[Journey] Growing A Money Tree Via Blogging In 2021!

[shaunm]

• I have had the head cold that's going around the UK right now (not Covid) the last week so haven't done much other than sleep. I'm still not 100% so I will probably take this week easy too, once I do feel better though, I am leaning more towards doing keyword research for a blog project for next year rather than publishing content for this blog to give it more time to observe the effects of the YouTube widget in Google for this niche but so far, it really hasn't had much of an effect on traffic to the blog.
• If I can keep this weeks income/traffic then the blog is close to the $1000 per month mark and I will be happy hitting that with this blog this year.
• Article 1 - 1803 Words
• Article 2 - 2872 Words

 

[Graybeard]

Now if you could scale it somehow ...
Definitely, some nice progress..

 

[T J Tutor]

AWESOMENESS! Love your efforts and reports!​

 

[shaunm]

• I haven't done anything new on this project as I want to just leave it to age in while I do keyword research for my project for next year. It has seen some growth over the last week so I am happy with it slowly pulling more and more traffic as I work on other stuff.
• New daily organic traffic record of 923 hits.
• Turned script execution off in Ezoic Leap to try and stop a bug with AAWP and so far it seems like it has fixed it and clicks are being redirected correctly now.

I uploaded the video update for the month of September too and the site managed to make $877.31 in September 2021.

 

[shaunm]

• Ordered 2 new guest posts and 2 new niche edits for this project but its more to test a service for a blog I want to start next year to see what they deliver.
• No new content for the project this week as I have been busy with other stuff and going to start banking content for next years project for the rest of this year I think.
• The Ezoic Ad Index tool is showing that ad spend on the network has gone back to what it was at the end of last month after a little dip so hoping for an increase in ad income this coming week but time will tell.

 

[Zaryab Khattak]

With this journey thread, I am going to focus on growing one specific blogging project throughout 2021. Although most of the content generation for the project will be done between January and March with regular updates, I will post anything relevant that happens after that as well as reaching traffic/income milestones and monthly updates on the growth of the blog too.

• I have settled on a niche for the blog, this was actually harder than I initially thought it would be as this is only going to be a relatively small blog so I didn't want to use a niche I could potentially make an authority site with in the future. Although the niche is related to one of my interests, it is something that I have only been interested in for a few months so I don't know the topic as well as I would like.
• I have done some initial keyword acquisition today for the project to get some general keyword ideas for the blog. I basically just used Answer The Public and Keyword Sh*tter and ended up with 1119 initial keywords to check the competition of after removing the keywords with 0 predicted search volume in Keywords Everywhere. As it's snowing pretty heavily here right now, I will probably spend most of tomorrow going through these initial keywords to see how many of them are actionable for articles. While doing the keyword competition analysis tomorrow for the keywords I will also be doing alphabet soup, people also asked, and wildcard checks in Google to see if I can find other keyword ideas as I go.

Good luck mate
Wish you best of luck for your future

 

[Graybeard]

Break that $200.00 wk ceiling Maybe, The Halloween season?

 

[shaunm]

• Highest income week for the blog so far, also had another organic traffic record of 957 hits in a single day from search engines.
• I switched around some Ezoic placeholders on the blog to try and spike income to take advantage of the ad rate spikes in Q4.
• It looks like the YouTube widget has stayed in the sub-niche that I noticed it in last month but at least it hasnt spread into other sub-niches the blog covers. I have checked some page level analytics for the pages with the YouTube widget in first position and my blog in 2nd and traffic drop off is between 75-90%.
• I haven't added any new content to this project this week as I have been pumping out the content ready for a new blog for next year building on the lessons learned from this blog and the one I built last year.

Good luck mate
Wish you best of luck for your future

Cheers pal .

 

[shaunm]

• No new content produced for this project again this week as I am just focusing on my project for next year and banking articles and prepping keywords.
• This weeks average works out to be on track for $1000 per month again so hoping that it holds around this from now on and I will be happy until we see some more growth for the blog with its daily organic traffic.

 

[shaunm]

• Its been a nice week for organic traffic daily records, managed to hit 1020, 1023, 1067, 1119, 1189, and then 1368 all in the same week due some come keywords moving up from 2nd and 3rd to first.
• Pretty sure that this is the highest income week for the blog since starting it too so I'm hoping that traffic at least maintains but I think it will grow over the coming weeks with any luck.
• No new content added to the blog this week as I am banking content for next years project.

