What I've Learned As Full-Time Blogger (+ New Changes & Strategies)
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- čas přidán 29. 08. 2024
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I've been blogging and building content sites for a very long time and in this video, I reflect back on the last 4 years as a full-time blogger.
There are some massive changes that happened in the blogging industry and there are also ongoing changes right now that WILL change the way we should build our authority sites and blogs.
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Narrowing that distance to your writers makes perfect sense. Things like "tone of voice" and understanding search intent, emotions and motivations of readers, it's all quite hard to learn for some. Having a physical location sounds good, but of course adds different overheads and changes the lifestyle that blogging can grant you. Depends where you are at in life. I think there can be other ways to get closer to your writers, it could just be cases of changing the feedback process. Having less writers who work more often but have a ton of face-to-face feedback, etc. Things I am thinking about at the moment. All the best to ya!
Thanks! Yeah, fewer writers with more hours is certainly also a step in the right direction! good point!
I am also full-time from day one, Doing client SEO + Blogging, But now thinking to shift full focus on blogging especially ads based sites as we all know Google just punishing affiliate sites :) . Let's see what comes for me for the next few years. and best of luck to you too.
Sounds good, Arshab. Good luck!
google doesnt punish good aff sites just bad ones
Love hearing your story, Morten. Thanks again for all the tips. Gonna make my first $100+ with my blog this month thanks to your channel and course!
That’s AMAZING, Brandon!! thanks for letting me know! 💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼
Inspiring story! I'm sure a lot of folks out here are trying to test the waters with blogging as well, and you've helped them a lot with this video. Thanks for this, man!
Thanks a lot, Will!
That same video from Income School got me started too.
Ha! thats cool!!
I have about 5 small sites (50-130 posts each) and I’m just scraping through on full time. I’d like to know more about where/how to find experts in certain fields that I can pay to write for my sites. Can you make a video for this? And how you plan to “source” your studio writers? Is it the same setup idea that IS use?
Good question. I do several things. Advertice for experts via Problogger and also Facebook groups can work. Other times good writers know other potential writers in the same niche.
I don’t know yet about the studio as it will be in another country than Denmark where we live. It’s still on the drawing board.
Twitter is a fantastic way to find experts. I have a Twitter list called "niche site builders" that has over 100 followers. I'm sure some writers follow the list too.
Hello Morten! Your story is inspiring! Just curious, do you use social media to promote your blog posts or you just write quality contents and let Google index the posts then later on rank automatically?
Btw, I've been watching your videos for quite a while now and I'm learning from you! More power to you! 😁🙏🙏🙏
Also doing it full time, and i started in 2010, currently manage with my wife, but I do most of the work and editing with 20+ writers too.
That's amazing, exactly like me ;)
Your idea of a mega site fascinates me a lot. Thank you for all that I'm learning from you.
Happy to hear that!
Hi Morten,
Always nice listening to you and appreciate you taking the time to answer the questions.
You mentioned you'd focus on fewer sites to which you'd build CZcams channels. I'm curious how you'd go into building a YT channel into a niche that you either don't know that much about or there's really not a lot of ways to create video content for. I've been building a YT channel for one of my sites that reached a couple of thousand subscribers but I've been using stock footage (which probably isn't great long-term) and I'm running out of interesting video topic ideas. I'm pretty much stuck at this point, I'm curious to hear your version of a YT channel for a site.
We actually don't - but I'm considering it. At this point we only run the GoDownsize channel which is setting very still at this point! But we'll put it back to life soon ;)
It seems like not a lot of American people work full-time in blogging. Which is amazing to see. I like learning from your videos. I’m working on my blog to get approved for MediaVine or Adthrive. I’m skipping Ezoic because they don’t use plugins anymore for onboarding . You must transfer your nameservers.
