Week 7 Progress Update – New Foundations
It’s time to reflect on another week of my solopreneur journey, and I can safely say that this has been a really fun one! With a few unexpected highs and lots of extra research, this should be a really good progress update, so let’s grab a cuppa and get started!
Solo Innovator
This week, I ended up spending most of my time on Solo Innovator, the first time in quite a while! My sole goal for Solo Innovator was to review the keywords on 20 posts and update the articles to be more targeted to solopreneurs.
I’m really happy to report that I did review 20 posts! I found the process of reviewing my old posts really enjoyable as it was great to see how much progress I’ve made on my blogging in the last few months. The old posts had no internal or external links, didn’t cover all of the topics, and didn’t really focus on all of the keywords that they could’ve done, not ideal!
When working on updating the posts, I was largely focussing on using the skyscraper method, which involves reviewing other posts that are ranking in the top spots for the keywords that you’re targeting and adding any additional sections to the posts your writing. This method, along with doing some additional keyword research, has really bulked up a lot of my old posts, so I’m confident that I’ll start seeing a good bit more traffic in the coming months.
What’s more, while researching other posts as part of the skyscraper method, I stumbled on one of my own posts in the search results! That’s the first time that I’ve seen one of my own posts show up in Google Search without me actively looking for it, which was really exciting. Hopefully, we’ll start seeing even more posts appearing in the coming months!
Combating Bard!
This week, I was watching this video about how AI chatbots could impact blogging in the long term. While I don’t believe that AI is going to destroy blogging any time soon, I think that the release of Google Bard in the next few months will reduce the number of impressions and clicks that blogs start to receive.
While I am experimenting with a fully AI-written travel blog (see below), I’m keen to try and keep Solo Innovator having the human touch. However, with the coming of Bard and other AI search tools, I’m starting to think that I need to start releasing more blog posts sooner rather than later to avoid this blog becoming hidden by the results of AI tools. So, how am I going to do that?
I’m currently trying to find a balance between fully created AI content and writing all of my articles by hand by writing a bit of software that generates a blog template for me to write on. This blog template will be generated by looking at the headings and keywords of well-ranked posts as well as other keywords from some automated similar keyword detection sites. This will then allow me to use this information to research some more and write the articles. This should allow me to skip a lot of the slow keyword research and idea generation sections and allow me to quickly write up a blog post for the blog.
I’ve already got a basic proof of concept that can generate ideas from a single blog post and keyword research. I now just need to allow that to combine the headings and keywords from multiple blog posts, do some automated image research and a few other bits and pieces before I’m able to start using it to speed up my post creation process. I reckon that it’ll still be a few weeks before I’m able to incorporate it into my writing flow, but it should help me generate more posts each week, which will hopefully allow me to stay ahead of the AI search wave.
Travel Blog
Last week, my goals for my new travel blog were:
- 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
Unfortunately, it’s been incredibly difficult to get either of these tasks done this week. I’ve tried 2 different APIs to generate new posts from, and both were really unsuccessful. One API didn’t provide the correct information when searching for places in the API, which meant I kept getting incorrect results, and the other had closed applications for API access, which I only found out after spending hours signing up and filling in forms to get credentials. After these two failures early in the week, I kept searching for a new API to use but didn’t have any luck. My current plan is to wait until next week, and then I’ll have refreshed credits for my current API, which I’ll keep using.
Generating Pinterest posts for the site also didn’t happen this week. I kept waiting and waiting for the API key, but I still haven’t been verified for API access, so I’ve not been able to automatically upload any posts. As I’ve been waiting quite a while now for these credentials, I’ve decided that next week I’m going to manually upload a bunch of images to Pinterest so that I can get the ball rolling on creating a Pinterest audience. I reckon that the process of uploading 5 images each day will get tiring pretty quickly, so I’m hoping that my API access will come soon now, but I really want to start getting some more traffic on the site, so I need to start getting other traffic sources setup ASAP.
Search Success
Earlier this week, I received an email congratulating me for reaching 5 clicks in 28 days on the travel blog! While not a huge number by any standards on the web, I was really excited to see that my posts are starting to be seen on search! What’s more, the number of pages that are yet to be crawled by Google has also decreased to 400 posts, which means that Google’s slowly but surely getting through the backlog of posts that I created earlier this month. I’m hoping that by the start of 2 weeks’ time (when my API credits come back), Google will have largely cleared all of my post backlog so more sites can start appearing on the search results.
This Week’s Goals
This week, I have a number of goals for my blogs. Before I get into the individual targets for each of the blogs, I’m going to be focussing on a shared target, which is to improve my EEAT score. EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. While watching some videos about blogging this week, I noticed that I hadn’t really focussed on doing anything to either of my blogs that show Google that I’m an authoritative and trustworthy source of information. While this isn’t something that’s going to matter too much in the short term, if my rankings improve (like I’m hoping they will), then I could start seeing Google limiting my search traffic because they don’t know if I’m an authoritative source.
As a result, I’m going to dedicate part of this week to improving my EEAT scores, so look out for more detailed author pages and other business information on the blog this week!
Now that the generic goals have been set, let’s delve into the individual targets that I’m setting this week.
Solo Innovator
As I started refreshing the content on the blog last week, I’m going to try and finish that by bulking out the remaining 20 posts on this blog. This was a really enjoyable experience last week, so I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep my motivation and enjoy revamping the old posts on the blog.
I’m also going to keep working on my post-inspiration generator. My hope is that I can be largely feature complete by the end of the coming week, which means that I can start integrating it into my post-creation flow and start working on writing new articles in 2 weeks’ time.
Travel Blog
As my travel blog has been largely stagnant these last 2 weeks, I really want to start making progress on getting more traffic to the site. As it’s been taking so long to get the Pinterest API access, I’m going to start working on applying for Instagram API access too, so that I can hopefully start automating posting there in the near future as well.
On top of this, I want to actually have some posts on social media now. I want to create my own Instagram account for the blog and update my socials software to be able to generate posts for both Pinterest and Instagram in the correct aspect ratios. I’m then going to generate enough posts for a week and schedule them manually to be posted on the app. While I would love for this all to be automated right now, I’m going to spend some time manually uploading the photos so that I can start getting some posts out there, and hopefully start getting some traffic over time.
Summary
So, to summarise, my goals for the week are:
- Improve EEAT scores on Solo Innovator and my travel blog
- Finish implementing the post-inspiration generator for Solo Innovator
- Update the remaining 20 posts on Solo Innovator
- Setup and Instagram account and apply for API access for my travel blog
- Upload a week’s worth of Pinterest and Instagram content for the travel blog
Overview
And there we have it, another week of solopreneuring done. Check out next week’s post 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.
