LIVE - Let's talk Google, SEO, and the Future of Blogging

hey everybody how's it going it's good to be here um I see we've already got some uh questions getting started I've also got a few that were pre-submitted from Project 24 members couple from YouTube and from income School insiders so I'm going to go ahead and jump in um today I have a feeling the majority of the discussion is going to be around blogging Google kind of future of SEO for blogging um and also just traffic where's that come from what do that the business model look like and all that so we we can go into all that but also feel free to bring what other whatever other questions you have to the table I am going to start with a couple of questions here that came from Project 24 members so this first one um says that I mentioned in a recent Doug cunnington podcast that from the very beginning I would focus on foundational content um rather than just kind of the methods that we've taught historically in the blogging system so you know what we've taught before was kind of like your first 10 blog posts write response posts kind of find those using industry terminology finding kind of longtail keywords easy to rank because low competition kind of stuff um fairly short blog posts and that's not terrible because a lot of times it just takes um that kind of practice to kind of get good at finding a question people have and answering that question thoroughly in a blog post that said from the very beginning I think I would focus on what I called in there kind of foundational content and so the question here is what's foundational content does it look like 10 or so response posts that are answering specific questions um in each kind of subcategory for the website so that we're we have like a a lot of content or does it look like long staple posts um kind of like what we used to call pillar posts for each subcategory and then kind of building on as we go and where would we find this foundational content so that's the kind of the big question now here's what I think about that when I say foundational content I'm talking about just the important information for your industry whatever my topic is for my website there I mean we're going to break that down the main topic into categories and subcategories so because we we need to be organized and we want to make sure that we're not just all over the place but for any kind of category within my within my overall topic there are going to be certain questions that basically everybody has and those and that they're going to search a ton and some of those are going to be very competitive because really big websites in your industry already have content answering those questions answer those questions now if it takes the form of longer blog posts or if it takes the form of several smaller ones that honestly isn't what's key here what's key here is making sure that we have it you can't really establish topical Authority in a topic if you haven't answered the biggest questions in that topic so you know rather than just focusing on low competition search queries we're going to make sure that we're including very foundational um just the big questions that people have or the common questions that people have um and that way we have a mix of those we also want some of the low competition stuff because it'll be a lot easier to rank for those the next question here from a project 24 member and I promise I only have a few here and then we're coming right to you guys that are here live um so that's great um but here says how can a busy YouTube content creator build a lower effort blog to gain traffic to their Channel and promote an info product is is there a way to do it with a lighter amount of work than a full-time blogger and if so where would I start I think this is a great question and it really kind of goes back to what we did when we started our backfire YouTube channel so um four five years ago we started a YouTube channel um and really it was kind of an experiment we were testing out our theories about YouTube so that we could teach YouTube in our in our YouTube system as part of project 24 and uh we made a bunch of content and then we took a few months off while we focused on other things um we hired new people we had I mean there's just a lot of work going on and then we're like yeah well you know what that's actually doing pretty well let's uh let's make some more content and we would kind of go in spurts like we were not doing it the way that you ideally would for for YouTube and yet over the course of a couple of years it grew to be decently substantial I mean um I guess three years ago almost three years ago um when Jim my former partner when he left and he took backfire with him we were just shy of 100,000 subscribers now it's way over that it's over 700,000 I think um because he's taken that as kind of his full-time thing over the last three years which is fantastic but what's cool about this is we started the blog and there are a few things that we did because we didn't have time to write a ton of really good content it's also not a topic that we entrusted to just generic writers um and so here's what we did one we wrote a little bit of content ourselves um that was a project that Jim Moore worked on but he wrote a handful of really solid resource blog posts so the the topic was around Shooting Sports um whether or not you agree with that it's immaterial here but um he wrote like a blog post about we had put together this huge chart with a ton of data for all different cartridges different sizes of um of bullets that you can shoot and um we had a ton of ballistics data and one of the things that we had was the amount of energy they used and stuff in order to calculate sort of a measurement of recoil so how much the gun recoils and um we put that together in we just had this huge database right so we made a blog post or he wrote this blog post all about recoil put in it this big table with just like just data so you just compare side by side a whole bunch of different cartridges and I mean that can rank for literally hundreds of search queries and it it did but here's what was cool about that was because we already were on YouTube and we were already building an audience there any time that we referred to anything that had to do with coil we would tell people about this resource that we had on the website just briefly mention it linked to it and that gave us instant traffic to that blog post and instant Authority um Google sees that traffic they see that people clicked over from YouTube so it's referral traffic and instantly that blog post started ranking very quickly for a lot of different search queries around recoil creating those really good resource posts means like one of those can take the place of probably dozens of individual little blog posts the other thing we did was we invited people who were knowledgeable on the topic people who read content on the website people who watch the YouTube channel um just every now and then we would mention hey if you want to write for us you can you can write on our website and so we had a handful of people who are writing for us freelance who weren't like they weren't bloggers they were knowledgeable in the topic and it's way easier to get really good content on people who have knowledge of the topic than it is to get really good content from people who are knowledgeable about writing but not the topic and we've been really successful with that we initially did that with our camper Report website some of the best content we got um short of what we wrote ourselves was content that we got from Freelancers who were people who used and lived in RVs so that can be a great way to reduce the amount of time but also you just aren't going to have to write as much or do as much work with your blog because you're already establishing a lot of credibility with YouTube videos so and there's there are a lot of other different things we could do to kind of help make use of content we've already made for YouTube kind of make use of that as a Blog I wouldn't use AI to just like write a transcript or rework a transcript but you could take information from a video take the transcript feed it into the AI and guide it to