Live Q&A: SEO, Affiliate Marketing, and Blogging Tips

hey everybody this is a little better um a minute ago a few minutes ago i started alive and for some reason my camera was just not turning on it's really weird um but i got it set up now so um welcome welcome back to income school i'm glad to be here live with you today i'm going to be taking questions uh about anything um let me know what you want to know about seo internet marketing affiliate

marketing etc um so thanks to all of you who jumped onto the other stream first and who uh uh got a little bit um anyway a little bit of a weird surprise there so thanks everyone i see uh we're starting to get some people joining in here in the room so hi hi to all of you um let's see all right we've already got some questions coming in um one thing that i've been by the way

i'm gonna start taking questions in just a second here one of the things i've been really thinking about a lot lately is um just kind of how important it is to kind of get back to some of the basics there are a lot of things in internet marketing that are taught that we teach that you know we kind of get on and stuff but like there's some really important basic things about um seo about content creation

and about affiliate marketing that um oftentimes like we overlook because we're looking for kind of that i don't know something big something really exciting that's going to be a game changer silver bullet and um the reality is focusing a lot of times on those important foundational things is really important and so um as i've been thinking about that i've discovered that there are a lot of things that we just kind of know internally here at income

school things we've been working on that we've like never really taught um because to us they just seem like the basics and it's because they're very important but we've been doing it so long those things are obvious to us so anyway there we are so you got a question here um indigo navarro rubio asks if i'd be open to doing um an open niche site challenge um yeah i think i would be something to keep in

mind with everything that i'm doing here at income school all the different things i manage in project 24 it's funny i'm like way busier than i ever was when i had a real normal job but i love it and honestly um i do like to create content i like to you know do it myself as often as i can so um just kind of depending on what the details of the challenge were yes i'd be open

to doing something like that um dj delos says jarvis is a huge question what are your thoughts on it you know i don't have thoughts on jarvis right now sorry don't really have anything to share there's a lot of huge questions in internet marketing uh cass to allen does a shared hosting account affect seo no um shared hosting specifically doesn't in fact there's a not fairly recent video actually put out by google that uh that addresses

this the fact of shared hosting isn't the problem the problem is when that hosting gets really bogged down people say that well if it's shared hosting and somebody else um that's on that same hosting you know maybe has a site that gets penalized does that impact your site no it doesn't um google does their their ranking based upon the the url the domain not based upon um where it's hosted and so that's not really an issue

there is some shared hosting that's very fast and there's some private hosting that is not at all and so really that's not the question it's more of just how good is the hosting all right um more another questions here lots of theme um site audits bradley bernie asks site audits um i'd love to do site audits i'm assuming that's the question is if we'll do them um i i would like to we're looking at ways we

could implement that it becomes very time consuming and often hard to do but we'd love to do that what is in the project 24 youtube course from sami ullah there's a lot of stuff we have a whole lot of um like skills based content in the youtube course right now so the biggest thing that's missing right now from that is kind of how it all fits together into a system and so that's something that we're working

on right now and hopefully in the next couple months we'll have it out there in project 24 but nate um who's the uh the face of the channel makers channel uh he's been hard at work on that we've been meeting about that a ton regularly trying to kind of kind of hone in on what that system looks like and there's some really cool stuff coming so there you go um bazzas how do you speed up article

research and writing we actually have a good youtube video on this it's a couple years old uh it's called the perfect blog post in one hour i believe um that's really what i would share here now there's additional research to do beyond that that video shows how we quickly are able to organize our thoughts um to be able to research and write an article very very quickly however as often as possible i would add to that

more original research if there's something that you can do to do some of your own testing talk to an expert directly in some kind of an interview gather some sort of data that you can aggregate etc that's going to add a lot more to the post than just doing research online and finding the answers based upon that the other thing is if you can separate the research as much as possible from the writing time so what

i like to do is if i'm working on a site or a new youtube channel or something like that i really do like to spend my free time just kind of getting into that industry i'll listen to podcasts i watch youtube videos and i just learn as much as i can that's going to do a lot more for saving you time on research and writing than any other like tactical thing you could do at the time

of writing all right lots of questions coming in i'm going to take we got a super chat here from firma co best wishes from germany thank you i really appreciate that thanks for thanks for that thanks for sharing that um let's see about what i posted in the last video won't google flag it as duplicate content when you add it to more than one page i actually wanted to address this and in fact i still might

in like a youtube video on our income school tutorials channel but i'd be happy to address it here in a quick fashion in that video what i showed was how you can make a reusable block and fill it with a few of your top recommendations for affiliate products things that you would recommend to basically anybody that comes to your site and then you could put that in your post i showed putting it at the bottom you

could put it wherever it makes the most sense and then by saving it as a reusable block you can literally just add it to every other blog post that you want to put it in one i would recommend not necessarily using the same block for every article on the site i would maybe create one for each category that's a little more customized adam over at wpcrafter showed in a video on the same day how to take

