Week 6 Progress Update – Even More Blog Updates!
Another week, and another progress update! This week’s been a rollercoaster of great progress and struggling to see any results. With work still being really busy too, sadly some of my projects have had to take more of a backseat this week. So without further ado, let’s get into this week’s roundup.
Solo Innovator
My two goals for Solo Innovator this week were:
- Create 2 new research-based posts for Solo Innovator
- Get at least 3 backlinks for Solo Innovator
Starting with the good news, I was able to get 4 different backlinks for Solo Innovator, which will hopefully be great news for my site rankings in the coming months! It took a lot of work to get these backlinks, so I’m probably not going to tackle trying to get more links for a little while.
In terms of writing more blog posts, unfortunately, I’ve not had the time to write any again this week. I normally write my posts in the middle of the day during my breaks from work, however as my job has been so busy in the last few weeks, I’ve not had time to devote to researching and writing up information about solo entrepreneurship.
Solo Innovator Impressions
I’ve been monitoring the search console for Solo Innovator more in the last few weeks as my first few posts are starting to get to the 3 months mark, which should mean that they’re starting to rank more on Google. While I am seeing some clicks through to my blog, the click-through rate (CTR) and average search position are really quite low. This is likely due to me not optimising my posts for keywords, as I’ve been focusing on researching the content that interests me and writing informative content about the topic, rather than focusing on including specific keywords. As such, I think that’s starting to bite me, as I’m not experiencing the increase in traffic that I was hoping for from this site.
Post Crunch
Last week, I set myself the goal of writing at least 2 Reddit and Indie Hackers posts promoting Post Crunch. Sadly, I’ve been really lacking the motivation to make any progress in marketing this project. With none of my previous marketing efforts amounting to anything, it’s been really hard to motivate myself to continue developing the app, even with my self-imposed deadline of next week.
As this lack of motivation has started leaking into other projects too, I’ve decided that I’m going to stop working on this project from now onwards. I’m going to leave the site live for now, as it’s running on some free hosting from AWS, but I’m not planning on doing any big marketing attempts to revive the project. I’ll probably do a round-up of my thoughts and lessons learnt on this project at some point soon, but I probably won’t be mentioning it again on my solopreneur journey posts unless it starts getting some customers organically.
Travel Blog
Last week, I set myself a number of goals for my new travel blog, namely:
- Reach 700 posts on my travel blog
- Get at least 3 backlinks for my travel blog
- Setup a Pinterest account for the travel blog
I can safely say that I’ve achieved pretty much all of these!
My new travel blog now has well over 700 posts (772 to be precise) and is really thriving! While generating these blog posts, I actually ended up running out of free credits for the API I was using, which was a great sign as I wasn’t expecting to be generating so many blog posts in a month so quickly when I first set up the account. As I’m wanting to prevent myself from spending too much money on the project until I start seeing some income from ad revenue, I’m going to need to spend some time hooking my post generator up to a different API to generate some more blog posts.
While these new blog posts were being created, I managed to get 3 organic backlinks for my travel blog using whitehat techniques. Like with Solo Innovator, I’m going to hold off doing any more link-building for now due to the amount of effort that it took to get these few. In the future, I’ll probably come back to doing some more link-building, but right now I’m wanting to shift my focus onto some other goals for this blog.
Travel Blog Focus Shift
Earlier this week, I was watching this video by Fat Stacks talking discussing whether niche blogs are going to die soon, given that Google will be releasing Google Bard in the next few years. Along with quite a few other things, the video got me thinking about how I could try to continue to grow the online presence of my travel blog so that I’m not just reliant on Google for driving people to the blog. While my search rankings are starting to improve at the minute, I’m pretty sure that my content could easily lose a lot of clicks when Bard is released as most of the content is generated by AI.
As such, my 2 main focuses for my travel blog for the next few weeks are going to be:
- Growing my content by continuing my current format and expanding into new sub-niches so that I can evaluate which sub-niches perform better
- Expanding my blog’s reach onto a number of different social media platforms
One way that I’ve already been trying to grow my blog’s reach is to start creating a Pinterest page. As I’m not a massive fan of social media, my aim is to automate the creation of the posts, so that I don’t have to interact with it as much as possible. I’ve already written the code to create the image and descriptions for the posts, however, I’m just waiting for Pinterest to approve my request to access their API. Once that’s done the Pinterest account will be up and running for my new blog, and I’ll hope to start seeing some traffic from there in the next few weeks/months.
This Week’s Goals
Solo Innovator
This week, I’m not setting a goal of writing any more posts for Solo Innovator. As I’ve failed to write any in the last 2 weeks and work’s looking like it’s going to be hectic again, I’m not setting any targets to write more posts.
Instead, I’m aiming to revisit half of the posts on this blog (the first 20 posts I’ve created) to do some proper keyword analysis and sprucing of the posts. My hope is that I can increase their reach by better targeting what solopreneurs are searching for which should bring in more traffic in the long run. I’m not envisaging that this will dramatically improve my search rankings in a matter of days, but I’m hoping that within a couple of months, I will start to see some improvement in my search rankings.
Travel Blog
My targets for this week follow on pretty nicely from the main focusses that I’ve set for the blog, namely trying to create more content and improving my online presence.
As I’ve run out of free API credits for the month on my current information source for the blog, I’m going to set up an account with a different source which also offers free monthly credits. My hope is that with these 2 accounts together, I should be able continuously to generate posts throughout the month, meaning that I’ll be able to target just under 1,000 new posts per month on the blog. I’m planning on focussing these new posts on a completely different sub-niche, which will hopefully help me to compare which sub-niches I should be targeting when I get some good analytics data in a few months.
As well as focussing on generating some new posts, I also want to try and get posts created for the blog’s Pinterest account. Unfortunately, I’m currently under the heel of Pinterest to accept my API access application, so hopefully, that doesn’t take too long so that I can start adding my posts to my Pinterest account.
Goal Summary
So there we have it, my goals for the week. To summarise, I’m wanting to:
- Review the keywords on 20 Solo Innovator posts and update the articles to be more targetted to solopreneurs
- Connect my travel blog’s post generator to a new API to start generating a new style of posts
- Start generating some Pinterest posts to promote my blog
Overview
So there we have it, another week of solopreneuring done. You can see how I got on this week here, or if you’re new to my Solopreneur Series, why not check out my explanation of all of my different projects, or see last week’s update.
