Week 4 & 5 Progress Update – A Very Busy Couple Of Weeks

It’s been 2 weeks since I last posted an update here, so it’s probably time for a new post! After 1 week of and a very hectic work week, I didn’t manage to complete all of my goals, but I sure did get a lot of good work done.

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Solo Innovator

My goals for Solo Innovator this week were:

Write 2 new research-based posts on Solo Innovator
Look into white-hat link-building techniques

As you can see by my homepage, I clearly failed to write my 2 new research-based posts on this blog last week. As I’ve still got shiny object syndrome, my new travel blog is still taking president of most of my time, meaning that I didn’t really get the chance to write any new posts here! That being said, there are a lot of topics that I’m still wanting to explore on this blog, so I’m expecting I’ll start writing some more posts here next week!

I did however start looking into white-hat link-building techniques. The research has given me quite a few ideas for places that I can start getting backlinks on for both of my blogs. In the next week or so, I’m planning to start reaching out to other site owners for backlinks, so we’ll see where that takes us soon!

Post Crunch

I’m still really struggling with motivation for this project. With no one responding to any of my marketing efforts (mainly through cold outreach and a few Reddit posts), I’m really starting to worry that I’m not going to make my target of 1 paying customer by 23rd June. I’m going to keep working on marketing it for the next 2 weeks and we’ll see if we get any more traction.

Travel Blog

I ended up giving myself quite a few goals for these 2 weeks with my new travel blog, and I can safely say that I’ve achieved most of them. To recap, they were:

Reach 400 posts on my new travel blog
Create an automated blog post review app
Improve the styling and menus of my travel blog

On my week off, my laptop was free from me doing work, meaning I could devote it to generating new posts for me. This was great and meant that I reached just over 300 posts by the end of last week! However, this week I needed my laptop again for work, meaning that I couldn’t run it for as long generating posts, which slowed down progress. I’ve still hit my goal by reaching 432 posts on the blog, but I really wanted to move the post generation off of my laptop so I could work and generate posts at the same time!

This meant that last week I decided to spend a few days migrating my generation code onto a spare computer running Linux that I had lying around. It took so much longer than I thought it would to migrate it, mainly due to incompatible libraries, but I can now safely say that it’s working as I’m expecting, meaning that I should be well on my way to generating a lot of blog posts by the end of next week.

The process of moving my post generator to a new machine caused quite a few bugs to come up in the generated posts, meaning that I had to go back to reviewing a lot of the posts by hand. Because of this, I didn’t end up creating an automated blog post review process to automatically publish blog posts that look of good enough quality. Now that I’m happy that most of the posts being generated are of good quality, I’m going to have another look into this this week.

Search Results

As you can see from the image above, total search impressions seem to be levelling out somewhat. I was surprised that Google started showing my pages on its search results and getting clicks so quickly, so I’m not that surprised that things have levelled off a bit while Google works out where to place my site.

Currently, Google still has 230 posts that it needs to start indexing and showing on its search results. I’ve been researching quite heavily into whether I can speed up their indexing process for my site so that more posts can start getting traffic more quickly, however, it seems like Google likes to take its time with indexing pages from new sites. While I’m waiting though, it’s giving me a good opportunity to tidy up the menus and categories of the site and help to improve the user experience before I see an influx of new visitors.

This Week’s Goals

This week I have a number of goals that I want to aim for. As seems to be the trend at the minute, they’re mainly revolving around my new travel blog.

Solo Innovator

My aims for Solo Innovator are to create 2 research-based posts (hopefully I’ll actually manage it this time) and I’ll also try and do some link building so that I can get some backlinks to this blog. Apart from this, there’s not too much to do with Solo Innovator right now. Search impressions are slowly increasing and eventually turning into clicks.

Post Crunch

I’m really going to try and increase my motivation for this one this week! With so many marketing dead ends that I’ve experienced, I’m going to continue with my last push to try and get a customer by 23rd June. My main focus is going to be writing more Reddit and Indie Hackers posts, in the hopes that someone from my target audience actually bites and creates a subscription.

Travel Blog

This week I’m hoping I’ll be able to get a lot of work done on my travel blog. Given that my blog generator is fully up and running now, I’m going to aim to have 700 posts on my blog by the end of next week. As well as this, I want to try and get at least 3 backlinks to the blog to hopefully improve my Google search rankings even more.

While doing some research into promoting blogs, I also discovered that Pinterest can be a great way to build up a following for a travel blog. As a result, I’m going to have a look into creating a Pinterest account for my blog and setting up some code to automatically publish images and links to my blog posts there too!