write a good blog post based on using as a source material what you said in a video I think that could work um but video content and blog content are so different that when we try to just take if you try to take a blog post and use it as a script for a YouTube video it doesn't look it doesn't it just doesn't isn't very good likewise you take a transcript of a YouTube video and just try to make it a blog post it doesn't read very well it's a different media so um last one I have here from Project 24 members says um he says he acknowledges Nobody Knows the answer to this but in my opinion how much weight has selling a product had on eat of a website so one of the big theories out there is if you sell your own products on your website then you're more likely to be viewed as authoritative by Google Now the caveat here is that most of us that sell products don't actually do it on our own website a lot of the products we sell are hosted on third party if you're using Shopify um I mean if you're using like woocommerce or sh cart then you're selling it right on your website but a lot of people who have a store are actually selling on a different platform altoe um but they still get the benefit of this so here's what I think is that one of the things that Google is trying to do is verify our legitimacy uh it's hard for independent bloggers if they don't have a very big social presence on the web it's it's hard to verify that they are who they say they are and that their content is accurate even if you put a ton of work into it and really know I mean anybody can say they're a doctor so uh we need a lot of these other signals and one really good signal Google can use is do you have a Google Business listing even if you don't have a pin on the map because you don't have an office that people can come to having a Google Business listing and um along with that oftentimes having products to sell where people who have bought the product then leave you reviews and so like for us I don't like people can leave reviews for me on income school they right now they're not set up to publish automatically so I'm way behind there are reviews that I haven't gone through and like put in the right format to post um so that's that's on me but we do also have a Google Business listing for income school and I invited members like a while ago year and a half two years ago I just said hey it would be helpful to us if you want to leave a review for us positive or negative we're not going to take them down but um go leave a review for us on Google if you don't mind and they did and we said and we actually just said there's a few different places you can leave listings for us one Google another one I was approached a couple three years ago by the Better Business Bureau and they said we think that you should be listed with the Better Business Bureau and get a rating and start getting um feedback through uh people's reviews and so I did and so I have to pay a little bit every single month to keep my listing there with the Better Business Bureau but that's a place where people can go and look and see if other consumers have complained about me got my first complaint Yesterday by the way it's completely ludicrous but um I responded to it and it'll be fine but um people can leave reviews there too and so I just have a spot on the website where I just say hey if you want to leave a review here's a few places you can do it you can leave it here for our website go put it on Google go put on B Business Bureau some people put it in all places um I even listed uh another website um I'll shout out ebiz facts they do reviews of affiliate courses we don't rank very well because I don't have I don't ever do a strong push to send people over there so I have way fewer ratings over there than anywhere else but I have actual reviews on the internet about a product I sell Google knows income school is a legitimate business because other people have experienced having doing business with us and anything you can do whether that's just literally selling an ebook under the name of your business even if you're selling it on Amazon I think it's going to make a difference because people are going to be able to buy the book They're going to be able to see you as an author you can you know link that to your website there's so many signals going on there that just help to validate Your Existence and your legitimacy so and I do think that that's made a difference um the more signals we can have externally and I mean you could just say well yeah that's backlinks but I think there's it it's not just backlinks and backlinks are good but having the right kind of links and the right kind of signals my Google listing only has really one link to my website it's the link that says here's the website but because it's connected all of those reviews that have been written Google can process those and see how they vote um positively or negatively for the products I sell and therefore for my legitimacy so things to keep in mind um I'm going to check here because I also posted this for income School insiders got some likes over there but no specific questions I also got a few questions that were presubmit from my community post so I'm going to address a couple of those and then we're going to you guys that are live um so first one here says do you feel that websites with quite a small Niche can achieve good page views and income after 24 months if you start and work hard um the size of the niche I don't think is the issue so people talk about Niche sites and Niche sites are dead and honestly I have mostly avoided the term Niche site or Niche site for few years now because I don't like the mentality around it the mentality generally being I'm G to pick a really specific topic I'm gonna write a bunch of content about that topic um usually just focusing on um longtail keywords we're going to put some ads and affiliate on there and it's a passive income site and like that's it and we've been really trying to push people the direction of building something a little bit more impactful something building a brand over a year ago we made a video about branding it didn't do that well because it's not a super popular topic with people in the niche sft they're like I don't want to build a brand I just want to make this little thing and stay completely Anonymous and have it be as passive as possible and the result of that is what we're seeing today um I think going that direction is is a mistake but having a specific topic a niche isn't the problem you can have a very specific um topic for your website you can pick a niche and you can write the content for it and you can work really hard and you can build a brand but we're going to have to work on building that credibility and and that's that's I think what's missing for most Niche site people is working on that credibility yes there's a link building aspect for most people as well who are in the niche site space but that's my problem with the term link building it's not about the link it's about The credibility and so we participate in Industry Outreach and we'll be talking more about that today so is it possible even within 24 months absolutely uh in a small Niche absolutely you're probably not going to do it if over the course of two years you've written about 50 blog posts and that's it but if you're creating good content and you're doing your industry Outreach you're participating and if you work on monetizing in ways that aren't just ads and um affiliate marketing then you can make substantially more income in 24 months in fact you can often make a substantial income from much lower traffic levels than what most passive income Niche site people um need to have in order to be able to make any sort of real money so is it doable yes now um you're just gonna have to change that mindset a little bit the another part of that was how would you start a blog they have a about 200 videos on their YouTube channel so how do you what would you do to incorporate video and and blogging um you know if your blogs are very kind of Hands-On tutorial um fantastic like if you're if those are what your videos are go ahead and make a blog post that supplements that list that lists out the steps of the