Blog update 5/22/2019

I feel like I always say this, but it really feels like the blog is picking up!

I should break 30,000 sessions this month, and if I'm lucky $100 in affiliate earnings.

Instagram in particular is going very well. I'm getting closer to 30k followers, and I've also realized that my follower count is giving me street cred in other places. For example, I joined Indie Hackers, an online community, and when I shared how I broke 25k followers on Instagram, I got a lot of questions and upvotes.

In addition, my IG approach of being the polar opposite of most female devs there who try to go the lifestyle / IG "model" direction, seems to be panning out. I've had multiple existing good brands contact me for collaborations, and it always turns out that I'm the first Instagrammer that they have reached out to. I think my style and educational approach is building up a lot of perceived authority for my own brand. So I'm really psyched about that. I'm hoping to get a couple sponsorships in the next month or so.

Content creation is getting a bit easier-- I did a couple posts + YouTube videos recently in a relatively smaller span of time. Eventually I want to be able to create one post/video per week, but at the moment I'm trying to focus on creating my first course.

My course is going to be for beginners, and will build a simple responsive website as a way of teaching responsive design skills. I've wireframed the website out in Adobe XD, which is a very cool tool. And right now I'm just starting to build the website itself.

After that, the plan is to create a written version of the whole tutorial and release that as an eBook. And then record a video version of the course, working with J to make it unique, creative, and cool.

One of the people I read about on Indie Hackers created his own course in React as just an eBook, and now a second course that's just video. And he is bringing in 3k per month. So my plan is to release the course in tiers-- either just the eBook, or eBook + videos for more. In the long run, I'd like to be able to create a new course every 3-6 months? I can figure that part out later. The fact is, creating and selling your own courses is by far the best way to generate income online.

I'm feeling relatively optimistic about being able to start making money from courses. Maybe I'm thinking too big, but I am predicting that although I don't get a lot of traffic from Instagram to my website, I may get a decent amount of customers from Instagram. We'll see.

After J leaves his job next week, he's going to be able to help me with more YouTube stuff! I really think that together we can make some really high quality tutorial videos. I'm sure there will be road bumps, but I am quite optimistic that we will be able to work through them.

Blog update 2/8/2019

(Writing this for a /r/juststart Reddit post, so the wording may be a bit different)

Hey all,

It's been about 5 months since my last update. I will try to update more regularly here, but it may or may not be monthly.

Past updates:
My first post (https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/9e2ct9/case_study_update_1_one_year_in/).

General info


I run a website in the tech space, and also have an Instagram, YouTube, and just started a Twitch channel. The general goals are to establish a trusted brand in my niche space, and generate income through affiliate links and eventually digital products (ebooks, courses).

Traffic

I recently got rid of Google Analytics and am just using my web host's AWStats for analytics. I'd heard it's much less accurate than GA, but when I compared my numbers the AWStats Unique Visitor count was very similar to the GA Sessions. Regardless, I'm more interested in trajectory than the numbers per se, and I'm happy to have zero cookies on my site. So it's good enough for me :)

All that said, my Unique Visitors numbers for the past few months are:

15,564 -- Aug 2018
19,003 -- Sept 2018
22,442 -- Oct 2018
23,317 -- Nov 2018
23,455 -- Dec 2018
31,776 -- Jan 2019

60% of my traffic comes from Google, and my top performing page makes up 43% of my pageviews. Definitely need to optimize that page for monetization in the future.

Blog Content

I wrote 9 new posts in those 5 months, bringing me to a grand total of 18 posts.

I tend to write long-form posts-- most are around 2000-3000 words.


Instagram

Instagram is definitely where I spend most of my time. I try to post 4-5 times per week, and various stories generally every day. I also do some story series or IG Lives occasionally to answer common questions I get or discuss a topic.

I hit my goal of breaking 10k in early November, and I've been steadily getting between 600-800 new followers per week. I haven't noticed much change in the increase rate, so if this stays the same I'll be just under 50k by the end of 2019.

One cool perk of IG has been brand collaborations. I've had a few freebies, usually small things like stickers and stuff. But in the past couple months I've been approached by an office equipment startup that is sending me an office setup package (desk + chair) for free in exchange for writing a series of posts and doing a giveaway of one of their desks over the next couple months. If that goes well I will try to get them to do some paid sponsored posts afterwards.

In addition, a YouTuber with 60k subscribers who is just starting out on Instagram reached out to me to see if I'd be interested in doing sponsored posts to promote a new online course. I was pretty excited because I've watched a lot of his videos and I've mentioned him a few times to my followers as a good resource for specific questions.


Video (YouTube/Twitch)

Started creating some content on YouTube here and there. I had one video I uploaded like a year ago but it was a ghost town other than that. But as my day job workload has decreased recently (I work from home), and I've gotten a bit faster at writing blog posts and maintaining Instagram, I have some additional time and it seems like a good time to try to create consistent content on there.

