Nowadays, it takes time to get your blog indexed and ranked in Google. When you start a new blog or a new subdomain, you would have done all the recommended actions such as submitting to Webmaster Tools, sharing in social media and telling your friends, family, colleagues or basically anyone who listens.
It may take anytime between 4 to 6 months before you see traffic starting to increase if you are starting a new site. And then it would slowly require time again to pick up more and more again.
Many people give up before they start to see results. Because really, starting a blog and writing articles on your own is really a lot of hard work. It ain’t easy because you have to continuously crack and squeeze your brain for ideas and to sit down and write, write and write.
I already have a couple of established blogs which I have build years ago (one is more than 10 years already) and these blogs have steady traffic.
However between end of last year and this year, I have also started 3 new blogs on a subdomain (because I have decided I am not going to sell the blogs hence I host it under my name). For the 3 blogs, I am back in the same position as many who are starting out.
It really takes time for Google to trust your site
You have to give Google time to have a general feel and learn to trust your site. In the past many fly by night sites have tried to outsmart Google so Google needs to play safe.
You need to write unique and useful content or have a unique writing style that attracts and retains your audience. Then slowly, your site would move up in the search ranks.
No more thin content guys
Years ago, blogs can get away with thin content. At times, I would be waiting in line, in the train or at the airport and I would whip out my Blackberry (and later my Samsung Note) and start to type articles via the WordPress app and then post these articles to my site.
These articles, written using my phone would mostly be thin content but between 5 to 10 years ago, quantity matters over quality. Basically I am not writing spam content…. just that there were 2 blogs I had that I mainly wrote short content. After the Google did a major change in their algorithm, these sites suffered a massive drop in search engine traffic.
When I actively blog in 2017, it became a totally new ball game. In order for the article to rank, it has to be of good quality. Thin content would not serve your site well, unless….. you are in a super low competitive niche and write about topics that many people search for but very few people writes about it.
No more writing nonsense to fool the search engine. Google is tracking the time each average user spend your site- no matter how many meta tags and keywords in pump into the post, if readers bounce off immediately Google is going to get the message and stop sending visitors over.
Don’t give up on your blog too soon
If you write good, useful and unique content…. eventually readers will find you. It will take a few months, you need to be patient. It really helps to have passion in what you do because your passion would be what is keeping you motivated and interested in the first few months when there is literally no organic visitors.
This is something I totally and absolutely agree on. I did not say it based on my experience with blogging 10 years ago but with the 3 new blogs that I have just started. After about 4 to 6 months, I am beginning to see results.
I get a lot of inspiration from Jim Harmer and Rick Kesler from the Income School YouTube channel. They believe in starting a blog, writing good solid content and give it time (about 6 months) and you would then see a hockey stick growth in your blog visitors.
Usually, I tend to rewatch a lot of their videos… which came at a time before I saw results on my blogs. I did not give up and continued on …..but I know the feeling…. many would feel discouraged and give up.
I really draw a lot of motivation from them because they go with completely white hat method- ie they believe in writing long unbeatable few thousand words blog posts with proper research. That’s about it and later the traffic would come in on their own.
However not all the situation applies to me because my primary source of monetization is Adsense. I have tried with Affiliate but they earn no way close to what I earned from Adsense.
Another YouTuber that I have recently discovered is Ryan Scribner. When he started his YouTube channel, the first month he made $2.57, second month $7.16 and third month $59.99. This is for 3 to 5 hours of daily work that he puts in on making his videos.
At that time, if he has spoken to anyone, they would say he is silly to stay on but what he saw was an exponential growth. No doubt it is a small growth but what he saw was 178% of growth on the second month. The third month, even though it was only $59.99, it was a whopping 730% growth.
Nowadays, he sometimes can earn up to $1000 a day from his videos that have gone viral.
This puts to point that during the beginning, you would not see results. Perhaps you may be writing for weeks and months and earn only a few dollars. But study the trend of your income…. is the growth linear or like Ryan, it actually grows on an exponential rate?
If you give up too soon, you would never know what you have missed.
When I had been so busy with my corporate work, I decided that I have to scale back drastically on my blogging which I did. Because if I continued to blog while working, my personal life and relationships would surely suffer.
Each year when my hosting company bill in the hefty hosting fees, I thought if I should just cancel the account. Yes I was silly but I did not monetize my blogs that time because I could not figure out how to do taxes as a part time blogger.
Finally I decided not to close the account because so much of my heart and soul went into creating the blogs so I just renewed it each year from my salary.
Fast forward in 2017 when I had to resign to be a caregiver…. I suddenly find I needed more money. I was grateful that my blogs came to the rescue and that I did not delete them. By then, the traffic for some of my larger blogs have grew even though posted very few articles.
Today, a large part of my earnings were from blog posts that I have written around 2009 to 2012 that have ranked well with Google for many years.
Therefore please don’t give up.