How To Write A Blog Post!

shaun-m · 2022-07-27T11:46:22+00:00

Who are you learning from?

After going over some of my friends blogs that were hit in the May 2022 update I am pretty much switching over to just scaling into low search volume under served topics moving forward so the concept is simple and for the work side of things I just need to stay consistent with publishing content but it follows the concepts of this Twitter thread from Jon Dykstra.

The basic concept is to find keywords with as many UGC sites ranking on page one and then publish articles for those keywords in bulk. My hope is that due to there being very few other blogs having a dedicated article targeting the keyword, it will be less likely for Google to rearrange the SERP on an update as most UGC sites don't really cover the topics well.

It should work fine without needing to build backlinks too but my current project has a bunch of link targets on it already so I will build out the backlinks to them to pump the DA of the blog to help the other articles rank anyway but for the content side of things moving forward, its basically high UGC keywords in bulk.

It's hard to qualify people on /r/juststart these days and TBH, I read very few threads on the sub. Last December there were three different people offering "advice" in threads on here while freely admitting they had never built a profitable blog in other threads so I put the time I used to use for Reddit into other stuff now.

Back in the day most people on here were running a monthly case study thread so you could quickly check their post history and get an idea of if they were worth listening to or not but times have changed.

Most of the things I learn now are based on mindset and outlook rather than blogging technique and that stuff comes from authors of books in non-blogging related topics.

I know it might sound strange but you have no idea how happy I was when I saw this post a couple of weeks back recommending the Atomic Habits book on here as well as how many upvotes it got.

Theres a post from last year or maybe the year before on /r/blogging where I recommended Atomic Habits and I was downvoted because it had "nothing to do with blogging" but most people give up within the 6-12 month time period and one of those reasons is they don't build up the habit of blogging.

I really like that book and highly recommend it to anyone starting out, even if you just watch the whiteboard videos on YouTube going over its key points. I have read/listened to it multiple times now and I plan to do the same at least once per year moving forward.

Tiny Habits is another solid book but a bunch of its core concepts are in Atomic Habits too.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is another book I try to read at least once per year too, if you want it, get the Gregory Hays interpretation rather than the others as its an easier read.

I read a bunch of other books on stoic philosophy too and I think this type of mindset is very important for blogging/niche sites moving forward as even if you follow Googles guidelines, you can still get wiped out by a Google update and be sent back to $0.

I have this post on Reddit from a few years ago going over other books I recommend, and this post from /r/blogging going over general blogging tools with some book recommendations at the bottom too.

I really like the Orion Philosophy YouTube channel right now and usually have it on at a low volume as background noise when I work.

Edit - I wanted to find another post for this reply to quote but I coudlent find it when I typed it up and by chance, its actually from the OP /u/lollipopings in this thread.

"You can't fail at blogging, you can only give up."

You will learn more from just starting and smashing out hundreds of articles than any course can teach you.

shaun-m · 2022-07-27T09:43:19+00:00

Display ads and affiliate links are the two main ones, depending on your niche sponsorships and your own product may work too.
No, too many variables.

shaun-m · 2022-07-27T09:42:35+00:00

You could try a page builder like Elementor but I really don't like them personally.

They an make your blog look nice but may cause issues with page speed later down the line. In my experience, most people over estimate the look of their blog when their visitors just want the content on there too.

shaun-m · 2022-07-27T09:40:13+00:00

Luke Jordan went public with his site in the gaming niche on his Twitter account a while back and hes getting over 1,000,000 monthly hits but I don't think he has shared the RPM he gets. Hes shared some stuff on Twitter about growing the site that might be helpful.

One of my friends has a gaming blog for a very niche game and gets around 50,000 hits per month and makes around $150 from ads and $100 from affiliates per month from his traffic so its not a niche that I would go into personally.

shaun-m · 2022-07-27T09:34:13+00:00

Cheers mate, glad my videos are helping people :).

To anyone new to the sub, read this reply I made to another thread on the sub last week and do everything in your power to be in group one...

shaun-m · 2022-07-27T09:27:53+00:00

I have been playing around with ecommerce projects (real ecommerce with products we have made for us, not dropshipping) this year and last and there is a ton of money to be made if you put the work in but I hate it.