So far I've uploaded 3 real videos and 1 IG video repost to YouTube. The goal is to do 1 video per week, or at least 3 videos per month. My initial plan is to make video versions of my blog posts-- recording from scratch, and using the blog posts as scripts, basically.



Monetization

The money game is growing slowly, but the numbers are increasing!

In early September I created a couple of "Best" articles with affiliate links and featured them on my homepage and in my sidebar. So it's been nice to see a bit of income starting to trickle in.

In October I made $87 from an affiliate program (non-Amazon).

My Amazon earnings have been:

$0.05 -- Sep 2018
$2.63 -- Oct 2018
$9.03 -- Nov 2018
$10.78 -- Dec 2018
$11.04 -- Jan 2019


Goal Tracking

Goals from last time:

• Write 1 how-to post (per month) -- Achieved (wrote 9 new posts in 5 months)
• Write 1 affiliate "best of" post -- Achieved (wrote 2 affiliate posts)
• Hit 10k Instagram followers by Thanksgiving -- Achieved
• Make "any kind" of money -- Achieved
• Rework homepage to promote specific posts -- Achieved

Goals for next time:

• Write 1 blog post per week, upload 1 YouTube video per week
• Maintain Instagram content creation
• Get at least one paid sponsorship deal set up

Other Notes
 
Long-term, my money-making goal has been to create digital products to promote, like ebooks and online courses. I haven't created anything yet. Part of me is super impatient to make money, but I also recognize that I need to get good at content creation first. The plan right now is to practice making videos on YouTube, then once I'm more comfortable and get better at it, to create a complete video course and sell that. I'd also like to write an ebook.

Over all that, though, I'm realizing my real goal is to establish myself as an authority in my industry. I actually really enjoy answering emails and messages and helping people trying to figure out a problem. So in a way, while I want to make money so this can be my full-time thing, I also am trying to build some kind of community to help people in my niche audience.

Anyway, I know this is a bit different than most people's approaches of just affiliate marketing websites, so let me know if this is helpful to keep posting here.

Blog update 12/31/2018

Happy New Year! I'm in the middle of doing some freelance work for my cybersecurity client, but figured I'd take some time to reflect and write a bit on how Coder Coder is doing, since it's been a while since the last update... 3 months!

My main focus in the past few months has been Instagram. I hit 10k in early November, and have still been growing between 600-800 followers per week. I should be hitting 16k sometime on New Year's Day. When I tell friends how many followers I have, they're always incredibly shocked, and it's almost like I'm a celebrity. But to myself, I feel like there's still a long ways to grow-- I don't know if 100k is possible in the web dev niche, but I'd like to hit 40-60k.

On Instagram I really feel like I've invested a lot of time writing informative posts, doing Q&A stories, and helping people via DMs. Tomorrow I'm going to experiment with doing an IG Live, in preparation for a joint live I'll be doing with another Instagrammer (@samanthaming) sometime in January. It really feels like I'm part of a community, which is awesome-- trolls and creeps aside, there are a lot of cool people and it's cool to be able to help other devs out.

Writing-wise, while I've really gotten good at writing posts on Instagram, writing on the blog regularly is still a challenge. Originally I had this expectation that I have to write a new post at least every week. But I'm realizing that Instagram is the place where I create regular content, and I think my blog is functional for now as an SEO destination, and where people can sign up for my email list. I'm not stressing quite as much about writing blog posts all the time. Because the majority of people reach my blog via SEO, not necessarily from my emails.

Eventually of course, I want to create more regular content on the blog. But at the moment my main focus aside from Instagram is to create a free and a premium course. Hopefully in the next 6 months? My goal is to create a free course about basic responsive design in January, and then create a more in-depth premium course on building responsive websites by the summertime. So honestly I don't think not having new blog posts for a couple months will be too bad.

Money-wise, I've started generating a small amount of money. In Oct I earned almost $90 from 2 affiliate sales of a popular coding course author (Wes Bos). And I earned $9 from Amazon Affiliate links in Nov, and $10 in Dec. That's mostly from website traffic, not Instagram. Also, I've achieved one of my initial goals and have gotten some freebies from various companies in exchange for writing IG posts/stories and tagging them! I got a free domain name, a set of privacy stickers to cover the camera on your laptop/phone, and won a giveaway of a desk raiser and standing mat.

But I think from now on I'm going to be very selective, and only work with one or 2 brands that I actually love, like the desk raiser company (Varidesk). I don't want to dilute my content with too many sponsorships, and honestly I'd rather direct people to my courses.

I'm not going to post on Medium anymore, because it seems to be dying, and I haven't participated in the Facebook coding groups like I was at the very beginning. But I'm ok with that. I want to just focus on the few very important things for me-- Instagram and creating courses.

Workwise I also agreed to start working 40 hrs/wk for my main client for 3-6 months for their website reskin. I know it will be a lot more time, but I think that it'll be a good challenge to learn to manage my time and work efficiently.

