One week ago, I started a project of setting a habit of posting daily on my niche sites. I’ve been kicking myself for being inconsistent with my posting. This is the kind of slacking that prevents my websites from growing. Last Monday, I set up a new process for myself to follow.
There are a few things that have helped me to stay on track, and I’m proud to be celebrating one full week of posting daily. It’s not a major milestone, but it’s the start of something great.
My Whiteboard
My whiteboard has been great at keeping me on track. It’s essentially a physical spreadsheet that I can’t ignore. The key pieces of data I’m tracking are: number of posts, last post’s published date, and how many posts are in the works (sent off to a writer).
This method of tracking my progress provides me with a visual tracker of where I’m making strides and where I’m slacking. One week ago, most of the sites on this board had zero posts. I’ve made sure to get every site at least 1 post. The only exception in this week is that one site is very technical and the post I ordered is to be very long. I’m fine with waiting a little longer for this post to be ready. It will be worth it.
Keyword Research
If you’ve seen my other posts, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of the KGR method of finding long-tail keywords. I’ve taken this method and adapted it to my own process. Doing keyword research is actually my favourite part of doing any SEO work. This is the part that fascinates me the most.
Finding easy topics to rank for is second nature to me. I can spot a perfect long-tail keyword target in under a minute. Once I’ve found it, I put together a small content brief to send to a writer. Once ordered, it shouldn’t take more than a day or two for the content to be ready. If the topic I’ve found is something I’m knowledgeable about, I’ll write it myself and that usually takes about half an hour.
Ordering Content
I’ll order my content from various sources. It really depends on what I need. What type of article is it? Information, product review, or technical? What is the length of the article? What kind of quality do I need? These all have to be taken into consideration before handing it off to any writing service.
Content writing isn’t free, and that’s perfectly acceptable. You need content to move forward, and there are people who are willing to produce it for you. I like to find a reliable source of content writing and spend as much as I can. If you want to know what services I use, just send me a message.
I usually pay $10 – $15 per article that is 500-1000 words in length. I will always proofread the delivered content and add a few hundred words myself. I like to put another 20-40% on top of whatever is delivered to me. This ensures the writing is even more unique and has some writing that is up to my own standards.
Writing My Own Content
When I have to write my own content, the entire process slows down to a crawl. Writing requires a lot of mental energy. You need to know a bit about the topic to begin with. You always need to do additional research, more so if you have no idea what you’re writing about. On a day like today, I have 10 articles waiting to be delivered and only 1 that was delivered.
This allows me to stick to my “1 post per day” minimum. In actuality, I’ve been publishing 3+ posts per day. Mixing ordered content and self-written content, I am able to punch out a lot of posts in one day.
Proofreading, Optimizing, and Publishing
No matter where you get your content from, you need to proofread it. That means reading it, then editing it. This step is crucial as it lets you know exactly where you can spot some optimization opportunities. You’ll find where you can change some keywords around or move entire sentences and paragraphs around to increase readability.
Optimizing your content for SEO is usually what takes the longest. You need to set up titles, a slug, headers, descriptions, featured images, embedded images, external URLs, internal URLs, and be mindful of keyword densities. It sounds like a lot, but after you do it enough times it becomes second nature. Having the right plugins helps, too. I like to use Rank Math for most of my sites because of the live optimization checklist it provides when you’re writing a post.
Publishing takes a bit of effort, too. I like to make sure every new URL is submitted to Google through Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool. This is like giving Google a notification that you have a new web page live. In some cases, I’ve had new web pages ranked on page 1 on the same day and started receiving traffic immediately.