that same concept and if you're using the pro version of many themes they're going to have a way for you to be able to create that i've done things like that with with divi to create some custom layouts for blog posts but you can do custom content and then create rules and have it just appear in every blog post in that category so then it's automatic automatic you don't have to add it in you don't have

to go back to your old blog post and add it and it's pretty cool so um so that leads the question isn't that duplicate content well here is what google actually says about duplicate content and it's basically that uh the only type of duplicate content they care about that they would penalize is if you're duplicating really substantive comment or content so whether or not it's copy and paste or even like spinning content from another website without

adding any real value even that can be treated as duplicate content oftentimes that duplicate content it won't necessarily receive a manual penalty but it will be impacted from an seo standpoint if google can tell that the original content comes from somewhere else it's debatable whether or not google actually does that sometimes it really is the spun content that performs better in the end but still when it comes to just taking small elements from a blog post

and repeating them on other blog posts throughout the site google doesn't care about this this is a small piece of the content whereas the meat of the article is different in every single blog post so the substantive portion of the content varies having you know one block of text that repeats itself on your site is a lot like having another block of text below that which is usually the author card with a picture and a piece

of text that appears again on all of the blog posts written by that author that's also duplicate content but it's also not you could also say that you get duplicate content anytime that you have um you know like if you put one blog post in multiple categories well on those category pages the same excerpt will show up multiple times on your website so and on the main blog archive page is that duplicate content and so that's

really the the question there and based on what google has said and our experience with with google and with search uh no that doesn't um that doesn't actually have an impact on seo so there's my long answer um i'll probably even have a more in-depth answer with quotes from google in a youtube video here on the income school tutorials channel before too long okay cory rollins thanks for the super chat um he's asking what camera and

lens i'm using for this live stream what i'm doing this is kind of fun i've started doing this um for live streams both here and then i do a lot of um live stream or live it's less of a stream and more of just like a discussion or group meeting inside project 24. i am using an actual real like normal camera it's a sony a6500 and then i'm using a micro hdmi cable or many hdmi whichever

it is and i link from that to a cam link which is like this little it looks like a usb flash drive but it's uh what it is is uh it takes that video and it then i can put it into a usb on my computer and it uses it like a webcam um i tried plugging it directly in like an hdmi port or something it doesn't work quite as well the cam link really solves that

problem so it's like 100 cam link but with a camera like a normal camera and then the lens on it is a sigma um i'm gonna find out for you yeah it's a sigma 16 millimeter lens um that uh we've been using for a lot of youtube videos for a long time so it's basically the same camera that you see us on our youtube videos but it's connected and then i'm using a rode podcaster microphone to

get a little bit better audio too so thanks for the question um got another one from cooper time hey ricky project 24 member with a two and a half year old site 120 posts 35 000 views a month good job zoi epmv is still only about four dollars plus a few affiliate sales is it because the niche is crowded and any tips to raise this um i don't think it's necessarily because the niche is so crowded

um what i would say is uh if you're not doing well with ads it could be well it's there's several things it could be actually it could be the ad layout itself are you taking advantage of kind of the most beneficial ads ad placements one of the highest earning ad placements is right at the top i hate it um you know one that's like above the title of the blog post i hate that i hate pushing

the content down i'd rather have a better ad experience and i've found that even without that ad placement i can do really well but i also like to take advantage of anchored ads as much as possible so there's the anchored footer ad that you can get and an anchored sidebar ad and those ads will stick with the user as they scroll down the page and then once sort of the maximum earnings have been reached by a

specific ad it'll switch out and show a different ad in that same spot and so those tend to be the highest earning ad placements anchored ads the anchored footer ad does well on mobile the anchored sidebar ad doesn't because the sidebar moves to the bottom below the content so really nobody gets to those another thing you can do this actually makes a big difference on desktop is leave as much sidebar space as possible for ad placements

a lot of people fill up the sidebar with too much stuff um by default wordpress typically puts like a whole bunch of recent posts and meta stuff and recent comment all these things there um i get rid of all that stuff i only have a couple of things in the sidebar and then leave as much room as possible for ads again that doesn't help with mobile users which make up a lot of viewers these days but

it makes a big enough difference on desktop that it helps the content itself we can improve that by making sure that first of all the content itself is very friendly to a wide range of viewers um if you take at all like an approach that's um that alienates any group at all and like i i don't mean that like like we're being prejudiced at all but rather um you know if you have a site that's got

kind of a really grungy feel to it and a really manly feel to it it's kind of a turn off for a lot of people um even if it's really good for that specific group of people and so um that is going to impact your ad earnings if you decide to go that route and i and i think it's okay if you want to build a site that kind of caters to a specific a specific kind

