Gold [Journey] Growing An Informational Intent Site To $10,000 A Month From Scratch!

[shaunm]

Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Article 1 - 1554 Words.
• Article 2 - 1501 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1498 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 4 - 1517 Words - Outsourced.
• Spent more time making pins for Tailwind to schedule out for my niche site case study, this really is the task that just doesn't go away, I doubt I'm even a quarter of the way through yet.
• Google has "temporarily" disabled manual force indexing in Google search console. Its strange how they have been having a number of issues with their indexing system and then just disable their force indexing capability. See what happens over the coming months but I think its going to be a total pain to index stuff, especially without building backlinks now.
• I have noticed a drop in traffic for my niche site case study but its not getting enough traffic to really see if it is a proper issue or not. That said, I have seen people reporting that the fix rollout for one of the recent Google indexing issues may have accidentally caused a mini penalty to some blogs and the dates line up perfectly.
• Spent more time researching investing and current events in blockchain as I want to start putting money back into both next month.
• Finished reading The Richest Man In Babylon, great book for the concepts of building and maintaining wealth, highly recommend it.

 

[Strickland]

Spent more time making pins for Tailwind

Nice little spike in earnings,
Do you think tailwind is saving much time in the long run? as far as I know it just schedules the posting right?

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1607 Words.
• Article 2 - 3984 Words - Outsourced.
• Made more pins for Tailwind as well as additional pins for the 4000 word article test above as its kind of an intentionally hybrid article to try pull as much traffic from Google and Pinterest as possible where as the other content on the blog is more towards Google traffic and anything from Pinterest is just a bonus.
• Spent some time catching up on SEO blogs about the indexing issues right now and a bunch of people seem to be seeing the same thing I was. I checked my SERP tracker right after reading the articles though and the pages that dropped out of the indexed have all bounced back in. Not sure if it is just a coincidence with the dates lining up or if Google has fixed one of the issues they are currently having but I will keep an eye on it.
• Spent more time researching investing and blockchain. I picked up a small amount of Ethereium and will start to put cash into a Vanguard Lifestratergy Fund next month too while adding to both each month from now on. I do plan to pick up Bitcoin in the future too but for now, I want to stick to Ethereum but I usually flipflop between this so we will see how much free cash I have next month.
• Spent more time playing around with the Ezoic dashboard but there's not much else I can do until I am getting solid traffic to this new domain.
  
• Read about a third of The War Of Art By Steven Pressfield and gave up on it. It failed to grab my attention and there was a bunch of examples that he used in it that are very far fetched to try and prove his points.

Nice little spike in earnings,
Do you think tailwind is saving much time in the long run? as far as I know it just schedules the posting right?

Yea Amazon Prime Day seemed to be more popular than I had thought. Hmm, I am new to Pinterest in all honesty mate but I did some tests manually back in May or something and it would be a total pain to manually post pins at the schedule, especially if you are trying to catch people in the USA due to time differences. Tailwind is cheap enough and I am a big fan of the tool, I just need to get better at Pinterest so I can actually pull traffic from it >.<.

 

[shaunm]

Update

Sat

• Article 1 - 1523 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1612 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1486 Words - Outsourced.
• Spent a bunch of time making pins for Tailwind.
• Finished reading The Art Of War by Sun Tzu, great book and a quick read too, well worth checking out.

Sun

• Article 1 - 1493 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1484 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1517 Words - Outsourced.
• Spent a bunch of time making pins for Tailwind.
• Finished reading As A Man Thinketh by James Allen. Very short book, I actually read this last year and thought it was a waste of time but this second read was more useful, it's basically just rephrasing different ways of your mindset needs to change if you want better things.

I also uploaded my site review video for October 2020.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1605 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1484 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1525 Words - Outcoursed.
• Article 4 - 1628 Words.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1543 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1510 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1487 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 4 - 1554 Words.
• Tried out some keyword research with Quora for keyword acquisition, found a few keywords but not sure this niche is good on Quora.
• Started planning my next round of article to try draw both organic Google traffic as well as Pinterest traffic.
• Google says they have fixed their current indexing issues in a Tweet, I havent even checked the comments to their Tweet as the last few have basically been people reporting the issue is not actually fixed so time will tell.
• Played around with Pinterest trying to migrate my boards over from the personal account to the business account so I can track the analytics but not having much luck. Just going to leave it for now to see what happens with actual click throughs to my blog.
  
