If you follow my Youtube channel (or this blog) at all you know that I’ve been blogging for almost 3 years now. In those 3 years, I’ve learned a lot in regard to how to blog, how to make money with blogging, and a lot more.

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A lot of that I’ve shared on here already but one thing I’ve never really talked about is the steps that I took to build my largest site.

That site turned two years old in January/February of 2022 but prior to that two-year anniversary, it had a monthly high of almost 225,000 page views last December!

Now that site gets far more pageviews during the holiday season (Nov & Dec) but still throughout the year it averages 130–150k pageviews a month.

That is by far my most successful site but I have multiple other sites that get between 30–50k monthly pageviews and multiple other sites that I’m building that should be in that range within a few months as well.

Now I’m not just here to brag (although let’s be real we all like bragging about our accomplishments). I want to share some of the big things that I did that helped propel this site to success in under 2 years.

So let’s dive in.

1. Write Good Quality Content That Helps People

This is number one on my list for a reason. I’m fully convinced that without this my site would not have been a success at all.

Now when I say “good quality content” I’m not saying that it has to be perfect or that you have to be an amazing writer to succeed. What I am saying is that the content that you write should fully answer the query and not just be written with bogus made-up AI info.

I will talk about my keyword research a bit later in this post but I made sure that everything that I wrote on this site was actually helpful to people.

To do that I concentrated on informational topics answering the questions that people had in my niche.

Let’s say for example I was in the flooring niche. I might write articles about whether flooring should be laid vertically or horizontally, or whether gluing the flooring down or using floating flooring was better.

The articles weren’t designed to bring me affiliate income (although many of them have affiliate links in them). Instead, they were designed to actually help people and answer the questions that they had.

Now when I first started the site I was far from an expert at writing helpful content so some of the articles aren’t what I would want them to be today. But I did the best that I knew how to do at the time.

And that’s okay.

You don’t have to be perfect or an expert when you start. Just start with writing helpful content and over time as your writing improves your articles will become more and more helpful as well.

2. Put Out As Much Content As Possible

The next thing that I did was put out as much content as possible. Now to you a lot of content might be different than to me.

However, as bloggers far too often we say we are “putting out content” when in reality we are just goofing around and doubting ourselves.

During that two-year period, I averaged putting out an article a day. Yes, I averaged one article a day for almost 2 years!

Now some of those days I put out multiple articles and other days I put out no articles at all, but that was the average over that time frame.

Now you don’t have to write as much content as me to have a successful site. This is especially true if you know what you are doing regarding backlinks, keyword research, etc.

This site was built 100% from scratch and I had no prior blogging knowledge so it took me far more articles than it would people who have some knowledge about writing or about their niche in general.

However, the important thing to know is that building a successful blog takes dedication over long periods of time. You can’t stop writing because it gets hard or you get busy.

What you need to do is just keep putting out good quality content every day, week, month, and year and eventually your site will grow to a place you never imagined as well.

3. Write About Things People Are Searching For

The third thing that I did to help make my site successful is I made sure that I wrote about things that people were actually searching for.

Now I know that keyword research is difficult for many people (and it was for me at the beginning too) but I found a method that works well for easily finding keywords that are least some people are searching for… and it’s 100% free to use as well.

In the video below I go into great detail about how I do keyword research using that free method. It works great to find low-competition queries and also helps you only find what people are actually searching for.

Now, this is far from the only way to find things that people are searching about but it is an excellent method and it’s the exact method that I used to build that site to over 200,000 monthly pageviews so it certainly does work.

The main issue with many people’s blog sites is that they don’t do any keyword research at all and instead write about topics that they like. While that might have worked in the past and might even work now (if you get lucky) the main issue is that often you aren’t writing articles about things that people are actually searching for.

Take for example an article titled “Today I went hiking”. Is that article based on something that someone is searching for? Nope!