of demographic within a niche oftentimes that can be a way to break in but just know that if it's not like super overall friendly just to middle-aged people to older people to younger people it's going to have an impact on which ads will display a couple other things to consider too is like with a zoic like any other platform it does take time so depending on how long you've been with the zoic you're going to see

those earnings go up more and more over time with a zoic that seems to continue even beyond sometimes what we get with others with other ad networks simply because their ai is going to continually try to optimize those ads for you so part of it is just giving it some time but yeah making sure that your content the images the design and everything is really friendly to a broad audience those types of things are going to

make a lot of a difference um there you go also more ad placements are going to do better but that's going to impact your your traffic um let's see we got another one here and i saw one in fact there's a couple here i missed moshi karim uh thank you for your super chat and um itachi gaming do you run any academy to learn directly from you well yeah so we have project 24 project 24 is

our membership um and there you do learn basic just directly from everything that everything that we've learned me and jim and the rest of the team everything that we learn we teach and we share inside project 24. we have a members only podcast where we're sharing kind of the latest even before we fully ready we're fully ready to teach it in a course that's what we're just talking about the things that are top of mind and

highly relevant but we also have course content changing and adapting and improving all the time there you go joshua b burkins burskins sorry says was going to do the battleship course but notice many of my year old posts were never indexed do i now need to wait an extra year after being indexed um i would still do a content audit of the site what you're going to find is that those posts basically have no traffic at

this point because they weren't indexed um and so those ones i'm probably just gonna leave alone but i would still do a battleship audit of the site and you'll see um the reasons for the no indexing it's kind of hard google says that they only index content that their algorithm thinks is actually going to show up for a search and so oftentimes if we write an article that's on just such a niche down topic that there

just aren't really searches for it um then when google sees that that's like the only topic of a blog post they might not even index it at all um i don't think that's the only reason there are plenty of others another is just if it's going to rank far enough down the list that nobody's going to click on it it also may not get indexed if it looks to google like the type of content that people

don't go to like for example there are a lot of pages on our websites that google won't index simply because it's not a page that's really intended to show up in search results so it's just not going to be indexed sitemaps you know for example are often not indexed but there are other pages oftentimes on our sites that don't really get indexed directly so um anyway there's there's a a lot of reasons why that might be

happening in terms of battleshipping though i would mostly just leave those pieces of content alone um or i would re-evaluate them from the standpoint of search analysis to try to decide is there something about the topic itself that just makes it not likely to be searched there's anyway there you go um i want to make sure i'm not there's a lot of questions that come in so i just want to make sure i'm not missing any

um i don't i don't only answer super chats by the way but um i i often try to give them precedence um here's one that just caught my eye here cyan saga says why news articles get to the top of the page right away um the reason is is that like if you're using schema properly and you have news related content and you've kind of established yourself as a trustworthy source in google's eyes or a source

rather that seems authoritative enough whether or not you know we're not gonna get political about it but um that seems authoritative enough then what happens is uh google knows that news content has a very short cycle and so google's going to promote that content immediately they're going to surface it immediately whereas a lot of the content that we write is not really news specifically sometimes it might be you know product related news or something but for

the most part that's not what it is it's more of an evergreen type of content and the content that it's competing with is also that way and so google's going to take a little more time their algorithm rather is going to take a little bit more time hamza ali asks what tips or strategies would i use to go from four thousand a month to ten thousand a month how many blog posts so um i do have

a video coming out uh hopefully on tuesday a little bit about not specifically this this is taking a site that's only six month old has you know income's not even really a thing on it yet and turning that into the full-time income um and but the principles there i think are going to be they're going to be exactly what you should probably be doing at this point it's not always about just adding more content the video

is going to go into optimizing that content some of that content a little bit more for for commercial whether that's you know ads selling your own product as well as uh um what do i not say oh affiliate marketing so um it's gonna go into all that but basically it's about the type of content we work on at this point and how we're going to structure the content on our website linking between posts and such so

um not exactly siloing kind of topic clustering um it's kind of a new strategy that i haven't really taught before but it's one that i think is going to make a big difference the other thing um the other thing that i would do between to get you know up to that 10 000 and even higher mark is um often times at those levels i'm looking at treating this as like a like a real business not not

just like a site something on the side but as a real business and oftentimes that means um creating my own product an info product um potentially a physical product but usually an info product um that oftentimes is kind of the big opportunity for um income growth even without necessarily again adding a ton more content um that's a big one the other thing that you can do if you want to keep it passive is potentially branch out

start another site if the site that you're in is already just kind of full you've got the content covering everything and now it's kind of a matter of optimizing um there you go there's there's a couple ways to do it so basically you can take what you've done and do it another one and a half times and you've got your ten thousand dollars all right i better get to some of these um cooper times says last

