Failure is a big part of becoming great, which is one of the main reasons I’m writing. But pros almost never show how hard it is for a beginner. They only tell the good parts of stories. Nowadays, the whole concept of blogging is based on the idea that you can fake it until you make it. So, everyone pretends to be an expert and not share failures at all.

Most of the time, they give very general information. Even so, it’s not strange that they don’t share their best strategies. Also, most bloggers would only post this kind of information if they were successful at it. Don’t get the wrong idea. You can get those results, but I want to show with this that it’s not always as easy as they say it is.

Sometimes it just takes time. I’m pretty sure that someday, this blog will do well. And when it does, that’s proof for you that you could do the same. That is the reason why I’m posting this: to prove that I started with zero.

If I’m being honest, I’m on a really tight schedule, even though I will try to update this article daily. But I can’t promise you that. I started the blog today. Then, I spent most of my time putting up everything, like social media accounts and analytics. I also uploaded the sitemap to the Google search console and the Bing webmasters.

For those who don’t know, it takes time for Google and Bing to crawl your site into their search engines. If you send them manually, they crawl it faster.

• Day 1: 25/08/2023
• Blog posts published: 5
• Total no. of blog posts: 5
• Domain Ratings: 0

Chapter 1. Traffic stats

It’s a lot harder to get traffic than it is on social media, where we can post a selfie. And an algorithm gets us hundreds of likes. Getting traffic for a blog is as much work as making the content itself. SEO is my main way to bring people to my site.

Google Analytics stats for Day 1

It’s nice to see you get 76 visitors on day one until you realize it’s just bot traffic. Google says they filter bot traffic out, but I’m convinced that this is just bot traffic. Because my blog is not even indexed properly yet.

If I couldn’t find my site on Google, then I don’t know how anyone else could. At least not a real human. So it’s not that impressive. But seriously, I need to get something ranked so I can get some organic traffic.

• Total visitors and traffic sources: 76 Users ( 70 Direct, 6 Organic )
• Bounce rate: 93.7%

Bing Analytics stats for Day 1

I didn’t plan to pay much attention to this, but I remembered that Bing has been trying to fight back recently. With their ChatGPT investments, they look promising enough competition to Google.

And since not a lot of people focus on Bing, it could be an underrated traffic source for the blog. So, in the upcoming days, I have to check what I have to do to rank on Bing faster.

• Total visitors and traffic sources: 1 ( 1 Organic )
• Bounce rate: –

For some reason, Bing shows the stat on 24 August 2023. But since I made the site live on the 25th, I’m counting it as traffic received on the 25th of August.

Pinterest Analytics

SEO is a long-term method, which is why I wanted to do it. If you are just starting out, you can’t really count on SEO to bring you traffic. Social media is probably the fastest way to get people to your site. And Pinterest is highly recommended by bloggers. So, I knew that I had to do it no matter what.

Even though I was a little skeptical, the thought of Pinterest sounds like a lot of work. I hadn’t used Pinterest before, so I wasn’t sure how it worked. But I was surprised to find out that it’s a lot easier than it sounds. The process is pretty automated. But I do need to figure out how to make my pins go viral on Pinterest. I think this would be the best way to bring traffic to my blog.

• Pinterest Pin posted: 1
• Total Pins: 1
• Impressions: 6
• Followers: 0

Twitter Analytics

Research shows that if I want to grow faster on Twitter, I need to post at least three times a day. So, I’ll do my best to match the number of posts in the days to come, but for day 1, there’s only one.

• Tweets (For the day): 1
• Total Tweets: 1
• Impressions: 5
• Followers: 0

Chapter 2. Monetization

Blogging is a lot of fun and something I enjoy, but my main goal here is to make money. I mean, let’s be real, aren’t we all? So that’s when the excitement kicked in, and I made a huge mistake on my first day of blogging.

Affiliate Programs

In the future, this will be the main way for this blog to make money. The best thing about affiliate marketing is that it generates passive income. It’s the same as planting a tree and waiting for it to grow. Once it starts paying, you will keep receiving something like a paycheck every month.

For making money with affiliate marketing, there are some great programs out there. Check out this list of high-paying affiliate programs.

Here is a screenshot of the email I got from Bluehost’s partner team. I didn’t have enough traffic, so they rejected my application. Some Affiliate programs let you sign up right away without a lot of requirements.

But there are some programs that are more picky about who can promote them. This is a very important lesson for a beginner. So, the first thing I need to do is build an audience.

• Applied: 1
• Approved: 0
• Rejected: 1
• Earnings: $0.00

Advertisements

I don’t like ads as much as affiliate marketing. But if it’s done right, it could be a way to make some extra money. So, you can expect to see ads on this blog at some point.

• Applied: No
• Earnings: $0.00

Note: I won’t be adding the part on “monetization” for a couple of days. Because I’ve learned my lesson by applying to the Bluehost affiliate program. So, I will first focus on building an audience, then later try to monetize the blog as it should be.

Chapter 3. Key Takeaways from Day 1

This is a list of what I’ve done and what I still need to do on my blog. This is to explain why I choose to do certain things. This will help you see things from the point of view of a new Blogger.

1. Indexing on search engines

First, I submitted my sitemap to Google Search Console. But after a few hours, I discovered that I could manually submit URLs. Since that is the fastest way to get them indexed, I did that. And to my surprise, they indexed the posts the same day. At least, that’s what Google says. But when I tried to search for the posts on Google, I couldn’t find them. Instead, there was a URL for my site’s post in Japanese. Maybe that’s something from the people who owned this domain before me. I don’t even know what that is, so seeing it is strange. But, yes, I don’t see my posts, even though Google says they’re indexed.

One thing I noticed is that they index your posts in the exact same order as you submit them. So, if there is an article that is more important to you, then you submit it first.

I’ve also submitted my sitemap to Bing search master but not the URLs manually, which I left for day 2.

2. Make quality content

I’m not sure how long it will take for my blog to get steady traffic. But when I do, I need to write things that people will actually want to read. People’s attention spans are shorter than ever in 2023, so if I spam them with junk content, it won’t work. Instead, I need good content that will keep people on the site longer. The most important and first thing I need to do is make the posts better. That means I should update the five posts I already uploaded before making any new ones. Then, I need to make sure that whatever I’m making is a good piece of material.

3. Work on decreasing the Bounce rate

Bounce rate is an important measure for Google search optimization. So, I need to lower my bounce rate. The best way for me to do that is to write more blog posts. But because I’m on a tight schedule, one of the fastest ways to fix it is to make my site’s interlinks better. My interlinking between articles is so bad that some of them don’t even have interlinks when I post them. I have to fix that right away.

4. Increase Domain rating

Again, domain rating is an even more powerful factor in how Google ranks search results. The more likely you are to rank better than your competitors If you have a higher domain rating. Well, I can’t rank for anything on Google since my domain rate is 0. So I need to get it up. Guest blogging in exchange for quality backlinks seems to be the solution. But I don’t really get enough time to work on this blog, so I don’t know. I’ll have to give it a shot, but it will take a while.

In conclusion, a lot needs to be done. If you have a full-time job and are the only person working on your blog, you could expect this from the first day. Things could be very different with a team, but since there are so many things to do, it will take time. But believe me, it will all be worth it in the end. You just need to get started.