So for 2019 I'm really optimistic! Things are growing, and I have some exciting plans in store for this year. My big goal this year would be to earn the same amount of money from Coder Coder as I used to earn working full-time at my old job. I think it's definitely possible, although it may be a challenge to achieve that by the end of 2019. But here's to trying!

Blog update 9/22/2018

Just wanted to write a small update about writing! Writing content has been the most difficult part of this whole blogging thing. Which is really not great since by definition blogging entails writing! But I think I've started to hit my stride (a bit).

I've been doing like 1 post every MONTH or so, or even every 2 months. Bad. But the most recent post I wrote, while yes, I started outlining it probably a month ago, the writing started out difficult but ended up going really well.

It was originally going to be a step by step guide on building a one page responsive website. I started outlining it, and pretty quickly realized it would end being a really huge 10,000 word post. Which isn't bad in itself, but I think it might require being a video instead.

Also, I was trying to figure out good blog post topics that could sort of foray into similar content that I'd eventually make a course out of. So I could see how popular those types of posts would be, and determine if a course on that topic would do well.

So there was a few stops and starts, and I had started two different versions of the article, but it didn't quite feel right.

Then I started just planning out my potential course idea and planning out a set of post ideas that I could work on. And I guess figuring out that framework made something click about how this post (on building a simple website layout from a wireframe) could be structured.

And I figured out what the post would be about, and how much detail to go into with the demo website so it wouldn't be insanely long. But still able to make the post about a compelling topic.

Looking back I have no idea why it was so hard for me to get started. But anyway, once I figured out the scope of the article, as well as how it would fit into the greater body of content on the blog, I felt ready to go. I knew exactly what I would write about.

Even after I started writing, though, I had a hard time staying focused. Part of it was the fact that I spent a tonnn of time last weekend optimizing the website. I'd actually written 2 "best of" posts for affiliate content, installed Google Analytics and set up some click events, applied to more affiliate programs, and redesigned my website. A lot of energy had gone into all that work, which might explain why I had trouble focusing on writing and finishing this dang post!

However when I restarted working on the post again, I ended up making an Instagram post about how I was *still* working on this article (that I had originally mentioned on Instagram a few weeeks prior). So I think due to that, I felt real social pressure on myself that I needed to finish it and just get it out there.

It's surprising what some accountability, even just perceived accountability, can do. I had posted about how I was having writer's block on Tuesday. I was also trying to work on some freelance work, so it was a bit busy.

Thursday night I had started feeling like I was getting some momentum in writing, but wasn't done yet. Also my freelance work had freed up a bit, at least enough that I wasn't going to have any people chatting me, for the most part. So on Friday I had a relatively clear day, and in the morning I realized that if I just powered through, I could actually finish the darn thing and finish it once and for all.

So I did. I finished writing in the Google doc, then pasted the text into Wordpress, optimized all my screenshot images, formatted everything, and hit the publish button! Then I was able to share it on Instagram and made it my Friday post. I may stick with Friday for my new blog posts, because I've noticed that I'll often get a surge of likes on Fridays as opposed to other days.

It felt incredibly good to finish that article. Also, because I had written about 1200 words just on Friday morning (if I'm remembering rightly), it really opened my eyes to just how much work I can do if I buckle down and churn it out.

So far I've gotten good reception. Lots of great comments on Instagram of people saying they were psyched to read the article, and I even got an email from a mother in her 40s who is teaching herself to code! It feels good because I feel like I'm doing something good in the world.

Honestly, I like freelance work because I do love building websites. But if I could truly spend 20 hrs/wk working on Coder Coder, I would really be excited.

I currently feel like Coder Coder is starting to really get traction (altho I always feel that way). I was approached by a computer glasses brand to review a free pair of glasses that they would mail to me-- one thing off my wishlist to happen, getting free swag from companies! And my web traffic is continuing to go up.

What I'd like to see in the near future is making some real money off of affiliate offers. I'm thinking of new ways I can promote affiliate offers-- maybe making my own banner ad type blocks and putting it in the sidebar, or at the end of posts. I'm getting people clicking on the homepage "best of" posts, so it's working.

I just need more traffic. It's a numbers game, honestly.

While I would love to create and put out a course, I really, truly shouldn't think about it yet. I need to get good at my bread and butter-- posting on Instagram, and writing articles on the blog. Because those will increase my readership and my followers, and will hopefully start to bring in some money.

Looking forward to the future! I'm optimistic that I can start writing posts more quickly and get more consistent in the content creation part of all of this.

Blog update 9/11/2018

It's been a little over 3 months since my last update, and things are really going well!

Work-wise, I'm so, so happy that I'm a freelancer now. I have 2 main clients that I work for, I have a standing 10 hr/wk maximum agreement with one, and the other isn't a maintenance agreement but project based. Currently I have about 30 hrs/wk booked, billed whatever time I actually work. And sporadic hours for my old job, which I'm trying to phase out as much as possible.

