I started this blog with three intentions:

• Share my knowledge of writing, travel, and the freelance world.
• Use my posts to create new leads as a creative coach and ghostwriter.
• Grow my audience in order to monetise my blog as an additional income stream.

At the beginning of this journey, I made the decision to take this blog seriously. If I wanted to be a successful blogger, I needed to approach it in a professional manner. That meant creating a plan, enforcing deadlines, and monitoring growth. As a part of this, I also want to ensure I am progress-tracking throughout the next year both to reflect my growth and share it with others trying to do the same.

It’s now been exactly one month of posting on Gone Travelling Productions – that’s 12 posts over 4 weeks – and it’s time to break down exactly what has happened. For anyone wanting to start a blog, in this post you’ll learn:

1. Preparation
2. Website
3. Search Engine Optimisation
4. Posting
5. Results
6. Reflections

Preparation

The very step to consider before launching a blog is deciding what to write about. There are two elements to this decision:

Niche: The particular subject matter, genre, or audience demographic to specialize in that represents your unique and recognizable brand identity.

Topic Pillars: The three areas under your niche’s umbrella that you plan to write about.

It’s important to choose a niche that you confidently feel able to write a LOT about. It should be interesting to you and ideally relate to an ongoing experience, hobby, or area of expertise.

I knew I wanted to launch a blog as an extension of my work as a freelance coach and writer so the niche came easily. The Topic Pillars took a little more consideration but I finally settled on the following:

Niche: Freelance Writing

Topic Pillars: Remote Work, Writing Advice, Career Shifting

These areas allowed me flexibility in the type of posts I would write from travel experiences as a remote worker, to thought pieces as a freelancer, and guides to get past common writing challenges. I felt both genuinely interested in and passionate about all three areas so was ready to start writing.

To grow a blog you need both consistency and quality in your blog posts. After some research, I settled on a plan to post 3 times a week every week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That is a lot of writing for just one person. To set myself up for success, I decided to prep the first month’s worth of posts before launching in order to have a great backlog of work ready to go.

I recommend using notion for this as it allows you to write and track progress within the same tool, keeping everything accessible from one place. By the end of January, I had 12 finished blog posts ready to be published according to my weekly schedule.

Website

Prior to building a website, it is essential to have a clear brand in mind. Starting from your niche, you should consider creating a brand kit that includes a colour palette, logo, and font selection. This will later act as a cheat sheet when designing your blog. I chose to work with a graphic designer to create my branding kit instead of attempting it alone as my strengths lie in writing, not in design!

Once I had my brand kit, I used WordPress to design my website. I found a template I liked and then edited the colours and fonts to match my brand. As I wanted to use this website not only as a platform for my blog but a resource for my business, it took several days to complete.

For the blog itself, I ensured the was an About Me section, an email subscription box, and an archive to find other posts. I uploaded a single post to experiment with and made sure it looked good on laptops, tablets, and a phone screen.

Finally, it was time to schedule my posts. I moved them from notion into WordPress and scheduled them to post at 8 am Eastern Time – supposedly the best for gaining readership.

Search Engine Optimisation

Having a finished website and 12 scheduled posts isn’t where the preparation stops. I want to grow my audience towards monetisation goals – to do that I need to make sure I’m reaching as many potential readers as possible! That’s where SEO comes in.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is crucial for a blog because it helps improve your blog’s visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), leading to increased organic traffic. There are countless techniques and tips when it comes to SEO, but here are the ones I followed in the past month:

• Using Google’s Keyword Planner to compare possible keywords for each post before settling on a final three.
• Inputting these keywords into my blog post title, body, and except wherever possible whilst ensuring the text reads as natural. You cannot sacrifice quality in this step, each use should be intentional and fit within the greater context of the piece.
• Experimenting with SEO tools such as CapitalizeMyTitle and Blog Title Generator to explore the success of different titles.
• Using Canva or my own photos as blog post header photos with each one saved with my keywords in its name and metadata.
• Implementing Headers and Lists into my blog post layout in order to tell a search engine what information the post contains.

Posting

After publishing each search engine optimised blog post, the work still isn’t done. Now is the time to share share share! Social Media is your asset in this moment to further your post’s potential reach and benefit from the support of family and friends.

I did not find this step easy. In fact, in many ways, I have failed. I do not post on any social media and haven’t for several years. Like many, this has in some strange way become a point of pride in my life…a sort of evidence that I do not rely on the validation of social media attention. Or, from another perspective, that I am afraid of it.

As this blog is a professional endeavor I decided it had a place on LinkedIn. I personally follow several blogs through LinkedIn that have sparked ideas, inspired, and challenged me on a multitude of topics – why couldn’t mine do the same for others? I knew it was time for a challenge. Instead of sharing every post everywhere, I would share one post a week on only LinkedIn. It was scary. But it made a big difference. To avoid backing out of my first post, I scheduled it to go live in the middle of the night and awoke to likes, comments, and clicks.

Immediately my discomfort at sharing was outweighed by my excitement to have views on the blog I had worked so hard on over the past months. I was proud of what I was putting into the world and so it being seen was…validating. Perhaps I didn’t require validation for my personal life, but it sure felt good when it came to the professional. In one month my LinkedIn posts have had over 900 impressions which (spoiler alert) is more than my blog. This is evidence that if I want to grow my audience, I need to be using Social Media.

My next step is Pinterest. I’m currently working on creating my professional profile and 2-3 images per post to share on that platform to hopefully grow my audience even further…but you’ll have to wait for my next post to learn more about that!

Results

The part we’ve all been waiting for! I intend to use these monthly updates to track my growth, see what’s working, and change what’s not. So let’s get transparent!

Here are my blog stats for February 2024:

• Total Views: 194
• Total Visitors: 78
• Total Likes: 35
• Total Subscribers: 12

Reflections

So where do we go from here? The good news is that I like blogging. A lot. Not just writing, but working on a project with quantifiable stats that I’m able to monitor and watch grow. My mindset in 2024 is to approach everything with curiosity. Instead of focusing on what I WANT to happen, I am opening myself up to what COULD happen. I’m getting rid of expectations and leaning into endless opportunities. I feel so strongly that the more I put into this blog, the more I am going to get out of it, and so I don’t plan to stop anytime soon.

That being said, there are some serious changes that I need to make. Running this blog is more time-consuming than I anticipated and so to get back on track with success I’m going to have to get a lot stricter when it comes to my writing schedule and deadlines. I’m already running through the initial backlog of prepped posts and noticing a change in the direction of what I want to actually write.

There’s no denying that certain posts perform better than others and that using searchable and popular keywords in a title really makes a difference when it comes to clicks. Best Writing Prompts to Overcome Blank Page Paralysis is a great example of a post that can reach a wider audience and requires less in-depth work from me. Now whilst this is great on one hand, on the other it lacks nuance and wasn’t as satisfying to produce as some of my longer-form pieces like Digital Connections: Networking Strategies for Creatives. Already I am sensing a need for balance between these posts I love and feel connected to, and those that are more likely to bring in new views and grow the blog overall. For now, I intend to monitor the difference without too much change in my approach.

For next month, I want to get stricter with writing, implement better SEO etiquette, and start posting daily to Pinterest. How is this possible? With a March Blogging Challenge. The guidelines go live on Wednesday – will you be joining?

Now, it’s over to you. What do you want to see from Gone Travelling Productions in the future? How can I create a better experience for you the audience? Leave your feedback down below.