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one year ago I took on an audacious challenge a challenge given to me by me and the challenge was to accomplish what we normally do and what we teach people how to do in 2 years in half that time just one [Music] year I set out to organically grow a Blog with no tricky link building following only the processes that we normally use to build organically a Blog to a full-time income of at least $4,000 a month in just one year so first I'm going to tell you how I did and then second I'm going to talk about what I was able to accomplish from this plan and what sort of results each of those things led to and then three I'm going to share with you the insights that I gained working really hard over the last year to talk about what I would do differently if I were to start this challenge over but more on that later first let's dive into what you probably here for and that is the results how much running if any do I have to do so how did I do let's review the goals the main goal was to get to $4,000 in a single month and in order to do that I needed to get an earnings per thousand page views of at least $32.80 based on 121,700 24 members were earning that much 3282 per thousand page views they were getting on their website so calculating from there means I needed almost 122,000 page views a month from this blog to get that I would need to write at least 170 blog posts assuming I could get an average of 715 page views per month from each blog post again coming from that same survey my plan was to write those 170 blog posts in just the first three months on that blog and then add additional content throughout the year that's because in the past we found that it takes several months on a brand new website for Google to start really giving it some Authority and trust and so I wanted those written as early as possible well how did we do first let's talk results my best month was the month of December and instead of $4,000 what I earned was $ 43760 so I got a little over 10% of the way there what does that mean for my running means I'm going to be running 36 freaking miles I'm going to do that I probably won't do that in one take and in fact I have some fun ideas for how we could have a lot of fun with those miles uh and still run a bunch of miles in uh at a time and in fact the idea was given to me by a project 24 member who is a trail Runner uh and so I don't know if he can quite empathize with me and what it's going to take for me to be able to run that much uh the farthest I've run in one one go is a little over 13 miles but let's talk about some of the other numbers my page views in the month of December was also only 1,786 page views not even 2,000 page views in a month and that's based on not 170 but 70 blog posts and 25 out of the 70 blog posts were published in October or November so most of my content hasn't had much time to age but still instead of 715 page views per post I have averaged across those 70 posts 25.5 page views and my epmp earnings per thousand or Millie page views when I only included my ad and my affiliate earnings so not counting an info product not counting a sponsorship I earned an epmp of $33.33 so my earnings were totally On Target the problem was my traffic wasn't and I didn't get the content created so what happened the short answer is I failed I failed at this the plan didn't fail sort of but I failed to stick to the plan so let's cover a few specific things that led to these outcomes the very first thing I did wrong was the very first thing on the list I said I would start with three subcategories the reason being that I would write a bunch of these blog posts covering just a few specific topics so that I could build out the topic map and have really good topical Authority but because I plan to create so much content and I intended to blow that number way out of the water I didn't stick to just three I covered at least eight different subcategories on my blog spanning across a few very vastly different categories so I didn't build real topical Authority and because of that my page views per post per month is way low topical Authority is one of the most important and one most beneficial things that you can do for your blog that's completely inside of your control you don't have to do collaborations with other people you don't have to depend on anybody else to create your content and build that topical Authority I didn't do it if I had made those 70 blog posts the 70 that I wrote even not 170 even if it was only the 70 but I had stuck to three to maybe five very specific specific clusters of content I would have gotten substantially more traffic I'm so convinced of that that that's actually the first thing that I'm doing right now to grow this blog substantially further over the next little bit the second issue that I had with this challenge was I took way too much on myself over this last year not even just in this challenge just in general I took way too much on myself and as a result I had to prioritize my life and my business work in such a way that creating this content in the first 3 months like I planned it wasn't possible it wasn't feasible I got a good start in the very beginning but I ended up dropping the ball and in fact I got so far behind which led to the third problem that later in the year I had to start rushing on other things and I wasn't able to do some of the other things that I had planned on doing throughout the year because I needed content first I rushed YouTube I didn't just make supplementary videos because I knew that wasn't going to be enough in order to grow an audience and get real traffic and make real money I was going to have to make a real Channel a channel that could grow Beyond just what you would get from search so I created a YouTube channel and I made 30 videos in 30 days and burned myself out there and I had some success that