time i asked about a poll plug-in uh tried forminator yap poll and a poll by total sauce they didn't work or they work while you're setting them up but don't seem to work on the front end okay cooper time i actually did look into it for you and i i'm gonna find the name of it again um there's one that definitely works with acabato i gotta remember the name but i'm gonna pull it up because you

did ask that last time here we go what was it called this will only take me like a few more seconds i hope crowd signal so with crowd signal you go and you generate the poll on their website and then you can embed it on the site they do have options to do pop-ups and all sorts of other things with acabato a lot of those don't work too well partly because by default aquabotto disables jquery there

is a setting in acubato um to enable jquery that should help but it doesn't it doesn't always a lot of these plugins that have kind of the popups don't seem to work but with crowdsignal you can embed a poll um anywhere on the site you can embed it in like in the sidebar you can embed it um inside of a blog post or on a page it's not going to get the pop-out effect but i you

know if you try to make it stand out you know with your design a little bit i think you're still going to get most of the impact of it and i'm going to be working on um that with aquabotto finding a basically the ideal solution of what i want you know which plug-in i want and then making sure that we're compatible with that so there you go all right chris heidelbauer says can you speak on the

pros and cons of using a personal name versus a niche name for youtube channels podcasts and websites i'm a web designer and i like to teach people but wonder about using a personal name to grow online and he says god bless thanks chris um yes a little bit okay when it comes to picking a domain name for a website um i think a lot more about branding than i do about kind of what the name means

when you start a new website or a youtube channel and it's just the name of the person at first the hard thing is if there's no name recognition then when people see it show up at a search result they're like i don't know who that is right that's more difficult on a blog than it is on youtube on youtube you can change the name of your channel at any time and so you could start it off

with a niche based name um just to kind of make it easier for people to identify kind of the topic of the blog of the youtube channel rather and then you could uh over time like at some point you could kind of make that shift a lot of youtubers have done that where they decide to focus on their personal brand and their name and then they use that to allow them to just kind of open up

and make the content about maybe a broader range of things not just kind of the one specific niche they started in so that's one way to approach it on youtube um but as far as you know blog youtube using your personal name versus using the name of the niche or a descriptive name um frankly i i don't think it terribly matters a whole lot from like an seo standpoint um it just it doesn't like we don't

need exact match domain names that's doesn't matter anymore so um then it just is you know when that name appears in the search results does that matter again it matters a lot less than the headline that is shows for the content you know um the title you know of a blog post that appears in the search results and so the question then is long term like which is it that you want to build up you know

if i were to make a website um so you said that yours you know uh it was about okay web designer or whatever you know if i were to make a web a website that was like i'm trying to find like an ideal domain name that includes something about web design or even just design in it and um you know everything's taken so now i have to pick a domain name like you know web design essentials

you know uh for you because web9 design essentials like so many of those are already taken i no that doesn't matter to me would i pick maybe a brandable name that kind of gives the feeling of web design um that's normally what i would do in part because it allows me to potentially sell that down the road i could sell the site whereas if i built a website that was ricky kessler.com and i taught web design

it's really hard to sell that asset it's very tied to you as a person now if this is something where you're building it up it's your career you're not going to leave that at least you don't ever intend to and so building a brand around yourself is not something you're worried about because you're never going to try to sell it then absolutely i think it's a great idea a lot of a lot of people who are

taking more the influencer out are choosing to do that and i think it's i think it works just fine all right cyclone hyder says what is the future of affiliate sites and seo um i think the future is still strong it we do are we we are seeing like shifts over time obviously google is um google is de-prioritizing i won't say quite penalizing but de-prioritizing sites that are very affiliate heavy particularly when the content doesn't add

additional value and i think that's one of the big problems in affiliate marketing is a lot of bloggers have tried to go the easy route so what we do is we pull together information that we find across the web um whether that's you know in amazon reviews for products uh even recipes like i saw a recipe site i was looking at just today where i was like i am not convinced the person who wrote this has

ever made this item but the recipe the story everything in it looks it looks legit but based on what i know um by working in so much in this industry i'm like i think this person is scraping content and spinning it honestly and they're doing it effectively right now and so as people try to kind of go that easy route google's getting wise to that as people are aggregating amazon reviews and basically just writing an article

that's like telling information that it's like okay the people that gave it a one star they said this and the people that hated it said this and that's my pros and cons list plus some of the product specs you know i that's not really adding any real value um other than you know somebody doesn't have to read the direct reviews now you've kind of aggregated that i suppose um but it's almost more trustworthy when it is

clear that it comes from somebody who actually used the product and so google is pushing that right and so what we are seeing though is that for people who are doing things i would say the right way or a better way where people are adding additional value by the content they create not just putting content out there and hoping some of it does well um they're still doing very very well and we're still seeing sites today

