Transcription
If you want to increase your blog's traffic and revenue, right now, in this video, I'm giving you the exact 30, 60, and 90-day game plan to do just that. So, I'm going to break it down month by month for you, and we're going to cover a lot.
So, how I pivoted and increased traffic after the recent Google Helpful Content updates, how to hone in on your profitable niche, how to spot new and emerging keywords and increase your traffic, exactly how to plan your content strategy over 90 days, and if you stick to the end, exactly how to turn that traffic into sweet, sweet revenue, right now.
Now, if you want to join us and learn how we're building these profitable online businesses in 2024, click the link in the description below, and I'll give you access to everything and exactly how we're doing just that, so you can get started once and for all. Let's get into it.
The first 30 days is all about niche selection. If you're new or pivoting into what works best right now, if you already have a blog, because things are changing fast. So, a little bit of a background, really quick, on my site. So, I was writing about software business, really competitive stuff when I first started back in 2019. Now, that blog has made me millions of dollars over the last four years, right? But today, after the recent Google Helpful Content Update, a lot of the stuff was so competitive that I got pushed down to page two by Forbes, Tech Radar, CNET, Reddit, all of that stuff, and I lost a good amount of traffic.
So, how am I rebounding my traffic today? How am I increasing it? Well, I'm going after things that actually work in 2024. So, I made a pivot, and personally, me, I always value revenue, actual things that change your life, over just traffic. But according to Ahrefs, and according to SEO people, it's all always about traffic. So, I'm like, "Okay, I'll show you I can get traffic too, if traffic's the only metric." So, we're going after easier, lower competition stuff that's around informational content, around blogging, YouTube, social media, and things that are just easier to rank for, not best CRM software that we're ranking for for years by HubSpot and all that, right?
So, as you can see in my analytics, I showed it in a few videos ago, but you can see here, 58,000 sessions. So, we're up 19% from 58 to 48, dropped down to 40. Now, we're on pace, like if we look at the week over week, we're on pace for about 75 to 80,000 sessions this month, and it'll just keep going up because we found that ranking for easier stuff actually works.
Since you want more traffic to your website, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Ahrefs. So, you've heard me talk about Ahrefs in dozens and dozens of videos, even when they're not a sponsor to me. They're my favorite all-in-one SEO tool for keyword research, competitive analysis, link building, pretty much the one SEO tool to rule them all. But they go a lot deeper than that. So, I also use Ahrefs' Webmaster Tools for all kinds of things to improve my blog.
So, everyone knows you need Google Search Console to index your website, but also Ahrefs' Webmaster Tools takes it a step further, and it shows you all of your backlinks, all the keywords you're ranking for, all the SEO issues that are messing up your site and that are easy to fix. So, if you're ready to set up your completely free account, give Ahrefs Webmaster Tools a try. Make sure to click the link in the description below, and they come fully recommended by me.
So, with all that said, this is about finding the niche. This is about finding what are you actually going to blog about in the first 30 days. If you're in something really competitive, software for business, finance, and it's not working, we need to find easier stuff to rank for. So, this first 30 days is all about finding the easy stuff that's actually going to drive traffic.
So, let's say you were talking about business and software and stuff. How do we find things that are easier? Well, we have to find the seed phrase to find tons of keywords that we can rank for in the first 30 days, right? We want to find 30 to 50 informational keywords that we can actually dominate. So, we want to find a seed phrase that can lead us to all of those keywords in one spot so we can build topical authority in one spot.
So, for example, I put in here "business ideas," and I dropped the difficulty down to four. Random number, but you could write about all kinds of different, easier to rank for business ideas: craft business ideas, 3D printing business ideas, drone, um, business, blue-collar business ideas. So, you can see that there's art business ideas, 1,700 different keywords here. So, you want to create easier informational content. You want to find a seed phrase that leads to 50 or 100 of these over time because you can rank for all of them once you're getting more in place.