YouTube channel today has over 900 subscribers and well over the 4,000 hours of watch time that I need to get monetized in fact in the coming weeks it's probably going to help get my number well over the $400 I'm at today and I could easily end up at over $1,000 a month just because I finally hit that Mark and that's on a YouTube channel that started in mid August the next thing is I wasn't able to follow through with all of these things again because I didn't have the content so I have some affiliate on the blog but I wasn't able to develop a really good affiliate strategy because I didn't have enough content I wasn't able to do a whole lot with ads I finally got ads on the website just a couple months ago so they're new which means they're not performing as well as they're going to later but also CU I don't have the content I don't have the traffic and so even though my epmp is plenty High the earnings that I'm getting are obviously still way too low and then info products I was able to put together an info product and I got it launched the week of Christmas literally after everybody's already made all their purchases for Christmas that's when I finally got it done and I haven't even made any content pushing it I literally just put it on the website just to have it out there and so far I made one sale I just didn't get to do so many of the valuable things that I had planned to do because I fell so far behind on the content if this sounds familiar to you because you've been in that boat just know it's really easy for people like me to stand up here and tell you yeah just go spend a couple hours every day writing blog posts what's the big deal but things are going to come up in your life that are going to prevent you from being able to do everything that you set out to do that's normal and that's okay I'm not making excuses for what happened to me this year the reality is and this is me being completely honest with you this year personally is probably the hardest year that I've undergone in my entire life the things that have happened to me in my personal life and the things I've had to deal with it was the most difficult most stressful year that I've ever had I had more anxiety attacks like than I've ever had in my entire life and in fact to the point where now I can recognize what an anxiety attack really is whereas before it was like that was weird where'd that come from now I understand what they are because they happen to be so many times this year because of the stresses and all of the other things that were going on in my life add to that the fact that this is the year that AI went mainstream right after I I started planning this challenge AI goes mainstream and on top of that I think as a result of what happened with AI and the massive amount of garbage content that other bloggers are creating using just AI as a result of that Google had to come out and dramatically change the way that their algorithm Works they made some changes that frankly I don't really think the serps today match what Google wants I think they're trying to figure out how to put the good content back at the top so this year bloggers are suffering and my blog was no different other things I had intended to do I Ed to participate more in my industry now this is actually something I did okay I almost immediately early in the year I went and joined a whole bunch of different Facebook groups that are for my industry ranging from people that are very into it to people that are kind of a little bit more casual about it and that has been one of the most valuable things from a learning standpoint I'm not participating a whole lot as my brand most of those Facebook groups don't allow pages but some of them do and in those ones I did join as my brand and what that allows me to do is as I participate and respond to questions and do things in that Community it gives me a bit of a reputation and builds that brand and invites people to click over to my Facebook page where I can link to all of my content even if those Facebook groups don't allow it so that was a really good thing that I did but because I don't have that much content and I haven't built up much of a brand yet I haven't sought out to get interviewed on podcasts or do a lot of the other things that I would need to do to build real eat I just need more content on the website first to make it more established and build some topical Authority again because I was so far behind on content I never got around to creating any sort of online group of my own or creating an email list so a lot of this plan didn't happen it's not a failure of these things and their ability to do what they're supposed to do these things work they're working on other websites that we have and they're working for project 24 members they didn't work for me though because I failed to be able to do them now that is a little bit of a failure of the plan that's why I said it's not a failure of the plan sort of I created a plan that required me to be able to dedicate a lot of time to this but there's a problem with that it didn't take into account life and it didn't take into account the fact that I run a company and that I do the jobs that I always did as well as most of the jobs that Jim used to do it's a lot of stuff that really rests on my shoulders and prevents me from being able to spend very much of my time my workday on this in fact very little of my workday goes into to this and so I'm doing this on the side just like a lot of you and this required me to be able to dedicate more time to it than I literally had hours in the day so the plan needs to change and there are a few specific things that I am absolutely going to change to address this website going forward the first thing that I would change is I would take this participation thing right here and I'm going to move that up right here at the very top we have our process for search analysis