Starting a new blog is hard work
I wanted to start this blog to share information about what I already know and what I’m learning as well as create a potential outlet for passive income in the future. What I’m finding is that I enjoy writing posts and learning about the technical side of building a website and this really could be more than a side passion if I put my mind to it.
So, one of the things I’m learning is actually how to get this blog going in the first place to build it into something meaningful. I’ve done research by watching YouTube videos and being an expert Googler, but there are still some things that I’m working on. Here are some things that I learned so far:
1. Building Traffic – difference between views and likes
I’m using WordPress premium as my hosting platform. Now that I have about 20 posts on the blog, I’m getting consistent notifications about likes on my posts, which is very exciting. I thought that would immediately translate into more views, but that is not the case. So of course, I Googled it to find out what was going on.
It turns out that most of my readers are viewing the posts through WordPress Reader and liking it there and not actually clicking on the blog itself. So even though the posts are being liked, I’m not getting very many views. Therefore, I need to figure out how to get people to click on the blog and read other content.
2. Building Traffic – Advertising
Now, I’m thinking how do I even let people know about the blog in the first place? I’ve mostly been using Pinterest and creating pins using Canva. I experimented with Pinterest Ads, but it was too expensive and I didn’t get enough clicks to make it worth my while yet. Here is an example of a pin I made for one of my blog posts. I’m considering starting a Twitter account to post tips of the day and drive traffic from there.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is probably the part I still have the most to learn about. The actual building of the site came pretty easily to me since I’ve had to build sites for school projects before. There are a number of websites that let you search for keywords, but the biggest piece of advice I’ve found is to search for long-tail keywords that have lower competition. This is called search engine optimization.
So, perhaps it’s being searched 1,000 times a month, but there aren’t many articles written about that particular topic. Turns out the types of things I like to write about are wildly popular and written about all the time. This is definitely an area of improvement that I’ll keep learning about it and working on for future posts. Perhaps I’ll take an SEO course to help improve my knowledge. It’s something I wish I knew earlier about starting a new blog.
4. Revenue – making money from the blog
One of the reasons of starting a new blog is to make passive income. I’ve watched tons of YouTube videos and read other blog posts to try and figure this one out. It seems you need a combination of advertising, affiliate links, sponsored ads, and even your own personalized premium content. Well, I certainly have lots of ideas and things in the works, but it’s not going to happen overnight. So, for now, I’m just utilizing the WordPress Ads that is built in to the site functions and some Amazon affiliate links.
For transparency, my site ran about 450 ads in February and it generated a revenue of $0.04 and about 1000 ads in March for a revenue of $0.01. Obviously, I was disappointed with the lower number this month even with higher views, so I searched what could be going on. It seems that advertisers might be bidding lower prices for space and my content just hasn’t had enough time to saturate. That’s okay. I actually have a 15-18 month plan in place and this is just the start.
I wanted to share some of the things I’m learning about starting a new blog here with you in this post. Feel free to drop a comment with any tips you have. Let’s help each other!
Pingback: Tracy Dee's Posts