I also uploaded the monthly update video for this blog going over everything and it made a total of $1120.60 for the month of October 2021.

 

[IM_Newbie]

@shaunm I follow the vast majority of your content whether here, on BHW, Reddit, or on YouTube and you´re truly have been an inspiration for me personally.

You mentioned in your last post the site has made around $1.1k last month, may I ask, how many articles have you published on that site?

Cheers mate and keep up with the great work!

 

[shaunm]

@shaunm I follow the vast majority of your content whether here, on BHW, Reddit, or on YouTube and you´re truly have been an inspiration for me personally.

You mentioned in your last post the site has made around $1.1k last month, may I ask, how many articles have you published on that site?

Cheers mate and keep up with the great work!

Cheers mate, it has around 400 articles now.

 

[shaunm]

• Traffic did drop off at the start of the week but it looks like its just the keywords that jumped up to 1st from 2nd and 3rd dropping back down. There is a small increase for last night so I'm hoping its Google trying them in 1st again to pull more traffic.
• Considering the drop off in traffic, the income drop isn't too bad so the blog is still on track to hold above $1000 per month at this rate even if the traffic spike doesn't return.
• The drop off in traffic was before Google started to rollout their spam update for this month and due to the keywords only falling from 1st to 2nd and 3rd, I'm thinking its more like the Google dance than anything to do with the update.
• No new content added for the blog this week again as I have just been churning out content and doing keyword research for my project for 2022 with this blog pretty much being done and left to do its own thing now.

 

[shaunm]

• Income is down slightly even though traffic is slowly going back up. I think it's more to do with Amazon though as a bunch of different sites in different niches have had really bad conversions this week. I'm guessing but I guess it's supply chain issues/silicon chip shortages knocking items out of stock.
• I have been looking into my rank tracker and some of the keywords that jumped into first a few weeks back then fell to third are now in second and that's why traffic is up a little bit. I'm taking this as a sign that those keywords dropping in position had nothing to do with the November update from Google and that it was just the Google dance as normal.
• I manually went over some of the test batches on this domain to try and settle on what I want to scale into for my domain for next year and I am set on the strategy that I want to use for the first six months worth of content and then I will see how things are going.

 

[shaunm]

• The black friday ad spend ram up looks like it stated last night so hoping for a week or so of that kind of ad spend on Ezoic.
• Income is also up on Amazon slightly but the supply chains seems to be stretched and some of the items I promote are out of stock just before black friday.
• The Google November Core Algorith Update is currently rolling out and its not looking like this site has been hit by it thankfully. The slight dip on the last few days is just articles dancing around in the top 3 of Google similar to a few weeks back. The rollout hasn't completed yet though so I could still end up getting hit.

 

[shaunm]

• Black Friday resulted in a nice boost for the ad income but had minimal effect on the Amazon side of things but this is probably due to the majority of the content on the site being based around informational keywords.
• Although the November Core Algorithm Update had apparently completed its rollout, I saw a spike in keywords jumping into the top 3 for this project on the 26th with Algoroo showing an amber alert for SERP change. Most of these are in 2nd and 3rd rather than first but it has pushed traffic up a little. I am hoping that the increase in traffic is due to the changes in SERP ranks rather than Black Friday due to this site not really being in a Black Friday friendly niche.
• This site got a new natural backlink this week from a pretty good blog within the niche. The strange thing is I used their site for research for this projects back when I started the content in January and now they are linking to me >.<.
• No new content added for this project as I am still just banking content for the project for 2022. I didn't want to publish any of its content until January but I may have to start publishing stuff in December as a few things have came up for January that will restrict my time online. Heres a sneak peak at the current banked content in draft for my 2022 journey project and I am considering buying a bunch more content while I also try to add at least three posts per day to my drafts.