we've talked about it we've even taught a lot of it here on YouTube we have a video all about it I'll even link to it right here okay there go learn our process for search analysis is our process of identifying which topics to create content about and it works incredibly well however when you're trying to decide which clusters of content which categories and subcategories within your Niche you should start with having some insight from a lot of other people who are literally living your Niche every single day is incredibly valuable and what I found was just a wealth of information on Facebook you can also find it in other forums you can find it in Reddit you can find it on Kora what are the questions people are asking I'm seeing very similar questions being asked over and over and over again and I'm seeing so many different perspectives in response to that that it's incredibly Val valuable once again because I have personal experience in my Niche I'm also able to add to that my own experience and I can create amazing content I haven't taken enough advantage of that I think I would start with that and I would spend probably a week literally just joining and perusing some of these groups and finding out what questions people have and finding out what other people think about those questions then I would go back to this and I would say start with three two or even one cluster of content in fact I want you to start with only one cluster of content that's what I would do today I would literally pick one thing one aspect of one subcategory within my Niche and I would exhaust it I'd write 15 maybe 20 articles depending on kind of what that cluster of content is and how much content it really merits that way I actually build some topical Authority there I would plan out a full map of basically all of the questions that people are realistically asking about that particular subtopic there are a lot of ways to do this we've talked about them many times on this channel answer the public is a great free resource you can use Google there's the people also ask questions the Google search generative experience is also providing you with something very similar to people also ask so Google themselves will tell you these are other questions that people are asking that are related to yours for those of you in Project 24 and know what I'm talking about you can use the Google partial answer method I don't remember if that's exactly what we called it but if you've seen it and you know you know go use that and see what the people also ask and what Google search genate experience will tell you you can also just straight up ask uh any of the AI you can ask chat GPT you can go to Bard from there we use the inverted pyramid those of you in Project 24 you know what I'm talking about to use our own brains to try to figure out sort of where these questions lie and which ones are likely to be asked by the most people and which ones are maybe only asked by a handful of people we can group those queries together figure out which ones belong in the same articles figure out which ones could be in different articles but could link back and forth to one another and we write all the articles in that cluster maybe it's 10 maybe it's 20 maybe it's even 30 and we start there then we'll take another one that's closely related but different enough that we don't pigeon haul ourselves into just one tiny thing and we move on to the second one if I were to do this again I would want to write 170 blog posts 200 blog posts and I would want to do it in the first half the year but I'm a little bit less worried about doing it in the very very beginning the reason for that is if we can build topical Authority on one thing early on and then we pick other things that are close enough closely enough related to it that Google sees us as an authoritative Source on those things then those things are going to rank really quickly I'm even finding on this website where I don't have a lot of topical Authority my articles are getting index and at least showing up in the Ser really really really fast so go build some topical Authority and do it quickly but I would write things out one cluster at a time so that you can get topical Authority in this and then in this and then in this and then you can actually spread out this content creation a little bit more over time and I would move this one up and do it basically at the same time I think you could stick with just creating supplemental video content you can obviously get by without creating any video content at all but the value of video content for Content creators is so amazing in fact I got to tell you this fact I from this content you know I wasn't getting tons of traffic but I've been getting traffic throughout the whole year and I have affiliate links in a lot of Articles uh affiliate links that were very very helpful and that fit the content really really well and I was getting clicks but I wasn't making sales and then I started my YouTube channel and within that very first month I started making sales and now I consistently make sales and you would say how is that possible nobody even looks at YouTube video descriptions how are you getting people to click on links well I mention them specifically in the video I say there's a link in the description but I also write pinned comments where I say these are the things that I talked about in this video people look at the comment section way more than they do in the description there are some other different tactics that we can use to help people to actually look at the description but here's the other kicker when you make video content you are a hundred probably thousand times more trustworthy than when you just write a blog post that's because when you write a blog post even with your name on the blog post and an about page to a reader you still feel pretty Anonymous they don't know who you are when