Heyaa
I’m sure you have heard how baby steps matter. Take one step at a time, and you'll start seeing the change you want… after some time. Every habit-building book has that message, that one message, at least.
But… experienced it?
I did… several times actually. I experienced it back when I was a LinkedIn nerd. I witnessed it with a few of my clients.
But it’s not only about putting one baby step (or content) a day. It’s not about putting in consistent efforts. I know a lot of people (and you, too, probably) believe it. But it doesn't happen only because of consistency.
If that was the case, I mean churning consistent content could bring results, I would have been a Twitter influencer 5 years ago. But I’m not (yet).
On Twitter, I was everything and everywhere. I posted (mostly) random PJs (poor jokes) and puns, and I retweeted other random PJs and puns. If you visited my profile, I had absolutely nothing that stands out. It still doesn’t.
So, it’s never about consistent efforts. It’s about consistent targeted efforts.
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OK, back to my story…
It’s almost a year working on my book blog. I started it on July 9 last year, republishing my existing book-related content. I had several scattered around.
The good thing is the site visits kept growing right from the start. People love books, I guess. In 7 months, my site was receiving 1K visits each month (every 28 days, actually). But then, that was the high point.
It was January 2023 when my site was receiving 1K visits each month. After that, it started falling. The number remained at 700-800 visits in the following weeks.
I even bulk created and uploaded around 50 articles in February and March. They were popular topics, but even that didn’t improve the site numbers much. These new articles were ranking, of course… somewhere on the 5th or 6th page of the search results. Yup, that deep.
So, after 2 months of consistent efforts, I paused.
I could have continued my “consistency,” but that would have led me nowhere.
Now, instead of creating fresh content, I worked on updating the existing ones. I did post a few new ones, but mostly I have been doing updates… since April.
What kind of updates, you ask? I added keywords to those bulk-created articles; the keywords that I was ranking for but weren’t in my articles… in the hope it would improve ranking.
Another thing I did was change the title of a few articles. These articles were ranking better for a topic other than what I wrote them for. Relevant, but different topic.
Updating just 1-2 articles a day when I found time. Nothing herculean.
And last month, in June, Book Blabber crossed the resistance level (as they say in stocks) of 700-800 visits. It touched the high of “1K visits in 28 days” again, and then 1.2K visits.
Another thing that I tried with Book Blabber was improving Google Image search ranking. I tried it for the content created before Feb-Mar.
I not only wanted to improve search appearances but also clicks.
So, I put a glimpse of the article in each image I uploaded. For summaries, I added a part of the summary or a quote from the article. And for quote articles, I imagified a few highlighted quotes.
And to ensure that Google shows the images on relevant searches, I added the main keyword to the images’ alt text.
Did the efforts bring any results? Did I see improvements?
Well, compared to the previous 3 months, image clicks have more than doubled. It’s 95 clicks between April and June. Nothing brag-worthy, I know. But it was 40 clicks before I started updating those images. So, it’s some growth.
For images, too, I updated only 1-2 articles a day when I found time. Nothing herculean.
Yes, consistently. But as you see, it wasn’t only one thing.
To grow, you need a lot more than consistency to grow. You need to try and tweak things to find what’s working and what’s not. (just like I’m testing a new “preview text” for this newsletter, showing the approx. reading time)
A few months down the line, I might not have more images or keywords to add to any of the articles. But I’ll still need to refresh the content while adding new articles.
I might need to add more content. I might have to look for better keywords, change the title or meta description, or link blog better for improved relevancy… or maybe I’ll need to look for a more trending book to write about.
But that’s a problem for another day.
Taking your leave for today.
Bidding adieu.
Live long and prosper.
See you next week, with another story.