tutorial all the materials needed and all that kind of stuff so they kind of go together and that is a great complete resource for somebody who's got that question if your videos are more just you know talking head um but not like not quite in the same format where it a video is really needed to go along with the blog post well then what I might do is just take some of that information and write try to repackage it in a way that makes sense for blogging kind of like we talked about earlier with the other YouTube question um but you know video content is ranking really well right now um YouTube or you know Google who owns YouTube loves to promote video content um but also video content is ranking as it is posted on YouTube but it's also ranking the page for a website so sometimes you'll click on a video and it'll take you to the page um on your website where that video is so we'll take the videos that we' published on YouTube we'll embed them on our website oftentimes when there's a resource on the website that matches it so if I have over 200 videos I'm going to look for those videos where a really good supplemental piece of content would would be helpful for the video and I'm going to go create that piece of content and embed the video with it that's probably where I would start um one here about eat and ym Y L uh student a student in nutrition that's not yet board certified how do you handle ym um they've been adding links to YouTube videos from experts but doesn't that pull people off the website I would not just add links to the videos I would just embed them on your website um that's totally fine to do as long as if the video if you click share and it can be embedded then it you can embed it on your website there's no copyright issue there then people are watching it on your website the creator of the video is getting credit for that view but they're staying on your website so that's the way I would go about that that um but I would just focus on kind of building up that brand eventually you will be board certified but having that certification is valuable for ym but it's hard you know you have to like prove to Google that you have that it's probably better to work on building up credibility creating a brand participating in your industry once you are board certified go work on getting yourself on some podcasts and collaborating with YouTubers and stuff um because that's going to do then people are going to be able to see you and see that okay this is a person who knows what they're talking about they're claiming that they're board certified um but they're doing it like in videos and on podcasts and stuff and people could go look you up and see that you actually are uh those kinds of things are going to help more so than just having that certification so for now work on creating good content work on building a bit of a brand maybe start some of that industry Outreach as much as you can and then once you are board certified um and you can say like I'm a doctor I'm a whatever your certification is then you'll be in a really good position uh to go out more much more publicly because people will be able to look you up and see that you have that certification another one I got pres submitted um this is just kind of overview um what do we do going forward with blogging uh without focusing too much on the Google serps what opportunities do we see um they's say there Marcus says trying to diversify traffic sources are there opportunities for creating new Niche blogs we already kind of talked about that um new Niche blogs diversifying traffic sources I think is really valuable um if we don't want to be dependent on Google and other search engines or I mean people say well why don't we just focus on like being in Duck ducko and stuff well that's great we already are the way we create content ranks really well on those other search engines we're not just creating content specifically for Google we found that when we do work that makes our content rank well on Google it ranks really well everywhere else too but the majority of Internet users aren't using those other search engines they're mostly using Google so when it comes to search traffic we just want to make sure that we know what's going on with Google it's not that we're big fans or anything like that but we can diversify our traffic sources if you're in a niche that does decently well on Pinterest make sure you're on Pinterest we added a course in Project 24 on Pinterest that one of our members Cara she put together for us and as part of the course she literally built a Pinterest account for cook for folks and just started creating the pins and implementing her strategy and showing what she how she did it as she went along we just got the four-month update and we're I mean just hitting great numbers we're seeing awesome growth a little bit of a hockey stick there in the last few weeks um great timing for the niche as well as we head toward the summer but also um basically following exactly the the pattern that she sees every time it's pretty repeatable Pinterest is a much easier search engine to sort of game than um than Google is but it's not really a whole lot of gaming required it's just knowing how to create the right kind of pins um and we don't even go crazy like she's not even creating tons and tons of pins so um anyway that's that's done pretty well and it's diversifying traffic in fact cook for folks is our site that there's this last update there's no there's nothing there's no blip um so that's pretty cool and I don't know how much of an impact Pinterest had I need to go check if search console traffic dropped but Pinterest went up and that's why we're not seeing much of a dip um I don't think that that accounts for all of it I think that that probably among other things has helped solidify cook for folks in the serps even though um it's not a big corporate site um so yes there are lots of opportunities diversifi traffic uh not just like social media like Facebook and Instagram although just being present on other platforms is good but I think it's important to understand where your ideal audience is where are they hanging out online if your ideal audience is on Tik Tok well then maybe that's where we should be um if your ideal audience is on Rumble make sure you're on Rumble but if you're making videos for rumble you might as well publish them on YouTube as well um so yeah just start with where your audience is and don't worry about being everywhere at first um just create content for for them where they are last pres submitted question um is it time to Pivot to incorporate a stronger backlink strategy given the shift to Google seeming to favor larger higher domain s rating sites is this how smaller sites can perhaps rise in the Surs um and he says I'm not specifically talking about link building but but shifting our efforts toward things that would get us more back Lings um also follow up to that what are the odds this we correct later and we just wait as the junk gets cleared out will will we just come back I don't think that that's in really the strategy we want to take of just like well let's just wait because I think Google will sort things out later I do think that where we're at right now is not the end state that Google wants I think they're working on trying to get there and right now it's oftentimes really hard to differentiate between good blog content and really bad blog content and if we're honest most of the blog content on the internet is not very good content so a lot of it's being swept up together I do think that over time um Google will improve their ability to sort between the two but I can't we can't just rely on making quality content we also need to work really hard to build our brand and our credibility which means shifting our Focus or ensuring that we're including in our strategy plenty of external um efforts that will give us backlinks but again it's participating in our industry it's Outreach it's um it's just making sure that it's clear to Google and to people that we're we're actually the people that we say we are we're legitimate um we're a business and that's one of the things that I think a lot of us need to shift our mindset on I've been trying to