Back again for an update and gauging interest in stuff like this in general as I'm far less interested in SEO, display, and affiliate currently.

If you've seen any of my past posts on here, you know I had a successful portfolio of content sites (30-40k avg. MRR) that was completely shredded.

Traffic continued to fall with updates following HCU and finally started to stabilize a few months ago. I've tried a handful of things including parsing down/completely removing advertising in certain cases, consolidated a bunch of content, and other tweaks here and there. No luck on that front, but I'll keep those going in the background. I'm not spending too much time on any of my existing sites. In fact you can check out some of the ones that were my previous top dogs:

- puedomanejar dot com: A DMV practice test site in Spanish/English for US drivers.

- motorcyclezombies dot com: A site that started as a hobby site when I was interested in rebuilding old motorcycles and grew into a broader moto site.

- vinvaquero dot com: A VIN Decoder tool with some supporting content

Traffic for each of those sites now hovers in the 100-400 per day, when they were once about 1.5k to 8k+

First half of the year was spent spinning wheels and trying to figure out where to focus. I had a kid Aug 2023, so a year+ later I'm also adjusting to what focused working time looks like now. It's a whole lot different than when I was building my sites!

In May/June I decided to pivot into focusing more on my art business. I'd been selling a small series of prints on Etsy for some time on the side. I enjoy that, so I started to put more thought into my store/listing setup and set up my own e-commerce store. Since then I've been releasing new art, experimenting with different products, and even selling in person.

Traffic is going up, and those sales channels have been doing $2 - $4k per month. I've been experimenting with different channels for customers. I scheduled out a whole bunch of social posts a couple months ago, but those haven't really been doing much for me. Still figuring out the right mix and approach to it.

While those numbers feel like somewhat of a success for selling my art, it's a far cry from the prior few years. I'm going to keep building there because I like it, but I also need to get some new projects in the mix. If there's anything I learned from my content sites, it's to not get complacent and to diversify from the start.

If there's interest here for a mixed bag sort of approach like this, I'll try to provide updates as I go along. It's bound to be a mix of experiments, failures, and hopefully some success!

The online content economy is changing. (obviously)

I don't want to go on a whole rant here, but I have several successful newsletters that I started this year.

Not selling anything, not doing consulting, not making a course.

Just wanted to let you know that this shit works right now like blogs used a few year ago. Paid newsletters, I mean.

The last newsletter I started 49 days ago got 47k views in the last 30 days. I would never be able to do this with a blog.

That's it.

I'm wondering if you guys are running newsletters? What are your experiences? What platforms are you using?

I love the fact that there is no single point of failure and that I own the list. No longer scared of Google changes. In fact less than 2% of traffic to my newsletters come from Google.

God bless.

So, after months (maybe years?) of overthinking, second-guessing, and waiting for the stars to align, I finally said, “Screw it!” and just started working on my dream project. 🌱

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

1. The first step is the hardest. 🚀 I thought the fear would stop after starting—nope! But once you dive in, the water isn’t as cold as it seems.
2. Imperfect action > no action. 💪 I had no clue what I was doing half the time. But the progress I’ve made feels 10x better than the planning I never acted on.
3. It’s okay to pivot. 🔄 I thought I was set on one path, but halfway in, I realized I needed to shift. And you know what? That’s perfectly okay!
4. You learn as you go. 📚 I made mistakes, burned some time on things I shouldn’t have, but those lessons? Priceless.
5. Community is everything. ❤️ Surrounding myself with like-minded people (hello, Reddit fam 👋) kept me motivated when I wanted to quit.

I know many of you are in the same boat, waiting for the right time or the perfect plan. My advice: just start. It won’t be perfect, and that’s okay. The journey matters more than the plan.

How about you guys?

• What’s the one thing that helped you get started?
• Or, if you’re still on the fence—what’s holding you back? Let's talk! 😊

TL;DR: Took the plunge into a long-delayed project without a perfect plan. Made mistakes, learned lessons, and shifted along the way. Progress isn’t linear, but starting was the best decision I made. What's your story?

About 4 months ago I started a website using 100% only ZimmWriter bulk articles to test out the tool for AI SEO. The niche of the website is spirituality, which is imo perfect for AI writing, since it's not factual.

Yesterday I reached an all time high of 104 clicks/day. A couple of remarks:

• The website is in Dutch for which I just used the (suboptimal) beta language output ZimmWriter has (ZW does not yet have native non-English support
• The website has 100 posts which I published every day 3/day. I haven't touched the website ever since.
• I didn't do any interlinking, proof reading etc. No images in the posts, only featured images.
• I used Rankmath instant indexing to get all posts immediately indexed
• I have no ads or affiliate links on the website I almost did no niche research or no keyword research. Content was just generated based on sitemaps of bigger (English) websites in the same niche.

NEXT STEPS

• Adding more blogposts and internal links to the site as it seems the niche and method are working.
• I am not subbmitting for Adsense so far as I want to wait to get approved for Mediavine Journey (10.000 clicks/month)
• Adding a dropshipping store to it in order to generate some money

CONCLUSION

• Bulk AI SEO still works (although it might be a bit easier in other languages than English)
• Think this will work with about any tool. I used the (suboptimal) Dutch output from ZimmWriter but I'm sure it would work better with other tools.
• Let me know if you want to follow further progress on this project. I have an email list which I use to keep interested people up to date.

disclaimer: I hate all big tech companies so don't even try to say I am a fanboy. Also, my very-well earning site was destroyed too.

But I have to be honest. Even before the HCU I was seeing signs of a bubble being formed.

What signs?

I would google something and see 3,4,5...etc. site with articles that have the same title.

And sometimes those queries will be somewhat crazy. (e.g., Can you have more than 1 e-mail, what do bunnies eat...etc.)

We all ask stupid questions as we can't be informed on everything. When you have site after site taking queries STRAIGHT out of the Google suggest box, naming article after article that way and then other site copy, A BUBBLE was inevitable.

Imagine google "what do bunnies eat" and getting 20 sites with the same title and same genetic info.

And it's pretty clear that many of the writers would have no real experience with the damn thing. They would just take info from reddit, forums and refurbish it.

So, google decided to destroy the entire segment and with the Income School method.

And of course, we also have AI - that can also answer generic queries somewhat ok.

Many decent sites got caught in the middle.

WHY?

First, Google doesn't care. Seriously. People forget how big those guys are. Like even if you are 10million dollar company, you are still nothing to them. So you can imagine how little they care about the janitor who has a site about rabbits.

Second, they can't tweak their algo as precisely to save the "good guys".

So, we GOT OWNED AND FUCKED.

Google planned this IMO in the beginning of 2023 (or the end of 2022) and executed it slowly - first Sept. 2023, then March 2024 and finally August 2024.

The HCU is now part of the core. This means that every core update HAMMERS sites that the HCU classifier see as spammy.

Honestly, I could feel that this was going to happen, but I just didn't know when.

This is why I always advise myself to create original sites rather than use a template.

That said there is no 100% defense against an update. It's a question of when not if.

I was banned from the Amazon affiliate program about three years ago because I didn't provide accurate analytics regarding my traffic. I simply couldn't provide those analytics because I was posting affiliate links on my service hosted on Discord (rookie mistake).

Three years ago, I appealed, but I didn't fully understand the problem, and as a result, they told me that the account is permanently closed and they will not respond to any further communications...

