Blog post metrics can become useless noise if we try to complicate them too much. There are two sides to metrics, the good side and the bad side. The good side is when your metrics highlight the things you’ve done well and the mistakes you’ve made, allowing you to make changes to your workflow process and spend your energy more effectively. The more you can improve your process, the more valuable your efforts will be. The bad side is when you spend so much time burying yourself in numbers that you forget to do the things that actually earn you money (like creating content). It’s best to keep your metrics simple. Only pay attention to what helps you improve your process and ignore the rest. When it’s all said and done, the most important metric of all (in my opinion)…

In my opinion, the time to hire your first freelance writer is after at least 1 year of consistent, serious blogging on your own. You should have at least 50 articles that are more than 9 months old, and preferably written over 100 total articles yourself. The Three Situations The way I see (and the way I’ve experienced it), there are three different situations you may find yourself in with regard to hiring writers for a blog. 1. You’re new to blogging When you first enter the world of web publishing, there’s a lot you don’t know. Or at the very least there’s a lot you don’t have experience with. First and foremost, you haven’t written very many articles. If you’re going to hire a freelance writer or two, then you need to have some idea of what differentiates a…

While I don’t personally use average position to track my websites’ health, I typically like to see an average position of 30 or better. As we’ll see, there are many factors that influence average position, and when you average position goes down (by down I mean from 25 to 30 for example) it’s not always a bad sign. A worsening average position can often mean that Google has decided to rank your articles for new search terms, and that’s a GREAT thing. Now if you’re looking for a comparison, I’ll be sharing numbers from my own sites, so feel free to keep reading. Finding The Average Position Across My Sites I currently run three websites, and I have Google Search Console set up for all three. First, I want to take a look at my average position for each of…

Over the last three years, I’ve published about 3 blog posts per week on average. But in recent months I’ve taken a more methodical approach to blogging and have increased to about 15 posts per week. I think new bloggers should be publishing 2-4 articles a week. And when you get serious about blogging I think you should use your financial goals to determine your weekly output. How Many Articles To Write When You First Start Blogging I think using financial goals is a great tool to determine publishing goals. However, I don’t think it makes sense for new bloggers to start out and say “I’m going to publish 30 articles a week.” Why? Well mainly because you don’t yet know what a good article looks like yet. But also because it’s hard to write lots of articles when you’re…

The cheeky truth is that you can make month with only one blog post, but based on my personal experience over the last three years blogging, you’ll want to publish at least 50 articles if you want to cross over the $100/month mark. I’m going to walk through my time blogging, how many articles I’ve published and the income milestones I’ve hit (recently crossed $1,000 a month!). Then we’ll look at a hypothetical path to $10,000 per month. One which I am planning to take over the next 3-4 years. The Unsatisfying Answer How many blog posts do you need to make money? The unsatisfying answer (but the truthful one) is that you need only one blog post to make money. That’s really all it takes, but you won’t be quitting you day job after you write one article. And…

I use Google Search Console for many things. One of them is simply to track the progress and success of my articles in organic search. After 2 years of observing my own websites and studying the data of websites that are for sale in online marketplaces, I’ve come to this conclusion: As a general rule, a good click through rate in Google Search console is about 3% to 4%. One out of my three sites hits this range, and I think about 1 in 4 sites I’ve seen for sale fall inside or above this range. Sharing CTR For My Sites I currently own three websites and of course I have Google Search Console (GSC) set up on all three. I follow the GSC numbers pretty closely, checking them 2-3 times a week for each site. Here’s a breakdown of…