Traffic

Last update in June was around 5000 users per month. Currently I have 12,000 users per month in the last 30 days. So I've more than doubled my traffic in 3 months! Most (76%) is from organic search, and my DA (according to Moz) is 22. Bounce rate is still quite high, around 90%. But I think part of that is due to me not giving my users many options to navigate to after they've finished reading a post. Which leads me to my next update...

Website Redesign

I was reading a subreddit called /r/juststart, which has a lot of self case studies of affiliate niche sites. Some of the posts are sites getting around the same traffic #'s as me, but they're making like $1,000/month from Amazon affiliates. I realized at that point that I need to get my monetization game in gear.

My homepage sucked. It had a header and then just a grid of blog posts, and the footer. Sign-up forms were only in the sidebar for posts. The past couple nights I've started redesigning the homepage and some global styles:

• Changed the header from teal to a nicer more friendly blue color
• Added a hero on the homepage with a nice CTA headline/subhead that reads "Want to get better at coding? / Get practical tips for beginner web developers." With a form to signup right under.
• Updated the sidebar color to be blue also, added Amazon Affiliate disclaimer at the bottom of it, updated sidebar form CTA copy to match what I have on the homepage.
• Wrote 2 "best of" articles for books and courses with affiliate links, to be featured on the homepage

Still needs to be done:

• Display "best of" posts on the homepage
• Display 3 most recent blog posts on homepage
• Create /blog page which will display list of posts
• Implement some basic GTM/GA tagging to measure what's getting clicked

Social Media

I've been working on my Instagram game really solidly for the past few months, and it's paid off handsomely. In July I hit 2000 followers, and since then I've been posting every day almost without fail. I'm currently gaining around 10% of followers per week, e.g. I'm at 6000 something followers and have gained 600 something in the past week. Which is a crazy return if you think about it.

At this rate I should be hitting 10k sometime in mid-to late October, assuming my gain rate keeps increasing to stay at 10%. Then I'll be able to link out to stuff from my account! I'll have to start planning that out, to add highlighted stories to link to my major posts/pages, as well as a courses list with affiliate links.

I'm not planning on doing much else on social media. For Pinterest, the plan is to get my husband to design some awesome illustrations for pins for my "best of" pages, and hope they go viral on Pinterest. The pin he designed for my Absolute Beginner's Guide is still bringing in quite a bit of traffic because it went semi-viral. But I'm not going to do the manual pinning game, at least not right now.

Future Plans

I know eventually I want to make a course. What I've landed on as the topic is to do a very in-depth, step-by-step guide of making a website from the very beginning. Like creating files and folders, creating your HTML file with info on what goes in the head and stuff. Then going on to build a simple one-page website from the ground up, from the planning to wires to picking design styles and a color palette. Then the actual coding, along with my own thought processes for how I decide things like CSS classes and such.

What I'm going to do to work up to that point, is split up all that into a series of posts, each tackling one step in the website build. Then write a blog post with code snippets and screenshots.

Once that's all done, I'll make a video tutorial of each blog post and also make the files accessible.

It will be a quite in-depth course, so I'm not sure if I want to make that a paid course, or make it a free course. And later on make other, paid courses.

In some ways it makes more sense to make free tutorial videos on various topics in web dev. Like how to make a simple 2-col website structure, or various modules like an off-canvas menu, or a modal window.

But I can figure all that out as I go. Right now, as always, the trick is to figure out how to keep writing content!!

I haven't been very successful at that yet :P

But I'm looking forward to the next few months. I'm hoping I'll get a few more affiliate clicks, and break 10k, and have published at least a few articles by the next update.

Money-wise, I haven't made much at all, currently $3.71 from Amazon affiliate links.

Blog update 6/6/2018

Haven't updated for a while, but things are doing well!

In March I was talking about publishing a post about making a website without design skills, and that's actually the last article I published on the site for now. Work at my day job (web developer at an ad agency) got incredibly busy for a while and I was working till late at night for a couple weeks. I definitely got a bit burned out by it, and just had no energy to work on the blog.

Fortunately, that is all changing-- I am quitting my job! My last day is next Thursday and I'm incredibly excited. I'll be working half time doing web dev contract work (partially for my by-then former employer), and hopefully will have much more time to work on the blog.

I've started trying to develop a system for all the tasks to do for it: researching, writing, posting on social media, etc. I'm also going to be working with my husband on creating an amazingly awesome and in-depth course on HTML and CSS. The goal is to create a course that goes super in-depth and is focused on practical information that other sources may not get to. I'm very excited for that, although I know it will take a ton of work.

Email

Still using MailChimp for now. I had to get GDPR compliant and so for now have gotten rid of content upgrades, since you're supposed to be up front and clear with your subscribers on what you are signing them up for. I think I still need to work on my language on the subscribe form and thank you page. My plan here is to change and be extremely transparent and be as non-scummy as possible when it comes to the marketing. Part of me wants to actually raise the bar for signing up so that only those who are very interested will want to sign up. I'd like eventually to create a free 5 day email course that will be similar to the type of course I'll create. And start making the sales funnel that way.