Yeah, that's true. I also know a lot of people here in Europe who make a solid coin from blogging! ;)
@@PassiveIncomeGeek that is amazing, I’ve had my domain for at least 3 years but didn’t take blogging seriously until earlier this year.
Thanks for sharing all the experiences.
You’re welcome!
Great 👍
You don’t taking about income!!
20 writers are huge
You must make a great money
I never share our income numbers, I think its a personal matter 😉
I'm not yet there (that's reaching 100k traffic to my main blog). In today's video, you helped me re-look at zero-volume KWs in a different way, especially how I should be looking at them in the next 2-3 years.
Your content is great! Thanks, Morten! Which city are you in these days, if I may? (Last you shared was Amsterdam..., if I remember).
Thanks, Sandip! We live in Aarhus, Denmark now ;)
thanks for sharing Morten!
Oh, good to see you here, Emilia! Thanks for tuning in, I trust you're well!
I'm curious about that original danish tech blog.. I might even know it!
Anyway - good luck moving forward. 2-300 articles per month is certainly impressive!
Thanks, Thomas - always good to meet Danes here! god aften!
@@PassiveIncomeGeek By the way Morten - I think you already covered your hiring process for writers, but do you have some content specifically on hiring editors?
Congrats on reaching 20k subs
Thanks, Ismael ;)
Did you retain 100% of your companies/websites? How much do you pay editors
Yeah, our company is ours alone (Maria and I). The editor pay varies, but normally I pay 30% more for editing than writing.
Thats an interesting review of how things have changed and are changing. I think it sits very well the Google announcement on their Helpful Content Update. (Did you plan it?!)
A bit surprised to hear that you may reduce from 5 niches down to 1 or 2 since you had valued the variety.
For myself I have picked 5. However, I soon found that I can only concentrate on one as I work on my writing skill. But I did think of working on the others again later on as I progressed.
I'm now wondering if perhaps I should still be open to a few niches until its clear which one I can really work best with.... Or perhaps its better to cut down early because I may never get enough traction across 5 to prove the good one. That would mean having more confidence in the niche selection as a beginner.
yeah, it's all pretty much up in the air. I think we'll continue building 5 sites as long as they all grow nicely, but I expected Google changes to steer us in the direction of really high-quality - and who knows, maybe the "Helpful Update" it it? we'll see ;)
Can you do a video about topic selection…..I’m wondering if this is the primary key to page-views?
Oh, it sure is! Check my most viewed videos, there are a few on this!
Can you please make a few videos on how you build team and manage them with details process maybe. We tried to scale up our team, but had some difficulties.
Hi Ikram, I have this in my course ;)
Will have a look, thanks
I am really confused about affiliate because of the latest updates because I can't afford products. So, can I just use CZcams for product images and use online resources for research?
I’d stay away from reviews of products you haven’t used. Go for other types of content.
Hey Morten, could you please make a video on the quality content update and i am a bit sceptical about going on a broad niche. Thanks
I think we have to wait a bit to see what it is. All I hear from Google on this is what they always say... write quality content for people (not machine) - and that's exactly what I try to teach to ;)
@@PassiveIncomeGeek Yeah. Thanks!
Hey Morten,
Could you share where you source the fact checkers from and how much they charge? And also how do you pay them? Is it based on words like with content or is it hourly?
I pay them hourly and the pay ranges from $30-50 for most. It’s different where I find them. Sometimes I use Facebook groups for specialists or even someone who emailed me regarding some wrong facts - so we agreed on a fee for fixing a batch of articles.
@@PassiveIncomeGeek thanks Morten
Hey Morten, thanks for the great video again :) Question, at what point it's smart to form an actual company for the blogging business?
Hmm, that's very much up to the laws of your country - I know VERY little about that stuff - sorry!
Depends on the taxes and if you want actual employees or just freelancers. In most cases you can work without a company, or have an LLC if you are from USA.
thank you for your video, as a newbie my title posts are only my keyword. But i realize that is not attractive for user. Can i change it later on ?
absolutely, one of the quickest wins are updating titles. It doesn’t derank your articles.