sort of edge us this way for a long time and I've been doing it far too subtly because I think a lot of viewers here don't realize that this is at all what I'm trying to do but I don't want you to think of yourself as a blogger I don't want you to think of yourself as a niche website builder like you have a business even if you're not selling anything yet and your whole business right now is just content think of it as that think of it as a business and give yourself that level of credibility and as you think of yourself that way and start acting more that way you're going to do those things that give you credibility so we'll talk about more of that as we go forward on the YouTube channel as well as in Project 24 okay lots of pre-submitted questions but I'm here for you that are live so let's jump into your questions now and um so the first one here was from Kevin um I ranked a medium post number one next day wrote another and again I went to number one uh There are rules but you can post affiliate links so what are my thoughts about writing on other platforms like medium I have no issue with writing on other platforms I just also want to make sure that most of my emphasis is building out what I own um but medium can be a great place to go put some content and build credibility for yourself so just again continue to use that same that same brand that same name you know if I'm writing um you know as Ricky Kesler on income school and I go write a blog post on medium that's on a blogging related topic and you know I'm going to use my name Ricky Kessler I'm going to refer to the other work that I do um with it and and show that credibility but also that way any readers are likely to you know they they're going to want to go see the other stuff that I've done but also it's going to give a lot more credibility to my site so like if I just post on medium and just you know I put affiliate links in and stuff so I make some money there it's still going be really limiting as to I mean at some point maybe you have enough credibility that you're like well I could probably sell an info product but but where do you just finally build a website then so even if you're not going to write a ton of content on your own website I would create your own website so you have a landing page you have um just a place to send people and to link to from a Google listing and and all that stuff so just just have your own property online um and make sure that you build that out and the same would go for someone who's like a YouTuber I would say um you know get a website build a website um and have a place where you can send people that shows that I'm not just someone who makes videos um I I'm a person I'm an entity I'm a brand that you can interact with and that has other offerings and stuff and I think that's going to do a lot to um build credibility all right um there a lot some of these questions are things we've kind of touched on like I want to start a blog this year um how do I start I see lots of videos um I find it hard daily to stay relevant with my job um so you know getting started it it really comes down to start by figuring out what it is that you want to create what do you want to offer to the world so we would tell people before like a niche but then people would say well what's the best Niche and I say well I don't know what are you interested in um what's something that you know more than other people about or something that you um are so interested in that you feel confident that you could really like build on that topic for a good period of time um and where you could come up with something even if you don't have it today but come up with something that adds value to that that industry um that's your Niche I don't really care what it is I don't really care how competitive it is there's a dentist on every corner just about here and every one of them has a lot of patience because everybody needs a dentist right well the same is true with online business I know it seems like well but everybody can read the same blog it's not like a dentist a dentist can't one dentist can't serve everyone that's true but a lot of people aren't going to connect with one blog and a lot of people are goingon to have different questions based on their needs and their experience that aren't going to be answered by that one blog post they're going to ask different questions and have different concerns and I keep finding today even though content has just blown up on the Internet because of AI I still keep finding all sorts of search queries that I'm searching that do not have a good answer now part of that might be because there were good answers in blog posts and Google Now is not showing them anymore because they can't tell if they're any good but this has always been the case we're always running into and even a year two five years ago we're always running into search queries that we can't find good answers for because nobody's created something that solves that specific problem we find it all the time so find a way that you can add value to the world and then choose that as your topic and then typically for us we're just GNA at that point go the route of creating a website on WordPress very simple and start writing content and from there we can figure the rest out now because we're saying like you need to think of yourself as a business and stuff there have been some questions around okay well do I need to start with my product and then create content and you can if you have a product in mind if there's something you're like oh there's something I'd really love to sell or you're already a business you already sell things and you're like I just want to increase my traffic and get more credibility and notoriety and get more traffic organically because I'm so tired of paying for so much ad space if that's the case like that's fine if you start with a product that's great that puts you ahead okay because now you can make sure that you're crafting content that will actually funnel people to your product so that's that's fantastic but if you don't have that yet that's okay start with the areas of your topic that you find really interesting really valuable create your content around that just but just don't have the mindset of this is going to be a easy way to make lots of money super passively that's that's just not how it's going to work okay um I got a question here digital catalog Hub are affiliate sites doomed if all you are is an affiliate site chances are this is going to be a tough road going forward if all you do is um write reviews of products um compare products it's going to be tough unless you are like the tester of products so wire cutter did a fantastic job of this they tested products now they're owned by New York Times um and they don't do as good a job anymore but um they built that credibility because they actually tested products I think YouTubers who test products I think can still do really well but most affiliate sites If we're honest are content where people just create a lot of pros and cons table or comparisons tables of products many times products they've never even touched it's just based off Amazon reviews people don't need that anymore especially because I can go straight to Amazon and I can literally watch videos from people who are influencers who are holding the product and will tell me about their experience with the product why would I go read somebody's blog post where I have no evidence that they've even touched the product and I think Google part of the reason that a lot of people who say well having affiliate links gets you um gets you dranked on Google I don't think having affiliate links does that it hasn't for me but if that is the emphasis and focus of website then you probably don't have the kind of content that should be ranked honestly um because people might as well just go straight to Amazon and watch the videos there and read the actual reviews especially because now Amazon will also has little um AI review sections that will just summarize the reviews like these are the things people really liked about the product these are the things they disliked well a lot of Amazon reviewers that was literally what you did you would read all the Amazon