People that know me said I was a good writer and should start a blog. Me? Nah, I wasn't so sure at all, and put it off until I found a small blogging community and read some of their work which inspired me to give it a try.
Now, you'd think I'd want as many people as possible to see my work right? But no, I went on Blogger and began work on my first posts without telling a soul for six long months...
Analyzing Analytics
My thinking was that if my work sucked, no one would see it. Trust me, if I could burn those early posts, I would, they were horrible! :) But I was learning how to blog and wanted to make my mistakes in front of as few eyeballs as possible while being live on the web.
And then much later, I wrote an Adobe Photoshop review that sort of took off. It's true that you can grind along in obscurity and then out of the blue, the blogging Gods smile upon you and you start to gain traction.
But for the first several months, I'd get what I called "onesies and twosies." That was literally one or two visitors a day. Believe me, I was excited for even that and would dive into the analytics to see where they came from (region and website), time-on-site, and which pages they clicked on.
I learned that I could double my views by splitting an article over two pages. There'd be a teaser paragraph or two on the main site, and then the rest was a click away on page two. Two clicks, in one visit, and a chance to double my ad impressions.
I spent many hours learning about this new (to me) thing called SEO, and the importance of long-form content when trying to rank on Google. I'd play around with titles, and switching keywords around in order to see what worked.
Split testing, image optimization, weaving keywords (and phrases) into natural-sounding text, and which days of the week (and even time of the day), were the best ones to post on (Tuesday was better than Monday, for instance, and for movie reviews, Wednesday and Thursday were better than Friday... Way better).
Six months after starting, I finally told a few co-workers about my website and solicited their opinions. By then, I had a small but growing body of work. All of them told me my writing was pretty good, but I was having none of it. "Are you kidding me? That crap?" But they insisted.
But I wasn't as interested in what they liked, but what they didn't like and needed to be improved upon. I did end up getting some good feedback which allowed me to tweak things to make my writing even better.
Making "Cents" Of Google AdSense
I can still remember the day someone clicked on my first ad (Jongo would have been proud!). It showed up in my Google AdSense account and I was absolutely elated. Now, we're not talking about a crapload of money here, it took a little while to earn enough to reach that $100 payout threshold, but click by click, things started happening.
I also had affiliate accounts with several companies, I recall how difficult it was offering the GoDaddy product for instance, back then during a deep recession. All of the FTC reporting stuff we had to do both on my site and on Twitter.
Every time I sent out a tweet, I had to mark it with either the #sponsored, #spon, or #ad tag in order to meet the guidelines. On my website, I had a special page listing the various companies I was doing business with. All of my financial relationships were fully disclosed. Self-reporting was a big deal, and I followed the guidelines to the letter.
However it was interesting to see the varied items from my other partnership that showed me what people bought after clicking through on one of my affiliate links.
I'd review some tech gadget for instance, and on my dashboard, it would show me all of the other purchases that they made of which I also earned an affiliate fee. Some of which were quite eye-opening to say the least. I had I think, a 24-hour cookie attached to my link, where I got a vig (maybe Task can add this term to LeoGlossary :)) for anything they purchased during that time period.
People buy a lot of weird stuff on Amazon...
I'd review say a music player, and along with that, they'd pick up let's call them, "marital devices". Yeah, that's it. You know what I mean. :) Oh yes they do sell that kind of stuff, whether they're supposed to or not, is another story.
Today those things are listed on Amazon as "banana cleaners" and as George Takai would say: "Oh My!" :) But not only those, all manner of varied products would be added to their shopping carts, and I could see all of it...
Developing Good Form On Long-Form Content
This is where I developed my focus on long-form content, as the longer the article was, the more keywords and phrases naturally occurred, which really began helping me in search. They started me out with $150 in credit, which I used to direct even more traffic to my little site.
Some keywords were too general and too popular (making them more expensive). So writing many articles and trying to rank for more long-tail (and cheaper) keywords was the way to go.
I know some don't want to put the work in to write long-form blog posts, but lemme tell ya, it really helps with the search engines. Seeing your work pop up under multiple keywords and key phrases is very rewarding, especially if you can land a spot on one of the first three pages of a search engine where the real action is.
I'll never forget the day when, for a brief period, my review about the latest version of Photoshop ranked higher than Adobe's own page before someone over there got a clue. I found out about it when an SEO website forum teaching newbies listed my page as an example. It began: "Look at what this guy on a free Blogger site did to outrank Adobe. If he can do it, you can too!"
It was heartwarming to read that, as often just a little bit of encouragement is all it takes to inspire a new blogger to keep pushing ahead.
Eventually, someone else found my work good enough to copy, and began scraping my blog posts while publishing them under his own name.
The headache of having to fill out a long form for each individual post in order to get my copied work taken down, caused me to leave the platform.
A few years later I found Steemit, and it inspired me to start blogging again. The flame that comes along with being a blogger was rekindled again, and now on Hive, that inner light, shines oh so bright.
Content Note: The debate over AI-generated content is raging here on Hive, and I thought I'd wade in. I don't even know why there's a question about it, as a longtime creator of original content, the answer to me is obvious. But here are my thoughts, please share yours below.
In my opinion, using a tool such as Grammarly for instance, in order to check your text? Not a problem. I'm also cool with AI-generated art as long as it's disclosed. Using bots such as ChatGTP to actually write your post for you, is absolute bullcrap, don't do it.
That's just lazy, and it's also cheating your reader. The "English isn't my first language" excuse doesn't hold any water either. Either write in your native language, use a translator app, or find a friend with polished English skills to help you edit your work (and credit them, of course: "This post was written by XXX XXXXX, and translated into English and edited for clarity by XXXX XXXXX"). Done.
If you can't find an editor, publish it in Pashto or Urdu, or whatever your native tongue is, I don't care. But whatever you do, don't cheat your readers and thus rape the reward pool on Hive.
I started writing this post about 3PM on Sunday 3/5/23. I just finished it at 9:02PM on the same day. I'll likely publish it sometime between now and early Monday morning (time of day matters!).
You can create original content without using bots. What I've learned over the years as a blogger, is that there's real value in letting a post "simmer" in order to make it better.
I'm not wedded to any of the words in this post for example. All of them are changeable and trust me, they'll be swapped out in a heartbeat if better words or phrases come to me.
This post was started and stopped many times during the day. Taking frequent breaks allow me the time for good ideas to come to me.
Parts of that last line ending with "that inner light shines oh so bright." was changed three times over six hours, getting better with each revision. It was changed yet again this morning (5:49 AM, right before publishing). That's the difficult but fun part for me in writing original content. The more you write, the better you get, and if you wait, you can add even more polish to your work.
The journey to improving your skills as a writer begins with creating your own content. The AI is already in your head just waiting for you to start using it, and there's nothing artificial about it. Put some extra effort in, and you'll become a better blogger and a real asset to Hive. :)
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Image Credit: [1] @EverNoticeThat Created using Canva.