The fact is that my "case" falls under the ones they forgive (it's written in the operating agreement), since I wasn't damaging Amazon's image, so I’m sure that if I properly explain my position, they might reinstate me in the program... the problem is that they are ignoring all my communications! What would you do in my place?

Thank you very much in advance; any help will be invaluable!

Does it make sense to use a domain with primarily US traffic (4k users/month) to use for an e-commerce business in another country? It's the same niche so we see the value, but also not sure if the site having mostly US traffic would impact our site for Australia based e-commerce venture? It's in the mental health niche. The site is not currently monetized. About 2 years old

Not really a case study but I wanted to share what's up with my SEO journey. In case you don't remember, I am the madman who likes to work on a thousand small projects at the same time rather than focusing on just one thing. My last update from nine months ago

• Got my first website accepted to Mediavine in September 2023, so right before the HCU decimated my traffic. Never recovered and down about 80% ever since. Currently making 2-3$ per day from that one website and nearly abandoned it as I don't see much room for growth.

• I have two more websites which were not affected by HCU but had little traffic, have been focusing on growing those, especially since Mediavine announced Journey back in March. I got both sites to 10k sessions per month and they have both been accepted to Journey in the past two months

• Surprisingly, I have *yet* another website that I launched in December which got accepted to Journey despite having CONSIDERABLY less than 10k sessions per month (around 1.5k lol). I am actually a bit pissed cause getting this one website to 10k was going to be my next goal and now i feel demotivated, but oh well. I think it got accepted because the traffic is mostly from the US and in a good niche (->health/supplements). Even on adsense it was making almost as much money as my older websites with 10 times the traffic.

• Finally I also have *yet yet* another website which i launched two years ago and was going somewhat well but also got hit by HCU and not showing much signs of recovering. It gets about 2k sessions per month but a lot of traffic from Russia (not sure why or how) and understandably it got rejected by Journey. It's in a fun niche that I like so I will try reviving it at some point, but not my priority for now.

what's next? Honestly idk. One year ago I thought I would finally be able to live off SEO income but that's not the case anymore. My strategy of working on multiple websites was always PARTLY due to not wanting to put all eggs in one basket and it kind of paid off since I now have multiple websites generating a little bit of income (I expect each of the four websites on MV/Journey to bring around 100$ per month each, so like 400$ per month - thankfully I have other income streams but this alone doesn't even cover rent, and I have juststarted my journey in 2020 so it's been a while now).

I have been experimenting with pinterest and flipboard to diversify traffic sources but honestly I miss being able to just write content on hyper-niche subjects and rank easily on google. I do not do blog-style websites, what has been giving me hope currently it's programmatic seo (and I have yet another pSEO project I have been meaning to launch in a niche that I am very excited about, but I decided to put this on hold for the time being).

I am currently waiting to see if my RPM on Journey scales according to expectations, so I can eventually get an estimate of what website I should focus the most on now that I have three of them on the platform. I would very much like to get at least one of them to 50k sessions and apply for Mediavine and have it become my main earner. Then I have the two other websites which have been hit by HCU and I am not sure what to do with them.

Yo everyone,

I've been building with a friend of mine an AI assistant designed to help my work on social media and it's now time to see some results.

My assumption is the following: if I build another AI scheduler on social media then it better works for me and make socials my #1 channel to gain users. If this is successful, then the product is useful and it will sell itself over time when people know about it (with the right distribution). If it doesn't, then it would be hypocritical to sell it in the first place.

Basically looking to get it working for our company first and share some results. Here are the results of the first week:

• Created an instagram account last week on which I post 3 times a day some memes about marketer (as it is my target audience). Been scheduling all these in less than an hour with the tool and at the end of week 1, I gained 20 followers (starting from 0) and 50k views so far. I plan on trying more volume to see how the algorithm handles it by posting 24 times a day - will let you know about the results.

Now my next challenge is conversion: at the beginning I thought that people would be less likely to follow a page where a company is mentioned so ended up never mentioning our platform. Second guessing this decision and I will change that next week and add the company link https://airmedia.uk :) in the captions.

It's not great but not ridiculous either. Let's see on week 2.

Hi I am from Italy and I have started from a week a niche website on the E-commerce(where you recommend products like shopify) niche(having already published 45 articles), and I already wrote 130 articles about a vpn niche website that I am doing with my friend who is also interested in SEO. now I want to know, is this the right path or should I do something else? Will I see results in one year, I would like to get a job in SEO or affiliate manager one year from now. Also I was wondering if I could see an income from those sites in one year based on your experience with those niches and business model. I am writing this message also to see if those niches are already too competitive and also to see if I should change them, I’ll do the articles no problem. Thanks for the long read. Last thing: if you thought that the articles were done by AI you’re right but remember that a lot of people use ai for content(in this subreddit there is also a case study that showed proof of work in a YMYL niche after a year) also each article is done by Claude(which is way more advanced than ChatGPT for writing) and ofter the prompts are longer than the actual article, the article has table images data and external and internal links, each one of them was crafted using the data from Neuron writer(surferSEO competitor), the content length is based on the competitors as well as the outline and terms.

Hey everyone,

I'm a long-time lurker and love seeing the case studies/success stories of the people here. So, I thought I'd share my experience building an affiliate site from $0 to $3,000 per month.

I don't plan on selling on the site anytime soon. I'm happy using the free cash flow to pay my mortgage and car payments.

Full transparency: I didn't intend to reach $3k/m. I planned to hit $1k/m and sell it, but things changed, I guess.

I'll keep the breakdown beginner-friendly and as detailed as possible without giving away too much about my website. Although, I'm sure some of you will find it, haha!

Let's dive into it!

Stats about the website:

• Expired domain: $350.
• DR: 32
• Current traffic: 15,000 - 18,000 per month.
• Number of articles: 143
• Niche/vertical: Nutra (male audience).
• Geo: US only (the products I rank for aren't available in the UK/Aus).
• Hosting: $15/m
• Plugins: $50/m
• Tools: $60/m

All in, I invested $500-$600. I made some mistakes early on with hosting that initially hiked my premiums, but I managed to sort that out.

Steps I took to decide on the niche:

This is your preference, I guess. My thinking was to find the best mid-range offers with low competition. When I say low competition, I mean ranking against Amazon and parasite pages rather than full affiliate sites with a long history.

The fewer affiliates I had to compete with, the easier my life was. I wanted to keep my investments low, so I wasn't planning on buying any links or using anything other than AI content.

1. I decided to pursue the men's health space. Firstly, I'm a guy, so I could write for this audience much easier than if I were competing for women's health products. I love pampering as much as the next guy, but I'll leave deep-dive reviews to the professionals.

2. I specifically focused on men 40+, so imagine anti-ageing products, testosterone boosters, sexual health -- that kind of thing.

3. My keyword research technique was a combination of reverse engineering any affiliates in my space and using Ahrefs wildcards. I had never used the wildcard feature in Ahrefs, but it's SUPER useful for finding longer-tail keywords with less competition. I'd focus on terms with 50-100 searches per month. I didn't care for high levels of traffic because of the mixed intent. I wrote review-based content, of course, but I supplemented it with commercial-intent terms.

• How do I stop X from happening?
• How can I do X as a man over 50?
• Why has my testosterone dropped now that I'm over 40?

These are just random examples. If a keyword had 10-20 searches but the intent was 'I'm ready to buy', then I'd target it.