Another one around business is like "business names." So, it could be cleaning business names, photography, bracelet, jewelry, crochet, nail, lash, real estate, tons of easy ones, right? Because this is easy, low-risk content that small blogs can still rank for, right? So, we dropped the difficulty down. I did 10 on this one, but usually I'm going for like under five. I want to see that difficulty at like zero or one or two. I want there to be no competition for this. I want there to be low, very low DR, under 40 sites ranking in the top 10 for this.
Other niches, these are really easy to find. So, if you're talking about food and recipes, drop the difficulty down, put in "recipes," and you literally have 60,000 different recipe articles you could write with barely any competition. Shiny sandwich recipes. I always go back to the shiny sandwich because I just love them so much, whatever they are, they're so shiny and delicious. Griddle smoker, Trader Joe's, unique. So, like, there's an endless supply in this niche. It's pretty much an endless supply in fitness as well. 4,900 under five difficulty keywords and workouts. So, back workouts with cables, track back workouts for women, baseball workouts, Smith machine, volleyball.
So, the key here is we want to find the seed phrase for us, but we have to niche down a little bit. So, if we find fitness and we say, "All right, there's 4,900 keywords here, difficulty is under five." Yeah, it looks fine, the search volume is good. What do I actually choose? Well, we probably wouldn't want to write all of these because it would take a long time, but also because it would be a little bit too different, right? So, like, if we're talking about, uh, forearm workouts with dumbbells, that's like an arm workout. If we're talking about track workouts, that would be more like a running blog or something related to that type of, uh, niche.
So, some of it's a little bit different. So, like, it has to kind of hone in on what are you actually talking about? How are you serving your audience is number one. So, if you do an article on track workouts and then you have one on tricep cable workouts, yes, it makes sense, it's all in fitness, but you might be going a little bit too wide. Whereas if you're doing running, it might be track stuff, running things, things, all of that. And then maybe you're just focusing exclusively on building muscle, building your back, right? So, it could be back cable workouts, shoulder cable workouts. You could go after all of one thing. So, just really think about what you want it to be, find the seed phrase, and go with it.
Or maybe you have a personal development blog. I just put in the word "motivational" and dropped the difficulty down. So, there's like Friday motivational quotes, Wednesday motivational quotes, motivational songs, motivational Monday, motivational videos, quotes, all that different kind of stuff, positive thinking, all of that. So, again, every seed phrase will be slightly different based on the niche.
Another one that looks kind of like a transactional keyword but isn't would be "best trails." So, the best, you know, if you're doing camping, hiking, the best trails is actually not a product transactional post. It's more of an informational post about the best places to go. So, I dropped the difficulty down to 10. I excluded "near me" because it was adding a lot of those. But then you can see like, if you have a hiking blog, it's like the best trails in Sedona, San Diego, Connecticut, Colorado, Michigan, Gatlinburg, all of these different areas, right? There's Shannon Park, thousand keywords here on the best trails.
So, finding your seed phrase is going to be key. It took me like a week to find a couple that I was going to go after, and they didn't have the word "ideas" or they didn't have the word you would think of in them. But, you know, usually it takes a little bit of digging to figure this out. The goal here when you're starting your niche is find a seed phrase that can lead to a lot of informational content that you can rank for. Think at least 50 articles because the key here will be building topical authority. In 2024, it's like we need to write all of these over time. They're really easy to write, which is good. We need to build them up over time. You need to find the informational seed phrase first.
So, another thing I would do here to find this is like click into some of them. So, I put in "business names" again. I see difficulty zero, "handyman business names." And you're going to see there's going to be some higher competition sites on here, um, but then you want to find one like that's a lower DR. So, like 41 here, fieldcamp.com, right? And, uh, I'm going to put in this URL. So, I'm going to go fieldcamp.com, I'm going to put that into the actual site explorer. So, I'm going to put in fieldcamp.com. I'm going to see what else they write, if they're ranking, and they have a low DR, and they're ranking for this stuff. Let's see what they actually have.
