Week 8 Progress Update – Big Progress

Another week, and another load of progress. This week’s been incredibly productive as I’ve done loads of extra things on top of the goals I’ve set! Without further ado, let’s dive into the progress update for this week.

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Solo Innovator

This week, I set myself 3 goals for Solo Innovator, namely:

Improve EEAT scores on Solo Innovator
Finish implementing the post-inspiration generator for Solo Innovator
Update the remaining 20 posts on Solo Innovator

I can safely say that I’ve absolutely smashed it this week, as I’ve accomplished all of these goals.

I’ve improved the EEAT score by making loads of small tweaks to the site, including improving the About page, including more information in the author bio as well as updating my contact page. There have been loads of small changes that I’ve done, so I’m hoping that will prevent me from reaching a ranking ceiling in the future.

I’ve also finished updating the remaining posts on Solo Innovator. Apart from a few outlier posts (which I don’t think I’ll be able to rank well for, or that I don’t think really match the target of the blog anymore) all of the posts on the blog are now updated. All of the posts have been updated in line with the skyscraper technique that I’ve been using and now include loads of backlinks and images, which should help to improve my trustworthiness for EEAT even more in the future.

A Helping Hand For Post Creation

I’ve kept on working on my post-inspiration generator, which creates the basic scaffolding for me to work on a post, and I’ve got it into a basic MVP state. The software can now identify the headings, keywords and paragraph structures of top-performing posts for a master keyword, and generates a sample blog post which I can then edit and add images and backlinks to. This allows me to relatively quickly create high-quality skyscraper articles with loads of images and sources, which should help more of my posts to rise to the top of the Google search rankings easily.

I decided that because the software is now somewhat working, I should test it out so that I can find any bugs and future improvements that I want to make to it. I’ve been really surprised at the speed in which this new project lets me write posts! I’ve created 5 new articles with the software in 5 days, all over 4,000 words, and I only spent about an hour of time on each, including research, editing and finishing touches!

This makes me really excited for the potential of this, as I should easily be able to hit at least 5 articles per week when I get everything up and running, which should allow my blog to dominate the search rankings. There are some improvements that I still want to make to the code, such as bullet point support and suggesting some sources for me to add more information to the articles, but this can come in time as I’ve now got the fundamentals of the project working.

If you’re interested, here’s the 5 new posts that I’ve created this week

Creating a Plan

As I’m now focussing on growing the readership of Solo Innovator as opposed to just documenting my entrepreneurship readings, I decided that it was probably time to make a content plan. While most of the articles that I write on the blog are still going to be focused on aspects of entrepreneurship that I want to deep-dive into, I’ve decided that I also need to write some articles that are targeting lower-competition keywords, and that bring up my authority in sub-niches in the entrepreneurship game.

So, on that note, I’ve created a content plan with over 300 different topic ideas, which are divided into different sub-niches of entrepreneurship. I created this by first listing all of the topics that I want to continue to research, and then started looking at some other entrepreneurship blogs, and found posts that were both successful and were around topics that I’m interested in researching and writing about.

I’m planning on tackling one sub-niche at a time, to hopefully build topical authority in a segment in Google’s eyes, which should help my posts to rise to the top of the search rankings much more easily. We’ll see how this process goes, but I’m hoping that I’ll soon start seeing the effects of this on my first sub-niche, the entrepreneurship basics.

Travel Blog

I’ve also made quite a bit of progress on my new travel blog this week. I’ve not quite completed all of my goals, but I’m still really happy with my progress here. As a reminder, last week I set myself the goals to:

Improve EEAT scores on my travel blog
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

In addition to Solo Innovator, I also focussed on improving EEAT on my new travel blog. I used the same approach (by improving the about and contact pages as well as improving author info) to improve the look of my site, which will hopefully allow Google to continue to trust the posts that I’m producing over time.

I also signed up for a new Instagram account and completed the process for getting an API key. Instagram’s process is much better than Pinterest’s for API key applications, as it looks like my key is already valid and ready to go!

Unfortunately, I didn’t quite have the motivation to start posting on either of the platforms this week. I’m not a massive fan of social media in my personal life, so it’s requiring a lot of motivation to set up and get started with these social media accounts. My plan is to bite the bullet and start uploading images next week, and I’m really hoping that this Pinterest API key gets granted soon so that I can setup and leave the social media accounts to run themselves.

Goals

On the back of such a great week that’s just gone, I’ve got some more exciting goals to achieve this week.

Solo Innovator Goals

I want to continue adding more posts to the blog this week, with all of the articles being within my current sub-niche, the entrepreneurship basics. I’m targeting 5 new posts, but we’ll have to see how well my post-inspiration generator fares with more blog posts being churned out. I’ll keep on fixing issues as I find them, so I could either blow this target out of the water if I don’t find many issues, or I might struggle to create 2 new posts if some new issues arise.

I also want to improve the categorisation of the site, as I want to help search crawlers to be able to link similar content as much as possible. I’m hoping that this will help improve my topical authority even more now, as I’ll be focussing on specific sub-niches of entrepreneurship.

I’m also planning on signing up to HARO (Help a Reporter Out) for Solo Innovator. I didn’t get on very well with it with Post Crunch, as I struggled to find many relevant articles to talk about. I’m going to try it again with Solo Innovator, in the hopes that more questions will be relevant to my blog content, so I’ll get more relevant backlinks. I’m also going to try responding to questions outside of my niche, in the hopes that I’ll still get more backlinks to the blog.

I’m hoping that by combining writing more high-quality articles and getting some good backlinks, I’ll begin driving more and more signals to Google that this is a site that should be linked to more frequently.

Travel Blog

After a few weeks of waiting, my API limit will finally be lifted for my post generation for my new travel blog, which means that I can get back to adding content to my site. As it’s been just under 3 weeks since my last post, I’m really looking forward to getting some new content on the site to send more signals to Google that the site is active and providing a lot of information. Google’s still not processed hundreds of my posts from last month yet, so it may be a while before I start to see the new content appearing on Google, but at least it will be present on the site and eventually might see the light of day on Google.

I’m also going to force myself to start creating posts for Instagram and Pinterest. I want to setup automated posting on both platforms together, so I’m going to hold off with my Instagram API key for now. My plan is to automatically generate the images and title text for each of the social posts, and then manually upload them to the platforms until the Pinterest API key is approved.