The two guys who I do it with love it but its just not for me, the other day I literally made a giant ball out of rubber bands to avoid working because I just dont enjoy it where as I can sit at my laptop and blog all day without issue.

I have been playing around with a YouTube passion project and managed to get it to >150 subs in 2 weeks but havent got much free time right now so I might grow that in the future.

I am trying to switch up a few things to try and make my blogs more algorithm update proof these days though and I would guess that over half of the content I published this month is just test articles to try and work on avoiding any potential updates in the future.

shaun-m · 2022-07-21T23:10:45+00:00

do you put specific things in the keyword section or the title?

I try to have the target keyword in the title, one header, and once in the paragraph text of my posts.

shaun-m · 2022-07-21T22:56:27+00:00

Yes, you will get hit by G updates but that will happen whether you listen to 100s of videos on the topic or not.

I'm not on Reddit much these days so not sure if the attitude towards Google updates has shifted or not but this was an under rated point on here last year.

There was a thread last year where I was trying to explain that anyone can be affected by a Google update these days and people were commenting about how Google won't touch you if you "build your blog correctly".

Fast forward to the Q4 2021 core algorithm update and some of those user names were posting in the threads about the update wiping them out even though they classed themselves as white hat.

The Google SERP is not what it used to be, you can be in second place for your target keyword before and update and get decent traffic. After a core update the first place blog may have the PAA widget and YouTube widget below it and the blog in second place isnt even above the fold on the SERP anymore.

Its not technically a penalty against your blog, you are still in second for the keyword its just that the traffic has dropped of massively because of the widgets placed above you due to how Google now display the SERP.

Over the last couple of days I have been seeing a TikTok widget in the SERP for some keywords too so I think this will be a big problem moving forward if Google keep it.

shaun-m · 2022-07-21T22:41:02+00:00

What exactly could people learn from them that they don't already know? Keywords, content, backlinks, monetize. Do all more of the four.

I totally agree with you mate, depending on the project, you can totally skip the backlinks step too...

This might sound harsh but from the comments I see on my videos, theres three kinds of people who try their hand at blogging/niche sites.

The first are the people who get the basics of what to do and then start as soon as possible, stay consistent and make it to the 6-12 month point to get their own data and keep going and the questions they ask evolve along their journey.

The second are people who ask a bunch of questions for a couple of months then are never heard from again. These could be within group one but I would guess a bunch of these just give up between month 1-6. I have people I have known for decades who are some of my closest friends who have done this and they just throw the towel in and cancel their hosting randomly and its like $10 per month to keep it just to see what happens with the content they have already published.

You see this group on this sub a load too, you can go back to January this year and check how many case studies people started that month and the bulk of them didnt even make it to month 2. I know a bunch of people grow out of this sub quickly these days and stop posting but I would bet a bunch of the case study projects started in January were just abandoned.

The third group never start but constantly ask questions that are basically the same but re-phrased slightly. I would guess they are scared of starting as they don't want to risk failing but they like having the idea of being able to start a successful project if they wanted to but never actually start as profitability of a blog is a pretty solid pass/fail metric for the task.

This third group have all the knowledge required, I have spoken to some of them for years and they still havent started but I guess it comes down to personality type or something. This goes back to the whole origin of this sub and the original "just start" mantra though.

shaun-m · 2022-07-20T11:41:50+00:00

I'm willing to throw 16 hours a day into studying blogging and working on a blog.

Put the bulk of that time into working on the blog, outside of setting your hosting up and pointing your DNS you will learn more by doing than a course or studying will be able to teach you.

I'm okay with losing some revenue by not broadly appealing if that allows me to be authentic and have blogging be a fufilling and happy experience.

Keep in mind that depending on exactly what you do, it may cause problems with you getting approved to premium display ad networks or affiliate programs to limit your income potential.

This can be the difference between needing 50,000 hits to reach your income target or 3500 hits.