reviews and you would summarize them in a blog post that that's gone there's no reason to do that anymore um been telling you not to do it for several years now there's absolutely no reason to ever read that kind of blog post ever again um all right I'm struggling with my website speed on mobile what are your recommendations so um I really only worry about site speed if it's like a noticeable problem for the user I don't really worry that much about the core web vitals numers um some people are still really hung up on those they turned out to basically be a non-issue when it comes to ranking um they're barely a tiebreaker uh so don't worry about them from that standpoint if you load your website and it loads normal like other websites do then that's fine now if it's loading really slow then we got a problem and there's usually a few things now you can go you can use page speed insights which is free or lots of other tools just Google page speed insights and it's a tool from Google and they will tell you these are the things that are specifically slowing your site down um and that is probably the best thing to do some of the most common issues are images the image files are too big so if your WordPress theme um or just your site in general the way that it's built you're not using the plugins to do this and stuff so it's serving like full-size images even when you're like on mobile it's serving like a desktop size in terms of number of pixels that's a problem it should be able to recognize oh this is a mobile version let's go ahead and serve a smaller version of the image um and it'll just have multiple versions um short pixel is a plug-in that will do that kind of stuff for you um so just just do that that will help a lot the other thing that often happens is if you have a lot of scripts that are running JavaScript and stuff you can try to Minify them with plugins like autoptimize um but also you might just try to figure out like do I really need whatever it is that's that is this script if it's some Plugin or something and it's just doing some feature some animation that you think is kind of cool but it's really doesn't add anything like maybe decide whether or not it's worth it those are probably some of the main things is um scripts that are running out of order or um that are just unnecessary or too long and uh and images if you're if it's not that then you're going to need to dig into it and see what page speed insights tells you um we got a question here one of my old sites has seriously been affected by the latest update it was poorly seed and the focus was too broad how or now can I Niche it down to one category should I Del should I delete the poor content then you can Niche it down to one category that um will probably help build topical Authority in just a more specific area uh it's easier to start specific and broaden your topic as you get more content as you can create more content and as you have author it in that space to cover kind of adjacent topics and grow your brand it's a lot harder to start really broad because you have to fill in a ton of content from the very beginning deleting poor content actually I would so for the last couple years with helpful content Google's been saying if you have content that they deem is unhelpful on your website it will actually put like a little modifier onto your overall credibility score and it will harm the rest of your website so if you have content that is poor content um and that is just written for the algorithm not really for people and that violates kind of any of the recommendations from Google's helpful content I would consider absolutely either removing it whether that's just moving it to a draft it later and try to recreate that content in a much better way or just if you're just like I'm never going to recreate that blog post I don't care if you delete it I would probably remove it from the index um cool where can I find good writers for my blog honestly the best wrers I think nowadays for your blog are people who know your topic independent of whether or not they are a writer you know so if you go to you know really anywhere upw workk and find people that are blog writers um you know they can craft a blog post that sounds like a good blog post but if they don't know your topic it's not really very helpful we ran into that own that same problem with our own writers why we stopped doing it honestly I would get contact back from them for my own site and I'd be like you know I need to spend another two hours on this blog post anyway I probably should have just written it from the beginning it would have been a lot easier because I wouldn't have to correct a bunch of things they said that I don't even agree with so at this point I would find people that are in your industry that know your industry even if they're just kind of fans of your industry but it's something that they live um like I talked about earlier in this like we did with backfire and with camper Rapport that worked so well and then it's just normal people who are going to like the idea of making a little bit of extra money on the side what we usually did with those writers is I didn't expect them to write a blog post a day it was more like based on their availability anywhere from one to four a month I I may have had a writer or two that did like two a week at some point but for most of them it was like a blog post a week or every other week and so it'd be something they could just kind of work on here and there over a couple of weeks they would often Supply their own photos so like on camper report we literally got blog posts where people had pictures of a project they did in their own camper and that was Fant fantastic and they wrote under their own name and we listed them as an author on the website that's a great way to go if you're just going to go with like a generic upwork writer um who doesn't know your topic very well I'd rather get a first draft from AI frankly um and then work rework it from there because I'm probably gonna have to rework the article somebody else wrote If they don't know the topic very well I might as well just use AI for the first draft I'll probably end up with a better finished product um because I can kind of mold what the AI is giving me and then and add my voice to it a little bit more um and add my own stories and stuff in and I could probably do that as fast as or faster than completely correcting something somebody else wrote um and putting it into my voice if that makes sense so that's where I'm at with that um let's see next question here uh um improving your writing skills so this is from Adrian de Coter um besides writing more blog posts and getting more of a feel for course or book that you could recommend to more proactively become a better writer a specific book there's so many book the thing that frankly helped was just when I was in business school the the class I took on business communication because it it helped fix what I learned in all of my previous English classes through high school and early college I was taught how to write essays I was taught how to write research papers basically write a thesis and prove the point that's it and then in college I started learning as an engineer I took I had to take a technical writing class and then um lab classes and stuff where we wrote up lab reports and wrote technical papers very different from a blog post and so those were kind of my styles of writing in business school I took a business communications class so it was not just writing but we we talked about emails we talked about um Powerpoints and stuff like that but it completely changed the way that I approach communicating a point to somebody else whether that's in an email or somewhere else I learned how to write more concisely I learned how to format my content in a way to accentuate things that I needed them to see because I know that like in an email when you receive an email if it's a long email with just a bunch of text and the paragraphs are really long probably not going to read most of it so having your paragraphs be shorter you know and where to break those for emphasis and where you can just bold or italicize some words or make a little section Stand Out by