In April 2020 my blog was barely alive. I had moved to Hugo from Pelican and ignored any kind of SEO optimization for it. I thought it was stupid and that the best content would win. Little did I know that my content wasn’t even being found! So after thinking about it for a few short minutes, I decided to dive back into SEO and figure out how to bring my blog back from the dead. ...
I’m done with my Medium vs Adsense experiment here. This is all part of a passive income strategy evaluation game I’m playing. I’m trying to see if I can build a $100,000 a year passive income portfolio. I know it will take time but I like playing these kind of games. Right now I’m evaluating a mix of different things such as dividend-producing stocks, web monetization, and Adsense. So far for February, Adsense is beating the pants off my Medium income. ...
There was a short time when at a previous Startup I moved out of Sales and into Marketing. I had to produce a lot targeted content in a niche market and that’s how I earned my living. A lot of the content I created ended up on the company’s blog, video library, or community boards so I considered myself a Professional Blogger back then. Now that I’m back in Sales and I Blog here for fun, I consider myself a writer and a Semi-Professional Blogger now. ...
I made the switch over to Hugo a short while and love the fast builds. You can read all about me ‘crushing’ on it in my [What I Learned using Hugo](/hugo-static-cms/ post. There’s one main thing I want highlight in this post and it’s how to optimize Hugo for SEO. Hugo, just like any other CMS, is pretty good out of the box but you need to optimize it. Here are my Hugo SEO tips for optimization. ...
Recently I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a new blog, just for fun. The area of focus will be on craft beer brewing and reviews. Knowing what I now know about content, content planning, and management, I started to think about how to build a site from the ground up with entertaining but valuable content. Of course, this means I need to spend time thinking about how to organize my content and what CMS will I use? If you read my last post, you’ll see that I’m back to WordPress but also evaluating Expression Engine. The reality is that WordPress is way easier when it comes to templates and since this blog will be casual, I’m not going waste time and effort with a big powerful CMS system only to have to hack together a bad looking web template. ...
Bless me Father for I have sinned. Please forgive me for my evergreen content creation and management sins. Yes, I admit I have mismanaged good content for the sake of expediency. The takeaway from this long post is this, always think about your reader first. Often I have ignored how my readers consume my evergreen content. For that, I beg for your absolution. I promise, on my CMS’s grave, not to stray from the path of good content creation and management again. Amen! ...
Recently I imported some custom reports in Google Analytics that I found online. They have been eye opening indeed! My most favorite ones are the Profit Index and Time of Day custom reports. Google Analytics assigns a page value to each and every page you have, provided you use Goals. Without using Goals, this won’t work! In my previous post, I wrote about how I started using Goals to see how readers interacted with my site. I arbitrarily assigned a value of $1 each time the reader clicked on a tag or stayed on a post for more than 5 minutes. ...
This is my first stab at trying to figure out how to optimize the SEO here. A doodle/sketch just seems the fastest in this case. Update I have since given a lot of thought to SEO on this blog as I migrated it from one CMS to another. Each CMS handles SEO in a completely different manner and over time the migrations have had, in some way, a damaging effect here. Perhaps the right thing to do is to pick one CMS and stick with it through thick and thin. That’s something really hard to do for someone like me, but I consider these migrations to be a learning opportunity. ...
I’ve been going through a massive blog post purge and deciding which posts to keep or trash. Why? I have so many posts that were like Tweets, short and meaningless. They just bogged down my performance and really provided my readers with zero information. This blog started dying at the beginning of 2020, Google made some Search Engine Results Page (SERP) changes and my blog started dropping like a rock. There were 100’s of similar blogs that were ranking better because they knew how to play the SEO game and I didn’t. So I decided to put a stop to it. ...
I posted about the power of Data Mining when analyzing your blog’s traffic and how to maximize your Google Adword advertising relative to your Adsense earnings, but I forgot to mention one critical thing! Search Engine Optimization (SEO)! SEO is just a process to organize your blog, or website, in such a way that you’ll end up at the top when ever an Internet user searches for something that is relative to your site. If you advertise your blog using a Pay Per Click method, like Google Adwords, then being ranked at the top of searches is really important as Ms. Danielle points out! It won’t come as a shock to readers of this blog that Data Mining can really help with your SEO! Techniques like associative analysis and cluster data mining are great ways to discover who’s clicking what on your site. Associative analysis is used to estimate the probability of whether a person will purchase a product given that they own a particular product or group of products. Cluster data mining, on the other hand, can identify the profile or group of customers that are associated with a particular type of Web site [via Data Mining and Business Productivity, by Stephan Kudyba]. These two techniques are critical if you want to maximize any e-business! Now here’s the caveat, before you can start data mining your site, you spend a few months gathering website statistics and data. However, this doesn’t preclude your ability to start optimizing your website for better web searching. Here are a 5 tips that I’ve been using that have had a great traffic impact in my blog’s short life. 5 SEO Tips: ...