Niche 1, Month 2 – Project 24 Blogging Journey

Site: The Radiologic Technologist

May: Complete Steps 22-40

Step 22: Make a Resource Page
Step 23: Build a framework for Resource Page
Step 24: Buld first Resource Category Page
Step 25: Build second…
Step 26: Build third..
Step 27: Site design and structure
Step 28: Watch video: Staple Posts, and write it
Step 29: Write second Staple Post
Step 30: Write third…
Step 31: Write fourth…
Step 32: Write fifth…
Step 33: Write sixth…
Step 34: Write seventh…
Step 35: Write eighth…
Step 36: Write nineth…
Step 37: Write tenth..
Step 38: Watch video: how to promote
Step 39: Record first YouTube video
Step 40: Watch video: how to YouTube with screen sharing

Writing Staple Posts

The key, as they explained it, is to write 2500 words or more. These are no longer responses to Google questions. These are shorter “How To “posts and “5 Best Things” type of posts. Short guides, etc. The method they use it to put a Headline 1 at the top and add another H2 or H3 every 2-3 paragraphs. Keep the paragraphs short and to the point. No extra drivel just to fill space. Keep the wording simple unless you know your audience is going to be highly educated. Make your own graphs and charts to use as images. Take your own pictures to use as thumbnails and post images. If you absolutely have to use someone else’s photos, subscribe to a service to have a large library to chose from.

YouTube Video

They recommend using your phone camera to record and not overcomplicate this part. Just 5-10 minutes talking about something relevant to the blog. I already had one video made on this niche topic prior to starting the blog so I just plugged that video into a page on my blog. Month 3 I’m supposed to have ten videos total. If you can’t think of a topic for a video, just use your articles for the videos. Narrate the articles, so to speak.

They also say you can create a podcast to have a similar effect. I’m guessing we’re just going for an alternate method of driving traffic to our niche site. I kind of like the podcast idea better. Find a YouTube video that teaches you how to use a screenshare / screen recording just in case you absolutely don’t want your own ugly mug on video.

Marketing

After getting a taste of that 1600 pageview day, I became hooked on watching my hit counter like Hoes on Santa. So to keep the hits coming, I went out and found a few groups in the niche/genre on Reddit, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Luckily, they all accepted me and my gentle spamming in their groups. So, in Reddit for example, I joined the Radiology subreddit. When someone would post a question about “How do I get into radiology” or “How much does a radiographer make per hour” I would write a sentence or two of small talk and then link to my niche post that answered the question. I repeated this on all three social networks. (I did this through July and have had terrific results.)

But it isn’t organic traffic. It’s all marketing traffic, inorganic traffic. Which is fine but it means I have to do stuff every day to stay engaged in each group. The days I have content to post, it is pretty easy to get traffic. But the days I don’t crank out content, it is a bit more of a struggle. My saving grace here was that I had already been making memes in my field for about six months just for fun. But I had only been posting them on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not the greatest place to wrangle traffic. I mean, I’m hitting the niche of people who don’t know what they want to be for a career and they are asking questions. LinkedIn is built for people that HAVE a career and are networking. Facebook and Reddit ended up being MUCH better.

But I grabbed all my memes and recycled them through FB and Reddit. They were widely accepted to the point where I created a meme page on my website as a library. The trick here is to create your own memes with your own pictures, then you can paste your own URL on the picture. Now, when people download my memes and share them somewhere else on the internet, they are advertising my site for me. Memes are easy to make. I doubt I need to tell anyone how to make them but just in case, I simply downloaded the phone app Photo Director and used that. $4.99 to buy the app and I was ready to go. The droid version is WAY better than the iPhone version, as are most things between droids and iphones. (zing!)

How does my site rank?

I’m not sure how accurate it is but I enjoy visiting CuteStat and running my domain name through it. The outcome, among other things, is your Alexa ranking and dollar value of your website. At two weeks old, I had no Alexa ranking at all. By four weeks my Alexa ranking was 4,292,170. I think the value went from $8 to $240 during this 4th week but has remained unchanged. (by June 11 I was at 3.7M on Alexa.) Further down on the page it shows you your average daily unique views and daily average page views. This thing may be total crap, I don’t know.

I have continued the same marketing strategy through May. My traffic dips if I don’t have time to engage in social media for a day. But I’m hoping, in time, I’ll have enough Return Visitors and new people interested in the career field that traffic will continue without my input. I do intend to return to make this an “authority” site with more content after I finish the second niche site.

I’ll post my June actions in the next post and include my Pre-Launch Go Live Contest. This contest will be an attempt to start building a newsletter membership.

I have jumped the gun a little and added Adsense ads to my site. Income School recommends you wait until you have completed all 30 posts. I already have a working Adsense account from my Orange Jeep Dad blog so why not use it. What I risk is sending a signal to Google that I’m all about the money and not about providing high-quality content. The Income School theory, best I can understand, is to put all of your content up for Google to index. No ads would indicate to them that you only exist to provide quality information. Once you start getting organic traffic, THEN you add the advertisements.

I couldn’t wait that long. My impatience got the best of me.

My Adsense earnings, in my opinion, turned out to be pathetic. (By the end of June, I’m around $16.28 for the last 30 days, but I didn’t get serious about loading up on Adsense ads until the end of May.) Now every page has 3-5 ads on it. Never more than 5, even on the 4000+ Pillar Posts. Google doesn’t have penalties that I can find if you post a ridiculous amount of ads on a page but I think it looks tacky.

I also added Amazon Affiliate links. Again, not recommended at this phase but I already have them on my old blog. So I put some ads on the sidebar and linked to radiology basic supplies like x-ray markers, lead aprons, etc.

Amazon is at $5.74 for May 11-June 11. However, Income School teaches that you shouldn’t see your first $5 until your sixth month and I’m there in six weeks so I shouldn’t complain. I am linking to Amazon products on a few pages and on the sidebar of every page.

The third income producer that I haven’t tackled yet is selling info products. Income School teaches to do (1) ads (Adsense, then Ezoic when at 4 months old and 10,000 page views each month, then AdThrive if you can hit 100,000 page views each month), (2) Amazon affiliate links and (3) info products.