What do you get when you work your fingers to the bone? (A March 2024 Retrospective)
(image: hands with no skin typing on a keyboard)
To (mis)quote a YouTube I follow: I'm not an expert, I'm just some guy who thinks he knows a little about SEO and likes to talk.
The Pundits Speaketh
This month has not been fun for any of us. At the beginning of the month, I pretty much depended on Google, but I decided to try other things.
To quote Yoda:
Keep blogging ,you must!
Spread thin yourself. you must not!
Get this right before branching out, you should!
To quote my dear father, whom I rarely listened to, except for this gem: Listen to everyone then do what you think is right.
Death By Google
This month, I spread myself very thin. I blogged mostly wrote, just 2 posts. But probably 10-12 updates, so it's not like the Google gods saw a dead blog. Actually, I am not sure they saw anything as you'll see in a moment.
Like most people my blog died, but that's ok, today IS easter right??
Numbers By Amazon
But wait for it... didn't hurt me one bit!! Look at Amazon:
THERE'S over 1200 CLICKS!!! I had less than 60 clicks on Google in all of March! That's down a little bit for the quarter (I have 3800 clicks for the first 3 months). But given what happened on Google? I will take
So... if I had worked my fingers to the bone and blogged? I would have had nothing but:
BONY FINGERS!!!
What did I do??
OK so where did this come from. I have been busy learning, diversifying, figuring out what works!
YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium, Pinterest
They all contributed something.
Yeah, I could have just kept blogging into a black hole.
But first I would have no idea what I'm doing wrong or right.
And second, I would have had zero results. With a conversion rate of 1% I maybe would have made one sale, MAYBE!!
YouTube Experiment
Let's start with YouTube. I actually started the channel earlier, but got serious with it sometime in late February. I used a tool called Invideo to make the videos. NOT THE AI TOOL!!!
I created the scripts by hand. I might have used AI to help me build the outline, but frankly the scripts GPT generated made me puke...
So I generated the script, but it in google docs (you'll see why in a minute), and used Invideo to generated scene-by-scene based on the script.
Invideo has one big fault. You can't get to the text once it's in audio. So if you want to generate a caption file for YouTube? You need the google docs file.
What changed in March?
First, I create two long form videos a week now. That regularity apparently is important. It's like you're creating a TV show. Your subscribers want to see some regularity.
Second, I learned as the month of March went on was that one long video could become 5-7 videos by using a tool called repurpose.io to create small videos out of chapters. That might have helped a bit because now I could schedule new videos almost every day!
Here's the result:
Facebook: Not a great help but I am learning!
I just revived FB a few weeks ago, thanks to Jay's courses on the same.
I found some GPTs built for pinterest and ask them to help create a "pin" for facebook. That's an image and description. I give it the text from a post and ask it to suggest multiple posts with the goal of engaging users.
I am not seeing much traffic, and yeah I should probably try some boosts, but I am not yet comfortable with my blogging skills. But this is encouraging. At least I am seeing more impressions:
LinkedIn: Just started again
LinkedIn I just started posting daily about a week ago. Need to do more planning, but I got a click out of it, so it's encouraging as well. I used a similar strategy as I did on FB. You see the impressions spiking where I posted:
Medium: It's actually Ranking on Google!!
Medium was the surprise. I started posting there in earnest when things started going downhill on Google. Some of my posts made it to page one of Google, and I averaged better than 6 reads (that's clicks!) a day! And each read has multiple links back to my blog.
Pinterest: Potential but no excitement, Yet
Finally Pinterest, I saw a huge jump in impressions this month. Almost 8000 impressions but only a handful of clicks but it's a start. I need to learn this platform. Some people have told me it's kind of like a blog in that you need to keep going for a few months before you see a lot of engagement:
BIng, Yawn...
Just to slip this in, here's Bing. It's not great, but while Google completely fell over, Bing was sending me something, around 1 click a day. I just hooked up to Bing with this site a few weeks ago, so I don't have any older data for it:
So what does this all mean??
I am beginning to see something here.
All of these traffic sources can feed into each other. It's like a circular chain. But most of them can point back to Affiliate links. Some directly, some indirectly.
There are funnels everywhere. Most of these sources other than YouTube and blogs need to go through landing pages. But I can also point them at each other.
Blog can contain videos.
Pinterest can't drive traffic to Medium (yet! I need to figure that out because it thinks it's a spam link LOL), but it can drive traffic to YouTube or the Blog.