So, as you can see here, these are their top pages, and we have like lawn care, cleaning business names, handyman, contractor, landscaping. So, you get a bunch of different ideas that you might not have thought of before. I can see that fieldcamp is more of an outdoor service-based website. They're probably an app or some type of service provider. But you can kind of look at, go to an individual website that's ranking in the top 10, look at their top pages, then you get more ideas on what they're ranking for because this is showing they're a low DR site, relatively. They're ranking for all the stuff in the top 10. So, what other ideas are out there?
So, within the first 30 days, whether you're starting a brand new site or you want to pivot your content into things that are easier to rank for, come up with like 50 keywords. Just create a spreadsheet, put these keywords in there, put the search volume, the difficulty scores in there, and then just stack rank them based on which one has more search volume, which one might be easier to rank for in your niche.
The next step, if you haven't launched a website at all yet, you're brand new, is to actually launch a site. So, I would recommend WordPress.org. Use WPX as your web host. Create a domain name that's broad enough. Probably a personal brand one is really good because you can pivot infinitely and create different types of content. You never have to quit when it's based on you, right? You will quit a tiny niche site if it's not working, but if it's at your name, I know it can be scary. A lot of people don't want to do it, but it can work in a number of different ways. If you do it that way, it can lead to job opportunities, it can lead to you creating a YouTube channel or a podcast, all these different revenue streams, course sales, all of it. People buy from people. So, I recommend that. Set a domain name through WPX or GoDaddy and just get started. You can use Kadence as a theme in WordPress, easy drag-and-drop editor. You set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and you can use Ahrefs' Webmaster Tools to spot errors over time.
So, you want to use Ahrefs' Webmaster Tools. Go to it. It'll give you a score like a 99 or 95, and then it'll say, "Here's all the errors you can fix." Duplicate meta descriptions, uh, missing links or broken links, all kinds of things. So, I have other videos. I'm not going to cover exactly how to launch a website in this video, but I have other videos on my channel to do that. So, that's a good first 30 days, right? Now, of what I would do: just find the informational, easier seed phrases, build a website, launch it.
Next 30 days, days 31 through 60, this is all about your content strategy. So, this is having your first keywords. Now, it's time to actually start publishing content. So, we need to know on-page SEO, and we need to know how to write this year, that content that Google actually likes based on being helpful. So, the good news is, with these seed phrase keywords, they're actually really easy to write. So, it's like, "best back workouts," easy, right? Simple list of the top five to seven workouts. If it's "best business names," "farming names," whatever it is, those are easy to write. Or "tattoo ideas," all really easy and simple posts to write. We're really assembling them in a list format that's really easy to write and understand.
So, the question then becomes, do we use AI tools or not? Well, what's really interesting, I've been reading a lot of threads on this online, and it's like, you know, Google's saying they're not really saying much about AI content, if it's good or bad. I do think that in a sea of AI content, it makes more sense not to just publish stuff right from ChatGPT, right? That doesn't make sense. But I have also seen a lot of websites where people are saying, "You know, my AI first draft and then I edit it content, that stuff's actually ranking better than my really helpful human-based content." So, it's really hard to know what to do, right? And you just really need a strategy for you.
If you're going to use AI tools, you still should have human elements in there, and you should make sure that it isn't just a 100% AI and it can pass content plagiarism detection. Because as we know, Google likes to change things up a lot. So, three months from now, they could say all AI content has to be, you know, it has to be 0% and they can't even read it yet, but maybe they will in the future. So, we have to just future-proof our strategy.
The good news is, when we're creating articles, we just need to set aside some time and create easy content. So, if we're using AI or not, we can use a tool like Surfer SEO, which will tell us everything. So, here's one of mine on the "best YouTube video ideas." I have an introduction, and then it gets into the content, H2 heading, "What are the best YouTube video ideas?" And then, you know, these posts are just simple lists: meet the team, behind the scenes, how-to guides, testimonials, demonstrations. And there's in this one, there's, you know, 40-something ideas.
