Income School Project 24 Blogging Progress Month 3

It’s been just over 3 months since I launched this blog. I’m going to start sharing my blogging progress to show the real aspects of running a blog. It’s pretty easy to share when you have good numbers and hit milestones, but sharing pain points is a good way to get good feedback to improve your blog. Feel free to leave any comments if you think there’s a better way to do anything I’m doing.

Why blogging?

I started this blog to build a business that I am in complete control of. Of course I enjoy writing about my experience with blogging and selling on Amazon, but I need my blog to actually make money. Blogging gives me the ability to learn and earn in my journey as an Amazon seller and blogger. It wasn’t until I got my Amazon account suspended that I realized I couldn’t depend on Amazon alone as my sole income.

Having my own site where I can write about what I learn from selling on Amazon and blogging gives me the ability to have a good financial foundation. If I’m solely reliant on Amazon to pay my bills, things are bound to go wrong.

Also, blogging my experience allows others to see what it’s actually like to build and grow a business. Many people here about the success stories, but few are willing to actually persevere and do the daily actions it takes to build a business.

Progress

I launched this blog officially on 12/28/2020. Since then, it’s been a slow uphill grind with little progress in regards to page views. As of now, I have 40 published blog posts including this post. I’m satisfied with my progress for content production, but I’m going to need a lot more blogs to grow my organic search page views. It typically takes 9 months for a blog to reach its maximum page views, so I’m not discouraged at all.

As you can see from my Google analytics screenshot, my page views and users are very low. I purposely didn’t blog for the past week and you can see that the dip in traffic and users comes from me. I have one article that gets maybe 5-10 views per month, but that’s about it.

Blogging approach: Income School

My approach to blogging is following the Income School approach. Income School is basically like a blogging course/community where they teach bloggers how to grow their site organically without links. I’m in their project 24 course right now and it’s been worth it.

Income School stresses that bloggers should focus on creating quality content and the audience will come. I agree with their premise because in order to succeed long-term you will need quality content. The organic search heavy approach is good because it will save you from losing all your traffic to an algorithm change or something similar.

Focusing on organic search for the bulk of your traffic forces you to create good content and think long-term for your blog. I’m not planning on even looking at monetizing my blog until I reach about 150 articles. At my current pace, I’m looking to pass that in about 4-5 months. This will allow me to build a good content foundation for my site and grow gradually.

Month 4 approach:

For this next month, I’m going to produce 32 more blogs. I’ve got 2 days dedicated each week to blogging this month and I’m planning on writing about 5 blogs on each day. This will almost double the amount of blogs I have on my site and hopefully I can see a jump in organic traffic.

Additionally, I might change my blog name to my name. I think this is good while the blog is still young and it won’t affect SEO too much. I want to change the blog to something centered around my name for branding purposes. This is a tall order for the next month, but I can definitely do it.

Long-term goals:

I’m not thinking too far into the future, but I want my blog to reach certain metrics. In the long run, I’m planning on this being a 7-figure blog. I’m planning on blogging for at least the next 10 years, I’m not sure after that if I will. Having this long-term outlook allows me to focus on building the foundation and not worry about how much money I made this month.

The only goal I have for this blog this year is to make $2,000 per month in the month of December. I can’t control whether or not I reach that goal, but I can control actions I can take to reach that goal.

Let’s break this goal down:

To make money off your blog, you need traffic. Without traffic, you cannot make any money.

If I produce 400 blogs that average 200 views each, that’s 80,000 page views per month. Between ads, affiliate links and maybe an info product, it’s definitely doable to make $2,000 per month.

Those are pretty conservative estimates, so if I get to 400 blogs published this year, I should be close to achieving that goal.

Pinterest?

I’ve read a ton of blog income reports and many bloggers use Pinterest to drive a large percentage of their traffic. Many other bloggers I’ve seen within income school use Pinterest to drive their traffic also. I don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to invest in Pinterest at this point. I’m going to keep my head down until I get to 150 blogs. Then, I’ll start looking at how to increase traffic, monetize, etc.

Final thoughts:

I’m going to start publishing real reports with the ups and downs in both my blog and Amazon business. This is the best thing readers can benefit from. Journaling how I’m going to keep improving and building my business will show to you that wherever you’re at, you’re experiencing normal feelings as a blogger or Amazon seller. I’m going to publish these posts once a month and hopefully you can see the progress I’m making and implement that into your business.