One thing that concerns me as a web developer more than my programming skills, is my SEO skills. As a freelancer and solopreneur, I need to be able to market myself as well as deliver solutions as expected by my clients. One of the best ways to find out what my client needs is to ask them directly what business problems they would like me to solve.
Another way to discover their needs is via web analytics.
A blog is one of the surest ways of positioning and branding yourself as well as your service. This is why content creation is so important, and why blogging is still alive and well even despite claims by netizens about how old school this online marketing strategy is.
I do my best to be mindful of what I blog in WebGrrrl.net, as time and time again it's proven that focused/niched topics bring organic targeted readers effectively into your site. It's challenging for me, though, because as much as I'm passionate about WordPress, web development, and blogging, I have other passions as well which I love to blog about (and seriously, I wish I have the guts to blog openly and more often about Kpop coz it's the shiznitz). So sometimes I don't follow my own rules.
And I paid for it.
Look at my stats from Google Webmaster. Majority of the traffic is brought in by keywords of blog posts that I made BEFORE 2010 and has NOTHING to do with WordPress, web development, and blogging.
Yes, this is how the online world sees my blog. Full of Bullfrog, Excel and PayPal tips. The only semblance of WordPress is found in #9 of keyword to my site. Please don't ask me why the #10 h0r53 d1c dot net keyword is part of my traffic :-(
It's also the partial reason why I can freely blog what I blog in Steemit and not really censor myself. Steemit's SEO sucks. It's not going to rank in the search engines for most of the keywords in the Trending section unless it's about cryptocurrencies and Steemit itself.
Looking at this another way, I'm actually pretty smart. The searches are actually from my own keyword research I made via AdWords, when I started playing around with niche blogs and trying to make money out of AdSense. It's a click-bait, if you will, of getting people to visit my site, because the term WordPress has such a crazy competition. At least there's organic traffic coming my way, even if's not in the niche I want.
Guess how AdSense performed in WebGrrrl.net?
Suffice to say, it's not my money-making blog for sure.
WebGrrrl.net 3.0 is a result of my repentance, kind of. I sacrificed a lot of the cool functionalities that WordPress has, especially sidebars and widgets. I'm particularly melancholic about the absence of widgets, because that particular feature was what drew me into using WordPress and developing WordPress plugins.
Oh well. I think it's for the best. The new design should be more effective for achieving what I need, which is more leads and network.
I need to move on and develop other cool stuff. For now, it's all good.
LIKE WHAT YOU READ? Then check out my previous post: https://steemit.com/wordpress/@webgrrrl/thoughts-of-wordpress-theme-development-in-2018