I am hiding my identity due to some personal reasons, I hope that won’t matter to my dear bloggers.
A small preview of my life - Hails from Bulandshahr, UP, completed my Bachelors in Mechanical Eng, joined some MNC and eventually Google as an AI Trainer. While I have had passion about blogging since my school days, it was my dream to make a website of mine and especially a NEWS WEBSITE.
Now moving to the actual story. Bought my first domain in April 2023 with hosting with the help of a friend at a price of 1500 INR (rupee).
It took around two weeks for me to set up the website and explore the tools. Till then I hadn’t followed any YouTuber or blogger, everything was a result of my curiosity and my hunt to explore.
Forgot to mention, I have been writing articles, journals, excerpts, reviews and scripts since 2016. Inshort, a seasoned writer with experience in multiple domains.
When I started I had 0 knowledge of:
- -Backlinks
- -DA/PA/Spam Score
- -Pro Plugins
- -Schema
The only thing I knew was writing SEO friendly articles. I started choosing topics from Google Trends and wrote 5-6 articles and added a site to the console. After 5 days, I started getting impressions and then I submitted my site to adsense approval.
Within a period of 15 days, I got approval on my site with 10 articles and most of them were ranking in Top 10.
REMEMBER- Google always push fresh websites to the top page in a bid to check the content quality and track the site. So, don’t feel like heaven if you get high impressions and articles getting ranked. After a few weeks, the algorithm changes to normal.
While working for another few weeks, I got to know News sites cannot be run by a single person and needs a team. I took a step ahead and registered my site as a company, developed it’s OFF-PAGE like charm. Till date, if a person searches my site name he will get results as if that is not just a news site but instead a media house. The hardwork was much to make this into real.
It was now time for the next step, me along with my friend created some posters and posted on various social platforms.
The plan was to hire interns for the content work. We got 200+ entries in the first Phase itself and we just took in 20 out of those. We worked for July and Aug with them. At the end of Aug we had around 30-35 articles ranking on Google. Our daily visitor count was 4000-6000 average. Some of the interns left us in Sept due to exams and other reasons.
October came like a surprise test to us. Our site got hit in October Update and none was prepared for it. Traffic dropped to 50-60 visitors, impressions went to 100-200, article deranked. Everything went on the negative side, leaving us unmotivated.
I waited for a completed month, posted some articles but didn’t work. I gave a break in November and started working on the site in mid Dec.
Gathering again a new team of 40 people and working aggressively on it.
We were posting 10-15 articles per day, 10 webstories, and worked on social media along with that. Everything was being done keeping in mind about the upcoming Core update. We were gradually seeing results and were happy. Numbers were not great but enough to keep us motivated.
March came with a new update but this time the update didn’t hit that much to our site, instead it strengthened some of our article rankings. But, things were getting harder as managing such a big team with only hopes was tough. I eventually lose my team and now left with 2-3 friends. Also, all the articles posted in march didn’t get any impressions and clicks were also low.
The hosting & domain was also about to expire on 1st April.
I consulted some Pro bloggers and mostly said top just sell and work on a new project. I thought about it and decided to sell it off. Met a client from a random adsense selling group, he agreed at 25k and I SOLD my 1st website.
Total Expenses done on my site:
- Hosting+domain = 1500 INR
- A guy looted me in name of ranking my site in November = 3000 INR
- Backlinks: 300 INR
- Tools: 600 INR
- Marketing & ADs: 1000 INR
Total Earnings:
{0}
Between June and September, I didn’t place any ads on my site, just to keep users engaged for better site experience. And later, core updates hit my site and made it worsen.
Though my Adsense account had $7-8$ inside.
There’s a lot of things I learnt from my first project. I take this as learning. I learned wordpress development, in depth SEO, Using plugins, themes, adsense, ads, blogging community.
Points to Remember for New Bloggers:
- Don’t blindly follow anyone. Get knowledge and implement in your own way.
- Keep your site simple and faster initially to get adsense approval faster.
- Don’t forget AI doesn’t help new writers in any way, Learn to write not to practice AI.
- Don’t go for Loading, Adx, and other terms - they are just fooling you around
- Keep working on 2 sites, a single site will make you feel bored, so working on 2 different niches will keep you in a safer zone and also keep you motivated.
What am I doing Now?
I am working on around 5 sites at present and each is of a different niche. Out of 5, One is a personal blog and will be shared among you all after it gets some recognition and others are just to flip. It’s fun to work in blogging but with care and hardwork.
GOOD LUCK!