My suggestion (if you're a beginner) is to write about something you understand. Remember, affiliate marketing is about conversions, not traffic. The more you understand your users' pain points, the more you can program your AI tools to help them achieve that.

My content strategy and the tools I used:

My content strategy was really simple: publish every single day. I used a split of commercial-intent keywords (maybe 30-40%) and review-based keywords.

I didn't want to go down the 'best' type keywords. I didn't have enough solid offers to make comparison tables worthwhile. It also meant I could focus on 'vs' keywords with my small handful of products. A lot of the things I ranked for tried to solve a similar problem.

So I'd pit them against each other. If someone converted for either product, I still win.

I used a combination of a customGPT and Cuppa. Again, I wanted to keep my investment low, and Cuppa has the lowest subscription available for an AI writer that I've found online. I think subscriptions start at $15/m and my cost per article worked out at $0.02 lol.

cuppa.ai (note: I'm not an affiliate or trying to make a commission—it's here for you to check if you want).

1. I'd programmatically batch 'review' content in Cuppa, i.e., vs pages or review pages. I'm able to do this because the headers are the same. So, I set my header structure for one page and then used it throughout the project.

2. Once my content was ready, I'd start to humanize the output. Product reviews need to feel as if a human has written them. So I trained my custom GPT to speak as if it had previous experience with whatever the product is/was.

I won't give away my prompt but, if you want to combine Cuppa with ChatGPT, try doing:

1. Interview techniques to prompt the output to become more self-reflective.
2. Ask questions with timeframes (i.e., how did you feel using X this month?
3. Ask to insert opinions, first-hand ratings, and comparisons.
4. Make it casual and use emotive language (remember... selling the product).

I'd do this section-by-section to refine Cuppa's output. What people get wrong is they take AI generated content and hope it ranks (which it might) but, I wanted my content to RANK AND CONVERT.

It would take me 30 minutes per article to edit (per day). So I could EASILY publish an article per day without any hassle.

Even if you're working a 9-5, you could get up an hour earlier to publish a piece of content.

Timelines (for the impatient... like me)

I set a milestone of 6 months to make my first $500 from the site. It could've flopped. Don't get me wrong, I was under no illusion this could've not worked.

With that out of the way, here's the progress of the site:

One thing to note, sometimes I'd target a term which I thought had low search volume but would randomly generate a flurry of traffic for a few months straight. I haven't been in the space long enough to know if things were/are seasonal but, that's why my jumps are sometimes aggressive.

I expected growth to be pretty linear and gradual.

It was tough for me to see nothing for 3 months but when that first commission came through... I thought to myself 'I'll stick it out and see what happens' lol.

I know there's likely going to be your traditional 'this didn't happen' responses. And that's totally fine. But all I'd say is try it and see what happens. Don't dismiss something before you've tested to see if it works or not. I was the same. I'd dismiss everything and stay sceptical which... made me miss out on money.

My goal now?

See where it can go. It's creeping in on $4,400/m right now (I'm in month 18). I've started to switch up my traffic sources slightly (testing Google ads, FB ads for newsletter sign-ups, etc). If I can get it to $5k/m and let it sit there, I'd call that a huge success.

I'm happy to answer any questions (if there are any) but, if not, I hope this encourages people to give things a shot and see what happens.

Cheers!

I've worked in affiliate marketing off and on for many years, but never with Amazon's affiliate program, which I know many (most?) of you use.

So this should be an easy question for you guys.

I know of an ecommerce merchant with a pretty strong online presense. Say they sell sinks and showerheads. And most of their ecommerce business is through their website (although they also sell those products on Amazon).

They have OTHER products (say, towels and rugs) that are topically related but they have found that fulfilling orders for these seondary lines isn't a priority for them.

So although their product pages for towels and rugs are raining fairly well (not as well as the showerheads, faucets, etc, but not bad), when the consumer lands on those pages he/she gets a "product not currently available" message on those pages.

In other words, they are focused on their core products, and they still offer the secondary products, but only through Amazon.

My question: If they put affiliate links on their own product pages for towels, rugs, etc and point those links to the same products on Amazon, would this be a violation of Amazon's TOS?

Hello,

I love reading stories of people's journeys here so here is my part. woke up to a $200 charge from the Dreamhost for another year of renewal of their services. So Today marks one year of my blogging journey. Here are some Stats from Analytics;

Total Users - 36k

Biggest day was 96 users

Google search console Stats;

Total Impressions 528k

Total clicks 32.8k

Average CTR 6.2%

Average position 9.2

My website and Why I started this:

I watched all seasons of Shark Tank US and after each episode, I'd go to the Shark Tank recap website and check how those companies are doing now. I tried searching for the Indian version of the show but nothing like that existed so I decided to create one.

Here is my website

The HIGHS:

TBF all I did was to get the website up and start writing content and made sure that my score on SEO was in the 90s and that worked (briefly at least lol). the new season of Shark Tank India started in January and I started pumping content the same night the episodes aired. In the morning it was validated and on Google and I was getting visitors.

I MADE IT, I remember the feeling in February of this year when I was getting anywhere from 500 to 900 visitors a day on the website. Mind you I was also putting in about 20-30 hours of work a week alongside of my full-time job but it was so worth it.

The LOWs;

Google update hit in March, I also got super sick and was in the hospital so I stopped working on the site first two weeks mainly because I was on medication and sleeping most of the time. I checked the website a week later and my traffic was down to under 100 people a day and it was going down very fast. it stabilized at around 50 visitors a day mid-April.

Also, some work stuff happened and my car died a week later at the worst imaginable place but that's another story. In short, March was the worst month I had in probably the last 6 years lol

Last 6 months:

I decided to just keep my head down and keep working and completing the project. It felt like a chore when I was pumping content but I slowed down and started writing things on my own timeline. Summer was here and I had less time to work on it anyway so I decided imma slow down and get back at it during Fall/Winter. I do really enjoy just checking out companies, and searching up people to see if I can find any information so I do consider this a hobby now.

My new articles are taking a while to show up on Google search and rankings are not great.

Future:

I'm 48 articles away from completing the project until the new season so the plan is to write those in the next couple of months. I would also go over the companies before the new season airs and update the articles accordingly so tons of work ahead in the next 3 months. The good news is I can get back into the routine. I enjoyed the summer but I usually do not like going out in winter so I would have more time to work on it and I'm looking forward to it.

Final Goal:

While financially I don't think this would be successful, It will help me professionally in the future. I'm very likely to keep this up and maintain it to see how it goes(or until I find a new thing to work on). As I said it's a hobby at this point.

Thank you for reading an I hope Y'all are having a good day:)

Hi. Apologies if this is a noob question (and if so, I hope somebody can quickly answer it without taking up too much time).

I just paid $750 for two links. I'm trying to figure out whether these links are good or not.

Are these two metrics important for determining the quality of a backlink?

• DR greater than 20 (Ahrefs)
• Search traffic greater than 500 (Ahrefs)

I found those two metrics from one of jamesackerman1234's case studies. It really makes a lot of sense.

The two links I bought are 70+, but the search traffic from ahrefs is 0 (exactly 0!).

So does that mean those links are essentially spam links?

Please I would much appreciate answers!

Hi all - some of you may remember my previous posts where I discussed prgress on a blog that I set up following u/Philreddit7's technique in targeting low-competition keywords. While my 3-monthly Reddit updates stopped, I continued blogging in the background.

