About a year ago I created a blog post with title - I hate blogging - in that post I complained about lack of motivation. Well, it has been a year already passed and I haven't complained any more. Before digging deeper in - let me explain:
Back on October 2013 I started adventure called a blog and first of my blog post were a question addressed to myself - Can I Blog 365 days in a row?
Reason I was asking this question - when starting something new - it all seems so exciting, so adventurous. But then comes routine, especially for blogging thing - you see that results are not so great.
It has been already almost 18 months since I started my blog and with a short interruption on May 2014 when I missed 2 days in a row blogging I have been doing this thing - blogging continuously.
Is it hard?
Yes and no. Let me explain - it's hard to produce high quality articles every day. It's not hard to produce low quality articles every day. Simple, right?
During my bloggin career - the quality of content has been a main issue for me. I have created a few guidelines for myself - how to produce a good articles - and one of them is to write a post with minimum of 500 words.
I'm a tech-savvy person - and by writing blog posts I have simple goals of: to attract visitors and monetize my blog.
With help of everyday blogging I have reached two major records:
- Traffic record: 19,798 users in January 2015
- Online Income record: $2,029.67 in December 2014
Right now looking on these numbers, they doesn't seem so high after all, but here is the thing:
When I started my blog I was dreaming of about 6,000 users per month and $40.00 in income / per month. My overall expectations at start have been exceeded greatly.
What's my blogging strategy
At start I had no idea what to write about, I started with random economical reviews, by reviewing some country GDP's and comparing with others.
Since I'm a drupaller I built my blog from scratch using Drupal CMS, just obviously I started to produce articles on How to Drupal.
I'm an expat living abroad in beautiful country of Georgia (South Caucasus), I decided to make blog posts about Georgia, places I have visited, restaurants were I have eaten e.t.c..
I got in love with photography - I started to take photos of all of those places.
I travel frequently so I started to write about my travel experiences. Since I'm travelling I'm staying at hotels.
At this point I started to think I could get some income by using affiliate income. Latter I found that hotel affiliate marketing is too competitive for me, but since I was already on path of affiliate marketing I started to search for great alternatives, and found them using Amazon Associates.
I created first real money generating category on my blog - by reviewing laptops. As I said - I'm tech-savvy person, and I like reviewing and comparing laptops.
My latest addition to my blog is a Food Blogger section - were I'm preparing some food and improving my English language skills, learning culinary English.
By this point I understood that I must produce some schedule, and I started simple, by allocating:
- Mondays - for laptop reviews
- Saturdays - for hotel reviews
I do produce blog reports about my statistics and income at the start of every month.
On the all other days it's just some random posts.
Now - and here comes a bad part of my story - If I have what to write about I write about it - I can expand a short story into a week long story, but when there is actually nothing to write about I just search internet for news, and then I try to reproduce them. I do not like doing that - but I must admit that I'm doing that sometimes.
Lately (for last 3 months) I decided to write 2 blog posts in day - to grow my audience.
Today is day when I admit - It's barely impossible to produce qualitative two articles per day. I'm planing to go back to my normal schedule one article per day - starting April.
What's my future blogging strategy?
In short - I want to keep it unique. I don't mind of writing epic sh*t style posts as long they are originally created by me. One way I find it to make work is by using blog carousels - by creating roundup posts.
You can see a few examples of such roundup posts:
- Best Outdoor Activities In Georgia (Tbilisi and Beyond)
- Best Hikes In Tbilisi Are Located Near Turtle Lake
- 23 Drupal Tips and Tutorials For Extending Your Website
The Bootom Line
Every day blogging is not so hard after all - all you need is to set a schedule and respect it. Avoid of copy/pasted articles, produce your own thoughts, develop your content writting strategy.