Now, what you want to do is look at the score. So, you have a score, get it to like 70 and move on, or 65. You don't have to over-optimize this stuff, but it's good to understand kind of generally how many headings there are, word count. Mine's a little bit lower than others, but, you know, you can see here, this gives you all the different semantic keywords to add into your article. First V2 video, challenge videos, video ideas. So, it uses natural language processing to scan the top 30, odd results on Google and see what is Google rewarding, what words are in there, what words do they expect to see in the articles that they're ranking. So, it comes up with stuff you'll never come up with on your own, like I didn't know like an unboxing video, I should probably have that. I mean, that's a big type of YouTube video. So, that's something I would add in in an update.
Now, when we're thinking about this, we just create a simple first draft, either ourselves or with a Surfer AI. We set aside time to do it. I recommend if you're just starting out, try to do everything yourself. Don't use AI tools because you want to get a little bit better at just typing in simple sentences and stuff. Use a tool like Grammarly to kind of improve your writing, but then we want to add some human elements. So, things like tell stories, show examples, if we're talking about products, say things you liked and didn't like, pros and cons, maybe photos of yourself with the product, videos I have on my site, expert quotes, external links to highly reputable sources, um, things like the National Institute of Health or government websites if it's based on that. Be relatable, so people can spot BS sites.
And small blogs that are doing well, they have a content strategy based on easy to rank for informational content. They add a human touch to it, so people like it. Ultimately, you want to build topical authority over time. So, that's where choosing your niche was really important, right? Because if we're going to build topical authority, how many articles does that need to be? Is it 50? Is it 100? Well, if it's 100, then we want to make sure that we choose the right thing that isn't going to be dominated by some other big media site. Like, if we're writing about the best AI businesses, good chance that that's going to be overtaken by Forbes or Reddit threads or things like that. But if we're talking about like the best types of tattoo ideas, that's probably a little bit easier than that other example.
So, you want to set a consistent publishing schedule. I would say that that second month, begin your publishing schedule and publish at least two blog posts a week. I used to say one a week, but now with all these tools, I mean, Grammarly, Surfer SEO, Surfer AI, ChatGPT to come up with, you know, ideas, all the SEO tools, I publish at least two blog posts a week. These are pretty easy ones to write, too. Maybe, 1,500, 2,000 word articles that are simple to write. And if you're starting to write a bunch and they're in the same niche, like different ideas, you can start internally linking them together, right? So, adding links into the intro, linking them together. So, again, days 31-60, all about content creation, consistent content creation.
Then the next month, days 61 through 90, that these next 30 days is all about monetization and setting yourself up for the long game, the future. So, first is monetization planning. So, that is finding affiliate programs. So, you don't have to find all of them and join all of them right now, but I would find your top 10 that you'd want to work with. So, for example, if you're doing all these tattoo idea posts, find like the tattoo ink and the guns and the aftercare products and find those affiliate programs. Put them in a spreadsheet. I would usually have a spreadsheet with like one tab could be my content calendar, so all the keywords I'm going to go after. It's simple columns: keyword, title, search volume, difficulty, published or not, link to the thing. Another column or another tab could be all of your affiliate programs you want to join. Using a spreadsheet, a Google Sheet, just to kind of manage and organize all of your information.
So, you don't have to join the affiliate programs yet, but definitely find them. Find ones that you can join in the future. So, now we want to start finding these transactional keywords that can generate affiliate revenue because all of our info content can generate both ad revenue and build our email list, which I'll cover in a second. But we also want to start finding transactional keywords. Like, if you're in the back workouts, what type of exercise equipment could be used? Could you join the Bodybuilding.com affiliate program, maybe a Bowflex or TRX or some type of fitness affiliate programs? And then the, you know, seven best, you know, in fitness, it could be treadmills, bench machines, ab machines, ab rollers. So, you start creating product-based articles too. The good news, it's kind of the same format, right? Seven best, uh, products in that niche, similar writing style to the info content, just more product features and things like that.