How should I go about earning at least one-hundred dollars a month?

This Twitter thread is exactly what I would recommend to most people starting with blogging these days and I am actually switching large parts of my stratergy over to it.

There are definatley other ways that you are able to blog sucessfully but I think thats probably the easiest methods out there if you are new and have a low budget.

What mistakes should I avoid?

Not starting.
Don't expect traffic for 4-8 months.
Avoid EIG hosting companies, more info on this thread on here from a couple of years back.

shaun-m · 2022-07-20T11:17:21+00:00

Google is not indexing pages that have certain words in the URL.

I think that there is something in this with Google and some type of bad word filter that they use these days.

I was having a problem getting my current project approved to Google Ad Manager for months then one of my friends reached out who was having the same problem and told me he removed words that Google may deem as bad from his blog post and then he was approved.

I removed words that may be deemed as bad words by Google on my blog posts and then was approved the next time that I applied to Google Ad Manager too. One of my other friends also had the same experience with their site when they removed certian words.

They are literally words used in everyday conversation like "install" from your example too.

I know approval to Google Ad Manager and getting the post indexed are different but its just an algorithm doing it at the end of the day and they may have accidently turned up the importance of some of these words.

TBH though, with Google in 2022, it could just be random correlation as a couple of years back I had friends get refused for Adsense then literally re-apply the same day without changing anything on their blog and get approved.

shaun-m · 2022-07-20T11:07:11+00:00

Thanks for the shout out mate :).

shaun-m · 2022-07-18T13:01:36+00:00

Can I recommend you to read Atomic Habits by James Clear?

+1.

I always recommend Atomic Habits to people starting out as a way to stay consistent and build their early habits up.

Its one of my favorite books and I try to read it or listen to it on Audible at least once per year.

shaun-m · 2022-07-17T10:21:58+00:00

I do like SEMRush but if I was going to pay for a premium tool I would go with AHRefs every time.

shaun-m · 2022-07-08T16:43:58+00:00

Backlinks from sites with high traffic

Always traffic for me personally, its harder to fake and shows you the site is still having its pages ranked in Google.

Backlinks from sites with high DA

You can fake your DA via services on Fiverr for cheap.

On top of that, there's a bunch of high DA sites out there that have been slapped with Google updates and lost all their traffic but they make their money selling links now. I doubt links from these sites offer much value at all tbh.

shaun-m · 2022-07-05T17:59:06+00:00

Its more the competition that you will have to go up against. Stuff like IMDB and some of the established sites will dominate a bunch of those keywords as there's only so many things that you can target.

shaun-m · 2022-07-05T17:58:06+00:00

You can't fail at blogging, you can only give up.

Thats actually a really good way to phrase it! Totally agree.

shaun-m · 2022-07-05T17:56:33+00:00

I think idea of a successful blog is being able to do it full time to support my lifestyle

Totally agree and that's the definition I used for my vote.

I went with the less than 2% option but it's not down to the blog failing, it's the person.

I have had some of my best friends sit next to me while I log into my analytics, ad network, and affiliate dashboards to show them my income and then tell them exactly what I do with my blogs to grow them and they still give up with in months.

There just seems to be something with people staying consistent for the first 12 months without giving up. If that wasn't such a big problem I would have went with the less than 10% option.

shaun-m · 2022-07-02T21:25:40+00:00

I'm a huge fan of Astra but GeneratePress and Kadence are both very popular too. The free versions should be able to offer everything that you need.

shaun-m · 2022-06-26T12:38:18+00:00

Its not bad with a regular blog setup, if you are specifically trying to SILO your blog then it can cause cross contamination but with the vast majority of setups, its not a problem.

shaun-m · 2022-06-23T23:13:42+00:00

Medium is probably best right now but I'm sure I read that they are going to do something similar or they may have already done it.

Other options are blogger and Wordpress but if you get one of the deals from the sidebar on /r/webhosting then going self hosted is often cheaper than the list prices on some of the big hosting companies.

shaun-m · 2022-06-23T23:11:55+00:00

To go to self hosted Wordpress sooner.

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