Finally Seeing Some Kind of Light in the Dark Tunnel
Last week, from Sunday to Saturday, I published a total of 10 blog posts.
That may seem close to nothing to the highly-productive bloggers out there, and it's surely a grain of sand in comparison to the big machine blog-type websites (that try to give "personal" recommendations / blog vibes, but are in actuality a faceless, cold, computerized company [cough] DiscoverLA).
To me, however, a girl that has been trying to produce content for my little, personal blog website, aroundLAwithTK [dot] com, since the summer of 2020 when COVID-19 had shut the world down, and has failed to maintain any sort of considerable content creation consistency, publishing 10 blog posts in 7 days is a big step!
Publishing 10 blog posts in a week is half of what I did in my first YEAR of blogging.
Now I know it's only a step, and I need to do MUCH more and maintain consistency for MUCH longer before I'll feel deserving of a giving myself a pat on the back, but I want to recognize this step nonetheless.
It's been a long, slow road for me as a blogger, and I'm still basically on the ground.
This is due to no one's fault but my own.
After buying the domain name for aroundLAwithTK in November 2019, which was after I’d verbalized the idea to a couple of co-workers in 2018, I didn’t make the first blog post onto the site until May 2020, and I still didn’t take off running.
My very first blog post on aroundLAwithTK [dot] com was about shopping at farmers' markets during the COVID-19 crisis. That piece, encouraging folks to shop at farmers' markets aroundLA, was published May 2020. The next was a continuation of the farmers' market topic, giving readers a Farmers Market for Everyday of the Week aroundLA, which didn't come until well into the following month from the first. The sort of regularity needed to get a new blog off the ground never formed.
All my aroundLAwithTK blogs in the first year-span of blogging:
Why Shopping at Farmers’ Markets in Better — eat aroundLA, May 2020
A Farmers’ Market for Everyday of the Week — eat aroundLA, June 2020
Three Black-Owned Brick & Mortar Stores — shop small aroundLA, Aug. 2020
Black-Owned Brick & Mortar Beauty Supply — shop small aroundLA, Aug. 2020
Get Up There And Ride Girl! Here’s Why — play aroundLA, Oct. 2020
5 Best Hiking Trails Personally Suited for You — play aroundLA, Oct. 2020
Six Southern Sunday Brunch Spots — eat aroundLA, Oct. 2020
What to Wear to Party in the Hollywood Hills — hangout aroundLA, Oct. 2020
Soul Food to Make a Southerner Feel at Home — eat aroundLA, Oct. 2020
Six High End Outdoor Dining Restaurants aroundLA — eat aroundLA, Nov. 2020
I Never Wanted to Go Natural, But Here I Am — beauty withTK, Nov. 2020
How I Grew My Hair as a Reluctant, Lazy, New Natural — beauty withTK, Nov. 2020
water your garden, friend — travel withTK, Dec. 2020
forget that , we're being unapologetic — travel withTK, Dec. 2020
First Day Exploring Morocco — travel withTK, Dec. 2020
I was wrong.. let me explain — travel withTK, Dec. 2020
you socialize MORE during SOLO travel— travel withTK, Dec. 2020
You Can't See The Desert, You Have to Feel It — travel withTK, Dec. 2020
Grocery Shop How A Rich B*tch Does — eat aroundLA, May 2021
COVID-19 Restrictions Lift aroundLA, We Are Outside! — hangout aroundLA, May 2021
Terrible. Though I was still able to garner views and a small audience with very little content on aroundLAwithTK, this is absolutely terrible.
(As a point of reference, I searched Google for how often a new blogger should post, and the top response from a digital marketing company says to post at least 20 times per month as a new blog to rank higher on the search engines. 20. Per month. A whole year passed before I got 20 up. [inserts melting-face emoji] 🫠)
To makes matters worse…
As you can see, aroundLAwithTK has covered a broad range of topics since the beginning.
On top of not creating content consistently for my blog, my blog is NOT in a niche market. And I didn’t even stick to one category. I was all over the place, which is exactly what blog experts and web masters advise you NOT to do.
Of course I’d heard the advice at the creator conferences and seen it said on YouTube video after YouTube about how to begin a successful blog: niche down! Not even a single segment of aroundLAwithTK was ever niche. What to do in Los Angeles? Puh-leez! Beauty? No ma’am. Travel? Not a chance.
Beginning a blog is already a long and hard process; not posting often and consistently makes it long and harder. I made it very hard for myself in the early years of content creation.
I couldn’t think of how to choose one overarching topic about my new life in Los Angeles, and of the various segments, I couldn’t think of how to narrow them down without excluding another part of it I’m interested in. I also never had any unique angle to any of them.. I’m a transplant that moved to L.A. to pursue her dreams, as did at least a million others, so the ex-pat perspective of Los Angeles isn’t really that niche either.
Do not make the same mistakes that I made as a blogger in the beginning.
If you’re thinking about starting a blog website, please, save yourself some years of agony (if you have any desire for website traffic) and do the following:
Pick a specific niche.
“Everything you need to know about knitting”
“Black girl guide book to growing natural hair”
(Those are two that came off the top of my head. Notice how the general topic is very specific, but if you were to begin to really think about them, there are hundreds of different elements that fit into each — each element is its own blog post, and likely, from each blog post can be derived another.)
Publish content often and consistently.
There’s a lot of information on the Internet; no one will find your little website, including Google, if there’s not a substantial amount of content on it for it to be found.
CONSISTENTLY! Even if you aren’t producing a boatload of content as a beginner blogger, at least being consistent over time will make way for consistent growth (if your content is halfway decent).