So, also, this is when you want to start thinking about what ad network am I going to join? Is it AdThrive, Ezoic, Mediavine? I recommend an ad network outside of just AdSense. Uh, and do it when you've gotten to 10,000 or more visitors a month. I wouldn't waste your time before that. You're going to make a dollar or two, and it's just not worth it in the long run. You could join something like Mediavine. All you do is you join, you, um, add a plugin to WordPress and then tweak some settings, and it'll start adding in banner ads within the content and in the sidebar. So, you start making ad revenue that way.
You also want to start building your email list with ConvertBox. So, you can use a tool like ConvertBox. It creates exit-intent pop-ups. So, every time that somebody hits that broader informational content and they're about to leave, their cursor gets up to the top of the screen, boom, they get that exit-intent pop-up to, uh, sign up for something and enter their email. So, when you're just starting out, you don't need to know exactly what that is. You don't need a perfect lead magnet and an optimized email funnel yet. You're just collecting an email address, right? So, it's really simple. I ran for a couple years with just a simple PDF I got on Fiverr. I created like a WordPress blog launch checklist, 7-day series. Cost me like $100 maybe or 50 bucks on Fiverr to have someone design it for me. But you're just creating something that people want in that, that niche.
So, informational content, if you're teaching, right? We want to be teaching, giving ideas, how-to guides, and things like that when we're creating our, you know, keyword strategy. And then we can build our email list with a lead magnet. So, the lead magnet should kind of just give you a little bit extra, right? A little bit more behind the gate of what people actually want.
So, days 61 through 90, it's really all about monetization planning. So, you're still publishing content, that doesn't stop, but at the same time, you're starting to think about monetization. So, what ad network am I going to join? What affiliate program am I going to add? And how can I also set this up for the future with an email list? So, the email list will eventually allow you to sell your own product, which is really unlocking a huge amount of revenue that you can build for your business.
And then finally, what you want to do is you want to start planning your second traffic source outside of Google. So, this year, I think it's important now than ever that we look as a website as a whole business, not just a Google-driven thing by itself with Google to affiliate revenue, but also what is a secondary platform that you could get traffic from? And this will also be niche dependent. So, if you're talking about fashion, it's probably Pinterest, right? You can start creating pins and boards and things linking to those blog posts. It's about AI and business, it's probably LinkedIn as a secondary traffic source. If it's about video games and gaming, probably YouTube.
So, you really want to think about that from the beginning, which is why again, a personal brand can help because it goes cross-platform. So, you can just start planning this for your future because the first step, uh, when we're talking about monetization, is like we can join an ad network, we can start joining affiliate programs, adding our affiliate links in. I use the Thirsty Affiliates plugin for WordPress just to organize all the affiliate links, to start bookmarking all your affiliate dashboards, right? It's really simple. But then we want to set ourselves up for the future, which is building the email list. So, at least just capturing them, even if we're not sending anything yet, figuring out if we can sell a product from the teaching that we're doing, and then thinking about the secondary traffic sources that we want to do.
Because we don't want to do everything. We don't want to do Pinterest and Google and YouTube and Instagram. It just everything becomes kind of shitty at that point, right? We want to have like two, two that we mainly focus on. Now, again, we can scale that out over time as you grow and scale your business bigger, but again, maybe you just want to focus on Google and one other one. So, you can make a lot of progress in 90 days.
So, if you're working full-time during this 90 days, on average, you'd work about 64 days and you'd have 26 days off. So, that's 26 days is 416 hours off, plus let's say like six hours in the days you're working, that's another 384 hours. So, you got like 800 hours of time to build something on the side in these 90 days. 90 days is about 12.8 weeks. Even at 10 hours a week, that's 128 hours you're working on this. That gives you another 672 hours of free time. So, roughly one-sixth of your time, one-fifth of your time, 20% of your time, your free time, you could be building a business on the side and really finding success.
