Since covering the issues with that person’s blog the other day, I privately reached out to her via Facebook Messenger and offered to help her move her site for a chance to create a case study on this site. I haven’t heard back from her. Sometimes those Facebook Messenger messages don’t get seen if you don’t know the person. It could also be that she thinks I’m crazy.
That’s possible too.
And really, I have a lot of work to do still with my sites that I shouldn’t offer to spend so much time on someone else’s site. I just really like online challenges like that and find myself wanting to help as many people as I can with these projects.
The trick is finding a way to help the most amount of people without spending too much direct one on one time for it.
And that’s why I wanted to start this blog.
I also want to use it as a sounding board for other things.
Which brings me to the latest findings. While doing some technical updates on my site yesterday, I noticed a competitor’s site going up in rankings and taking over the snippet for one of my popular posts. I still rank higher, but they rank in Google’s block of information at the top of the search results. Those are called snippets. It’s very volatile to get those spots.
I wasted several days a few months ago chasing the snippets and read that they aren’t easy to maintain yet so I stopped trying so hard. As I was looking at the competitor’s site, I found some things they’re doing right and some things I’m doing better.
I try not to watch them though because you can get sidetracked with your sites if you’re always worried about what they’re doing. I also realized that they have a different site that’s more general reviews and I realized that I might have found my own second site that I can create.
I’ve been itching to start a second site.
One that’s more inline with where our living and passions are right now. Our current site is based on a lifestyle that we used to be a part of. And although we researched and know a ton about that lifestyle, we aren’t actively living it so it’s not as exciting to write about.
That’s one thing that will help with things are getting tough with your site. You want to have an active interest in what you’re talking about. It makes the writing much easier to handle and it makes the tough days easier to deal with.
I have a domain that we bought a while back and haven’t done anything with it so I think I’ll use it to start this new site. The difficult part is making sure we have enough time to handle a second niche site (and third site overall since I’m working on this one now.)
If I take on the new site, then it’ll be a great way to show the process I go through to find things to talk about and how I write the posts and get them ranked.
I’ll take the rest of the weekend to decide and give an update next week on what I’m doing.
Site Challenge Update
For our current site challenge, we are 7 weeks into the challenge.
We ended up with
- $1,645 in Amazon Affiliate sales for the month of October
- had 9,757 sessions and 8,446 users.
I’ll have to figure out which metric to stick with on traffic. Apparently, I’ve been using sessions without realizing it. I use the Google Analytics mobile app to check things daily and it shows things a little differently than how the web app does.
The last week on traffic has been a little weird too. We were getting into 400 a day visits last week, then there’s been a downturn in visits. The traffic has just gone to presurge traffic, but it feels like it’s going down.
I saw that there have been two Google updates that correspond with the timing so apparently Google is making some changes. As long as the downturn doesn’t continue and it levels out, I’ll be ok.
But, it also corresponds with fewer sales for the past couple of days as well. When you start to track your stats, anything not going up becomes worrisome. Sometimes for no reason.
The one thing about online traffic and online sales is they are always fluctuating. Not getting too caught up in the fluctuations can be difficult.
So in the next post, I’ll share my decision about the next site and how we’ll move forward with it if we decide to start it.
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