If you don’t do the above, you will struggle. You will struggle beginning a new blog regardless, but if you don’t do the above, you will struggle much more severely. Then, you will most likely quit.
Thee only thing that saved me, as a blogger, from not being complete cow maneur was the fact that I'm a darn good writer. From the beginning of aroundLAwithTK, my pieces have been detailed, credible (always linking sources when giving facts), and well-written in my authentic voice as a writer.
(I suppose this is where I should admit that the 10 blog posts published over the past 7 days were NOT that of T.K. caliber; they are what my journalism professor back in college would call "fluff" pieces, covering something light in a general manner. So I'm definitely not about to sit here and pat myself on the back for that. However, I'm still happy about producing a decent amount of content over a week span and getting it up on the site.)
Why am I happy about publishing 10 blog posts in a week?
My first year of having aroundLAwithTK [dot] com, 10 blog posts is what I published in a YEAR span.
Seven days is a considerable amount of time for someone who never keeps anything up to keep something up. (Duolingo streak, daily journaling, journey to splits, you name it, I've dropped the ball on it.)
It has given me the urge to do more. Have I triggered my dopamine circuit? The “doing” is beginning to feel like the reward.
If I can combine quality with consistency, ou baby, aroundLAwithTK will be something dangerous!
My work, my writing, my topics, my target audience, is good. It is good. aroundLAwithTK is good! I have to reassert myself of that, as a blogger, because my lack of consistency creating content could have me thinking otherwise.
I could not get the clicks from Google Search, I could not see high page views on Squarespace analytics, and I could think it's because no one wants to see the content that I'm putting out. I could think my lack of website growth is due to my content being a bunch of cheap bologna. I could think that way, and sometimes that line of thinking does begin to make its way in.
When you are creating content, when you are making something, when you are sharing your art with the world, the focus should be on the craft.. yeah, sure.. that still doesn’t stop the numbers from being discouraging.
What should a brand new blog’s website traffic be in the first year?
Not what mine were, that’s for sure!
I typed into Google, “how many pageviews should you have in first year of blogging,” and one of the search results says: In my first year blogging, I received a total of 240,910 pageviews.
Girl, … Uhnt uhn.
Majority of the other search results answer questions about what amount of traffic equals what amount of money, because most people want to know how much traffic is needed to make money blogging. And I won’t act as though I wasn’t one of those people. Shoot, when you spend hours-upon-hours-upon-hours creating something, you’re interested to know if/when that something will pay you, to allow you to quit your day job and be able to spend more time on that something.
One seemingly-credible source says a blogger can’t even THINK about making money from a blog before it’s averaging at least 10,000 pageviews a month.
Chiiiiild. We know I can’t think about it yet. Let’s look at these numbers I totaled each of the past few years blogging.
In the first three years of blogging, according to Squarespace analytics, aroundLAwithTK had the following website traffic:
2021 — 3,403 pageviews
2022 — 13,165 pageviews
2023 — 15,953 pageviews
What I made in the last calendar year, from January thru December, all 12 months together, is what I need to be making EACH MONTH.
Even if you’re not a blogger, a content creator of any sort, I’m sure you’ve had a job or have had to count somewhere at some point; you can see my numbers are far from good.
Over three years into having a blog, and my website traffic is horrible.
Yet, I keep going.
Related: Hi, I'm T.K. I've Given Up On A Lot, But I Won't Give Up On This
Entering the blogasphere is a dark, dark place. Early on, if you’re growing traffic organically, you won’t see a flicker of light any time soon. That’s tough. Really tough.
How do I keep going even though website traffic is low?
While the numbers may not reflect it yet, I know the truth.
The truth of the matter is that I am good and my concept, aroundLAwithTK, is great. My work is good, but I haven't been doing NEARLY enough of it and it's for *that* reason that my personal brand hadn't seen substantial growth.
It’s takes knowing the difference between, “I ain’t got it” and “I ain’t doing it”. (“It’s not meant for me,” or, “I’m not doing enough to make it happen for me.” Which one is it?)
As is illustrated with my lack of consistency early on, I’ve struggled to be sure. If I were sure, I would’ve been doing more. I wasn’t.
Right now, however, I’m feeling like, “nah, I really got it,” and I have no choice but to do it.
I don't know what triggered this revelation. Was it the email from Google Search Console Team telling me that aroundLAwithTK was getting more clicks from Google Search? And is it the next acheivement, from that same entity and metric, being in my eyesight, that has me fired up, blogging my little booty off in the last week? Is it a little bit of light I suddenly see?! Whatever it is, keep firing me up.
At the start of blogging, I couldn’t see anything. I was throwing my content, very sporadically, into the abyss. Now, there’s a little light in this tunnel to becoming a paid blogger. Having a defined, quantitative target that I can see, that’s not too close and not too far, is helping me produce more blog content than I ever have before.
Originally, I'd opened ChatGPT to ask what could be the root of my recent motivation or the cause of my positive change in content creation consistency, but then I got derailed by trying to explain the backstory to my question and decided to bring it over here to aroundLAwithTK.
Cheers to another blog post to start off my second week of not being a lazy bum!
Maybe I can dig into possible answers to my question in the next one.. Or, maybe I don't need to dig at all; maybe I don't need to know how I suddenly became more consistent as a blog content creator. Maybe I already have everything I need to keep going.
Please, don’t hesitate to share this with those that you know who are working towards something, that though it may have no set path nor guarantee, they continue to forge ahead.
Thank you for being here, riders.