Today, I noticed I had written my 100th article, which is way fewer than I had hoped by this stage, but having a full-time job and life just doing what life does, that's where I am. So, I fancied writing a little post sharing how it's all going!

Has my approach changed?

Not drastically. I still target longtail keywords or questions on Google without great choices to look at and use that as my basis. I then try fleshing it out using various keyword-searching tools (mainly Keyword Surfer) to bulk out the main questions I should answer in one article. I know Google hates keyword stuffing, and that's not my plan, but I like to know similar questions and other things people are searching for to build out my article structure.

I have started writing my articles longer, aiming more around 1,500 words as before I was writing around 1,000 words - this seems to be helping. I also begin each article title with the main keyword as I had read Google likes.

I now add an FAQ section at the bottom of articles. I don't know whether it does anything, but I see lots of blogs do it, and it looks smart. Similarly, I now drop the first paragraph case as I read; it captures the reading more (I'm not sure this is true, but I like it).

I have been rewriting old articles that were not performing well and updating them to this new style, and many have improved quite a lot!

Numbers overall for this past year

Overall in the past 12 months (Google): 15.7k clicks, 895k impressions, Average CTR 1.8%, Average position 13.6. So far, in the last 30 days, I have had 4,600 sessions.

Overall, in the past 12 months (Ahrefs - I can't do the full year without a paid version): Domain Rating (DR) 2.3, URL Rating (UR) 4.7, Backlinks 40, Ref. domains 23, Keywords 3.3k.

Article positions: I have 11 in the top position on Google Search, 7 in the 2-10 bracket, and about 30 in the 11-20 bracket, with the rest not doing too well.

My blog was pretty lacklustre for traffic until around 6/7 months, when there was a much larger curve in my performance. I have seen a tiny down-spike for the first time, which I attribute to the latest Google update.

General Reflections and Next Steps

I am not sure this project will ever be profitable, not now with Google's 'AI Overview', which removes the point of reaching top rankings on Google. However, I still really enjoy it and am learning so much about my topic, which I love. This is my top tip; otherwise, you will burn out and give up.

I am still terrible at Social Media, but this will be my next adventure to try and grow a returning audience, as I mostly have new visitors from Google searches. This will probably be Facebook and Pinterest, but I am interested in YouTube! If anyone has any tips for being effective via social media, that would be helpful, as I'm hopeless!

I am interested in connecting with other sites and possibly guest writing something or promoting some of my articles on other sites/businesses. This is all new to me, but I'm really eager to diversify my traffic, especially since I mentioned that Google does not look like a good space for old-school blogs.

I'm considering adding new AI features to my website to give it a new 'function'. I'm still exploring and may add a Chatbot for users to ask questions about my niche tailored, where an AI 'expert' could answer questions and perhaps point them to my articles with the same/similar keywords, but I have no idea where to start. Any tips would be appreciated, as when it comes to AI, I figured if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

Finally...

If you made it this far, I will continue writing and see what the next year (and 100 articles) brings me. My aim is when (and if) I get to 10,000 sessions a month, I will put Ads on the website to garner a little beer money, but let's see!

I always welcome tips from anyone, so please do feel free to reach out! But just as an FYI for those selling services, I ain't buying.

Cheers!

Hey folks,

Never posted here before, but found so much inspiration and ideas during the time this community thrived.

I felt nostalgic the other day of a community that supported each other.

I want to try to be a voice of positivity. I've been in SEO for nearly 10 years, and the last 5 were spent enjoying the sweet nectar of niche sites. Those are definitely my best years and I am trying my hardest to not have to switch careers.

Since HCU, I think the biggest part of JustStart has given up on building their websites or starting new ones, but I want to let you know that there's still hope for this type of business.

I think majority of people who left this business have made the biggest mistake - it's like with any business - you double down during the dips when most people bail. I see more opportunity now than ever.

I know I am one of the rare folks who managed to recover from HCU (not 100%, but enough that this still remains to be my top income source).

Proof of recovery: https://ibb.co/vdryNnM

What did I do to recover:
-Disavowed hundreds of toxic and low quality backlinks.
-Trimmed nearly 100 pages that weren't ranking (built these due to "topical authority").
-Improved internal linking for each page (every page now has a minimum of 7 internal links).
-Added a community component (which is active and ranking for some keywords too).
-Added a 'services' component (it just generates leads which I end up selling, I am not actually fulfilling the services).
-Homepage looks like a legitimate business and not a blog.
-Added merch - it now looks like an eCommerce store, although I am selling only a few items here and there.
-Added 30-50 high quality backlinks - these are not bought ones, but hard earned ones. Spent 300+ hours on them, but now I have top websites linking to me.

Even though this is a rare recovery, I've started a ton more websites since the beginning of this year. 3 are now in the range of 5k and 10k in organic traffic. Not a lot, but they are climbing slow.

Others are... well not doing that well, but on a lot of these I've just tested a lot of stuff to find a perfect formula of how much AI content I can use etc.

And the perfect amount is fairly low, but still enough to boost my production quite a bit.

Happy to answer any questions you may have and help out.

Don't ask me to share my website, please, I am just not willing to do that.

Hi all,

on Dec 19th I launched DataAnalyst.com, and bringing you the 16th update on the progress.

Downsides of being a solo operator is when things get hectic in life, there will be a lot less time to spend projects. Missed last few update with day job going cray, but I'm back with a brief overview of June, July and August - it'll be a longer one, so pour yourself a cuppa, slippers on and get comfy.

Want to make sure I document the journey, and keep myself honest, so each month (altho now little bit less frequent) I will be making a post about the statistics, progress, some thoughts and what are the next steps I want to be focusing on.

While the main purpose for the post is to bring everyone along on the journey, I do think that members of r/juststart might benefit from the site, especially those looking to start an online project on the side.

So, just a reminder that early stages vision is to become the #1 job board for data analysts - hand-picking interesting data analyst job opportunities across industries.

DataAnalyst.com has been online for just over 20 months, and we're bringing new, hand curated data analyst jobs onto the site daily. As it stands, we've published over 2,300 data analyst jobs in total, all of them including a salary range.

Let's dive right in:

2023 Monthly Statistics update

2024 Monthly Statistics update

General Observations

an Update a day keeps your traffic away

Last time I was discussing the impact of the Google Core Update - March edition, and that it's finally hit DA as well.

Over April and May, it was just a continuation, with Google Search traffic going down, with the site taking around 40% hit on traffic, and lost around 35% of keywords (from its peak) that the site was previously ranking for.

The good news is that over June, July and first half of August I've seen a recovery, back to similar numbers as at the start of the year, with August actually eclipsing those numbers.

The bad news is that there was another Google Core Update - August edition, that's already showing a negative impact on Google Search traffic, I guess it's time to brace myself for impact, again.

on Showing up in search results

On the other hand, for the last 2 months, DataAnalyst.com has consistently showed up in the Top 3 search results for the "data analyst jobs" keyword in the United States. At some point it was even ranking n.1 (yes, I've made screenshots)

I take that as a big win - with virtually $0 spend on content (my only expense is the tech platform), I'm pretty happy to see the site showing up so high in the results, means that something had to be done right.

With all that, were still able to cross an all time high in terms of unique visitors, still contribute to almost 28,000 job applications made, and still grow our newsletter subscriber base.

So, where are people coming from?

Organic search - 53%

Direct - 37%

Social - 6%

Other - 4%

Overall, I expected to see a summer slump, which didn't really materialise, so it's nice to see month on month growth.