that start up and are earning a fantastic income by just doing the methods we teach um with some affiliate marketing some some ads etc so to me the i see the future is still being very bright people are still going to continue researching products online before they buy them people are still going to be looking online for how to do things and in those kinds of articles those are great places to put affiliate links and so

that's not changing and i don't see ai's being able to do an adequate job of most of that kind of content anytime soon at all so to me it's i'm still very optimistic about the future of it obviously though things will things will start to change over time and we just have to keep our eye on it and that's what we do that's what we're doing all the time is keeping our eye on it um marco

wong baez says hey ricky do you recommend including a blog in my shopify store will it help increasing sales as a matter of fact i strongly recommend this um whether that blog is like hosted the same place as the shopify store or you self-host it um and then kind of link back and forth between the two so that you know it feels the is consistent or i believe with shopify i'm not personally using it but we

have project 24 members who do um i think with shopify you can even embed a store on your site if i'm not mistaken so um basically though with the blog what you're going to be doing is finding people who are doing searches around the topic things where by searching that it maybe makes it clear that they're probably considering making a purchase in your industry that's how i would um maybe target my search analysis is toward those

types of searches um and then you know people read your blog post and they're like hey cool this is really helpful information you say now if you want to see my product that solves this problem for you or my product that is in this industry here it is and you link to it it's like affiliate marketing except to your own products and um we've had people who basically had a shopify store and were only making money

because they were advertising all over facebook and google and they're making more money from their blog now without having to pay youtube and google it's just happening organically but it took that work of creating the content up front miranda cox whoa it's scrolled and i lost you there okay there we go project 24 member here can non-product driven blogs still succeed in ranking if my niche is competitive in answers don't always have black and white solutions

but i format correctly um yes non-product focused blogs often do extremely well especially because they're they i mean it can be competitive but they're they're not competitive in the same way when we when there are products that are popular it's common for just dozens and dozens and dozens of blogs to pop up around those products and they're all creating the same kind of content and it's like hard to weak to get through all that noise and

put out a piece of content that's better and that google recognizes is better and users recognize as better and so um when you're not in a really product-focused niche um ranking often ends up being a little bit easier um again depending on the niche you know like medical financial tend to be pretty um pretty competitive and there are others as well now the black and white solutions thing yes actually i think when there's not a black

and white solution people are probably more likely to be searching and even reading potentially multiple articles to try to understand that topic from multiple perspectives when i have something complicated that i am trying to understand and get an answer to i often tend to read a lot of articles and so even those that are ranking number three and number four i'm clicking on and reading through and finding that you know the one that i found to

be most trustworthy is kind of the one where i'll delve in a little bit further and so i don't think that precludes you from doing well in the rankings if there's no product or buyer intent at all it can that can have an impact on the earning potential especially for the passive income models like ads and affiliate but oftentimes even in the non-product focused like there are still affiliate products there are still things that you can

recommend to people um thinking about like in the healthcare space like there are affiliate programs for um like online counselors you know there's affiliate programs for tons of things in the financial space um and so there's affiliate programs for a lot of stuff if you find a good product you'd like to recommend to people in your niche depending on what that is all right um uh like i get enough of these that i like kind of

just wherever my eyes land that's where i'm going right um john farrar asks are there great blog topics that do not reflect using our post scoring tools is there an alternate approach i'm not quite sure what you mean with the post scoring tools but i would say that any sort of tool that you're using whatever it is there are still going to be topics outside of that that can do very very well i hope that makes

sense and so oftentimes we'll create you know tools that are kind of shortcuts to help us identify good topics for blog posts everyone has their some version of it right even our search analysis method but even then there's going to be stuff outside of that that could perform very well and for that um it can be tough we to some extent just kind of have to use our our knowledge and intuition of the industry to have

an idea of whether or not that seems like a reasonable topic for search volume and then the competition analysis is going to be the same no matter what um applicable innovation says elementor versus gutenberg never made a website in my life um i do like the direction wordpress is going with their builders but gutenberg on its own is still not not as powerful as i'd like it to be to be like a full page builder and

so elementor even the free version of elementor is going to add some really neat things um cadence blocks is a plug-in now that you can have that you can use um that goes with the cadence theme but you can use it even on other themes that's going to allow you to basically add a lot to the functionality of what you have with gutenberg elementor being one other page builders the divi page builder i like i use

it a lot and they recently put out an update that is going to help improve a lot their page loading speeds um where they've really struggled for a while because their their theme is so powerful and the page builders so got so much stuff in it that it got a little bit bloated from a code standpoint there you go john blankenshield says is the project 24 is the project 24 right for someone with little to no

experience in blogging besides passively hearing about it from your channel and other podcasts and channels don't know where to start yes the project 24 member is designed kind of to work no matter where you are um but it's picking people up from the very beginning so even with no like techy background at all it's going to show you how to set up the site and get it going we don't dive as much into the into the