using M dashes at the the beginning and end um little things like that that just accentuate certain things visually um so that people can scan it and still get the most out of what you're giving um those principles helped me a lot and so it was literally it was just that class um trying to think of good books and we have several so if you see a comment here she's probably watching this right now she lik lately she's been getting a lot there's um but Brandon Sanderson who I mentioned in my video amazing fiction writer he he is a lecturer also at BYU in Utah um and he does like a Class A year but he literally has these lectures that he gives to this college class just available for free so Julie if you're watching um if not I'll find a link to that but he has he talks a lot about kind of building story a lot about there's a lot of good stuff there too um it would be interesting and probably valuable to incorporate a little bit more of we got to be careful with this but a little bit more of Storytelling principles into our blogging without writing big long fluff stories that have nothing to do with the with the principle so writing our blog post in a way that engages people throughout but I'm not talking about like writing a recipe blog post where people came for the recipe and you go off and enough for like 5,000 words about your grandma that that's not what we're talking about here um I'll try to think of some other good ones and I'll put them in the description okay um uh let's see what do you think how much time is required to reach at least $500 a month through blogging alone not complimented by YouTube well depends on what you mean by blogging alone if by blogging alone you mean I'm just going to write blog posts and I'm going to do nothing else meaning no industry Outreach no participation anywhere I'm not going to go join any Facebook groups in my Niche to find out what questions other people have and to help them by answering their questions and um you know occasionally where it's allowed link to or at least mention my content on the on the web um if you're not going to do literally anything else but write blog posts then to get to $500 a month probably you're going to have to write 100 articles or more but again just really depends it also depends on how you're going to monetize it if you're hoping to do that with just ads I mean it it's getting harder to do so um let's see there like I'll give you cook for folks as an example I think cook for folks does in ads a few hundred dollars a month about 300 or so um I haven't looked super recently but the traffic's been fairly steady and the traffic's between 15 and 20,000 page views a month I think um and it's got 100 plus articles on it so I mean it's totally doable but um and honestly the content's not amazing on cook for folks if I'm gonna be fair um it the traffic was about double where it's at at one point before all any of the helpful content started um and then in that first year of helpful content it dropped a bit and then it's been steady ever since so yeah $500 is doable but if we're saying only blogging that's that's gonna hold you back now if you're willing to do a little bit of Pinterest you know you're not going to do YouTube but you're willing to do some Pinterest you're willing to do some other industry Outreach then that's going to make it a much more short thing um Kip Bodner HubSpot CMO said that exponential SEO growth May no longer be achievable in about two or three years as it becomes more like other channels um any idea for SEO Reliant other than video um I don't know I don't I don't really think about this as just 100% SEO Reliant and that's why um I think this I I'm just not seeing as big like there's an there's an issue right now for sure the Google the serps for many questions are not as helpful as they used to be and a lot of the kind of of content that bloggers have been creating is just not showing up now some of it is but a lot of it not a lot of it's just gone um and so if but so if that's the approach that you continue to take then yeah that's not going to work but um and if we're talking about SEO Reliant in terms of like traditional SEO what most people are teaching and doing what most professional seos do which is literally to understand Google's algorithm and try to manipulate it um which is literally the opposite of what Google's telling you to do and what Google's been trying to get us to stop doing um now they're actively saying create content for people not for the algorithm and with the advancements in AI I honestly think the algorithm will get to a point where it like you won't really be able to game it very well at all um because it it'll become less of an algorithm and more of a self-thinking AI um I mean it already it already is AI it has been for a long time but anyway um so I I've never really focused on in fact we've never ever ever taught SEO growth our approach to SEO is writing content that should rank well um and that still works now reaching exponential growth within two to three years we still see the hockey sck often happen in far less than that time frame um I mean even over the last year so it's not that it's not possible things but things are changing um and we're absolutely looking at all the different ways that we can build credibility um the question here lots of blogs disappeared do you think they will return I think some will I think as Google gets better at sorting between what's good and what's not but if we want our blogs to return I think we need to do more to establish their credibility so some of those things we talked about even just going in creating a Google account for your business like a normal free Google account and then creating a Google Business listing for your website you don't have to have an address to do that like you don't have to put a pin on the map one of the first questions Google asks you is do you have an office or a store that people can walk into and if you say no fine they don't ask you for an address and they don't put a pin on the map for you but you can still fill out all of the other Google listing information and you can literally like add products to a Google store and then all of your products can be in Google shopping um so when somebody searches for that type of product and Google lists a bunch of different products that's where those come from it's a Google shopping directory get your products there you know do that kind of stuff and that's going to add credibility and then your business can start getting reviews from people you could encourage readers of your blog to review um you on Google that's a little bit harder to do unless you have a product for them or some other way that you're engaging more directly but you know the more you can do to get people to go review you on Google that's going to help a lot too um Armando says I've heard that Flipboard is the New Hope for bloggers have you tried that platform nope I have not yet I've heard of it I haven't really I I'm not one to just like chase after whatever's the hottest thing right now because the hottest thing changes so often that like nobody's ever on top of it the people that like are on the Forefront of a trend usually are lucky because they adopted something early that happened to become a trend it's really hard to predict what's going to be the next Trend um before it happens and so you can be an early adopter and hope that that thing picks up the way that you thought it would and if so there's often a lot of money to be made I tend to kind of follow where things are going and make sure that I have something stable and steady so if you want to go play around a Flipboard do it but that doesn't mean like abandon your website or move all your content same thing I'm not going to take all my content and go post it all in medium and delete it from my website um I'm not going to do that kind of thing but that doesn't mean don't go try out that platform or even like dive all in but still keep your home base keep your website and try to get people back there because that's where you have the best opportunity to influence them and to make a good income from them okay um all right let's see Marcus says it looks like Google's losing market