An additional learning on running a Newsletter - since I took pause with the newsletter over the summer, I was quite excited to get the next edition of the newsletter out. What I didn't really foresee is that going couple of months without sending it, would have a trickle down effect on the deliverability, almost as if it was throttled to prevent spam abuse.

If you haven't received this month's edition, I apologise, and I'll figure out a way to get it over to you.

On Monetization

I decided to start offering an exclusive partnership with a sponsor, that wouldn't be a detriment to on site experience.

It would be one highlighted sponsor per month, on the whole site + newsletter - this could command a much higher fee, and would expand potential clients, from only employers, to education providers, analytics tools etc looking to target analysts.

The added benefit is the network of both DataAnalyst.com AND BusinessAnalyst.com, where for the time being I can offer same BusinessAnalyst placement as part of the package.

With that in mind, I've downloaded a dump of all companies/orgs paying for Google Ads, over the last 12 months.

Particularly targeting same keywords that I can offer them direct audience to, through the site. (i.e Data Analyst / Data Analytics + courses, certificate, tools, bootcamps etc - I'm not going for all the long-tails for now, just the key subset)

Just over the last 8 months, that makes around 120 organisations (ranging from educational institutes, startups offering data analytics tools, to bootcamps and career tools providers) who target some of these specific keywords, and have actively spend on getting those ads up in search results.

That's the next job for me, to do an active outreach and see where it makes the most sense to go from here. This is something that I wanted to do over the summer, but day-job and additional responsibilities got int he way.

In the meantime, I did already agree one sponsorship / partnership, which is planned for early next year.

It's time to start building out that calendar.

On Content

I'm consistently thinking how I can add more valuable content on the site - not just on salary trends, or interviews, but also around education.

After-all, career growth and education go hand in hand.

There are of course cases where people were able to find a data analyst job without a formal degree, I think it would be very fair to say that in today's cutthroat challenging job environment, having formal qualification is a must have.

Whether it is for an entry level role, or for people who are looking to transition from their exiting role within an organisation (although in those cases, having a network and trust of colleagues around forms a big part of the equation).

With that in mind, what's coming in the next couple of weeks or so, is an Educational Directory.

Simply put, a directory of all (or close to all) Data Analytics degrees in the United States.

It will be structured around the degree award

• Associate
• Bachelor's
• Master's

and also will be browsable by states, on campus/online curriculum.

I hope that people will find this directory useful, as you'll be able to see all the degrees in one place, with links to curriculum as well as financial considerations.

There is also an angle where I'd like to use this directory to reestablish contact with Educational Institutions, establish partnerships and have both sites listed in their directories - to the benefit of both students, and sites' authority.

On The Salary Guide H1 2024 update

With approximately 2,200+ data analyst jobs listed on the site up to this date, we analyze data to develop data analyst salary guide.  

The Salary Guide has now been updated and published to include data for H1 2024.

You can find the data analyst salary breakdown, by these areas:

Industry

• breakdown by specific industry, overall minimum, maximum, median and average salary + salary breakdown by years of experience

Years of experience

• breakdown of all jobs on the site by years of experience
• entry level (0 - 3 years), senior (3 - 5 years), lead (5+ years)

State

• this is where it gets tricky. Now, as it usually is with this kind of exercise, lumping the data all together you come up with an insane range.  

On the other hand, if you split the data in 52 different ways, you'll get a whole different set of issues where N is not large enough to draw any conclusions - and for some states, there's simply no data at all (not to single any state out, but I'm looking at you, Wyoming).

Company view

• on each company page, we include average data analyst salaries at all the companies that are listed on the site.

As the site grows, and the number of jobs on the site increases, I believe that I'll be able to bring an addition source of information about salaries, complimenting those already available on other sites.

Day in a life of a Data Analyst, with Joe and Arun

Another two interviews from our series has been published earlier this week. In these interviews, we aim to share stories and experiences about the route to becoming a data analyst, keeping up with the skillset, recommendations to aspiring data analysts and much more.

Joe is now the Director of Analytics and Data Science at UPMC, and Arun is a Senior Data Scientist at Fulcrum Digital.

Firstly, thank you Joe, and Arun for your time, and sharing your experience, your journey, thoughts and advice with our readers, about growing one's career in the data analytics space.

We also touch on the Question of the Year: How does AI impact the Data Analyst role?

Make sure you read both interviews on the blog, they are absolutely worth it.

And now, let's jump in.

After starting his career in nursing, Joe is now the Director of Analytics and Data Science at UPMC's Heart and Vascular Institute

Speaking with Joe, we got to talk about his extensive experience - and to be honest, I really can't properly cover in a few paragraphs here.

So, let me provide a few bulletpoints that Joe covers:

• self-education to improve patient outcomes
• the importance of networking, seizing opportunities, and luck
• how the role will change as your career progresses
• what makes him excited about the healthcare sector right now

And two of my favourite highlights from our conversation (on using data to drive business decisions, and on leadership):

On using data to drive business decisions:

"The insights are easy, it’s getting them to drive business decisions that is difficult. What you truly need to get people to act on insights is trust.

Trust takes a while to develop but some ways to establish early trust are the following:

1. Get quick wins in a new position.

Do this by finding the low hanging fruit and knocking those projects off the to do list

2) Overdeliver.

In other words, be as fast as you can with turning projects around

3) Communicate.

Initially, don’t worry about overcommunicating (yes, you can overcommunicate), but when you are new to a role, be sure to keep people updated and ask as many questions as you need."

On leadership:

"Being a leader requires a very different skillset to what's required from individual contributors, and early in one's career.

Everyone can be a leader, it doesn’t matter what your formal title is.

I started studying leadership in an individual contributor (IC) role, 3 years before I got a formal managerial role.

I did this through reading, listening to podcasts, and then applying those concepts and ideas to my daily life in both work and home.

So, it’s important to realize that leadership is something everyone can do in any role.

Making that mindset shift makes being able to jump from a technical IC to a managerial role much easier because it is much more important to lead than to manage.

Managing, in my view, are the actions associated with formal procedure in an organization, typically related to human resources. These are standard and mostly check boxes and are easily navigated if one has developed an ability to lead.

I will say, leadership is a constant teacher. You must be willing to be humble and learn from when you make mistakes to get better at it."

How Arun went from LinkedIn networking, a data analytics internship at eBay, to a career shift into a senior data scientist role at Fulcrum Digital

On how his data analytics role equipped him to be a better data scientist

"All data roles in general are partners of the business.

There is a lot of emphasis on being aligned with the business teams and strongly supporting them.

As a data scientist there is a lot of emphasis on building predictive models which involves doing Exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, building machine learning/AI models, model evaluation, deployment and maintenance.

But the key to all of these things is making sure the problem statement and the goal is understood along with ensuring the data cleaning and preparation are done in the best possible manner.

So being an experienced data analyst helped me in the areas of SQL, building visualizations using tools like Tableau, DOMO and also having strong connections with the business stakeholders and to deliver valuable timely insights which helped me be a well-rounded data scientist."

On a data analyst role in different types organisations:

"There are two types of career paths in the field of data:

1. Working for consulting companies like Mu sigma, Fractal, EXL, McKinsey etc.
2. Working directly for product companies such as TESCO, Meta, Unilever, Pepsico, Google etc.

Choosing either of the two depends on what kind of career paths that you want to pursue as both provide different kinds of career paths.