you know site design and really technical stuff but there is a ton of awesome content on the web again i mentioned earlier in the video adam from wpcrafter there's some other youtube channels as well that'll go through depending on specifically what you want to do they'll go through that for you however what we show is just a very simple straightforward way to set up a website make it look good and start getting content on it which

is kind of where we focus that's the thing that matters the most in terms of getting traffic to your site but over time you'll find as you learn more stuff that you might want to start branching out and learning new things um to be able to make your site extra cool um johnny9 says hello last time i asked you uh we're saying you're going to create a bottle forum for aquabota users any eta on that i

don't have an eta it's something i want to do unfortunately my to-do list is fairly long but um yes it's something i want to do and it's something i think that we'll do pretty soon here but uh i can't say exactly when that's gonna happen okay um manner122 is it normal to have only zero to three users per day after four months i have 35 posts it is normal to have very very little traffic for several

months i will say it's also normal for on many sites to have some traffic um in that time frame you know at four five six months to start having you know 10 12 15 users per day would be fairly normal and so if you're not getting any yet at this point i would i would maybe start looking at that if you're connected to google search console you could look and see if there's any issues there with

your with your content being indexed or any other issues that they've identified on your site that's maybe preventing it from from getting traffic at this point you may find that your content's indexed but its ranking position is still just really really low um which is fairly normal for a new blog depending on what niche you're in and because of that like you're just not getting a lot of impressions people aren't seeing your article yet and it

just needs a little bit more time also more content as you add more content to the site it adds to the overall authoritativeness and so create more content surrounding those topics you've already covered you know build build up if you have multiple categories on your site um you know make sure that there's multiple articles kind of in each sort of genre that you write about on your site and you'll see that will improve quite a bit

as well um how much blog do i have to write in one year really i mean it kind of depends on what what it is you're trying to do for a lot of people you're you're building something on the side hoping to earn some money from it and so you know taking a little bit more casual approach to it is going to be fine if you're trying to build a business and you're trying to replace your

job or you're trying to get an income and because you don't have one right now um you know at that point i'm going to pick it up quite a bit the first 30 blog posts are very important before that i mean if it takes you a year to write 30 it's not going to move you're not going to get any momentum going on your site and it seems to prevent it from really getting noticed by the

algorithms and so um what i would say is get those first 30 blog posts written as quick as you can my recommendation in the first one to two months after that i am okay with slowing down but still within a year i'd like to see somewhere in the 50 to 100 blog posts um on most sites depending on kind of where you are i think that's totally doable if you think about that 100 blog posts is

one every little over three and a half days so about two a week if you can write two blog posts a week for a year especially if you crammed in a bit more at the very beginning um it's gonna it's that's i think that's doable but i think that's kind of what it takes to be able to really make things happen um man i wish i could get to everybody's questions i really do um let's see

kibra asks is mental health a good niche to go into i think that's going to be a very tough niche i think it's highly competitive it's definitely considered ymyl which is your money your life it it impacts people's money and it or or their life mental health is one that has a big impact on life and so google wants to make sure that the content is accurate and not gonna not gonna mislead someone and because of

that they lean heavily towards sites that are and content that's written by people who are authorities on the subject establishing yourself as that type of authority uh takes time and a lot of work so if you're at all new to blogging i wouldn't go that direction okay janna op income school does it help to be consistent in blog posting since day one where you get no visitors at all does it pay off later consistency is on

blogging is less important i would say than just the amount of content so you know publishing every two or three days um has probably is probably a lot well is definitely a lot less important than just having 30 40 50 blog posts on a website um and so i wouldn't worry as much about that and where that matters is like i'm not gonna you know write 30 blog posts in the first two months but spread them

out so that they're every three days um it just isn't that isn't important um that said consistency in the sense of consistently working and just continuing to work at it and writing and writing and writing i do think that that makes a difference not so much necessarily from an seo standpoint but from a personal standpoint of just putting in the work so if you just build a into your schedule a consistent time every day that you're

just going to work on it and you're going to keep writing blog content um i think that that sort of routine is gonna help you help a lot so there you go um here we go they keep popping in um lead with jim what do you think about someone who wants to start a contributor site like a version of forbes or huffington post except mine will be faith-based is there a chance of success um sure i

think there's a chance of success um a contributor site in the sense of there are multiple contributors that write on the site who aren't owners of the site they're writers yeah absolutely and in fact we have often and many members of project 24 have had contributors on their sites in the sense of they hire a freelance writer to write an article here and there and over time oftentimes that other writer kind of gets a some authority

on the subject we have hired before in as freelance writers people who have specific knowledge uh in a particular niche who aren't necessarily writers by training they're just um they just know stuff about that topic and that's actually done really really well for us because we train them on the style of writing and then they go right for us um and then those people again like they are one of the writers one of the contributors on