Facebook and LinkedIn can drive traffic to YouTube, Medium, and the Blog.
So somehow, I need to look at each of these as assets that I can improve, maintain and eventually learn to evaluate.
Recent Comments
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Yes, I might. It's hard to tell. The bottom line numbers are dollar signs, but not really. They can be pretty random. So I need to look at a bunch of numbers and figure out where I am going. I agree with Partha's comments about GSC. I look at it daily just to get a giggle and move on.
Hi Mikey, it sounds like Mikey is doing it all. There is one thing that I do agree with you about diversifying your niche. You've been doing all that. I admire your courage to try them all.
Im the opposite.
I don't want to go to FB, YouTube, or any other SM platform. I don't like them. It's just too time-consuming. I tried the video. I wouldn't say I liked it. I tried many things to start YouTube, but I could not.
My problem was 1. the AI voiceover did not match the video timing. 2. I couldn't get the caption to sync with the video and AI voice. My only conclusion is to sit down, ASL sign to the camera, and post it on YouTube. I will have to do what my late husband always tells me: "Sit down, bite the bullet, and do it." That means I have to use my face. I will have to sign to the camera and then put the captioning, but there will be no voiceovers because AI voiceovers will not work in sync with my ASL signs.
It defeats the purpose. My videos will have no sounds. I would not know how to put music in them or anything like that. I sign and caption them. That is the only thing I can do. The problem is I won't get many viewers because most people can hear and want sounds. AI voiceovers are impossible to work with. I have no idea how you managed to make it work. I could not make it work. I became frustrated and angry and told myself to forget it; it was not worth it.
Maybe your technical skills help with that. My technical skills suck. I don't know how to use the camera or what to do. I found it so time consuming that i just dropped it. The only thing I am good at is writing. I would instead write than sign.
I agree that those SMs can help with traffic. My Pinterest sucks too. I am not good at using SM and will not waste my time using it. People tell me I must. The more they say I must use SM. I rebel and resist the idea. I resist using all these platforms, yet I know it's where the people are. They stay there on the platform I notice they do not like to going to a website, they want everything read there. Content is absorbed directly on that SM platform. That's all there is to it.
So the post has to be read like Twitter, Quora, Reddit, all that is a bunch of junk with no natural substance. The meat of it all is our blog post. Google did screw up the SERPs for everyone. Google is rewarding Reddit. The sick joke of Reddit has a bunch of crappy content there. Who wants to read that kind of junk?
Thanks for sharing your experiences with all this.
I do have a presence on Reddit too, though I haven't been able to figure out how to be consistent with it. People asked the darndest questions...
There is a way with invideo where you can use your real voice, but I haven't tried it. I'm happy with the AI voice for now.
And adding background music with invideo is easy peasy. I just don't try to overthink it and find something that's not to annoying.
As for doing it all, again, I am making a whole $15/mo right now. A good time to learn.
Does the invideo already have AI voice embedded? I can't hear. The only thing I can feel is the vibrations of the low bass music, like drumming, feeling it on my laptop speaker. I might have to consult with people who can hear and tell me which music track is excellent, but I think the voice is enough. Why add music? If my target audience is only for Deaf people, it might be limited viewers. I will need to go back and check invideo again. I found it hard to do. I didn't understand how it works. If I spoke, no one would understand me, Deaf voice.
Yes you're right. If your audience is deaf people then maybe music doesn't matter. Does voice matter then? You can just add captions.
Yes, voice matters to me. I did check out Invideo AI; it's not bad. But I will have to pay for it. It costs $25 a month, and it's hard to budget for it. I don't want their watermarks on mine, so that's the only way to be a paid subscriber. All of them require money. I did check out others; seemingly, Invideo pricing is not that bad—cheaper than Sythensia and Pictory. I like Pictory; it's $29 a month, which is not affordable.
I like invideo more than Pictory. Pictory AI based video doesn't work for me, just like Invideo doesn't. I have control over my video content with Invideo.
Hi Michael
Great job on adding and integrating all those platforms to your brand! 👍👍
You should consider an AI tool like HootSuite if you're not already using one (maybe I missed it in your post) to help you cross-post the same content to all these various places. 😎
Frank 🎸
I have tailwind. I can't figure out how to use it though. I need to spend a little time figuring it out.
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Lots of great info here. Thanks for sharing! I have such a long way to go, I'm realizing...lol.
Yes. I need to learn, then I need to scale. This takes time.