Stats

Despite not publishing new content in a couple months, my traffic has steadily been going up. I actually broke 5k users and 6k sessions in the last 30 days. So I am quite hopeful that I'll continue to build up once I start creating content again.

For traffic, 63% (~4k sessions) is coming from organic search, 12% from social, and 6% from referral. I'm actually not doing too bad on organic search-- my top ranked search is just "coder" which not surprisingly doesn't have a high (CTR) click-through ratio. But I'm also on the first page for searches like:

• "web development for beginners"
• "simple html website" -- I'm actually #2-3 for this one!
• "responsive css grid"

Social Media

Surprisingly, most of my social traffic is now coming from Pinterest! Of my referral traffic (clicking a link somewhere else to land on the website):

• 30% is from Pinterest, 
• 20% from freeCodeCamp, 
• 10% from YouTube (freeCodeCamp reposted an HTML video on their channel), and 
• 2-3% from other places like Reddit, Instagram etc.

On Pinterest I've had my pin for the Absolute Beginner's Guide go semi-viral-- it's been reposted on a couple other boards that have a lot of traffic. I've had around 500 sessions just from Pinterest (~7% of total traffic). Pretty crazy. I think Pinterest is one area that I'll really need to make sure I have beautiful looking pins-- that one is doing so well b/c of the title, and the art that Joe designed for it. Also I've noticed most pins use a photo background, so mine may have stuck out a bit more because it has a bold purple background with cool illustrations.

Plans for the Future

The main plan is to actually be writing consistent content, once post per week. I need to figure out how long it takes me to write one post of reasonable length.

The long-term plan is to work on that video tutorial series on HTML and CSS, and post them to Udemy, SkillShare, and potentially other places. I've been watching John Morris Online, and he has an interesting model where he has free tutorials on his YouTube, then more in-depth courses on Udemy and Skillshare. Wes Bos does a similar thing where you can buy his course on Udemy, but if you buy from his own website he includes more content. I definitely want to try to drive traffic to my own website and sell from there. It may take another 5-6 months to release a full HTML & CSS course, but I think it will do very well.

I was also reading a post by Neil Patel called "Everything I Taught You About SEO Was Wrong" where he says that the focus on just traffic and growing traffic is a bit misguided. Instead, we should be focusing on our potential customers. For example, my target audience is beginner web devs because I eventually want to create a course just for beginners. If I start writing articles about advanced topics, then while they may get me traffic, they will not be making me any money unless I start focusing on advanced web devs. So good food for thought. You don't need a tonnn of traffic to make good money online; just keep things focused.

Looking forward to the rest of June and my first week or so post day job!

Blog update 3/30/18

Closing out March. The year's flying by! Trying to make use of my time efficiently and wisely.

In the past week or so, I've started feeling like things with the blog are clicking, and things are growing at a slow but steady rate. I'm very pleased with how things are going!

I'm going to try updating in specific areas each time I write, for better tracking purposes.

Writing

Writing is honestly still the #1 thing I struggle with. But I have had a perspective shift, I think due to the Elite Blogging Academy community (so glad I joined!).

Before I felt like I *had* to write 3-4 hours per night. And for some reason I would just end up doing nothing really productive. After reading about all the moms who work on their blogs on stolen moments throughout the day, I realized that I need to do the same. So now I'll just tell myself, ok, I'll work for 30 minutes or 1 hour and try to get X done.

It's made me much more productive, and also reduced my stress level around the blog, because I don't feel like such a big obligation weighing down on me. Being more realistic and chunking my time has been such a huge improvement for me.

I am currently working on a new post about how to design and build a website without design skills, and it's going well. Most of the writing is done, actually, and I just need to build the demo site and get all the screenshots in.

Email

I'm still using MailChimp, and I'm thinking of sticking with it for now, since it's free until 2000 subscribers. ConvertKit seems to be universally loved, but it's $30/mth and I kind of want to see if I can just keep MailChimp going.

I'm still figuring out what the heck to email my list about. People say you need to "date" your list, or to treat them as friends. So one area I need to work on is that. I just want to make sure I don't annoy or bore them, and that I give them helpful information.

Medium

Medium changed their algorithm recently to display heavily toward members-only articles and articles from big name companies like Bloomberg and the Atlantic. They've also gotten rid of the "trending" section, and just have a small sidebar with the top 5 articles on Medium.

It's put a huge dent in stats on free articles, specifically freeCodeCamp. I had a previous article that got 44k views, and for my recent absolute beginner's guide article, I thought I could reach toward 100k. But the algorithm changed right before the article was published, and so right now I think I'm hanging around 14k views.

I think I'll need to change with the times, I'm considering writing a members-only article just to see how it does. And the other plus side is that it could bring in some income for me as well.

Instagram

I've posted very consistently on Instagram the past couple weeks, and using the Hootsuite app to schedule posts as well. And I've gotten about 70 new followers in the past week. Instagram is interesting, because I'm not getting much website traffic from it-- but that will change as I get more followers.