the site and that's again that's worked very very well and so if what we're saying now is like okay we're going to do something like that and except i'm not necessarily like paying them they're just writing for the site um or and maybe it's just to kind of get their message out or their name out there or whatever it is to build up you know a reputation and some authority uh maybe they are getting paid for

the content whatever it may be um from google's standpoint it's gonna look the same from the user standpoint it's gonna look the same and it does work very well um for them to do that so yes um let's see um what type of content should i post on a new amazon affiliate website frequency and competition from this from a data expert um first of all i don't like to build amazon affiliate websites specifically amazon is still

a good affiliate program it's still one that probably makes more people more money than most other affiliate programs directly but there are a lot of other affiliate programs that makes some people way more money even than that and so um i don't like to just limit myself to okay what products from amazon can i can i put on my website um i'd rather create a a content focused website a focused website um i focus on creating

good informational content and then i link to products i you know find the products that i want to talk about and i link to them um right now we're working on an affiliate marketing course for project 24. i just spent some time with nate we were sitting down talking about kind of the different approaches that we take to affiliate marketing and to linking to products and we were able to kind of define some specific areas and

different ways that we approach that and i think that's going to be really really beneficial as we continue to kind of work through that um again it's things that we're doing but now we're kind of wrapping definition around that to help others to be able to understand better what's working and and what's not and so i don't take it from that approach of i'm building an affiliate site or i'm building an amazon affiliate site i take

it from the approach of i'm building a site here's the topic of my site i create content about that and so the type of content you want to create if you're trying to get into affiliate marketing is helpful informational content on topics people are actually searching for that's really what it all comes back to and then let's see you asked content frequency and competition in general if you're very very product focused especially for like successful products

on amazon you're going to have a lot of competition because that's what a lot of other people are targeting they think that's where the money is and so oftentimes it does end up being very competitive and the content is actually not all that good or all that helpful again we take kind of that side approach we focus on answering specific questions people have on the web with our content and then linking to a product whenever that

makes sense and we actually end up doing better um and then you incorporate other monetization methods too ads and others um content frequency again the frequency matters a lot less than kind of the amount of content as well as um how the content performs you know if i write one article that just nails um a handful of really good search terms i might get 10 000 page views a month from that one article and that's really

great um and so the amount of content as well i again a website for me i'm i'm focused on content hard on content until at least 30 articles are up before i even worry about linking um beyond that i'm still going to 50 to 100 articles before i'm really you know again shifting too much away from content focus um but at that point maybe i'm monetizing more as i go so there you go and that's kind

of what my first year looks like after that there's a lot of optimization that we can do with the content and with the monetization all right i got a few more minutes here um some niches that newbie should stay away from um this is a follow-up from kibra um basically most anything health and fitness related is just very very saturated um money is very very saturated uh there's i mean income school i mean it took us

a long time to get income school off the ground and that was like six and a half years ago um and it was youtube that really did it for us so if you do want to go into any of those areas youtube's going to be the place to start um focusing first okay um other things i've kind of mentioned already like getting very heavily product focused um you know i think i think you can build a

site in a niche where obviously products are a big piece of it um that's kind of like with with backfire where jim is right now products are a big part of that niche but the topic isn't the products the topic is the topic and so um by taking that approach you open yourself up to being able to do a lot of product specific type of content but the niche isn't isn't just product focused if i made

a site that was just blenders.com you know just all about blenders and i'm not talking about like coding i'm talking about like blenders for making smoothies um it's very product focused and i'm gonna find myself facing a lot of stiff competition and it's gonna be hard to create a lot of content that's not just specifically about products so those those are really the big big ones most everywhere else i think you can find a spot you

can find a space i may be missing a couple but those are the ones that i just would not recommend if you're getting started from on your first site uh well moving from okay um system fernando well moving from blogger to wordpress effect the sandbox period um we call it you know we call it the sandbox there's not officially like a sandbox and what the sandbox is and the duration of time really varies from niche to

niche and um it varies so much it's based on so many variables it's really just kind of a testing period where google has no idea who you are and what your content is like whether or not it has any sort of authoritativeness and people would trust it and like it and so um there's just a lot of very early testing going on and so they don't call it it's not really a sandbox but it's what everybody

refers to because most new sites seem to go through the ghost town phase is what we call it so moving from blogger to wordpress i don't know that that's gonna alone be the thing that impacts the sandbox period however i would not be building a site on blogger um having your own custom domain is just gonna speak more to your authority your authoritativeness which i know it's weird it's like okay pay some money get your own

domain and now you're more authoritative than a site that's on blogger but that's maybe even mostly a perception that humans have which impacts which articles they click on and so um that does end up impacting and could impact your time in the sandbox as well so there you go uh maybe yes but on the other hand um with like a blogger or any of those other types of platforms uh you just what you're going to be

