:
I didn't know this
Click to expand...
I presume this, my I don't have high proficiency in Russian.
My conclusion comes from my poor experience and watching a Russian YouTuber named Stas Bykov.
He has videos in which can be seen his stats in Yandex Metrica (Yandex analytics tool).
He uses Sape type of links as well he does on-page optimization, using the Yandex keyword tool (Wordstat).
 
DurSharukin said:
He has videos in which can be seen his stats in Yandex Metrica (Yandex analytics tool).
He uses Sape type of links as well he does on-page optimization, using the Yandex keyword tool (Wordstat).
Click to expand...
Are his videos also ranked on Google?
 
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