• Finished reading Living With A SEAL by Jesse Itzler, good book and surprisingly funny.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1466 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1477 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1514 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 4 - 2591 Words.
• Picked up some BTC after the PayPal press release about them supporting it. Still don't have much BTC or ETH but I want to start accumulating again. Current thinking is if the Google indexing mess is still this same at the start of November I will put the cash that I have for content into crypto and stocks rather than risk the same problems the domain from January is having with indexing.
• Finished planning the next batch of articles designed for both Google and Pinterest traffic, I want to shift my own efforts over to these now too rather than the articles I have been typing up that are designed for Google traffic. They are more Pinterest friendly while also have some keyword research for Google too and with a length of >2500 words, there should be organic long-tail traffic from Google too but again, it depends if Google fix these indexing bugs.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1492 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1564 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1499 Words - Outsourced.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1492 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1524 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1533 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 4 - 1598 Words.
• Article 5 - 2575 Words.
• Did a little more keyword research with a new keyword acquisition theory that I used for Article 5, I want to knock out at least 10 articles to test it as it has potential.
• Finished reading Zero To One by Peter Theil, it's an excellent book and well worth reading.

I also uploaded my Q&A video for October.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1775 Words.
• Article 2 - 1496 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1490 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 4 - 1540 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 5 - 1407 Words.
• Article 6 - 1543 Words.
• “Currently not indexed” creeping up in GSC for my niche site case study but this may just be due to the problems Google is having with indexing, it's only around 20 right now but I'm going to keep an eye on it.
  
• Wirecutter seems to have locked their content behind a login wall, not sure if it is just a test or if it is pertinent but I am curious to see what happens with their SERP rankings because of it.

 

[AmNovice]

Looking forward to seeing the spike in your earnings come the holiday season! you planning for it already?

 

[Strickland]

due to the problems Google is having with indexing

This is doing my head in, is it a problem or an update Google have implemented?

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1566 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1489 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1503 Words - Outsourced.
• Noticed the initial Pinterest traffic for my niche site case study coming through so happy with that. It just means that I should probably make more pins for Tailwind to schedule out but my Tailwind is full until early next month so I can put it off for now as I don't like doing it.
• Noticed that the posts that I published at the start of October are starting to jump into the SERP on my rank tracker. Not sure if this is their initial entry position after indexing or if they have been lower than what my rank tracker checks but thats unlikely due to the competition level of these keywords. This might be a sign of Google actually fixing the problems they have had recently or just their indexer taking almost a month to index pages these days.
• Did some more keyword research using the method I was playing with earlier in the week, I kind of want to spend a month growing a blog based around nothing but this specific Keyword Acquisition method as it could be a quick and easy way to scale into display ad/affiliate hybrid micro niche sites in the future.

I also uploaded a video going over some thoughts on minimum viable search volumes for keyword research.

Looking forward to seeing the spike in your earnings come the holiday season! you planning for it already?

I'm not planning on changing anything in the layout for my sites, just let the naturally higher search and CTR kick in and hopefully spike earnings.

This is doing my head in, is it a problem or an update Google have implemented?

They confirmed that is a number of different bugs but they have said they have managed to fix them multiple times now and I think they might actually be getting somewhere with it now.

a lot of $200+ days there congrats

Cheers, been hit with a ton of returns recently, I guess people baught stuff on Prime Day and realised they didn't need it but hope it normalizes soon.

 

[Honeybadger]

This might be a sign of Google actually fixing the problems they have had recently or just their indexer taking almost a month to index pages these days.

What problems on Google?
I tried & fail to find it on SEO news sites
Search Engine Journal
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Watch
Moz

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1499 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1514 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1536 Words - Outsourced.
• My niche site case study had its highest organic traffic day outside of the Prime Day rush last night so looks like things are starting to pick up again with it. Also had its highest Pinterest traffic day with 5 hits but it's only been getting consistent traffic from Pinterest for a few days right now.
• Did a little more keyword acquisition to get more test keywords for this new method for my niche site case study domain.

What problems on Google?
I tried & fail to find it on SEO news sites
Search Engine Journal
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Watch
Moz

Not sure what you did to try and find it but I googled the top two sites you listed and added indexing problems after it and it's the top result for each search...