@@PassiveIncomeGeek doesn't changing articles affect CPM/CPC?
I left my job last month to go full time on working across my sites.
Thats amazing, Sambhu - very happy for you - must be a good feeling!
Hey man, I have a very strange problem. Some bots attack my site from various countries and IPs that change. Has it happened to you before? What can I do? This is so disturbing...I cant focus on content or anything else and I am constantly thinking of what they try to do and how to block em....Please if you have any idea lemme know. Thanks in advance, Morten!
Bots will visit and spoil your analytics data. 99% of bot traffic is harmless. Talk to your display ad network (if any) and ask if they think uou should set up a filter in analytics. You can also filter some bots out with a switch in analytics (google it 😉)
@@PassiveIncomeGeek I wouldnt just filter em from analytics cause then Google can see my reduced time on page and increased bounce rate. I suppose this is what they are trying to do. To influence my metrics, right???
Hey Morten,
I am thinking setting up an informational ecomemrce blog where I'd like to share my expertise but never done such thing before clearly it's not one that one can earn from ads given it doesnt have any product it's merely a news/industry related blog with no products and hopefully later sell it as a media blog ? any thoughts? keep up the great work
Ecom is a great topic in general, with high ad earnings as there's lot of advertisers interested. You can easily make money from ads on such a site - but it may be hard to find cracks (underserved topics).
@@PassiveIncomeGeek exactly thats what I thought. Do you think one can build a sell as a media like Hustle did to HubSpot?
I have some concerns about the future for white hat blogging/sites. There’s a Reddit post where they are talking about how these black hat groups are investing lots of money into these scripts that are creating massive People Also Ask sites that are getting millions of views from Google and the recent Core update actually boosted them (while seeming to drop smaller white hat sites)
I know, it’s the scraped/AI sites I’ve also talked about with millions of answers. I think Google will figure a way to stop it 😉.
It’s a risky and churn-and-burn strategy and in the long run I’ve always found stellar content to surface above the competition.
Are you buying links? This seems to be a very sensitive topic, still.
I don’t build links anymore. Last 6 sites are built with zero backlinks! though they come pretty quickly with good content.
nothing sensitive about it. You do it or you don't. And in case you want more traffic, putting more articles out there is simply the best way to go about it. And you can only spend that money once, so better spend it on content instead of links.
I consider myself a part-time blogger but the way Google has been smashing blogs these days really frightens me. I am not willing to to go full-time until this nonsense halts.
Yeah, I see. It's hard for smaller sites with low authority these days, hopefully things clear up soon.
Its not nonsense...making blogs that don't make the cut are still ranking. It's googles way of cleaning up the trash
@@TB-zt6hs It is. I write a big chunk of the articles myself so i can assure of the research and content quality. Secondly, I still regularly see poorly formatted, logically incorrect, AI written articles ranking at the top.
@@jawadahmad7005 I get where you are coming from. There are many low quality blogs that are also ranking in my niche. But I believe that as well as you have quality on your site, it will eventually edge out these other competitors
Hi Morten, sorry for the unrelated comment. I am hiring a developer to change my site from html to Wordpress. He intends to use elementor and I am worried this will affect site speed. What would you recommend?
Don't use it! It will kill your speed. Just use Gutenberg. It's not quite as good but much MUCH faster.
@@PassiveIncomeGeek thanks- do you have a theme you would recommend for an informational site?
@@PassiveIncomeGeek I have articles I wrote using elementor. Ezoic recommends I delete elementor because it's affecting my site speed.
After I deleted elementor, it broke all past article I created in elementor. I have 40 articles made in elementor
Any news on your site that was affected by the update?
Nope, so far it's still dead :/
@@PassiveIncomeGeek sorry, mine too 😟
Can I work with you
Sorry, I don't hire among my audience.