Consulting provides exposure to a variety of analytics projects across domains and industries while working with Product companies helps you gain a lot of knowledge about the product and grow well too."

BusinessAnalyst.com - brief Statistics update

As I've mentioned before, I launched BusinessAnalyst.com - where I'm looking to replicate step by step what I've done over with DataAnalyst. The overall idea is to create a network of sites, benefiting from the same infrastructure, serving and helping different career paths, and making a collaboration with organisations much more appealing (after-all, most companies who hire for data analysts also look for business analysts and vice versa).

Arguably, this might not make much sense seeing that DA still hasn't brought any consistent revenue in, but on the other hand, I can reuse the whole tech stack and structures already in place, halve my cost per project, while doubling the surface area to catch me some luck.

Both Data Analyst and Business Analyst roles share a lot of similarities. So if you are looking for role that gives you exposure to data, going the Business Analyst route could also provide an opportunity to gain experience, and improve your data analytics skillset, albeit it would be a smaller part of your role. It's something that you can build on in the future, and use as a stepping stone in your pursuit toward a data analyst career.

General Observations:

After the very slow start, the site is continuing its organic growth (albeit at a glacial pace).

My main "beef" with the site, is simply how drastically different Google behavior is, when comparing to DataAnalyst.com.

DA indexed pages: 4,600 / 5,000 total BA indexed pages: 1,700 / 4,000 total

DA indexed jobs: 1,600 / 2,200 total BA indexed jobs: 123 / 1,600 total (WTF?)

DA ranked keywords: 6,100 BA ranked keywords: 9 (WTF squared)

I'm using same on-page SEO, same off-page SEO, same metadata structure, same job schema structure, using the same indexing tools, and yet, results are night and day.

I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND.

Content:

I've naturally progressed with the content on the site, recently also adding a comprehensive business analyst salary guide.

As mentioned above, there's now a whole structure around Educational content - Universities offering Associate, Bachelor's and Master's business analytics degrees.

A case could certainly be made that one can start in in business analyst career from pretty much most business related degrees, but at least for these experimental purposes, I've made the call to focus on Business Analytics (as the analytics part would enable people to broaden their skillset)

Things in the pipeline

• New data analyst jobs, added daily
• Figuring out what to do with the newsletter
• Monthly US data analyst market insights
• Improving the overall site experience (this one is a never ending activity)
• Continuing to bring you Data Analysts across their experience levels, to share tips, tricks and their thoughts

3 ways you could help

1. Looking for a new challenge? Check out the website - I'm adding new jobs daily
2. Looking to hire a data analyst to your team? Do you know anyone looking to hire? Shoot me a message on Reddit (or alex@dataanalyst.com) and I'll upgrade your first listing for free.
3. Looking to advertise? Now you can. Drop me an email and I can share the media kit.

Thank you all again, and see you soon.

Alex

Hey guys hope all of you are doing great At first i would like to specify why i created my app Dailies.

The inspiration behind Dailies came from my own experiences. I used to feel guilty about enjoying weekends with friends, thinking I hadn’t earned it. So, I developed this app not just to track productivity but also to help myself and others eliminate that guilt by rewarding ourselves when we truly deserve it. Now, it's not just about doing things—it's about rewarding yourself because you've earned it.

it was very hard to for me to create an app as i have never done something similar before and i do not have any experience doing so, i remember i was stuck in the phase of only designing my app, don't get me wrong its very crucial to so but for me i know i was so focused on it because i was afraid to get into the hard stuff the technical stuff and i wanted to build it alone and by myself. So one day i just started coding following some tutorials from here and there and tried to understand the basics, and to not get stuck on the tutorials hell i said to my self at least let me just build this small portion of my app, and the moment I'm done i will go to something else. By doing this i have found myself in a 7 months period with a working app and then published it.

The main lessons i learned are :

1. it is okay to be afraid, however do not let your fear be debilitating...
2. so not focus on the bigger picture, always start small and keep doing so until you have something you can share with people
3. there is no such thing as mastery, so just create something that works and something that is perfect as you will never do so
4. there is no perfect way, i remember i was looking for the best technology or programming language to create my app, just find one and go start and do not look back

Now i have some downloads in my app and I'm verry happy that i created something from just an idea that i had. Thank you for taking time to read this and hope the best for all of you

Here's the deal.

The Income School method is dead and the only one refusing to admit that is Riki since his company depends on that.

But that's a fact. He has 240k subs and people barely watch his videos.

Back in the day, a video of their would rack 30k views easily.

Why?

It was hard enough to make this happen when it worked (back when they were two instead of one) and now it's simply impossible.

The fact is GOOGLE is PENALIZING SEO-optimized sites that have no DR 90 or something.

What I mean by that is this:

if you use the soup method (like every IS site), google treats you like spam.

And it's been 11 months since that happened. And every subsequent update is REAFFIRMING THAT.

Right now there is the August update that is essentially looking for sites missed billed old-school style during 2024 only to kill them.

==================

I was screaming this back in Sep, Oct, Nov last year to the IS channel, but not one cared.

They all thought recovery was coming, but my intuition told me this cancer is going to stick.

Do not pay for SEO services right now as no one really knows what to do. (It was scammy before and know people are just scammy + clueless).

I am talking about everyone.

Back in the day, I used to believe Income School because their strategy worked and they would show it constantly

Now nothing works (at least nothing public) and they show nothing.

The guy is bragging about some pathetic YT channel that doesn't even have 2k subs.

The truth of the matter guys is that this industry is dying if not dead already.

And Google doesn't seem to mind it. It's giving all the traffic to reddit.

This months Reddit reached 1 billion views

It's growth last year was the largest in the history of the Internet because google puts it on top of everything.

=-=============

Sadly, it's GG.

But the grifters will keep grifting.

Hi everyone, full time lurkeyer here but I've been watching for the past 4 years and been inspired to create my own site from this community.

I've been working on my site for the past year, and until recently I hadn't made any money. Everyone said it was a niche that isn't good to get into, but I went on anyway as I'm passionate about building it anyway.

I've had times where I completely gave up on it because there was littlest gain for the amount of time I put in.

However, I really pushed through despite my doubts as the summer is the peak season for the site, so I put my head down in the winter to produce helpful content and guides. Each time I posted I would see a nice lil spike of clicks in GSC a few days after, as they ranked pretty quickly. As some guides have been published for a while and I updated them to be more helpful and have far more unique imagery, those have increased ranking over time to page 1 and some top positions.

The site uses affiliate to monetis, I'm way off anything like Mediavine as traffic is small numbers.

It got its first booking in mid-July wooo!!! Genuinely woke up and had the experience I've dreamed of, I made money passively overnight. It wasn't big numbers as you can see so I can't retire today lol, but I achieved my goal of literally making a penny and I was super happy.

The very next day I saw one booking come in, and it was much larger than the previous by X10 so made a lot more money, and I was over the freaking moon.

And then another booking trickled in the next day!!! When it rains at pours! I'm more motivated than ever to keep working away on it and have bigger goals for next summer. This is definitely the most motivating part of the process to finally see a result.

Keep believing in yourself. You will get there patience is key :) and when one result comes in, more will follow! You got this

I am looking for a newsletter service that will accept my gmail address as a sender.

I tried Sender (doesn't accept it), mailchimp (doesn't accept my newsletter because it talks about money), etc.

Do you have any suggestions?

Thank you!