share in some markets especially in some European markets being is increasing a lot still a small player though which is I think a good thing I would love to see better competition I know Bing's been working hard they've they there's so many TV shows where like when the characters do a search on the internet there like let's go Bing this and then it shows like Bing on the screen while they're typing it in um and you're like okay nobody says that it's not a thing I am totally fine with there being other competitors I think the existence of Duck Duck Go it serves a different another purpose for people um and all sorts of I mean there's other um there's the brave browser and they have I guess um I think their own search engine built into that I'm not I can't remember I I've only used it a couple times but they s they provide certain specific use cases and honestly if Google is not giving you the search results you want use a different search engine and I think if we did that more Google would probably do a better job of making sure that they meet our needs and our wants and right now the content that's been ranking well on Google all of our blogs still tend to be doing really well on being which is great so I'm all about it like let's see some good competition from being um interesting thing that I heard um I think it was in our project 24 Community um last night I read this in a thread but like a recent study showed that um young people today kids teenagers uh young adults they say I don't go to Google for anything I go to Reddit I go to YouTube I go to Tik Tok I go to here I go to there um but as we discussed it we realized like they don't even realize they using Google though so they'll open up a browser most often it's Chrome and then they'll just type a question in the address bar and then they'll get their answer from Reddit or from YouTube or wherever else but how did they find it in the first place it was Google and so it's like people like young people today especially they don't even they don't even know what tool they're using but they're still using Google and I think it's because especially since Google gave us their own browser and made it nice I still prefer Chrome over um whatever Microsoft Edge or whatever it is I prefer Chrome um I like it as a browser better they've given us lots of good tools so they've just kind of built this whole ecosystem just like apple has I've got all these Apple products um and it makes it so convenient for me so now you're in this Google ecosystem and you're just using the search engine just because like it's just what you do uh without even thinking about it and I think that's part of the reason they've solidified their market share even though their search engine isn't necessarily better so we might be stuck there unless we can all change our behavior um Vlad greetings um let's see yeah thank you for being here by the way I I I do I really appreciate by the way um many of you are very kind and um and very supportive and so it it does mean a lot that it can be really tough as content creators you you'll probably experience this yourself it can be really tough to put in a lot of work and not get much feedback at all blogging has gotten really hard because very rarely do we even get comments unless somebody's upset about something you said um on YouTube we get comments but like right now Niche websites aren't working very well so most of the comments on my videos are people who are just upset um and then I and then I get these really kind comments and ones like get down voted by people um and barely show up but they mean a lot so thank you by the way for for being kind and understanding I don't have a crystal ball I didn't know exactly what was going to happen I published a video a few weeks ago uh saying I was excited for this update because what Google said their intentions were I'm not seeing their intentions being anywhere near what the result has been and so last week's video I was kind of calling them out I want to point something out by the way in my video last week I said for to be a successful blog content creator going forward um you're gonna have to be willing to work hard you can't be lazy you're gonna have to be willing have something of value to add to the internet we've talked about that a bit today and you need to have a realistic expectation this isn't a get-rich quick make a bunch of money overnight it's totally passive kind of thing um used to be more like that it's not anymore hasn't really been for a while but it's getting far or less that way never at any time did I say that if you lost traffic it's because you were lazy not what I said there were many people who were angry at me in the comments for calling them lazy it's not what I said now if going forward you want to take a lazy approach to blogging which a lot of people do what I said was that's not going to work it's not the same thing so um just wanted to point that out I I'm never well I won't say never because I'm human and imperfect but I try very hard to not cast judgment about people especially when I don't really even know the details of their situation but even when I feel like I do know some details I've learned that I rarely know nearly enough details to be able to cast any sort of fair judgment and so I try not to have that be part of my life life um so I'm not calling any of you lazy if you lost traffic you're just like the rest of us I have sites that lost traffic some of it's because some of my content was kind of lazy content but a lot of it's just because what we've built so far doesn't isn't quite matching what Google wants going forward they want us to I think they do want us to build more of a brand and build more credibility around that brand to validate that we are um legitimate going forward um and if we haven't been doing that because that wasn't necessary not very long ago then we lost traffic it could be that simple so if you feel like I called you lazy I'm sorry it was not my intention but I was trying to be deliberately a little bit bold in what I said because frankly on YouTube that does better um I make all these videos I make all these videos trying to like provide really helpful things like I made a video about here's how to take good pictures of products if you're going to make a affiliate blog post like have a good picture of a product and yes I showed a setup that was probably different from what any of you have or what most of you have but I focused on trying to teach good principles of good lighting and stuff so you can start with a good photo and then I don't care if you use Ai and stuff to help make it even better but if you start with a good photo with decent lighting it's going to be better most of you probably didn't watch that video made a video over a year ago about branding also one of my lower viewed videos over a year ago and I'm being accused of today telling people all you got to do is write a few blog posts a week and uh that'll be successful it's never been what we taught so um I just it's it's hard for me when like I try to create content that's super helpful but it's just not what people wanted so they don't watch it even though it's what they need I don't blame you for that that's human nature and so if occasionally in a video I'm a little extra old or the title or the thumbnail of the video seems to be like intentionally eye-catching that's why it's because that's what it takes to succeed on that platform the only way to get you to watch what you need to watch is for me to convince you that you want to watch it first just something to keep in mind especially if you're G to do YouTube but I think the same applies the same can apply to blogging in fact it absolutely does because all of us almost every single blogger when we start I did the same thing when we first start we write a bunch of blog posts that are the things that we feel like people need and they're the things we want to get off our chest and whatever and I've taught this many times like don't just write all the stuff you feel like writing because it's your opinion but also don't just write the things that you feel like people need to hear if it's not something that they know to ask if nobody's asking that question