002: Build in Public Report – 25 Sept 2022

Welcome to my weekly Build in Public report, where I discuss the activities that contribute to me building a $20K/month one-person business (starting from zero) and what I have learned each week. 

Why am I doing this? Here’s why: 

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In this edition:

Goals & targetsImportant Goings-On this past weekWhat I learned about growing website traffic, Twitter growth, and salesWhat’s next

Goals & targets

With one week left in Sept, I’ve still got a couple of goals to hit:

This week I made progress in all 5 areas, even with Friday being a write-off, so I’m happy. I feel like I will need some part-time VA support to remove a lot of the admin stuff off my plate, so I’m chatting with Cheryl at The Growth Hub next week about it.  

(Btw, in case you missed it, you can check out last week’s update here.)

Inspirational goal:

Saw this posted in a group that I’m in. It’s a screenshot of somebody sharing the results they got after completing something called the “Kevin challenge”.

It turns out the “Kevin challenge” is to write and publish 30 blog posts in 60 days on your niche website, and this guy did it all without the aid of any AI tools. That’s super impressive!

Is this something that I could replicate? and why would I even bother? 

At first, I thought, “that’s INSANE,” but with some focus and discipline, I think it’s totally doable.

As for why one would want to push for such a high content volume in a short time frame, it all comes down to content velocity. 

The basic idea is this – it can take as much as six to nine months for content you publish today to fully mature into organic search results. So the sooner you publish your articles, the sooner they will appear in Google search results.

You publish more content sooner to speed up the process and get your website ranking quicker.  This means more traffic sooner, and if you’ve set up your monetization features as well, more money. 

There are four key metrics to any content-based SEO strategy:

1. Article velocity
2. Rankings
3. Traffic
4. Conversion

Since we might not be able to focus on traffic right away, we use all four metrics, at different times in a website’s lifecycle, to track progress.

— Growth Machine (@growthmachine__)
Sep 16, 2021

Important Goings-On this past week

1/ Participated in a 5-day blog writing challenge

My ambitious goal of publishing 5 blog posts per week, which I set back on Aug 1, has fallen by the wayside as I’ve prioritized setting up a rhythm and system for my weekly newsletters. 

So when Sadie Smiley announced that she’d be hosting a free 5-day blog writing challenge for bloggers I signed up. I hoped it would give me some accountability to write and publish more blog posts on my site. 

While I didn’t complete five blog posts, I did manage to get three up. The one I’m particularly proud of is an affiliate article where I share five tools that I’m using to produce articles that rank on page one of Google. 

2/ Identifying quick-win opportunities to improve website SEO (and traffic)

One of the benefits of starting over with a new domain and website is that it’s easy to identify where there are opportunities for improvement.

By taking the time to optimize the structure of your website, you can help improve your website’s SEO and grow traffic.

There are a few quick wins that you gain by doing the following:

Ensure that your most important pages are easy to findInclude keywords in your title and meta tags, Fix broken links,Have keyword-rich content

So this week I 

There are two awesome tools that I’m using to identify these quick-win opportunities:

Ahrefs site audit

I ran the site audit on my domain last night, and as you can see from the above screenshot, there are 41 URLs with errors. Many of these are pages that were copied over from my old website with broken links in them. So they’re returning 404 errors.

This is an easy fix – just need to go through each broken URL and update it with the current URL or delete any links that are no longer required.

You can access the Ahrefs site audit tool via their free webmaster tools.

Surfer SEO Grow and Flow
Grow Flow is Surfer’s AI growth management platform. It provides a weekly data-driven SEO checklist for improving your website traffic.

So all you need to do each week is to check what tasks the tool recommends you complete and work your way through the list. 

As you can see from this screenshot, many suggestions have to do with updating existing content on my website.

Surfer SEO announced recently that they’d made Grow and Flow free to help users with small domains (less than 100 impressions a day) grow their traffic until it made sense for them to upgrade to their paid plans.