you make a video they see you they see you interacting with the product they see you talking about the product and suddenly they are far more likely to believe what you have to say about that product that's because affiliate marketers have trained people to not believe them because they write reviews of products they've never touched another thing I would do is I would just go ahead and create that email list and some sort of lead magnet some sort of freebie basically as early as possible as soon as you have created enough content that you can slow down a little bit and plan to at least send out a monthly or ideally more like a bi-weekly a newsletter or something of value for people to keep them on an email list and keep them warm and give them value that gives them a reason to want to be on that list soon as you can do that generate the email list start collecting emails you need to own your customer list you need to have a way to be able to directly Reach people that doesn't depend on them looking for you through search or coming across your videos that show up on YouTube because even people subscribe to your YouTube channel aren't going to see all the videos that come out and I'd be a little less hard on myself and go out and get myself interviewed on a dang podcast even with only 70 articles come on Ricky you have enough topical Authority you could get away with it and there are a lot of fairly small podcasts and fairly small YouTube channels that would probably be more than willing to collaborate with the content creator even even one as little as me in this particular industry now I'm going to get really real again with you um one of the big things that's held me back here this year in addition to lots of things going on in my personal life is I do have a natural tendency to be a people pleaser and what that means is there are people who are very happy and would be very very very happy to see me completely fail in fact there are maybe some of you who are watching this video right now who are like ha I knew he couldn't do it yes he didn't succeed at this goal Ricky sucks those people are by definition bad people those people are basically by definition losers and if you're one of those people you are a loser and if you're one of those people that's like it's okay Ricky we're with you even though I I think you should have been able to do more and I think you're making excuses but you know what you accomplished something good job you're good people and I know you might think it's it's not quite that black and white but it really is and the reality is is that I have had many people in my life throughout all the years of my life who have treated me with contempt who have shown over and over and over again that they don't care one bit about me and that our relationship is 100% about what I can do for them and yet I have this compulsion almost to try to please those people I don't like people to be disappointed in me not only do I not like it but it like pains me when people are disappointed or when people tell me that I'm not good enough the reality is is those people suck and I shouldn't care what those people have to say and so I'm seeking to be a better me but that's something that really held me back this year because a few months ago I was having a lot of anxiety because in addition to all the other crap going on in my life I knew I was falling way behind on this goal and I knew that the odds of me achieving it were basically zero and I was talking about it and I think it was in a mastermind with project 24 members and I did I talked about this I'm like guys like if I fail at this there are going to be people who are going to quit blogging and they're going to say C Ricky couldn't do it or there's going to be people who are going to be like see uh Ricky can't do it he never could income school was completely built by Jim and Ricky sucks there's people that are saying that right now and that's fine it's not true but it's fine for them to think that I didn't want to be responsible for people giving up on something when they're so close to achieving good results I didn't want to be responsible for providing all sorts of fodder to people who have nothing better to do with their lives but try to tear other people down I didn't want that so I thought how am I going to do this and I was carrying all that weight like I said in addition to everything else and then some people told me project 24 members they said it's okay if you don't reach the goal a lot of them started saying things like yeah I didn't expect that you would achieve it I expected you were going to do everything you could but that you would fall short that's okay there were others that said yeah it's totally fine we support you and we just want to see what you're able to do and how far you get and what you learn from doing all of this and it clicked for me I have been giving way too much space in my brain in my heart to people who there is literally nothing I could do that would ever satisfy them those are bad people I shouldn't care but I do because I care about them and I care about you and I want you to succeed and I'm never ever going to purposely lead you into doing something that's going to be a waste of your time and a waste of your life this works content creation works it's been a crappy year 2024 I think has some real potential but that's because the rapidity of the change the way the industry is going it's happened so fast Google can't keep up hasn't kept up but they're going to figure it out and they're going to figure it out soon but in the meantime there are some sites many sites that have done incredibly well despite the recent Google updates and it's because they're doing the things that we've been teaching and the things that we should have been doing all along and many of them by the way they didn't learn those things for me they're just the right things to do