And there are income generating opportunities once I get bigger-- I could get sponsored posts / ad posts, and once I hit 10k followers, I'll be able to link directly from my Stories which I could use for affiliate links and other promotions. So I'm working pretty hard right now to try to post every day or so, because the more I post, the more followers I get.

Reddit

I had posted a huuuge text version of my beginner's guide article onto Reddit, but it got banned because of some domains I was linking to (apparently). So I took a step back, started commenting on some programming/webdev subreddits, and then posted a link to the Medium article. It didn't go viral or anything, but it got a decent number of upvotes and some good comments.

I'm trying to invest in Reddit too by leaving a lot of helpful comments, and hopefully I'll build up trust in those subreddits where my links will get more traction.

Promotion

I haven't reached out to my references in the beginner's guide article-- I think that's the next target after I finish the post I'm working on. My hope is that I'll get some backlinks and traffic out of that.

I actually got reached out to by a successful web dev blog called Cloud Living-- they said they would share my article with their social media if I mentioned them on my website. While I wanted them to also give me a backlink, they didn't want to do that. I figured, why not just try it, so I agreed to mention them in my article. It'll be interesting to see if they follow through and if I get any traffic from their social media accounts.

Stats

It's been a good month! In the past 30 days on Google Analytics, I've clocked:

• 2800 sessions
• 2200 users
• 4200 pageviews (I think this is double what I had last month). 

In addition, 37% of traffic comes from organic search, and 23% from social media. And according to Google Search Console, I've had almost 1000 clicks to my website from search.

It's really interesting to see that my traffic has peaks when I post/promote an article, and then dips down-- but that the dips are getting bigger and bigger. I guess that means that my traffic is getting more consistent.

For email subscribers after cleaning out the list I'm just under 400 subscribers. Pretty crazy considering I only have like 7 posts.

Monetization

I actually made some money off of Amazon Affiliates, mostly because someone clicked my link and then bought exercise equipment lol. So I got $2. I've been reading about how Amazon's commissions are horribly low, like 1-2%. But hey, I won't turn it down.

Eventually I'd like to create digital products, like templates, long form guides in eBook form, maybe even bundles of some sort.

My long-term project is to create an online school, based off the School of Motion model, where people in the class would be brought through mock website projects. And practice building websites and getting feedback. This would involve a lot of work and maintenance, i.e. not very passive, but I think I would still enjoy helping people train.

Future Plans

My focus for the near future is to be consistent-- in writing, posting on IG, commenting on Facebook and Instagram. I also am trying to be more consistent with my time-- working more efficiently to get more done in less time.

Blog update 3/11/18

I finally finished and published my web development resource mega-article. It was 8000 words, with tons of links to helpful resources, graphs, images, and even some gifs.

I posted it on a Facebook coding group and it got some really great feedback-- a ton of people found it super helpful. So I'm thrilled about that! I did post a draft to freeCodeCamp on Medium last week but they haven't published it yet. I'm really hoping it gets published tomorrow or early this week. I'm a bit afraid that they will reject it for potentially being too long (I think 8000 words translates to a 30 minute read or so).

The other news of note is that I went in for a purchased course, Elite Blog Academy (EBA). It's not at all cheap, around $900, but it's gotten really great reviews. Two incredibly popular blogs (i.e. making $100k or more per month) both point to EBA as the source of their success. So I feel like if I follow all their steps I will also find success in it, and hopefully faster than if I tried to figure out everything on my own.

So far the course seems very in-depth, and really planned well. You have a lot of work to do for each module, but it all makes a lot of sense. Also, buying the course gets you into a closed Facebook group, which I think is most of the appeal as well, because you get to be a part of a community where you can support and encourage one another. (This type of online course/school is something I'm thinking about for Coder Coder, down the line)

Strangely enough, maybe because my post hasn't published on freeCodeCamp, I'm feeling down and discouraged about the blog. Every afternoon after I get off work and every Friday, I'm soooo thrilled that I don't have to go back and do work at my day job. But then every morning and every Sunday evening I'm just dreading going back to work the next day. Having this goal of blogging and feeling like it's a possibility at some point in the next year or 2 is both exciting but also frustrating in the present moment.

Blog update 1/17/18

Writing is hard. Writing consistently is even harder!

My "easy" goal of one post a week is turning out to be harder than I thought. Part of it is that I want to write long form posts with high quality content that often requires some research. So those will naturally take longer to write. But honestly, I just haven't gotten the habit down yet.

I'm currently working on a post about how to start learning web development and to create your own roadmap or curriculum. I've outlined it but haven't started writing. Part of me wants to write another post of an idea I have in my head-- a semi-rant against people who turn their noses up at Wordpress. But that would be procrastinating and also I don't think being ranty is necessarily the tone I want my readers to read.

The good news is that due to my 2 really good Medium posts (that second one that I talked about in my last update turned out to also be quite popular!), my email subscribers are over 200, leaning toward 300! That's amazing. It's incredible to me that 300 people would be interested in my content. Obviously there will be unsubscribes over time, but I'm just floored.