 

[shaunm]

• Great week for income and traffic grow, the SERP has been really good for the last few days so I am hoping I can hold onto some of the new positions and keywords in first place as it gave the site a nice traffic jump.
• The site made it to the next level of Ezoic premium with the new premium ads being live on the site this week helping with a little boost in display ad income.
• I have been playing around with some new placeholder placements for Ezoic on the site ready for my 2022 project and it's actually pushed the site up to Black Friday income levels again even though that ad spend has tapered off. I checked the Ezoic Ad index to see if there was a correlating spike in ad spend and there wasn't so it's looking like it's the new placeholders giving the extra income.
• The site got four new organic traffic daily records this week of 1416, 1460, 1483, and 1651.

I also uploaded the monthly video update for this site for November too going into more detail on it.

 

[Honeybadger]

Fantastic progress @shaunm
Over 5,000 YouTube subscribers
Well done on your new traffic milestones
Also top job for moving to the next level of Ezoic
Really enjoyed watching your November 2021 Ezoic video
got a few questions when you get time

1. Where did you pick up that cool black and white chair from?
2. Why did you choose SiteGround for web hosting?
3. Your Amazon sales of $15,493.62 netted commission of $512.47 which is a 3.3% commission percentage, isn't your category supposed to pay a higher commission percentage or did I miss something?
4. What is the percentage of your desktop versus mobile traffic?
5. When did you start using the Google Core Web Vitals report? and what resource did you use to find out about it (was it a blog or email newsletter subscription)?
6. What is AAWP?
7. Did you find the guest posts worthwhile financially?

 

[shaunm]

• Two new organic traffic daily records this week of 1713 and 1747.
• Pretty sure the site is still on track for $2000 this month.
• The new traffic climb is from a new set of keywords that seem to be dancing around in the top 3, hoping the stabilize in first to lock in the new traffic spike.

Fantastic progress @shaunm
Over 5,000 YouTube subscribers
Well done on your new traffic milestones
Also top job for moving to the next level of Ezoic
Really enjoyed watching your November 2021 Ezoic video
got a few questions when you get time

1. Where did you pick up that cool black and white chair from?
2. Why did you choose SiteGround for web hosting?
3. Your Amazon sales of $15,493.62 netted commission of $512.47 which is a 3.3% commission percentage, isn't your category supposed to pay a higher commission percentage or did I miss something?
4. What is the percentage of your desktop versus mobile traffic?
5. When did you start using the Google Core Web Vitals report? and what resource did you use to find out about it (was it a blog or email newsletter subscription)?
6. What is AAWP?
7. Did you find the guest posts worthwhile financially?

Cheers mate.

1. Its just off Amazon.
2. They used to be really good about two years back but have gone down hill since then.
3. Most of the items I sell are from other categories with this strategy so the commissions are all over the place.
4. 67% Mobile, 30% Desktop, 3% tablet.
5. I don't really use it to be honest, just had some subscribers asking to show it in a video.
6. An amazon affiliate plugin for Wordpress.
7. Yea, this blog is profitable now and I doubt it would have grown as fast without the guest posts.

 

[VortexAlpha]

Nice to follow your journey like this, really put some effort into showcasing these results. I just found out about this thread and it really caught my attention how you made a progress with blogging each month. I will look more thoroughly at all the results to be able to discuss them further.

 

[shaunm]

• The traffic spike is tracking sideways through the updates over the last few weeks so its good that the site hasn't been hit. Seen a fair few keywords jump into the top 3 over the last few days too so curious if it will result in another traffic spike.
• Still on track for $2000 this month with the current rate being closer to $2500 but the week between Christmas and New Year might knock it down.

Nice to follow your journey like this, really put some effort into showcasing these results. I just found out about this thread and it really caught my attention how you made a progress with blogging each month. I will look more thoroughly at all the results to be able to discuss them further.

Cheers, hopefully you will find it helpful .

 

[shaunm]

• I really don't like the last week of the year as traffic/shipping is all over the place so its hard to track. Traffic is down a little but I think its just Christmas as the ranking keywords in the top 3 of Google for this blog is at an all time high right now.
• Amazon income is all over the place due to bank holidays for shipping the last two days.
• The holiday season ad spend boost may have stopped but it could just be the lower traffic brining the ad income down so much too.
• The blog got a new organic traffic record of 1768 organics in a single day this week.
• I got a $75,000 buy offer for the blog a few days back that is a really good multiple for this blog.
• I also uploaded my month 0 $1,000,000 blog valuation project video that is my main project for 2022 and I will start a journey thread to track next week that is below if you want to check it out.