Summary:
We let the proverbial cat out of the bag a few weeks ago and told our friends and relatives about the site. We’ve seen a massive inflow of traffic from that.
I’ll explain a little more about what we’ve learned from our approach to this below, but we’re grateful for all of you who have shown interest in what we’re up to.
After 5 months on the interwebs, we had 865 pageviews in January by 224 active users.
For perspective, in December we had 25 pageviews…total. That was from 21 users and at least one of those was me. ☹
The reason numbers were low is search engines still weren’t really telling anyone we were here. They don’t trust us yet. At least not as much as we’d like.
We did rank for a couple of keyword searches about Roth IRAs back in early January which resulted in a whopping 4 pageviews.
In terms of traffic, that’s pretty pathetic. However, I’m really encouraged by the fact that Google actually suggested our site to someone looking for a relevant topic.
It just confirms that we haven’t done something the algorithm doesn’t like, resulting in being filed in search engine purgatory.
Earnings are still at a cool $0.00. Don’t expect anything to change here for a while. I’ll explain below.
The fact that people are actually visiting the site and asking us questions about it is very refreshing. I pounded away at content for four months for virtually no one and was getting a little tired of it.
January was a moral boost.
Lessons Learned:
1) Focus on Content
We’re up to 65 posts and still have plenty to write about. I’m glad we made content the primary focus initially, even though virtually no one was reading it.
For one thing, I got a lot better at writing for a blog. You know, the not-so-stuffy, informal, one-sentence paragraph kind of writing.
Not saying the writing is great, but I promise it has come a long way.
Focusing on content also gave us a sort of critical mass of information. The quicker we got posts on the site, the quicker we gave people something to come see. This leads us to my next point.
2) Being Patient
I am very happy with our decision to wait several months before putting ourselves out there. If I was starting from scratch, all over again, I’d approach it the same way.
I’ve already explained how it gave people something to come and see, but it also gave us time to mess up a bunch.
No matter how much planning you do on laying out a website, you’re going to learn things as you get into it and your plan will change. Some of these changes take some time and may even break a thing or two on your site.
When you’re working a full-time job and parenting, like we are, you have to leave things in the ditch sometimes until you can come back and take care of them.
At least when we did this to a site no one was really coming to, it wasn’t a huge problem.
Finally, by building the site through steady posting of new content, search engines were given months to index and crawl our site.
In Google’s eyes, we’re not brand new. We’ve been around for five months even if most of our audience just learned about us.
3) Writing to Learn
Another interesting thing that has happened with writing frequently is that it has helped show me what I’m interested in learning and writing about.
Believe it or not, I don’t follow a highly structured writing plan. I just jot down things that come to mind while I’m writing.
The writing process itself has generated more ideas as I go. When I finish one topic, I just go to the next one on my ever-expanding list.
In a way, it’s like I needed to write in order to learn what I needed to write about. At this point, I have more ideas than I think I’ll be able to ever cover, but I have grown a ton.
4) I’m not writing to please a computer…but, maybe I am.
I hit on this back in our first update back in September.
I’ll spare you the gory details, but there is a method to how you publish a website in such a way that search engines will like you.
Ignore some very basic steps and the site will live in relative obscurity indefinitely.
The problem is you don’t want to sell out your identity for the sake of an algorithm. In addition to being completely disingenuous, it restricts one’s ability to express freedom of thought and be creative.
The challenge is striking the right balance without allowing the algorithmic tail to wag the design dog.
We found a pretty significant indexing oversight a week or two ago that has cost us a lot of time in the algorithm, but it didn’t impact the site appearance or topics at all. We’re looking for more wins like that.
Goals:
1) Keep Posts at Two per Week
I plan to keep churning out two posts per week for most of 2023 but won’t guarantee anything. Who knows? Life may get busy or we may decide to focus more on item 4 below.
2) I want to turn a profit before the end of 2023
This isn’t critical and I’m actually less concerned with generating any income than I was when this first started.
I’m actually happier with the positive feedback I’ve gotten than I thought I’d be, and in a way, this has justified the time investment whether there’s any way to gain from it financially or not.
I’m still not interested in letting anyone put their gaudy ads on my pretty site, even though that’s the easiest way to make a buck (or more like a few coins).
Instead, we’ll focus on affiliate marketing sometime down the road or use item 4 below.
3) Focus more on Quality
I spent a lot of time in January reading back through old posts and cleaning them up a bit. As I read through a few of them there were obvious chunks of information missing in some cases or just poor communication in others.
I’m going to try and make more “complete” posts going forward. One way to help make that happen is to focus on narrower topics at a given time.
I think there’s enough topical cross-linking within the site for people to find more information on another post if that’s what they’re looking for.
4) YouTube
Personally, I think I have a great face for radio.
I’m also not well skilled in video media nor comfortable in front of a camera.
So why not start a YouTube channel?
Using YouTube is the next logical platform move for the site. It’s much easier to gain exposure to new audiences, more people prefer videos over reading, and it will help us learn and grow.
We’ll probably build a library of videos while we learn to edit and make them. Then, we’ll release them slowly and tie them back to posts from the site.
There’s so much we don’t know about this, so we’ll see how it goes.
Other:
Overall, I’m happy we’ve started this journey. January was the first time I felt like what we were doing actually mattered.
I’ve been asked a few times now what our end goal or purpose is for all of this and I’m never really sure how to answer.
Initially, I wanted to turn a topic I was interested in into some sort of productive activity. I’ll even admit that the potential of generating income was very, very exciting to me.
Now that we’re into it, I’ve gained a lot of personal value from the learning experience. I’ve learned so much by forcing myself to put my thoughts on the page.
I wouldn’t say that alone has been worth it, but I certainly don’t have any regrets.
When you couple that personal growth with the feedback we’re getting, it absolutely feels worthwhile.
Don’t get me wrong. I still really want to take our monetary investment (still under $100*) and turn it into something profitable. But it’s more about the challenge to me than a cash grab or side hustle.
We have great day jobs and are content with the income from that. This is fun to me. No reason to ruin it by tripping over ourselves urgently chasing pennies.
Anyhow, I can see this going in a lot of directions. We’re open to whatever the Lord wills.
- We love to teach. Maybe we can do some of that through this?
- I’ve thought about self-publishing a book on one of our topics (now that I have so much writing practice).
- Maybe it ends up just helping a few of our friends and family?
- I’ve thought about buying a rental property and documenting the journey as a case study for anyone interested in that.
- We could even go in a completely new direction and launch a totally different site.
Wherever it goes, thanks for your interest.
(* unless you count the professional pictures which serve more than one purpose)