Had a site that was doing well and got hit by HCU. Still ranked first page for most of my higher volume queries, but not high enough to get clicks so traffic has fallen off of a cliff.

HCU only increased my appetite so I started putting in major work to this site hoping that once the algorithm got updated I could benefit. Almost a year later and that obviously hasn't happen.

About two months ago I decided to take a break from SEO for a few months while I relaxed and didn't let the SEO stress affect me so much.

But I'm back in.

I bought a domain similar to the old one, to be honest probably even better, and am in the process now of rebuilding the site.

I developed some stellar works flows and automations for my content creation process and I think that within this niche I have a strong possibility of becoming an authority source.

This niche involved a variety of brands / products / companies and I had reached out to many of these brand's PR and media departments directly and set up relationships with them for content. I had many of the brands tell me how much they liked my original site and how helpful it was. But apparently Google felt that it wasn't helpful, go figure!

So I have direct access to content that isn't yet available elsewhere online, a pipeline for getting it curated and written up to be posted on the site, and some sweet automation workflows for posting to social media.

I also mixed in some of the alt-SEO strategies that popped up from major influencers post HCU such as building out a Facebook page with a Likes campaign, building a couple of different sites up to thousands of followers for pretty damn cheap, I have social profiles on other sites with all of the content syndicated to be posted when the new WordPress post is created. Nothing that uncommon, but I made the process with Make.com rather than a tool like HootSuite or Later because those are expensive as hell and Make let's me fully customize the process for like $15 a month with nearly unlimited use for my use case.

I have some AI tools to help me take the content of my WordPress posts, curate the content into a 30 second or so long video, and will get those posted to TikTok and YouTube. This content is more informational rather than attempting to go viral. Any extra views or clicks that can be gained from this are welcome, but I'm not expecting these to really be a major source of traffic. If anything, I could see the content from these videos being seen as super helpful allowing me to build decent followings on these platforms directly and that helping transform my revenue sources. A decent following a companies would easily pay for partnered content within this niche.

So it's time to give it another go. There aren't many competitors in this space, it was actually quite shocking when I first decided to look it up. It's a very common niche, ubiquitous across everyday life, and I think even with the BS we're seeing from Google, the overall scope of digital marketing and media has me in a viable position.

I've just done the basics so far, getting WordPress installed, adding my plugins and getting those setup, installing the theme and changing all the settings.

Next up is adding the pages, starting with a drip-feed approach for them to get published. I believe Google has directly spoken about sites with a large number of posts or pages all getting published within a very short amount of time being an obvious sign that something fishy may be going on, so even though I have ~75 or so static pages ready to go, I'm going to hold off and slowly build the site up over time rather than flipping the switch and having everything be active all at once.

Going to focus on better content organization this time around as I had some of those things on my to do list last time around that I never got to that I think could be beneficial. Categorizing posts and pages better, showcasing related posts and content better, and how I write blog posts about the more upper funnel style of content rather than the direct brand / company / product specific content I had been producing previously.

I also have another 60+ domains that I purchased solely to create niche sites for and obviously that's far too much work for me to do on my own and with the current situation the viability of them may be minimal, but I know I've got some winners in there, one right now getting ~100 hits a day from Google and it's just a bunch of pictures on pages with no content. So I'm going to look towards optimizing that to be better suited for the viewers and the stuff they're looking for to see if I can generate an increase in rank.

Overall plan of mine, a long term dream goal, would be to get some of these lower tiered sites to rank and generate lower levels of revenue, attempt to sell them for whatever multiples people are paying these days, and invest in larger and more sustainable projects that aren't beholden entirely to the whims of the Google algorithm.

Nearly 20 years in experience with eCommerce, Amazon FBA, eBay, Shopify, WordPress, SEO, digital marketing, PPC, drop shipping, etc, so I have all the skills necessary to really make some profit off of these projects.

Going to try and use this subreddit as a way to keep myself motivated, sharing updates about progress, ideas I have, things that aren't working, and more.

Even when I was on a longer break from making niche sites over the last few years I'd always come here to read posts and case studies and income updates. Sad to see Google has wrecked so many people's income streams and motivation that the sub is hardly even used anymore.

This case study is based on my very first website. I learned a lot from other case studies and hope to inspire some other just starters with my post :). Beforehand I had barely any knowledge on content creation. I'm still learning and would like to learn more about site creation and affiliate marketing.

My goal was to start a fun project about a fun niche and have it generate enough income to pay for its own hosting costs while providing me content creation learning experiences. If I could succeed on this I knew that it should be possible to earn more serious income through content creation & affiliate marketing just by scaling up or starting new projects. I put about 100 - 150 hours work in this project so far. This includes researching which webhost to use, which CMS etc.. I did all the writing, images and web development myself.

Statistics:

To be honest I'm quite happy with the result. So far I achieved my goal which is nice. Although I must say it felt like a grind. Especially the first few months at which I didn't receive traffic at all. Also the hours that I put in this project are way too much. If I would have spend those hours at a normal job I would've probably earned way more.

Last half year I didn't do anything and barely looked at the statistics. Untill I suddenly received +100 euro income in my bank account without doing anything. Felt quite good. August so far is already outperforming July (not in the graph). My traffic seems to be only going up without me actually doing anything. Is this due to the site's age? I'm confident that my content is good but it still surprises me since I do not have any backlinks at all to my website. Also about 5 posts seem to generate 80% of the traffic.

Whats next?

I could use some advice on what to do next. Should I spend more hours on this site or create something new? I still have content ideas however the niche is very small and also written in my local language which makes the upscaling potential perhaps limited.

I also have an idea about starting another site about tech tools that I work with in my day to day job. It has a lot more scaling potential but also has way more competition and saturation. How can I decide where to put my focus?

I also struggle to motivate myself to be honest. Every hour which I put in this project so far earns about 1/15 of income compared to my job. However this is getting better and better each day considering I'm still making money from work I put in last year.

I've reached a point where I'm convinced that the internet is overflowing with valuable information on how to succeed online. The problem is, most of it is just a rehashing of the same old ideas.

For a while, I was stuck in a loop of watching videos from popular creators like IncomeSchool. But the more I watched, the more I realized that they were all saying the same thing. It was like being trapped in some kind of time loop, where the same ideas kept repeating themselves over and over.

The truth is, most of these "gurus" have become stuck in their own ways. They're no longer building and experimenting; they're just theorizing and pontificating. I recently tried to watch one of their videos, but I just couldn't bring myself to finish it.

So, what's the secret to success? For me, it boils down to a few simple principles:

• Avoid crowded niches unless you have a unique perspective or angle.
• Focus on specific, targeted keywords that you can actually rank for.
• Create a massive amount of high-quality content.
• Build relationships and earn quality backlinks from authoritative sources.
• Be patient and persistent – success rarely happens overnight.

This approach has worked for me, even though I've never been obsessed with backlinks. Everything else is just noise and distraction.

Hey All! I had an idea for a website and application that promotes competition both with friends and globally.

Premise extends to picking (like head to head style) who will win certain sporting matchups (niche-ish sport), then it'll have league and general public standings. I want to make money from this, but it doesn't have to be my day job. Goal will be to make this into a ~20K a year venture.

I've got the mock for website and mobile done and had a high level idea on how to promote. I'd like to fund/build it all myself, but haven't looked too far into how long or how much so still open to sponsors and partnerships. I would have to update the website close to every week at the least, and it would need some backend database and hosting for the league tables, users, friend list ability etc.