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-indexing-bug-almost-fixed/383662/
Status update on the Google indexing bugs

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Really bad day for income, didn’t get hit by returns and the main items are in stock. Traffic and CTR seem to have held and CR isn't much lower than usual so I guess people just aren't buying high ticket items or something, they might just be saving for Black Friday I guess, fingers crossed it bounces back soon.
• Article 1 - 1520 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1477 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1488 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 4 - 1671 Words.
• Article 5 - 1497 Words.
  
• I was thinking of taking on a VA to make pins for Tailwind for me but I think I will just do it myself and look for ways to make it more streamlined and easier.
• Spent more time researching the new iPad Air. Other than not supporting browser extensions, I think it has everything I need covered so I might try to come up for some work around for keyword research without browser extensions over the next few days.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Another bad day for earnings, again, SERP rank, traffic, and CTR has held, CR is down a little bit so I am hoping it's just people keeping their spare cash for black Friday or something.
• Article 1 - 971 Words.
• Article 2 - 1541 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1496 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 4 - 1528 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 5 - 1226 Words.
• It's been a few days since the pages from my niche site case study jumped back into the Google index and it does seem like they are holding so I am hoping Google's recent problems have been fixed with their indexer. Now I just need them to unlock their manual force indexing tool so I can try force a bunch of the new content on the domain into the index.
• Started to make more pins for tailwind and tried to focus on ways to improve the process, I managed to come up with a few things but I am hoping to build on it over the rest of the week to a point where I don't mind making pins.
• Finally had the time/motivation to go over the data for my paid traffic test on YouTube last month. I am classing it as a total fail for now though as its main purpose was to try and inflate the views for a particular video to push it up the YouTube SERP and the target video has only pulled 38 views from YouTube search this month but see if this improves in time.
• Finished reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• I had a head cold the last few days and felt ill last night so just went to bed instead of posting so this is last nights update.
• Article 1 - 1478 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1475 Words - Outsourced.
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• Article 4 - 925 Words.
  
• Checked out the Tailwind create tool that they just released but I still prefer Canva for making pins so i'm going to stick to that.
• Made more pins and I am actually finding little things each session to make it easier so i'm not hating it as much as I used to.
• Purchased more Bitcoin and Ethereum.
• Noticed that Google has updated the YouTube widget that they show in the SERP as shown in the screenshot below with a side by side comparison with the old one, it's about 25% bigger and adds an additional video option. My blog where these widgets are causing issues is down by around 9% in traffic.

 

[shaunm]

Update

• Article 1 - 1482 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1556 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1496 Words - Outsourced.
• Made more pins, I have a pretty easy process now so it's taking much less time to make the pins so I don't think it will get to me much anymore as it's pretty easy.
• I matched the organic traffic on my niche site case study domain for Prime day last night so it's joint best but didn't have the slight surge effect from Prime day, still less than 30 organics but pretty happy because most of the content from this month isn't even indexed yet and it shows growth.
• Analyzed the traffic for the current keywords ranked first for my niche site case study and I think I might have gone too specific for decent income so I spend a bunch of time coming up with a new strategy for informational articles.
• Started looking into Google passages to try work out how it's going to work but I think I will just have to wait until they push the update live and see how it renders in the SERP. I think this could be a big hit to my affiliate domains but I have tried to integrate it into my new informational site article templates so hopefully, my info domains will actually benefit.
• I spent some time reading up on Apple search but there's very little info that has been released but I am curious to see what's going to happen and how much of a market share they can take from Google. Being able to split organic search traffic to blogs between Google and Apple will help with traffic diversification and maybe make Google get their search results in order rather than just pushing YouTube to the top.
• I'm actually still listening to it but the Joe Rogan Experience #1558 - Tristan Harris episode is really interesting when it comes to this sort of stuff. Tristan says how Google are massively incentivized to push people onto YouTube rather than a blog as 60-70% of all YouTube traffic comes from videos in the side bar so I think the YouTube widget issue might get worse. Google stand to make a bunch more money if they can push someone into the YouTube ecosystem from the SERP as it stands. He also mentions how part of the anti trust case against Google is about them prioritizing their own products in their SERPs but its only a very short part with little information so I want to try get up to date with that too.

I also uploaded my new video going over why/how I am changing how I build my site next year and wanting to move away from buyer intent completely.

 

[Strickland]

Interesting video mate, I have a feeling you're a little fed up with Google