Using Medium has been a really good strategy for getting email subscribers. If you write good content on a big publication, then you can get thousands of views. And I customized the MailChimp scripts for signups to enable myself to set up multiple content upgrades that can be downloaded immediately. Adding those content upgrades have been really awesome.

So far, the strategies that I've found useful so far are:

• Write on Medium (if your audience is there), and get added as a writer to a large publication.
• Use the Medium URL of your article (not your own website) to promote to social media and your email list-- this will give your Medium article more views which will push it up a bit more. This is only useful if you can get hits from those sources.
• Set up an email list
• Use content upgrades and subscribe CTAs in your Medium posts
• Write consistently! -- this is what I'm finding difficult.

Blog update 1/3/2018

Happy new year!

My semi-viral post, called "How to be an uncommonly good web developer" is still getting some hits here and there. It will probably plateau out just under 9k claps. Last I checked, it had 35k hits and 1.2k fans (# of people who clapped). And my list jumped from 32 subscribers over 160 currently. I'm very pleased.

I also managed to pull out a new post two days ago that got published this evening. It will probably not be as popular, but it was fun to write. It's called "Inspirational success stories by self-taught web developers" and was a glorified listicle of stories that I'd seen on Medium. The authors all wrote about how they got into the field, many of them against quite high odds.

I'm still very very early on, but I've noticed that writing is getting slightly easier the more I do it. I'm still working on mainly focusing on the writing part. I'm trying to plan out the next few posts but sometimes I just don't know what people are interested in.

I am slowly getting a sense of what types of articles people like to read. Success stories, also I think tips on problem-solving and productivity as related to coding, in-depth and well done tutorials. I can see myself finding a sweet spot the problem-solving and soft skill type stuff. And also doing tutorials to fill in the gaps of areas that seem to be overlooked-- servers and deployment, nitty gritty how-to's on less popular stuff.

I'd also like to make some good GitHub projects that document things that would help beginners-- file structures, Grunt files, how to set up Sass files.

One things that I'm still trying to figure out is how to monetize this all. A lot of bloggers monetize by ultimately offering an online course that ranges from $199-500 or more. But there are already a lot of learn to code tutorial courses on places like Udemy for just $10-15. So I definitely can't compete with that.

One area that I think I could offer a unique product would be like the School of Motion model. I'd offer a 12 week course that would have the students build different websites from a design, and critique the front-end code. I think that a supportive environment where people of the same level can help each other would be pretty valuable. My main worry with that is that it would take a lot of time-based work while the course is going on.

My ideal product would be something that I can sell passively, without necessarily needing to hire people. But a school type model would be impossible to do just on my own. So I need to think about that. I'm starting to do some research into making online courses.

Other smaller products could be a book about problem-solving and productivity in coding, t-shirts with cool tech-y designs (there are a lot of crappy ones out there), a package of templates that people can work off of.

There are a lot of possibilities, but at the moment I just need to worry about writing content and getting email subscribers. And I think I'll figure out the rest as I go.

Blog update 12/28/17

Wowowow.

I have a Medium post on freeCodeCamp go semi-viral! It was published yesterday, and since then I've gotten 70 new email subscribers. So far on Medium the article has gotten almost 3k views. It feels like the system that I'm trying to follow is starting to pick up some traction. It feels really good.

I read an article recently on how to do Medium, and so I tweaked the system a bit:

• Write the article and publish on one of the Medium publications that I'm a writer for. Create a content upgrade for each article and add a link to the upgrade as well as subscribing to the bottom of the article.
• Send an email campaign to my current subscribers, linking back to the Medium article.
• Share the Medium article on Facebook groups that I'm a part of.

Basically I'm using my website just for SEO purposes. I'm trying to drive all traffic from social media and email to the Medium post, in order to get more hits and make it go viral more easily.

Aside from SEO, the website is still useful as a place to put landing pages and sign-up pages for the content upgrades.

It's a bit different from how I was seeing it before, but it makes a lot of sense. The ultimate goal is to get people to sign up to my email list. At some point I'd like to have a big following personally on Medium, so I can publish straight to my personal feed and not be quite as reliant on freeCodeCamp and other publications. I would still publish to publications every so often.

Very excited! I'm hoping to write two more posts before I have to go back to work on Tuesday.

Blog Update 11/3/2017

Pretty happy, I feel like I have most of the basic functionality of my site set up. I moved my MailChimp landing page to a WP page so I can record the referral to the sign-up. And got basic analytics set up with tagged urls to do a campaign for each post.

I should probably do some more manual outreach on FB and Instagram to try to garner more followers.

Currently working on my first real tutorial post, comparing 3 ways to make a grid. I was kind of dreading it because I'd mostly been writing soft skill content. But once I got started I was having a lot of fun researching CSS, and I actually learned some stuff along the way.

Also need to get some new pics taken for the site. The next website thing I need to do is making an opt-in section on my homepage above the post grid. I really don't want to put any pop-ups on the site. My goal is to keep UX minimal to minimize distractions, and just use sidebar and post-post areas.

