Blog Update: March 2023
February was another good month, plentiful with learning opportunities.
I want to begin by thanking everyone for your kind remarks. Getting positive feedback after doing a lot of work means a ton.
Next, we’re still not even attempting to generate revenue from the site.
We’ll need traffic in the 10,000+ monthly pageview range to consider starting monetization and even at 10k, it wouldn’t be very valuable.
Until we post otherwise, just assume we’re sitting on that.
Things are rolling right along with the site. Here’s some stuff we’ve been up to in the last month.
Back to Earth
In January, after sharing the site with our friends and connections on social media, we topped out at 971 pageviews.
That may not sound like a ton for a website, and you’re right, it’s not. But it is pretty good for a young site like ours that is still seeing some challenges getting Google to index it (more on that in a bit).
We had around 250 unique visitors in January which is also great.
With that said, February saw a big step back to what will be about 375 pageviews from 95 unique users and we’re up to 75 posts.
I’m not too bothered by the retraction for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to enjoy reading about finance.
Second, we can hardly count on our friends alone to generate enough interest to keep the site going. We need growth to come from organic search results which leads us to our next point.
Search Engine Headaches
Since we still need to find more site traffic, and we’re already hitting social media channels as much as reasonably possible, growth is going to have to come from organic web search.
Not to get off into the weeds too much, but in order for Google or Bing or whatever to acknowledge your site, they need to “crawl” and “index” it on their own.
Until that happens, you search using a complete paragraph from one of our posts, word for word, and the search engine still won’t produce a result for us.
The good news is we can help them by generating a sitemap, connecting our site to the search engine, and doing some other tricks to help the process along.
The key piece is the sitemap.
And that’s the part I messed up.
You see, you can generate a sitemap in HTML (which I did months ago) or in XML (which I only did last month).
Google* will only respond to a specific crawling request from an XML sitemap.
They’d eventually get to the HTML sitemap on their own, but who knows how long it would take and it could penalize the site in ranking search results.
So, my XML sitemap was linked to google about 4 months later than I’d liked. ☹
A second major SEO problem I’ve had is loading speed.
You may not notice from a PC and you probably haven’t noticed from mobile either, but our site was taking a long time to load compared to others.
So bad that I think it was preventing Google from indexing my site.
Over the weekend I set out to correct this and managed to make some significant progress.
I was able to reduce our average mobile loading time by 75% which is huge, but also shows how inefficient the site was.
I’ll spare you the technical details, but if you have any expertise in improving site speed and want to have a look, let me know. Dreamland is on me if you can help me make it better.
I’m not a very techy guy, so these sorts of problems are incredibly discouraging, but I confess they’ve also forced me to learn a lot which is good in the long run.
I’ll be continuing the SEO battle indefinitely, but hope it shifts from a “clean-up” to a “maintenance” focus soon.
(*I keep using Google as the example because that’s what everyone uses, but it applies to other search engines too.)
Getting the Name Out There
Another huge piece of search engine optimization (SEO) is building credibility with the Google supercomputer.
There are a few ways to do this: pageviews, establishing my human identity (Google likes it if you can show that you are an actual person and not an anonymous character or bot), credentials, traffic, etc.
None of these is as valuable to the algorithm as quality backlinks.
A backlink is a link to your site from another credible site.
Again, sparing you the details, I’ve done a lot of work trying to improve this by writing for other sites.
They don’t always let you know if they decide to use your stuff, so I guess we’ll see, but I do know of one backlink I did get from a fellow blogger in California that used me for a post he did about Dave Ramsey.
Hopefully, we’ll begin to see some traffic benefits from this.
More YouTube
I’ve been recording videos of these journal entries from the very start.
They’re pretty terrible.
Of course, I wasn’t trying to make them perfect either. I knew nothing about vlogging and figured I’d want to have that history for my own benefit.
I also knew recording the journal entries would give me material from which I could begin to learn video editing.
So, In February I made a video of my September journal entry and posted it to our YouTube channel. Woohoo!!
Again, it’s awful, but if you’re interested in how low the bar can be set, I’d be happy for you to check it out.
Like and subscribe and all that stuff if you want, but I’m not sure when we’ll be posting videos regularly.
Humbled & Energized by Feedback
One of the most remarkable things to happen over the last month has been the feedback we’ve received.
Friends, family, and church pals have all been so kind.
I want to point out that just hitting the publish button on the webpage way back at the end of August was unsettling.
What am I doing? Who am I to publish a website? Does this look like some sort of vain attempt to be internet famous? Are people going to think I’m trying to be a redneck Kardashian or something?
After I got accustomed to just having a site, it took another level of courage to actually open up to our friends about it.
Even then, I shared the site with a handful of 5 or 6 guy friends first so they could tell me I was an idiot before sharing all of this on Facebook and Twitter.
No word from them, so on we went.
Much to my relief, everyone has been nothing but encouraging, and while I’m sure there are plenty of questions about why we started all of this (I still have many myself), I want you all to know how very reassuring it has been to receive your kind words.
We are hopeful the Lord will do more but please know that your kindness already makes it feel worthwhile.
Goals
1) Keep on Posting
Not much to say here. I have scores of ideas for content, so I’ll just keep plugging away.
Once we hit 100 posts, I plan to back off to 1 post per week and begin focusing more on developing a YouTube channel which I’ll explain more now.
2) YouTube
Some of you may wonder why I’m bothering with YouTube.
For one, I am not comfortable in front of a Camera. If you want proof, go watch 30 seconds of the video I linked above.
Second, I don’t have any video recording or editing skills. I’m like a penguin in the Grand Canyon when it comes to video. Totally out of my element.
However, there is an SEO synergy that having both a website and a YouTube channel provides because YouTube is so much easier to rank on than the web at large.
This is particularly true in the finance category.
Finally, because not knowing how to make video is all the more reason to try. I’ve been out of my comfort zone for six months. No reason to stop now.
Along those lines, I found a free editing program called DaVinci Resolve and it’s incredibly capable for the cost.
I highly recommend it if you are interested in video editing, but don’t want to spend anything. There are tons of videos on YouTube to explain how it works.
While we’re on free software, Gimp is a nifty graphic design software I’ve also been using.
It may still be a while before I’m doing anything consistently on YouTube, but I plan to begin by editing my Journal videos and loading them first.
Hopefully, that will be enough training for me to produce something worthwhile for an actual financial topic.
3) Guest Posts/Backlinks
I’m soliciting guest writing opportunities almost daily. I hope these will pay off.
There are other ways I’m trying to promote the site, but it’s nothing exciting.
4) Why are we doing this, again?
I’ve been asked this more than I expected and I‘ve had several conversations in which the person I was speaking with was fishing for an answer to this but was too polite to be direct.
First, all the reasons from our first post are still valid.
We still love to teach, we still see issues that people are having with money, we still feel like we can help, we still want to help, and I’m enjoying the building process.
But, as I mentioned in last month’s journal entry, the more I write the more I learn what I want to write about.
I’m not what many would consider a very creative person. I draw a mean stick man, but that’s the limit of my artistic ability.
What I’ve found in writing, however, is something of a creative outlet for me. It’s been a bit surprising how just putting my thoughts on a page creates new ideas for yet another page.
It wasn’t necessarily something I expected, but I’m kind of enjoying it. So, onward I go.
Where does it lead? I have no idea, but I’m more interested in the journey at this point than I am in the destination, and I feel kind of fortunate to be in that spot.