they're building a brand they're building something that people can recognize I don't know if you remember but almost a year ago we published a video about branding for your blog branding making something that people want to come back to making something that people want to relate to and it turned out to be one of our lower viewed videos of the Year we're we're trying we're trying to give you the best information we can I've literally received uh criticism from people who are like you don't talk enough about this you don't talk enough about topical Authority you don't talk enough about branding and I'm like are you kidding me you just didn't watch the video you're not watching the content we've been talking about these things and these things matter cre creating a brand matters building topical Authority matters I've been talking about topical Authority for well over two years now two and a half years now because I knew it was going to matter and I knew with helpful content when it first started a couple years ago I knew that was going to be the way that we were going to get around that basically it's taking what we've always tried to do and creating the most helpful content possible to answer the user's question but then building authority around that by having more of that content you see in the beginning we used to focus mostly on Lower competition search queries right most people call those keywords we focus on the low competition ones because we could win those and that's what everybody did with Niche websites but over time it's become more and more important that you not only tackle the low competition ones but you tackle more around that topic so that you have depth of information on your website and as that's become more important we've been talking about topical Authority but a lot of people are not doing it or at least not doing it very well and as a result websites are being hit now some people have made a lot of attempts at topical Authority and their website still got hit and I'm not telling you you're doing a bad job of that there are a lot of factors that come into play here and this year has been crappy for a lot of people but the future's full of opportunity the good news is lots of people who weren't willing to put in the effort guess what they're doing they're quitting blogging because they're saying it's not worth it anymore which leaves a lot more space for you and me who are willing to do the hard work and are willing to create something of real value leaves us a lot more room for Success so I hope you'll join me in achieving that success speaking of achieving that success you might want to know what was the website I want to go check it out I'm not going to reveal it quite yet that's because I have 100% confidence that this brand is going to work and that it's actually going to be big and in fact it's a lot of fun for me and it's one that I really like and I want to grow it but I want to do it organically so I'm asking you to give me a few more months before I publicly release the specifics if any of you have already found it which wouldn't be a surprise it's out there on the internet trying to find people but if any of you have found it please do not reveal it in the comments if you do I will have to ban you from commenting on the channel which would really suck I really want to hear from you I just you know don't want you revealing that before I'm ready but I will be revealing it soon the other thing though that I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be doing some very very specific Project work on that website and I will be sharing specifics of about not only what I'm doing but also the results of those things in coming videos in fact on this channel I'm really excited for this year we're going to be taking a much more project focused approach so I'm going to be working on specific websites some of ours maybe some of yours and looking for opportunities to grow them to build them to improve them and talk about those here on this channel so if you have something that you'd like us to look at maybe your own website and you want to see what specific things we could do to it let me know but either way I promise that you're going to be getting a lot of benefit out of this project that I've been working on as well as the many other projects that we're going to be undertaking over the course of this year and in the future and I think that's it right oh I guess there's that whole like consequence thing about me having to run 36 miles so here's how that's going to work first of all I am going to be running that and I will be tracking it and I'll track it here on this channel in I think kind of a fun way but the other thing that I think I'm going to do is I'm going to try to have some fun with it so and this idea came from a member of project 24 who is awesome uh you know who you are Eduardo he's amazing anyway uh he had the idea that I do things where like I run a mile and then I do something for the rest of the hour so it doesn't take me an hour to run a mile a lot less than that of course um but basically I could run a mile and then for the rest of the hour I do a blogging related activity and I could talk about that here on the channel I could even do it maybe even live well that that's a lot of lives but use that time to help grow the blog and then when I'm done with that hour I go and I run another mile and then I come back and I do another anyway kind of a fun thing and I think that we could do something fun with that so if there are specific things that you'd like to see exactly how to do or how I do them and maybe I could do over theh shoulder videos uh I i' be happy to do that here on this channel tell me what those are let me know in the comments below and uh we'll give you some overthe shoulder training so I hope you'll join me this year and we'll do some amazing things with content Creation in 2024 w