it's never going to show up in a Google Search now that's changed a little bit today because you probably if people need to know it you probably should still WR WR about it because it builds topical Authority and you can link from your other blog post to that blog post because in your other blog posts where you write about the things that they knew to ask you can then steer them and direct them and say this is something else you need to know and then guide them toward that other blog post but for the most part if you're wanting something to get eyeballs and get people to click on it you not you need to focus on writing what people know to ask and what they want um and use that content to steer them toward what they actually need um all right here we go I'm going to take some more questions I know we're already um at an hour but I'm going to take a few more because there are a bunch more uh one here from geeki Goron um do you think having a Google listing for completely online business would be beneficial even if you don't have a physical location with that help with authority yes 100% um and you said set it as a home address you don't need to set an address uh you used to have to um in fact it was a few months ago I was setting up a Google listing for um literally I was doing it for a course video and um I saw that one of the first questions that asked me was do you have an office and I could answer yes because I do um and it doesn't have to be my house which is nice I don't really want people coming to my house thinking that that's where they're going to reach my business I'd really rather they didn't um so I don't want to list my home address really in Google as my address you don't have to do that you can just create a Google listing now um you can say that you have a mailing address and set it as a PO box or something uh which I think is better than having no address for your business uh but you don't have to have a physical location to create a Google business account a Google Business listing um and that allows you to create and sell products and receive reviews and all that kind of stuff for your business even if you don't have a physical location I think it's smart that Google finally figured out that like oh yeah some businesses are just online maybe we should create a way for them to have a Google Business listing even if they don't have an address pretty nice of them um took them long enough um how important is it to have the same brand name on social media and the blog and if the same name is important and the blog brand is not suitable for social media should you rename the established blog I think it's beneficial if you can be consistent so um on a project I've been working on uh we did this and social media accounts are pretty easy to rename blog's a little harder if you're trying to rename the domain um you can sort of name your blog something even if the URL for the blog doesn't perfectly match it um because you can just name your blog something that's just a WordPress setting and then have a URL um what you might do is to start out with you could purchase the domain of what you want your brand to be across all platforms and you could start by just redirecting that domain to your existing blog and that way if people type that in because that's how they know you on social or um if you link to that it'll just redirect um and then over time like later on or I mean you could do this now even you could migrate all the content to the new site create a fullon redirect um a wild card redirect so basically as long as you keep the same structure for all your permal links uh so you know if your per link structure is like um your main URL slash and then the name of your blog post that's your structure if you keep that same structure when you move it to the new domain um then you can just create one Wild Card redirect that will automatically take anything and just replace that first section of the URL and then um make sure that you're set up with both domains in Google search console and alert them that you changed it's a change of address so just search in Google search console for change of address and alert Google that yeah I just changed the name of my blog I unless the new brand name seems way offbrand for the topic I've never had that not work and maintain its level of traffic so but I would I would work on consistency of branding because I just think that that credibility is going to be vital going forward um all right let's see oh yep there's Julie she did comment with um a few books uh some of them like this one here a manual for writers of research papers thesis and dissertations that's probably not going to help you as much as a blogger but um but there's uh there's other ones that we've got that I think are pretty good genas Khan asked is this live yes all right um I probably I could answer questions all day long but I actually have to go record a podcast so um I think we'll call it today thank you all for for being here thank you all for participating for um for your support we're gonna we're GNA figure things out and if there's a final message I could leave you with it's two things I can never have just one final message two things the first one don't think of yourself as a blogger or a nich site Creator you are a business owner I know I mentioned that earlier in the live treat it as a business and think of it that way act credible and and you will be um it's it's pretty straightforward um what was the other thing there was a second thing um darn it I'll probably have to just make a YouTube video about it here soon there was there was another thing but that's probably one of the biggest things though that I I would recommend is to just don't don't don't limit Yourself by saying well I I make Niche sites or I I'm a blogger I make blog posts think of yourself as a business that does something to improve people's lives figure out what that something can be you don't have to figure that out right away your business right now can just be content but be thinking about that and be working toward that and try to actually improve people's lives the people that come to you if you have something of value for them people will and um that leads to the second thing and the second thing was just because things aren't doing great today based on what we've done in the past like the blogging we've done has led to a decrease in traffic today that doesn't mean that what we've done is dead or useless it means that today something that we did in the past doesn't work or isn't working right now things are going to change again here very soon um whether or not it'll improve for us probably a lot of that depends on us I think that Google will be able to see pretty quickly which of the blog type websites did the things that they told them to and started building more credibility and all that kind of stuff and which ones continued just being full of spam content and so if we just leave our blogs and do nothing I think we're going to stay where we're at but if we make these efforts I I think that as new core updates come out we're going to be the ones that rise to the top so don't think of anything that's happened right now as the final it's not final um it's this is one step on the journey just like the stock market goes through recessions everybody that pulls out because of it's It's a recession and says see the stock market doesn't work they lose money meanwhile other people are taking what they have and buying stocks because they're on sale and then three years later they made a boatload of money because the market came back I think that we're in a bit of a dip right now as content creators because of what Google's doing and I think if we just do the right things our businesses can be very successful we just probably can't just keep doing things exactly The Way We Were all right that was my second thing um thank you all again for being here I hope to see you all again soon

Channel: Income School

Views: 6,072

Keywords: internet marketing, passive income, website, seo, content marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, youtube creators

Id: P7ruQeRdOEk

Length: 70min 6sec (4206 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024