Welcome to the income report for the 4th month of “The Blog Strategist”.
I have been a bit lazy over the first 3 months making little to no progress. But December has been a fairly good month.
Below are the targets I’ve set for December last month:
- Publish weekly reports for all 4 weeks in December
- Publish 25 blog posts in total (of genuine value) – i.e., 14 new posts
- Publish “Privacy Policy” page – which I couldn’t yet
- Create a Pinterest account for The Blog Strategist – which I couldn’t yet
I’ve failed to publish weekly reports. I was motivated the first week & published a weekly report, but couldn;t after that. The weekly report is there at the end of this page. I’ve kept it there so that I can show you the thoughts of a bloggers. I might find these silly after a couple of years, but that’s the way it is!
I’ve made significant progress on the second target. From 11 posts in November, I’ve moved to 23 posts in December. More importantly, I’ve completed the draft version of the entire TBS course plan. Of course it’s the first draft where I’ve published the major chapters with most basic content, the next step is to improve upon the chapters with mind-blowing content that’ll make the readers go “wow”.
After completing the first draft, the result is that I will be working on a 15 module guide on blogging. Of course, there is more opportunity to add a few more modules in future, but to get started – I feel I have set the base. It’s to improve from here on.
I’ve finally achieved the 3rd goal as well. I’ve been postponing the simple activity of publishing a Privacy Policy page for 2 months & I finally got around to it. In fact, I made serious progress that I published 4 legal pages:
It was easy because it’s mostly a copy paste from my other blogs. I’ve built these templates long back, so it’s easy for me to publish legal pages every time I start a new blog. On the other hand, I’m disappointed at myself for delaying a simple copy paste for 3 months!
I achieved the 4th target also. I’ve finally made a Pinterest account for The Blog Strategist. I didn’t start posting yet, but I’m so happy that I created the account at least. There is a hiccup which I’ll have to address, my domain seems to be claimed by someone else. I’ll have to figure out a way to sort this issue.
On top this, I made some unplanned progress as well!
I’ve published the “No Paywall Policy” page as well. As you would know, my goal with The Blog Strategist is to build the most comprehensive blogging course on the world (that’s free!). And I’m fighting against two things mostly – paid courses & low value AI content. I already published the No AI Content Policy earlier. But in December, I got around to posting the No Paywall Policy as well. Even though I started drafting this a month back, I could finally find the motivation to finish it.
I know that there is a lot of potential to improve these pages & my income reports. But at this point in time, I just want to capture my thoughts & progress. I’ll gradually come back to these pages & improve them once I’m done with the key content.
I also wanted to publish a couple of posts on side hustles so that I have some content that’s Pinterest friendly as well. You’d know that starting a blog, niche, domains & all mostly do not work on Pinterest. Blogging is a dry topic from the lens of Pinterest. If you go through “How to Choose the Right Niche for Your Blog?“, you’ll get to know that only 4% people on Pinterest follow the Finance niche – it’s the least followed listed niche in Pinterest.
I know for sure that only a handful of people would follow blogging, so I’ll have to focus on that 4% who follow Finance topic & reach out to those in the 4% who’d be interested in starting a business as well. And the best way to reach this 4% is through posts on side hustles, passive income ideas, make money ideas, etc.
Ie, “How to start a blog” won’t work on Pinterest, but “10 best side hustle ideas” will work.
So, I was able to publish 2 posts on this which are:
I didn’t write them from scratch. I’ve already published these posts in a different blog of mine which was lying idle, so I just transferred it to TBS. But of course, I wrote the entire content myself, there was no AI content. I’ve never been a fan of AI content.
So, this is what happened in December. Overall, I feel that it was a productive month, I made decent progress. There’s still a long way to go, but I’m feeling more hopeful now.
Coming to the regular KPIs & blog performance, I didn’t make much progress. Below are the results for December:
- Total No of Users = 13 (vs 10 last month)
- Total No of New Users = 9 (vs 7 last month)
- Total Sessions = 14 (vs 10 last month)
- Avg. Engagement Time = 20 sec (vs 1 min 10 sec last month)
- No of Posts = 12 (vs 4 last month)
There’s no change in blog performance. If anything, the engagement time has taken a significant dip to 20 sec (that’s quite bad). I hope things will improve as I start improving the content. For me, it’s a very important KPI. Because I do not care about no. of visitors, but I’m deeply motivated by the fact that I want TBS to be the best blogging guide in the whole fricking world. And the direct indication is how much time people spend reading the guide. If engagement time is high, it means that my readers are finding value in what I’ve made. The December number is concerning to be frank. But I’ve just started & it’s too early to judge. I’ll wait for a couple more months to see what’s happening as I build up the guides.