But what if I write an article titled “Are hiking boots good for snow”. Does that meet the need of someone who is searching online for information? Absolutely!

I went more in-depth about this thought and how so many bloggers make this simple mistake in a video as well. You can watch it below.

4. Pick a niche that you know

Picking a niche is a difficult process. Some people spend many days, weeks, or months agonizing over the decision trying to find the perfect one.

Far too often bloggers will go watch a bunch of Youtube videos about finding or choosing a niche or go and find one of the many lists online of the “best blogging niches” and pick one from there.

The problem with those methods is they don’t take you into account.

The biggest part of picking a niche is you.

  • What do you know?
  • What have you done?
  • Where have you gone?
  • What have you experienced?
  • What do you love?

Now I’m not trying to say that your blogging niche has to be perfect or that it has to be something you have done for many years. But it should be something that you know about, have done before, and are likely to do again.

For example, I’m sure I could start a blog about traveling to Hawaii. I’ve been there once and it was amazing so why shouldn’t I write a blog about that?

The problem is how am I going to write better and more helpful content than the many people who live there full time? How am I going to share cool experiences or places that only the locals know about when I’m not one?

If instead, I were to write about Phoenix, Arizona (where I actually live) I could share cool things and experiences that I’ve tried. Things that I feel are really overrated (Tombstone, AZ is a tourist trap) and the best restaurants that I’ve found in the Phoenix area (you have to try a place called Burger Rehab).

Which place would be easier for me to write a blog about? A place I’ve visited once or where I’ve lived for 6 years? Obviously, the one where I actually live.

Now carry that same principle over to picking your blog niche. Pick something that you actively do or have actively done for a long time. Pick a niche where you know the terms that people in the niche actually use.

Pick a niche where you don’t have to research every little tidbit since you actually have done the things and know what you are talking about.

By picking a niche in an area you already know about, you will be much more helpful to the reader, will have much more authentic articles, and also will be able to write your articles much faster too. That makes it a win-win for you and your readers too.

5. Don’t give up

I know, I know, the age-old “don’t give up” gets old. But here’s the thing, when it comes to blogging it really is the most important thing.

As a blogger you will have to:

  • Write articles that no one reads
  • Do keyword research before ever making a dime
  • Spend hundreds of hours writing blog posts that you aren’t making money from
  • Struggle to figure out technical issues
  • Get hit by Google’s algorithm updates
  • Fail repeatedly
  • Not get the success when you want it
  • Not get the success that you think you deserve

And on and on I could go. The only thing that will help you push through all of those things is to simply keep on going and don’t give up.

A site that I started a year and a half ago was hit by the recent Google update in May of 2022. For absolutely no reason whatsoever that site went from getting 800–900 pageviews a day… to getting 200–300 pageviews a day.

Literally, overnight it went from my 4th best site to one of my worst performers.

I have invested hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into this website. I have personally written or edited over 500 blog posts on that site. It was starting to grow quickly and I was about to be able to put it onto a nice ad network that would have made me around $1,000 a month on that site… and then that update hit.

As a blogger when things go wrong you are going to have to decide whether you are going to give up or keep going when things like that happen to your site.

Only you can decide that too. No one can make you keep going. No one can force you to not give up. Only you can decide for yourself.

For me, what I did was let the site sit for a couple of months to see if it came back on its own (it didn’t). Then in the last couple of weeks, I have gone through and started fixing things like site speed, removing the ads I currently have (that were making me $1 a day since the drop), editing content, making it as helpful as possible, and more.

Why?

Because I’m not giving up.

I don’t know why that site was randomly hit and hundreds of articles stopped being shown on Google when all of my other sites built the same has continued to grow and flourish. All I do know is I’m not going to give up. I’m going to keep pushing forward until either Google fixes whatever is wrong with their algorithm that punished parts of the site, or I accidentally fix it by the work that I’m doing.

Either way, I’m not giving up… what about you.

Matt R
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