Month 4 & 5 Progress Update – Long Time No See
Wow, those 2 months went quickly! I can safely say that with a big house move and lots of changes at work and to this site, July and August were absolutely mental.
Before we get into the changes for this week though, we need to discuss the travel blog.
The Travel Blog
For the uninitiated, (if you are I’d recommend that you read the other posts in this series), a few months ago I started creating a travel blog that was largely automatically generated. Using a mixture of the Google place api and ChatGPT, I made a site that automatically created hundereds of posts per month, recommending different places to visit in different areas.
While I thought this site was adding some value, by providing concise recommendations of places to visit, Google obviously felt differently. Despite having nearly 1.5k posts on my site and live on Google my impressions dipped to even lower levels instead of spiking as I’d hoped.
With Solo Innovator needing even more of my time to take off, I’ve decided to take a break from working on the travel blog for now. While I’m pretty sure that with a decent amount of work I could get the site to take off, I’m not sure that I can manage multiple sites right now.
I’ll keep monitoring my analytics and search console though. If I suddenly see that some of this content is taking off I’ll hop right back onto making content. In the mean time though, it’s all focus on Solo Innovator!
Solo Innovator
I’ve actually made much more progress than I was aiming to with Solo Innovator in the last 2 months. For the record, my goals from last time were to:
- Achieve 80 blog posts total on Solo Innovator
- Respond to 30 HARO queries
- Post shortened articles to Medium (and potentially LinkedIn)
Let’s hit each of these goals 1 by 1 and also address a few extra things I’ve been up to.
Blog Posts
I set myself the ambitious target of reaching 80 posts on Solo Innovator (an increase of 30 in 2 months). Well, I thought that was ambitious at least.
Turns out that with my current content generation methods, I was able to reach 80 posts in a few weeks and now sit at 111 live posts (117 including drafted and scheduled posts). I over doubled the amount of content on the site in 2 months, and I’d say it’s great quality content too.
The blog content process I’m currently following means that I’m really focussing on writing great quality content, with targets of both seed and long-tail keywords, which should hopefully mean that I’ll be appearing in more search results in the coming months!
I’m generally batching my content generation techniques now, which is allowing me to be more efficient, getting a good few posts done in a single day, and then scheduling them to be released over the next few weeks.
HARO
In all honesty, I’ve never been that into HARO. It’s always felt like a lot of work, for very little reward. That is until these last few months.
Despite only sending off around 10 HARO responses (as opposed to the 30 I’ve targetted), I’ve already had 3 successes, which feels huge compared to the number of backlinks I’ve been getting from other sites.
My main problem with HARO at the moment is timings.
HARO questions come in at 10:30am, 5:30pm and 10:30pm for me. As I can only really work on Solo Innovator during my lunch hour at work (due to work and family commitments), it means that I end up missing out on 2/3rds of the HARO questions that come in.
This combined with the length of time it takes to write a single response makes it really difficult to feel like I’m making much progress by doing HARO.
However, I just need to look at my Domain Rating (DR) to see the difference, which has gone from 11 to 19.
This seems amazing to me! Despite the caviats that DR is just an estimate, and that it doesn’t directly correlate to what Google sees, it’s been really nice to see that my efforts are having an effect.
What’s more, my responses to HARO questions are helping me to establish industry connections. This has become my focus with HARO much more now. If I can keep establishing connections within the solopreneur industry, that could really help the business take off in the long term.
Social Media
My final goal for Solo Innovator was to publish articles on Medium.
I started publishing a few a articles on Medium, by essentially removing some of the content from my main article and getting ChatGPT to re-write it for the platform. However, I didn’t see much traffic coming my way from the site, or many views on my posts there.
My guess is that in order to be successful with Medium, I’d have to spend lots of time writing bespoke articles which would generate me no money. As I’m not really able to spend too much time on my side businesses at the moment, I decided that it’d probably be worth me investing my time elsewhere for now, and maybe revisiting posting on Medium in the future when the brand is a bit more established.
A New Hope For My Social Media Presence
All is not lost on my social media presence though!
A few months ago, while I was working on other projects I started posting my solopreneur journey on Twitter. You can have a look at some of my previous posts here. While I never really loved Twitter, as I found it way too easy to get distracted reading other people’s posts rather than actually working on my own projects, I did grow a relatively small following over there.
I was reflecting on my time on Twitter and thought that now might be the time to start tweeting again in the hopes that I can diversify my traffic slightly and bring in a new, more reliable audience to the blog.
So, starting from today, I’m back on Twitter and posting threads with different actionable advice about starting your own business. Each thread is linked to one of my blog posts on my site, so hopefully it’ll be useful for my existing Twitter audience and also bring in some reliable traffic to Solo Innovator.
Automating My Tweets
With all of that being said, I still don’t want to get too distracted with Twitter and forget to post any more on here!
As a result, I created myself a twitter scheduler bot so that I can bulk-schedule multiple Twitter threads in one go. While the UI isn’t the best, I’ve already used it to schedule the next month’s worth of content, which will hopefully mean that I don’t spend too much time scrolling on my feed in the next few months!
I’m going to see how twitter goes, and will be analysing my audience on Twitter and how well that converts to site views so I can tell if I need to change my approach, or ditch posting on Twitter altogether.
Goals
So now that you’ve heard what I’ve been up to in the last 2 months, lets set out some goals for the coming month. I’m going to try to post the next update at the start of October, so I won’t have as long as usual to make progress by my main goals are to:
- Keep writing, publishing 1 new article every other day
- Keep responding to more HARO requests and find a way to improve my process for responding to these
- Analyse my tweet performance and schedule new and improved tweets for October
- Start adding videos to my posts to improve time on page
Overview
So there we have it, the end of another Solopreneur Journey post. If you enjoyed this post, check out my last entry or see my guide to usability testing.
Also, go follow my twitter to keep up to date with everything Solo Innovator!