I'm looking for guidance on how to position myself strategically, questions I've been asking but haven't researched yet:

• General - How do I even structure my thinking!? The stuff below is how I've been thinking about it but what considerations should I be making, and how do I prioritize them? Do I need to look into finding a mentor who's done this all before? Or is google/reddit enough?
• Build vs. Buy - Do I spend the time upskilling myself in web & mobile development or do I explore a partnership. Concerns here are this 'business' generating enough to go around.
• Website and Mobile Application - Do I build both? How do they integrate? Is a mobile responsive website better than two seperate things?
• Promotion - I've got content creators in the game I want to approach, I know I'll need to spend some money in SEO, but outside of those, how else should I be promoting? Social media I'd guess but do websites have social presences outside of their website? Like I doubt I'm about to start a youtube channel for this (instead leverage other 'influencers' and their brand).
• Income - Where do I focus my efforts to bring in a constant stream of money? Affiliate marketing? Sponsorships? Advertisements on the website? Maybe tiered plans that unlock more features of the website/game/service?
• Lights On - What should I expect in terms of run costs (does it need a heavy database, where do I host it), how much effort will it take it maintain this?

Completely understandable that half of my thinking above just needs some time, an open notepad and google - but thought I'd just dump it all here in the first instance incase anyone had any ideas or guidance.

Appreciate any support :)

Hi everyone.

Issue: I'm thinking of ditching my current project (A -- see below) and starting another (B), or even a third (C).

Reason: I'm not sure whether I should try to monetise it properly given it's a spiritual site; also, the wellness/spiritual niche is massively saturated with some big players.

Project A:

So, I already have a 'spiritual' blog/site with over 50 posts, two online courses and a book about to be self-published. Focus/categories: spirituality (mainly buddhism), Mind (mainly stuff about the mind and mindfulness/meditation); Wellness (physical and mental wellness). Its really a mix of wellness hacks to make our busy lives simpler/less confusing and stressful, and some deeply siritual teachings, mainly focussed on Buddhist dharma. The unusual/special thing about it is that it incorporates a lot of Thai knowledge and 'flavour'. as I have lived here in Thailand for nearly 20 years; my wife is Thai and an expert in Buddhism and Thai astrology. We work on it together. I was also a monk for a while. 5 months in and the traffic is low, mainly because I have not marketed at all; SEO is all good. I'm really just not sure about the potential for growing the traffic hugely in such a saturated space, or whether making significant amounts of money from it is really ethical. . . Hence the issue.

Project B:

I am an educator who has worked in the UK and internationally in some top schools and am thinking about starting a site for parents specifically aimed at helping provide information for them on how to help their children thrive academically and socially-emotionally. I'd prefer not to go into direct consulting. I call the concept 'eduparenting' -- parents who actively take an interest in the holistic education of their child. Not sure how to monetise this one.

Project C:

Position myself as an expert in international education, especially in Asia. Become a thought leader in this niche. I'd basically be stating my opinions on a range of matters relating to international education, focussing on wider issues and how we are preparing children for the future etc. It could literally be anything. Not sure how to monetise this one either!

I should say here that I do want to end up making a significant passive income from whichever project I follow through on; I'm not doing it as a hobby.

For what it's worth, I'm equally passionate about both the spiritual stuff and the education stuff.

So, what are your recommendations!? :) I'm so confused and going around in circles, so would deeply appreciate any advice.

Thank you!

I’m focusing on helping Notion users Create customized templates using AI Prompts. The idea is to have a tool where you can simply describe what you need (e.g., "I need a project management template with tasks, milestones, and timelines") and the AI will generate a detailed Notion template for you.
I believe this could save a lot of time and effort, especially for those who use Notion extensively for work, study, or personal organization.

Here are a few features I’m thinking of including:

• Custom Template Generation: Describe your needs, and the AI generates a template.
• Template Customization: Edit and tweak the generated templates based on additional prompts.
• Template Library: Access a library of popular and community-generated templates.
• Integration: Seamless integration with your Notion account to directly import and use the templates.

I would love to get your thoughts on this:

1. Do you think this tool would be useful?
2. What features would you find most valuable?
3. Are there any pain points you experience with Notion that this tool could help solve?
4. Would you be willing to pay for such a service? If so, what pricing model would be fair (e.g., subscription, one-time fee)?

Any feedback or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your input!

So, I recently qualified for Mediavine's Journey programme through their Grow plugin. I went through all the onboarding, enabled the script, seemingly no issues. However, ads aren't displaying properly.

When I open my site (on a different browser to check the ad experience), I see an ad at the bottom that says 'want to see fewer ads like this one? Download Grow'. But I don't see any actual ads from companies other than Grow. And there are no sidebar or in-content ads.

I looked at Grow's help pages, but I couldn't seem to figure out what's wrong. I cleared the cache like it suggested, but that didn't help. It also said it could be an issue with my theme not being supported, but it's not giving a list of compatible themes. The only one it mentions is the standard WordPress TwentyTwentyFour theme, which doesn't suit my website's vibe. I put a lot of effort into choosing a theme that suits my brand, and if I'm gonna rebrand the website design to satisfy Grow's requirements, I want a list of compatible themes to choose from.

Also, it doesn't say anything about not seeing ads from other companies. I'm really at a loss here, I worked hard to be eligible for the programme, and I'm currently making less RPM than even Adsense's pitiful offerings. Any help or suggestions will be much appreciated. Even if it's just you suggesting the theme you use if your site works with Grow.

Thanks :)

Hi again,

Around the new year I shared a post about my portfolio of websites leading up to and after the new world of SEO following the HCU.

I was flying high with a consistent 5 figure/month portfolio with just shy of 500k monthly visitors that was reduced to peanuts following the August HCU and the others that came in its wake.

Unfortunately, I don't have much good news to share, and there certainly hasn't been any recoveries. Interestingly, both direct traffic and Bing traffic are up for a few sites, but not nearly enough to make much of a difference after the hits from the big G.

I've made some technical edits, experimented with content pruning/content updates, reduced display ad density, improved affiliate/native placements, worked on some better Web Credibility elements (BJ Fogg, Stanford), and dabbled in a little social media for one of the (formerly) bigger sites.

So far, no dice.

Since then, my sites have pretty much gone into maintenance mode while I focus on some other projects.

I'm curious what folks around here are experiencing with their own sites. From what I'm seeing, my own experience seems to be a fairly common one.

Obviously, the big challenge is replacing the traffic that once came from Google search with some other source. That means you need enough of your former audience using that source with enough intent to click through to your website. I definitely haven't cracked the code for that, and I'm still scratching my head on how or if I'm going to try to approach it.

I'm also putting out some feelers and toying with the idea of finding a partner who may have some different ways of thinking about this than I have - any experience on that front would be interesting to hear about too.

Ideally I'd be able to find someone with experience or knowledge growing traffic through other channels who's interested in a rev share. If that's something you might be interested in, shoot me a message and let's start a conversation.

Hi, I'm curious about how Adsense and Journey by Mediavine compare.

I know bloggers in general say Mediavine is better than Adsense but does this change depending on what you're writing about? For example, Mediavine is heavily geared towards recipes but are the RPMs as good when you're writing financial content?

And speaking of RPM, Journey by Mediavine is also measured by sessions RPM. What's the closest thing to compare this to in Adsense? I see it has Ad RPM, Ad Request RPM, Impression RPM and Page RPM.