You can do it. It's just about really learning as much as possible. It's going to be hard at the beginning. The first 90 days, you should not set, "Oh, I need all this traffic. I'm going to look at my analytics all the time and I'm going to get discouraged when it's not working." This is more about learning. This is more about there's a lot of different disciplines, and what tends to happen is, especially with online business, you need like a lot of them, a lot of different ones. So, like, there's always blind spots. So, you could be really good at keyword research, but you don't know about on-page SEO, or you don't know about email marketing, or you don't know about affiliate marketing or ad networks or any of that, right? Or doing a little bit of outreach, building links, or something like that. Unless I didn't even cover that because we're going after some easier stuff, but there's a lot of different things you'll have to learn, and we're not good at all of them.
So, for example, when I started my blog, I was good at SEO already, and I understood affiliate marketing. So, I hardly had that going for me when I started. This YouTube channel, I had never shot a video before in my life. I'd never done YouTube SEO, thumbnails, any of that stuff, right? So, I had to learn that. But now that I've learned blogging and SEO and selling a product and email marketing and YouTube and selling products on YouTube and creating videos and thumbnails and all of that, you just open up, you know, the ceiling increases on the amount of revenue you can make. But it's a lot of individual skills that you have to acquire over time. So, just don't get discouraged if you don't have them all at the beginning. This first 90 days is more about learning and increasing your skills than anything else.
And it's really about removing self-limiting beliefs more than anything else, honestly. Because when you're just starting out, you're thinking, "All right, I got to do 10 hours a week on this thing," and that's, you know, 128 hours I'm going to spend on this over the course of 90 days. I want this thing to work, and then it doesn't, it doesn't get any traffic, and you're like, "Screw it, this sucks," and I get that too. Which is why I love doing it as a personal brand because every single thing that you create is never lost because you can always pivot the content. You can always use your website, your personal brand, for job opportunities, writing opportunities, freelance work, anything to make money in different ways. You could pivot it into a mini agency, start writing content for somebody else, another business, making thousands of dollars a month with a client. There's no lost or wasted effort when it's a personal brand, whereas if it's a tiny niche site and you're talking about like smart home devices and it fails, then it is all wasted effort because you're just going to quit it.
So, you have to remove the self-limiting beliefs. And I get it because if you're going to spend a lot of time on something, I'd like a little bit of a guarantee that it's going to at least work somewhat, right? But the thing is, the first 90 days is really all about learning and figuring this out. And a blog is great because you can infinitely update this asset. You can update every single blog post, you can change the homepage, you can change the unique value proposition. You're just building an email list, you're just moving this, you know, lever forward to build leverage into your life because leverage is the one thing that increases your income.
So, overall, we have a big income problem in the United States, inflation, you know, CEOs making 100 times what what the employees are. So, we have to start developing assets for ourselves to take some of our power back. To do that, it kind of sucks, but we have to spend time in our free time to finally get this thing to become a full-time job.
So, with all that said, you can make a lot of progress in 90 days. And it's a little bit different than it was back in like 2019 or 2020 when I would have said just do all link building, focus on transactional affiliate articles. That doesn't work as well today. You know, we saw the re-fication of Google, the Forbes-ification. We can rank for stuff, we just have to kind of shift the strategy a little bit, and that's what I've been doing, and it seems to be working so far.
So, I hope you found that interesting. The first 90 days. Please like the video, comment with any questions. Uh, let me know, are you just starting your blog? Like, are you starting now? Have you already started? Are you pivoting your content? Just let me know where you're at right now. That would be really helpful, and I can comment and, you know, answer any questions that you have. And always like the video, it really helps a lot. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't. And if you want to join us, learn how to start these profitable online businesses in the 2020s, click the link in the description below. 80 minutes of free training, exactly how to do that, all the resources to get started once and for all.