Blog Update 11/2/2017

Just wanted to start recording updates on a new blog that I have started. I had the idea for it initially when I was on a flight to Japan. I was reading a book called The $100 Startup and it was really inspiring.

Reading that book gave me the inspiration to start a blog about learning how to code, because I realize that that's one of my passions and it's something that has transformed my life. So I would love to be able to help other people change their lives through coding.

Right now my blog's just starting but I have the website all set up. In addition I'm posting articles on Medium and trying to get some cross traffic from there. I also started an Instagram account in July, and I've gotten about almost 600 followers so far.

Instagram has been a surprisingly good place to find other programmers and web developers. It seems like there is a community of programmers who all use Instagram and do these daily posts.

Right now my main focus is just writing a lot of content. I found that it's really easy to get distracted by social media and looking at Google Analytics, but I'm trying to keep the focus on writing as well as promoting my posts.

My process is: look up a good post topic by researching Google search results as well as AdSense results, write the post, post it on my WordPress blog, then try to promote the post on Instagram, on Medium, and also sharing it in some Facebook groups that I'm in.

So far I've gotten a decent amount of traffic from Facebook as well as Instagram, and I'm also experimenting with some other ways of reaching out and finding people who would be interested in my content.

One of my goals is to make money through this website. I've been doing a lot of research on content marketing, SEO, and internet marketing. From what I've read, the main way that people make money on the internet from a blog is to get a large email list. Getting a good email list means that you have a captive audience, if you will, who are interested in the topics you're writing about, and these are people that you can ideally help achieve some goal.

As you keep writing high quality content on your blog, you gain the trust of your readers, and instead of viewing you as someone who just wants to sell them stuff like a salesman, you become to them a trusted source of information and someone that can help them in their own lives. Once you have a list of readers who really like your stuff, then you can eventually move on, once you have about 1000 subscribers, and you can try to promote a small product to them. This could be something like an ebook, or a simple online course, or some other kind of online product

I'll eventually have to do some more research into this, but basically what you want to do is to create what's known as sales funnel, and that kind of funnels your readers from becoming just readers of your post to becoming customers. Basically you have a end product in mind that you want people to buy, and you kind of lead them through a process to show them how your product can help them.

Right now, I really need to just focus on writing good quality posts and getting better at writing. The blog is coming off to a pretty good start, and I'm encouraged by the progress, even little, that I've seen so far. I have three email subscribers, and I'm getting a small amount of traffic to my website, only I think 60 visitors in the past week.

I'm hoping that if I keep doing what I'm doing and don't stop doing stuff, that all sees more growth in the future.

sick!

I've been sick for what feels like the past month, with a cold, a reprieve of a week or so, then got an intestinal virus + cold and now just have the cold. I've taken a break from blogging or Japanese studying this past week to get better. But I can feel all the hiragana and katakana leaking out my brain. sigh.

the value of being a resource

I recently began a digital photography tips blog. It's gotten to a relatively slow start, but traffic is increasing, and I'm trying to get into a consistent writing pattern.

Recently I've been thinking of what makes a good blog that people want to come to. In learning Japanese, one of the websites/blogs that is super popular is Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese. As web sites go, it's very simple and minimal in design, not fancy at all. The value is purely in the information on the site, and to a lot of people searching for online Japanese resources, it is pure gold.

The value of Tae Kim's guide is not that it necessarily offers resources that you can't find anywhere else. But he has spent a LOT of time writing a very detailed, in-depth guide that very clearly organizes the information in a way that is simple and no fluff, that makes sense to the reader.

The result of Tae Kim's work is pretty obvious in the comments left by numerous readers; they all praise the site and thank Tae Kim for writing such a great guide. Many express frustration in their searches elsewhere online for finding Japanese learning material. So his guide is clearly filling a great need.

The other great draw is that Tae's blog is completely free to use. Zero ads, only a donate button that says all proceeds will go towards creating learning material for the site. There is even a forum for users to share their questions. I honestly don't know how Tae runs everything for nothing, but he must spend a ton of time on the whole thing.

Short List of What Makes a Good Resource Blog

1. Understands what the reader's needs are
2. Offers information in a form intuitive to the reader's needs
3. Clear navigation, reader can easily find what he/she needs
4. Good design: modern, doesn't distract
5. Doesn't seem over-commercialized or salesman-y
6. Updates consistent and/or frequent

Anyway, with all this in mind, my end goal is to create a similar type of resource for photography. I think that even with the plethora of photography sites out there, I haven't seen a site that is well-organized with a beginner's guide out there. There are many, many photo sites, but most have multiple purposes, like image sharing, tutorials, and gear reviews. The lessons seem either random or are categorized, but are not really written with a cohesive progression of articles.

Tae Kim's site is great because it is pretty much in book form, with a table of contents. I think something like that for learning photo stuff would be really desirable to a lot of people learning photography.