Hello TheMoneyTools family. Welcome back to my blog. Using Google Search Console is a free and most effective way to track your blog progress. I wrote my first blog on April 15, 2019 (Roth Vs. Traditional IRA). Three years later, let’s look at how far my blog has come and what I need to do to improve.
Website design
The current theme is Newspapers by tagDiv. I have used this theme since 2019. It isn’t difficult to customize, and my experience improves the more I use it. I started with version 9, and now it is updated to 12.
RECOMMENDATION:
I recommend this theme because
- AFFORDABLE: $39 right now
- EASY to use
- Free resources for beginners. You can find it in their Forum
- RESPONSIVE CUSTOMER SERVICE: If you need updates or have questions, you can either visit their support site or request a service. Once you make a request, it takes 24 hours for a person to reach out and help you solve your problem. Even though tagDiv has tons of information on how to customize the website, I found “Requesting a Service” is very helpful
Focus contents of the blog
When I started in 2019, I wanted to share my own experience in personal finance.
At the beginning of 2022, the focus changed. I now cater my content towards helping people how to start blogging as a beginning and still focus on personal finance but combine it with healthcare. It is because personal finance is too broad of a topic, and I want to use what I know in healthcare as a pharmacist.
RECOMMENDATION:
Focus on what you know and what your passion(s) is. If you can figure out a way to combine these two together, I think you might have come up with something unique.
Performance
The data is only available from July 29th, 2021 up until now. Over one year and four months, I have 1,540 Total Clicks and 123,000 Impressions. The overall trend is improving but very slowly.
Average CTR is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click: only 1.3%, which is very low
Average position is the average position of your site in search results, based on its highest position whenever it appeared in a search: 42, which means that my pages often show up on the top of page 4 on Google search. This isn’t good because the first page is the top 10 results, and no one really scrolls all the way to page 4.
RECOMMENDATION:
Traffic won’t happen until you do these three things:
- Write content that help solve problems for others
- Market your blog through as many routes as possible: FB group, IG, Tiktok, Reel, Quora,…
- Stay consistent with your content. I don’t think there is a limit to how many blogs you should post. If you post three times a week and your content suck, it will increase the bounce rate. For me, I am ok with posting once a week or once every two weeks if life gets busy.
Queries & Pages
The top 4 contents that I have the most impression on are:
- $200 bonus from Venmo Credit card
- How to start as a freelancer with Fivver
- How to get a good deal at the Venetian in Las Vegas
- How to verify domain ownership with BlueHost.
This tells me that:
- People like content about money and want to find more ways to save and make more money.
- People like content about money and want to find more ways to save and make more money.
RECOMMENDATION:
Once you have some traffic, use these tools Google Search Console to understand what contents readers are interested in.
There are so many things to look at if your content doesn’t resonate with readers even though you spent your whole heart writing it (Indexing, marketing, grammar, ….). Because of that, JUST focus on what you can control, such as producing good content that solves people’s problems, and keyword searches, …
Most Successful Marketing Strategy: Pinterest
What are my current strategies on Pinterest:
DONE. It was challenging. I had to email the Pinterest customer service team to help me complete it because it kept saying “PENDING” even though I had completed the instruction.
Post Frequent
DONE. Since the beginning of October, I have been trying to post more. Every Sunday, I make about 5 pins scheduled to be posted throughout the week.
Content Focus
My focus is on How To Start Blogging.
Create Ideal Pin
Done. You can check it out here
Views Monthly
83,100. In the beginning, I had an average of 160 views monthly, which is very minimal. After I joined a public board about blogging, someone tagged my website on about ten pins, and it brought my account crazy traffic. Below are the top 4 pins which have generated thousands of views, none of which I created myself.
What is helping
Beautiful Graphic: I have used Canva to create all my Pins, and they look fantastic.
Tailwindapp
I used to do it back in 2019, but my account got banned because someone accused me of stealing content. What happened was: Tailwindapp allowed me to insert my website link to any pins that didn’t already have a backlink. I thought it was alright to do that, but it turned out it wasn’t. I couldn’t even retrieve my account because the process was complicated.
What need to do
- Continue to create pins every Sunday and post throughout the week
- Focus more on engaging with other members
- Be more active and join other group boards with similar interests
Least Successful Marketing strategy: Facebook Group, IG
Whenever I write a new blog, I use Canva to create graphics to post on IG, along with a nice description just like the one above. It was a challenge for me to generate traffic.
Reel: Yes, I do create Reels.
Challenges I am facing:
- Contents are all over the place.
- No theme.
- Not Posting enough
- Not interacting with others within the same field.
- The content isn’t interactive.
Facebook Group:
Yes, I have tried it for about six months. I joined a group that helps generate traffic to my blog. It did a decent job. However, I soon realize that that traffic isn’t organic traffic, and the people aren’t genuinely like my content. Another downfall is that there were a lot of tasks that I needed to complete within a Facebook threat, or I would get called out by the moderator. It was a challenge because I spent all day at work.
Marketing strategies that focus a lot of effort on but don’t show many results: Quora
- I joined Quora in 2017. Since then, I have answered 87 questions and generated 7.6k content views.
- Current strategies: There is no such perfect strategy. I try to answer at least five questions weekly and post one blog here. I always target the “Answer Request” section first. My hope is to bring traffic back to my blog
Challenges:
- Feel like I am not posting enough
- I am not engaging and following other spaces
- My content may not be attractive to others
Overall
My goals for 2023 are:
- Create more content to teach people how to blog
- Create a Teachable course to create an income stream
- Narrow down the niche to healthcare workers who want to start blogging and personal finance related to healthcare.
- Continue to focus 50% of my effort on marketing: Pinterest, Quora, and Reel.
- Make the site more mobile friendly
- Learn more about Newspaper themes by tagDiv so I can build a more attractive site
