March was a bit of a grind with some wins and a few losses.
Most of my focus was directed toward getting us indexed with Google and optimizing our search engine usefulness.
Here’s a quick list of things we learned in March.
1) Even Closer to Earth Now
March saw a continued reduction in site traffic. This is probably mostly a regression from social media interest.
Since most of the people who visit us from our social media channels are still people we know on a personal level, it’s only natural that this number would decline over time.
If you think about it, there aren’t that many websites that you visit regularly for very long, especially if the primary benefit is educational.
Eventually, you’re going to soak up enough of what the site has to offer and move on. MartinMoney.com is no different.
It looks like we’re going to have about half the visitors in March that we had in February. That’s down to 45 unique users and about 160 page views.
These are embarrassingly unimpressive stats, but they’re also not uncommon for a newer site.
It’s especially normal for a finance site, which is just a super saturated niche.
The good news is an increasing number of visitors are coming from organic search results which is the direction we want to move. Albeit slow, any progress in this category is a win.
2) We Got Indexed!!!!
Without a doubt, our biggest win of March was getting Google to finally index the rest of the site.
Well, almost all of it anyway.
There is a way to manually submit pages for indexing which I stumbled upon right after our February update.
There’s a limit on how many requests you can make each day, but we eventually got all of them submitted.
For some reason that I still don’t understand there are still five pages I can’t get Google to look at. It’s very strange, but I’ll keep at it.
Now you might think that once the site is discoverable on the most widely used search engines, we’d see a significant uptick in traffic.
Unfortunately, that is not the result we’ve seen.
Most of the topics we cover are miles down in search results and the few “impressions” we get rarely translate into pageviews.
It will take time to build credibility and improve our ranking in search results which is where much of my focus is now.
Regardless, it feels nice to have this critical step behind us.
3) Backlinks Are Tough
So last month I mentioned that we were making a concentrated effort on generating backlinks to improve the site’s credibility.
We’ve seen a little success with this, but not as much as I’d hoped.
Initially, it was going great. We were quoted for two separate articles, one of which was posted on another small financial blog and the other on gobankingrates.com and Yahoo finance.
Frankly, the post to Yahoo finance was a really big win and gave me confidence that this path was working.
However, as the month went on I pitched more than two dozen other guest posts, none of which has been used so far.
I still plan to use this method to build backlinks going forward, but I’m a little burnt out writing pitches for nothing.
At the very least, I’m going to try to make fewer, higher-quality attempts at this going forward.
4) Goals
Just keep trucking.
I’m still working on the YouTube stuff, but probably won’t post anything until I get pretty good at it.
YouTube definitely favors channels that post new content regularly; like three times a week regularly.
As you might recall, I have a full-time job that takes priority over this website. There’s no way I can put out three videos per week right now.
I’m not even sure I can come up with 3 topics per week. That’s over 150 per year.
That is a lot of dag ‘um video.
So, my plan is to start recording evergreen video content soon and build up a library of edited videos that are ready to post.
I’m assuming the more videos I make, the more efficient I’ll get at it.
Once I’m confident I can spit out three in a week, I’ll start loading them and try to keep up that pace as long as I can.
Now, you may wonder why all the focus on YouTube? Especially considering the fact that I don’t particularly enjoy making videos or being in them.
There are a few reasons.
First, it’s easier to grow an audience on YouTube.
The heavy hitters in written financial blogging don’t necessarily command the same power on YouTube. I don’t really know why that is, but you can look some of them up yourself.
The subscriber count, views, etc. are all lower than I would expect considering the massive audiences these sites draw online.
Second, a website and a YouTube channel complement each other well. It’s an easy way to reach a new or different audience and pull people back to the site or vice versa.
Not only that, search engines are more likely to improve your ranking if you have a related video embedded in your post. This is especially true for Google which owns YouTube.
Next, I see YouTube as a better option for monetization than the website.
I have mentioned many times my disdain for websites that are covered in gaudy, flashy, annoying ads and I won’t have it on mine.
This is a violation of the socially acceptable laws of monetized blogging, but I don’t really care. It’s also my ball, so I can take it home if I want.
Besides, to me, the cost to user experience outweighs the monetary benefit produced by ads on the webpage. At least on YouTube ads are expected and can be skipped.
Finally, and probably of least importance, when you make videos, you naturally produce an accompanying audio file that can be extracted and shared as a podcast.
I’m not sure we’d ever want to do that and I think it would be tricky to assume you can just slap the audio file out on a podcast and it will be as easy to follow as a video, but there’s potential with at least some portion of the content.
We’ll just have to wait and see on this one.
As far as the website itself goes, we’re up to 89 written posts and should hit post 100 in early June. Once we reach 100, I plan to write one post per week and redirect the extra time to producing videos.
At this point, there’s enough content on the site for it to be taken seriously. It needs time to grow and build credibility.
Hopefully, focusing on YouTube will help in that regard, but don’t expect to see any videos up on our channel for several months.
Wrap-Up
We’re seven months into this effort and while the traffic is nowhere near where I had optimistically hoped it would be, I’m enjoying the build.
I’ve learned a lot and had a good time, so onward we go.
Besides, when I started this project I made a deal with myself that I’d give it two solid years of effort before giving up due to a lack of interest.
I didn’t know much starting out, but I knew the vast majority of people who were successful doing stuff like this didn’t typically have a large audience even after one full year.
It is especially difficult trying to get off the ground when finance is the topic.
Patience is required.
Thank you again for your interest.