able to do with your website is just extremely limited your monetization's going to be more limited everything's more limited and so i'd rather just start on wordpress from the very beginning um let's see shivamara i have written blogs of 3000 words and main keywords ranking between 25 to 30 position total posts i have 50. please help an off-page website is eight months old domain authority is 35. so um if the website's only eight months old it's

just it's just young as a part of it but um really the on-page stuff is the stuff that matters the most um our you know how's the search analysis how's our competition how is you know are these topics that people are searching like if you're ranking really if you're ranking really well and not getting traffic then that's a sign that there's just not a lot of search volume in this case you say you're ranking between 25

to 35 to me ranking above beyond about number 20 is the same thing as not ranking at all the the number of impressions and the number of clicks you get are going to be very low but the fact that you're showing up at all shows that google's doing something with that content they're looking at it you may see organically that that it moves up if your content really is better than your competition um and so that's

what i would do i would say you know if i'm ranking number 25 let me look at the top 10 articles is my article actually a better resource than theirs if it's not then you need to go back to the content if it is okay then at this point maybe i do um maybe i do need to start um some industry outreach which to me would be just like hey i'm gonna go get myself interviewed on

a podcast maybe i'll reach out to some other blogs um but frankly i'm i'm more focused with the on-page stuff that's what i would do i would continue um adding more content i'd work on my interlinking between articles and you know take the few articles that are getting some traffic and link from those to other articles that are related and just get people to view more of the content on your site but again if your content

isn't a better resource than what's than the stuff that's that's beating you in the competition uh in the rankings then that's where we need to get back to is back to the content so there's a lot of things that could be going on there that's i guess that's what i'm saying all right um my time's really up but i'm gonna take i think i'm gonna take one more um your thoughts on these back-to-back algo updates june

and july link spam core word vitals etc it's on my way to 50 000 sessions but now i'm back to 30 000. um yeah so my thoughts on those updates first of all um those you know any algorithm update is going to impact a lot more than just one thing um obviously the the june july algorithm updates were very heavily focused on uh page experience which included core web vitals that was an update that google warned

us about for a long time mostly because they wanted us to make the changes proactively um and also i think because for most sites it was actually going to have very little impact on their rankings and so uh so they wanted us to do the work because it was going to make our sites better but they didn't want um but they didn't want um they didn't want the the a lot of sites to see like to

just get hit by the algorithm update and have it have no impact on them and then they would be like okay well why am i going to worry about that kind of stuff right so basically what they've said is that core web vitals you know page experience stuff these are mostly tiebreaker type ranking signals and so you know if two sites um have similar level of content they're just they're they're both a great resource but this

one loads faster okay cool it's gonna break the tie but it's not something where hey if my website's a bit a little bit slower it doesn't totally pass you know now all of a sudden all my rankings are gonna tank that's not the way it's supposed to work and it's not the way it seems to have worked for most sites however some sites have seen big moves like yours um and so when that happens we just

we have to take a step back and look at what you know what is impacting it like are are my core vitals really bad if they're you know if they're good generally good and or close to the to the green range then there's maybe something more to it than that and every algorithm update even the little ones they do like daily almost um are going to impact those sorts of things and so there may be something

else that was included in that algorithm update that wasn't really a headliner but that impacted your site and so that's what we just have to look at is what is it try to figure out there's a lot of troubleshooting what i'll often do is i'll look in my google analytics and i'll say you know was i hit across the board was it a handful of articles that were ranking well that now just aren't anymore but the

traffic on the rest of my site stayed pretty consistent that's again those kinds of signals are going to help me understand what's going on if it was totally across the board there's a reasonable chance that there is something site-wide and maybe it is that your page experience just needs to improve um uh if your site isn't mobile friendly like it doesn't it doesn't work well on mobile that's a that's a pass fail test nowadays same thing

with having a an ssl certificate um having a secure an https on your website is now a pass fail for google if you fail well then another site that has it that's comparable to yours is going to outrank you so i would look at those kinds of things um all right guys uh that's gonna do it for me today um i wish i had more time again and i wish i could get to everybody's questions but

i'm gonna keep doing these um as often as i can so um i guess stay tuned and also if you uh if you go to the most at least my most recent youtube video i think i've pinned the comment in there but i'm gonna have it linked to in the description of videos going forward but i did start like a little it's almost like a little survey just a couple questions but mostly it's just there for

um you to submit questions and topics that you'd like me to cover on the youtube channel and so even if you you know anybody watching this can't make it to youtube live to add to get a question asked um and answered by me uh feel free to submit it and we'll take time and make a nice video about it okay all right well thanks everybody i'm like still looking at questions i like i'm like feeling an

impulse to answer more of these but i'll never end if i if i don't so and i gotta go film actually a video with nate right now so uh we'll see you guys next time