There was more variety in the geography of visitors in December. I had people from 5 countries visiting TBS.
The majority of traffic is direct traffic which felt surprising.
Another interesting observation is that the engagement time for direct traffic is 1 second while that for organic visitors is ~1.5 minutes. Which means people who reached the blog through Google Search stayed for a much longer time. I feel this number should still be much longer given that most content in TBS in long-form.
Income wise, I made nothing in December. Of course, I haven’t pursued money yet because I’m working on building the content now. But I feel it’s time I started thinking about monetization strategies now. Doesn’t matter if it’s a cent or a dollar, making that first penny is a big encouragement in itself. It’s something I’ll plan for January.
That’s about December. It was a productive month overall.
With new year, I have a lot of new ambitions as well. My goals for January are:
- Improve all 15 modules of the TBS guides (content wise, design wise, etc). Move all content to Elementor from Gutenberg.
- Apply for Google Adsense (and hopefully get accepted)
- Apply for DreamHost affiliate program (and hopefully get accepted)
- Publish 30 Pinterest pins
Apart from TBS, I also have a new target for January which is to build a Pinterest-first website & report on my progress here in TBS. I’ll use freelancers to create posts, schedule pins, etc. But I want to restart a new experiment. I already have a blog with 300+ articles on which I’ve invested close to $3000. I’ll use this blog as the test case & bring in a Pinterest VA to create & post pins consistently. This is another ambitious goal I have. Irrespective of whatever happens, I’ll pin 8 pins a day for this blog till December 2025 & let’s see what happens.
It’s my new Pinterest challenge & I’ll create a separate section where I’ll write about this. I’ll also write about what’s happening with TBS Pinterest performance as well. But I’m sure TBS Pinterest performance will be quite poor given that I’ll be pinning on a niche which Pinterest audience doesn’t follow. That’s why I’m starting a new challenge. The blog used for challenge has content on cooking & home decor – two of the most popular niches on Pinterest. Of course, it’s freelancer written content (and not genuinely of the greatest quality to be frank), but I wanted a new challenge for my favorite traffic platform the new year which’ll be interesting.
Below is the progress report I’ve published for the first week.
I’ll be discontinuing the thought of weekly progress reports because it’s a bit too much. The time I use for making weekly reports can be used for creating blogging content & performing other experiments.
Week 1 – December 2024 – Progress Report (Discontinued):
Week 1 has been fairly good, I have made some progress unlike the last couple of months. I believe moving to weekly progress reports is helping as my accountability has now increased.
My earnings continue to be zero as I haven’t unlocked any monetization channels yet. My expenses stood at $20 for Cloudways hosting.
I am focusing on building the base content after which only I’ll be able to unlock monetization channels. I’m planning display ads (joining Google AdSense) & affiliate marketing (for high quality products I trust) for monetization.
Coming to content, I published 4 posts last week – one of the most productive weeks. I am reusing the old content I’ve built till date. I’ve made multiple blogs on personal finance & digital businesses earlier, spending months writing content. The content was a curation of my learnings building blogs, but I’ve never been able to fully utilize this content. It will be highly useful for building TBS because that’s exactly what I want to convey to my readers – the best content on how to build a successful, money-making blog.
Traffic Updates & How I Plan to Grow TBS:
On the traffic side, it was a depressing week as I had 0 visitors. Not sure if reusing content from my old websites is having an impact, but I’m not going to stop because of that. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years – it’s to not do something for a platform (like Google, etc), but for the readers. Whether I use old content, new content, AI content or anything, I do not know when Google is going to change their stance. I have to depend on alternate sources of traffic either ways.
But the one thing that’ll stay constant is people’s need for high quality content. If there’s an ultimate source on building a blog, a free, public case study with income reports – I’m sure people will find value in it. Be it via Google, Facebook, Pinterest, email or some other medium, things of value will be liked at the end of the day. That has been my motto since the last year – write for the readers, not for platforms. Create extremely valuable content & you’ll be rewarded for it one way or the other.
With this motto in mind, I’ll continue building this site with all the high-quality content I’ve written before on blogging. Also, I haven’t used any AI content before – so I do not have to worry about AI content, plagiarism, etc. because whatever I have is good content. And once I’ve updated & migrated them all, I’ll start writing new content from scratch to build upon what I already have. That’s the overall plan for growing The Blog Strategist as of now.