Day 0 (Or Year 8?)- LET'S GO!

What's up everyone? Following up on my last post I wanted to blog about my current "starting point" and hopes for the future.

WA Definitely Works

At its peak, TheBestGuitarLessons was bringing in around 7,500 visits a month (this was my best month, not my average):

This was after about 2 years of work, following only WA lessons. Unfortunately, as I was a broke college student, I didn't have the money for paid ads and never quite got the hang of social and never dabbled in email marketing, so my traffic was almost entirely from organic:

With that, I can absolutely confirm for you that the content lessons and low hanging fruit strategy absolutely works to add traffic over time. Most of my pages were getting 50-100 hits/month as landing pages (so this isnt counting people who navigated to the pages after landing on my site). However, only a couple of my posts really accounted for this traffic:

Additionally, you can see my average time on site, bounce rate and pages/session are all pretty bad. However, I really don't focus much on those metrics anymore (though back then they are the only metrics I really cared about aside from visits/visitors).

I wasn't making crazy money, though. Far from it. I was so focused on generating traffic I really overlooked conversion rates, conversion rate optimization and A/B testing... The above website was making around $1,000K/mo on its best months. The review Jamplay-GuitarTricks cross-review post was a major money maker for me. I can't even describe to you how ecstatic it made me to search "Jamplay Review" or "GuitarTricks Review" and to see my site, my reviews, at the #1 spot for both terms - it was absolutely incredible.

Stagnation Kills - Don't Make My Mistake

Fast forward to today.... Sigh.. This one hurts.

This is last month, November, 2020:

This is what happens when you allow 5 years to pass in between posts... Yeah, don't be like me.

As shown, I'm at less than 10% of where I once was a few years back. In my last post I detailed why I am getting back on the horse and staying on this time. I'll spare you the rehashing of that info.

I also mentioned in my last post one major change I've made this time around: I'm not exclusively using WA as my learning platform anymore. Carson & Kyle never recommended doing this, by any means. It just sort of happened naturally after being ripped off in the past and trying strategies that didn't work. They were the only ones who brought me results and therefor the only ones I trusted.

One of the biggest changes I've already made is a switch from my old, crappy theme to Thrive Themes and Thrive Theme Builder. These tools have allowed me to not only completely rebuild my site in a way that Im actually proud to send people there (I used to have to preface it was under construction any time I brought it up because it was so ugly).

Where Are We Now

Here is the last 30 days so far at a glance:

That spike on Dec. 5th was the day I migrated my site over to Thrive - so the hits are massively inflated. However, they are also steadily increasing as you can see day by day after that point. Though it is a little bit inflated since I am working on my site much more now than I was before the switch, so some of the sessions are my own.

If you are struggling with your content creation, I cannot recommend checking out Thrive's "RAPID Content Course" in conjunction with your WA lessons. The course has really turbo charged the writing process for me. I used to spend hours staring at blank screens trying to come up with content. Now I have 1500 word posts cranked out in an hour. Mind you, I suck at typing. I'm actually actively using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for 30 min every day to learn how to touch type. As of right now, though, I chicken peck the keys at probably under 30 WPM. So Im by no means a fast, or even a good, writer. But it has gotten so much easier, regardless.

I've learned that having a consistent content schedule is important. In the beginning its great to just produce as much content as possible to get your feet wet and start building some traction, but down the road, quality trumps quantity by a long shot, but consistency is still very important.

For that reason, I've set the goal/schedule of posting every Monday and Thursday.

Additionally, I refuse to put all my eggs in one basket again. That is a huge reason why I stayed away from my sitre for so long. Once organic fell off, everything did. I won't allow myself to be solely at the mercy of Google anymore.

Thrive Theme's biggest selling point is that they are a conversion-focused wordpress theme provider. Since switching my site over I have begun to optimize my opt-in forms and am currently executing a content strategy to build out my 30-Day Guitar Challenge email funnel.

In Summary

I am far less concerned with my traffic numbers this time around. While obsiously creating content and SEO will be a major part of the strategy and I still wish to rank and gain traction in SERPs, I care far more now about my conversion rates.

I've already gone through and rebuilt all 46 posts on my site for Thrive so they didnt look broken when I switched. Next I will go through and improve their readability as that's the one skill that has probably improved the most over time.

I'll be posting these updates monthly for the sole purpose of keeping myself accountable. I'm not expecting massive success right away, though I am aiming for the stars. I'm also not aiming to tell anyone what the right or wrong way to do things is. Though I will certainly be sharing what I try and my experiences along the way!