Hi guys, so on the 28th February I will be releasing a new course alongside 2 well known internet marketers.  The course is literally a mind-dump of the stuff I know.

For a quick recap, I started a niche website at the back of 2016 and within a year it was earning $1000+ per month.

What took it to that point was literally the mindset of “knuckle down and write write write”…

That income was GREAT and it stayed GREAT for about 12 months.. then it became not so great.

The lesson learned was one that said “don’t slack off writing”…

During that downturn I thought I had made it.  I thought I could ignore the site and focus on my offline established business that Ive been running for 6 years (lawn care).  So that’s what I did, and it bit me right on the back side!

It went down and down and down to a fifth of what it was earning, yes that’s around $200 a month.

So whats the crack now then eh Shaun?

As of today I’m in the same position.

Although I have switched my focus MASSIVELY onto the website and pouring out all I can to get it back up.

I COULD simply write a tonne more content and wait 3 to 6 months, for sure…  but because I have over 40 pieces of premium content on the site Ive been working to try and get those pieces of content to do well again, and that’s where I’m at right now.

Here is what I have observed the past few months while trying things…

• September 2018 paid for 3 premium articles from my go to guy for writing
• In October I personally wrote and published 9 low competition articles (KGR articles)
• and November I wrote and published 3 low competition articles (KGR articles).
• My thinking behind KGR articles was that they rank quickly due to low competition but low search volume.

Here are the overall site stats since inception at the back end of 2016

Stats only showing from mid 2017 as Id not got the stats plugin installed before then.

For most of 2018 I was getting on average 10,000 to 12,000 visitors per month.

Now it’s more like 151 per day or 4500 visitors per month.

So while Ive spent weeks trying to understand whats happened Ive also noted a few other things.

I was running a scholarship program for 2 years running, and this gained me dozens of .edu links, which I believe was why I had the good traffic.

I eventually closed the program down believing Google was not liking scholarship programs and with the advent of time, the links pointing to my site would have slowly dwindled away, meaning less importance on my site and less rankings…

This then leads me to think that more link building needs to come into play.  As there are now financial constraints due to there being less money (and my offline business is slow in Winter), I haven’t been able to pursue this line at all.

Instead I have been looking at and trying out other things that can help somewhat, things that cost nothing financially:

• Improving and updating older content.
• Improving CONVERSIONS i.e incorporating EMOTIONAL COPYWRITING into headlines/tiles and snippet (meta descriptions), with the thought being that more people will click MY website in Google because the headline is more interesting, and then Google will see that and up my rankings.

 

TRYING TO DO ALL OF THIS ALL WHILE RUNNING AN OFFLINE BUSINESS IS QUITE DIFFICULT.

I get lost in the sea of all the things that need to be done, things that go wrong and feel overwhelmed with it all, so the net result is very little gets done in the way of progress.

So a clear list of “to do” items is essential if I am to recover.

My to-do list:

• Update every post hugely – and update the post dates.
• Fix all technical SEO issues (I used serpstat for this) – COMPLETE
• Improve interlinking massively (part way through)
• Create lots of new content
• See out link opportunities

That’s it in it’s most simplest of forms, but I look at that list and see a lot of expense in terms of time and money.

So, as I work through these, and try to incorporate new “thoughts” about what works (Stuff I read about from other marketers) into my content, I realize that money and time are needed to help me get back on top.  Ideally I want to be trying to attract a lot more links, or look at setting up the scholarship again, and then producing a tonne more content.

The last 16 months for my website:

Looking at the above statistics you can see what I am saying tallies up with parts of the graph.

Around May 2018 it was at a peak (I then went crazy with my offline business treating lawns from spring to winter), so I neglected the site.. less content being made and a scholarship program being stopped all had some part to play I think.

So I believe that by simply doing the following I can get things back up:

• Content – new, and fixing old
• Links – getting new high quality relevant
• Fixing technical SEO issues

I will also be using a new structure shortly that moves AWAY from using keywords AND focuses more on topics…

 

One more thing I have identified while looking at my site CTR.

 

 

I can honestly say that I have NEVER massively changed TITLES and META DESCRIPTIONS of my posts  in all the time I have been running the website.

The only thing I HAVE DONE is that I have actively seeked to remove YEARS from my post titles…  I did this thinking that it was a pain in the backside to have to update all the posts each year.

So one thing I am going to do immediately is to update all my posts again so the year is shown in the titles…  I will feed back on how this pans out.   Hoping to see much BETTER click through rates.

 

So on to my course:

My SEO course outlines every last thing I did to get to over $1000 per month.  It covers every single step.

It is for anyone with a little bit of knowledge of WordPress and SEO, although I do cover how to set up wordpress, hosting, domain names etc  so anyone can take advantage.

Watch this space as I will be keeping you guys updated on how the recovery goes so that you can do the same if your site ever hits a lull period.

 

 

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