Blogging

Ideas for Blogging, including websites, information, and tips.

It’s time for my update Coffee website revival: December 2019 Update

Posted by

December Update

Well, since the last update, much of the site has been finished updating. All short posts have either been consolidated into much longer articles, unpublished for revision, or removed. I only have 50 articles now but about 100K words in total. So the average lenght is much longer than before.

The massive changes in organization have also finished and are settling down: 4 silos, each with 10~20 articles of about 2000 words each (average). Each silo header page is quite long.

However, I’m not sure that my site structure is correctly understood by Google yet. Categories are settled now, but tags are still dynamic (but not indexed).

I’m still playing with some URLs to get a better feel, but the redirection plugin tracks the changes. I just have to be careful… I don’t end up with a series of redirects.

Results so far

Page views have jumped 30.38% since November, in my target market, though the page consolidation has made a mess of some stats. The content has been moved & redirected. Now that much of the consolidation is done, I’m hoping that more stability in rankings will return. Less flux, more stability. Google stats in webmaster are right now not encouraging.

Income

Income wise, well, I’m not expecting a lot but there is some upwards movement. I hit $42 in December despite a quieter Xmas & a very bad post Black Friday period (unlike most other people here). Somehow it balanced out.

Sharing

I’m still updating content on an almost daily basis, adding images, reorganizing, editing as ways to keep the content fresh. I’m now posting my pages to LinkedIn, Twitter & FB… just to get it out there. I’ll do Pinterest soon.

Stolen content

Current strategy is to weed out all the copycat content thieves who have stolen my content, there are still quite a few pages leeching my content. So I’m planning to get them removed from Google or wherever else soon. One or two pages are particularly affected. In some ‘light’ cases, I’ll just rewrite 50 words or so. It’s more effective.

Backlink Building

The mailing list is a complete disaster with dropping subscribers, and few sign ups right now. Backburner. I’m still figuring out ways to create links so I will do a bit of commenting, guest posting and link building through organic means… kind of floundering there.

Goals

So goals? Can I reach total 12K page views? That’s a goal! I came close but reaching it would surpass the site’s first go-around 7 years ago.
Can I consistently reach $100pm? Well, I’ve streamlined my amazon links, got rid of the dud links (there were quite a few), and am now experimenting with different formats for ads/products. Adsense only accounts for 25% of the income but the RPM is poor. Compared to my original placement (I use automated placements), this isn’t so hot. So I’m wondering if I should go back to placing ads myself.
Feedback?
We’ll see… Thanks for sticking around. If you have any thoughts about my achievements, challenges & goals, I’d love to hear them!

Coffee Site Revivalist: My next update on reviving my site – Part 2 November 2019 Update

Posted by

#1 Traffic

I’ve had some success boosting traffic even with many fewer pages, and several data hiccups which meant that my Analytics code was missing in both Oct/Nov for about 10 days in total. Page views are increasing again. Y-on-Y we’re looking at about 100% growth.

#2 Content

All short articles have been merged, rewritten or removed. I no longer have articles less than 300 words and the majority are now 900~3000 words.

Another hit to traffic in Oct/Nov was the fact I seriously re-organized all the structure into a very simple structure. I’m not sure I’ve got it right yet… as I struggle with categories posts. But I’ve built silos for the main themes.

I’ll never have more than 100 pages on this site again. Thin content is over. I’ll also pare back non-performing content, in favor of content that people read. I have a lot of material to draw on, however.

#3 Income

It’s better than the past but I haven’t broken $40pm yet, probably because all the changes have unsettled my rankings and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to layout my money pages. I’ve tried page links, native ads, and now I’m trying direct image/linktext ads on Amazon.

#4 Server Speed

My pages are loading in about 3~5s, which for the resources I have at my disposal is poor. I’ve tried many solutions but often I lose the Native search ads that I use to generate income. I’m not sure why that is. It happened in the week prior to Cyber Monday… so sales dropped off a cliff, even though Pageviews were up. I finally found out it was Cloudflare’s issue, though I was unable to fix it reliably.

#Conclusion

I’m still auditing my content for DMCA infringements… I’ve found several pages that copy my stuff without permission. I’ve done some backlink removal too. But most of the bad links and illegal copies stuff have long since gone from Google.

If I break 10K pageviews, I’ll post an update. Promise!

Coffee Website Revival Part 1: October 2019 Update

Posted by

So the website/blog on coffee that I started many years ago is slowly reviving. But Google is as fickle as ever.

I managed to work the content organization finally on WordPress. The categories with my theme are just awful. So I co-opted the pages and made new silos under pages. I highly recommend Site Origin Builder

It really helps to do lay out nice pages that are theme independent. I also tightened up the number of categories, and pushed all of the post into one of the siloes.

Traffic is still only about 1/2 what it was… but now I only have 20% of the content (pages) that I had a few years ago. I’ve been slowly combining short posts with longer posts on targeted keywords…

Keywords were also a problem: I discovered I had a lot of thin content, a lot of content with the same ideas, and a lot of keywords that were only different by virtue of grammar. I got rid of most of those.

I’ve pretty much given up on driving pages with brands, unless someone can show me a viable keyword strategy. Google now prefers brands.
With relatively fewer pages, I will be able to make each page shine much more. I really like Matthew Woodward’s style of layout. So I shall borrow liberally the techniques.

Update you in a month or two. Thanks for your support!