Last Updated on November 15, 2021 by Scott Charleboix

In this post, “Journal notes for building my 1st blog” I’ve been blogging now for over 16 1/2 months and I’m not preoccupied with building up the number of Pinterest followers. Although I’m glad that it’s growing at a good and steady rate of four or five new followers every day.

This post contains affiliate links, I’ll make a commission at no extra cost to you
should you click through and make a purchase.

Journal notes for building my 1st blog

The biggest hurdle is monetizing the blog and with a new emphasis on a Holistic SEO approach I hope to have my blog monetized within the next year. The new approach with writing my blogs now is going to be done with doing keyword research before I write the blog post. It’s going to be a hard habit to break but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

It takes a little while to get into this good habit, but once you start developing your blog posts around your keyword it’s so much easier to write a post and have it score higher in Rank Math with nearly perfect scores.

I updated this blog post around 3 months ago and although there’s been a huge improvement in SEO I haven’t noticed any difference in monetizing the blog. The affiliate links are getting clicks but it still remains that for whatever reason the affiliate links are not converting which is so perplexing. Perhaps I’ll figure it out someday, I can hardly wait until it happens.

If you’re wanting to learn SEO, please read the post I wrote called 10 Steps for the Ultimate Roadmap for Learning SEO. It’s a one-stop shopping place to learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

I’m waiting for subscribers to start happening more on a frequent basis so that I can afford to substantiate paying $25 per month for an e-mail autoresponder in ConvertKit. The link to the left is information on How to add an Autoresponder for your e-mails. It doesn’t provide the step-by-step details because as of yet, I haven’t invested in it because I want to have a “steady” flow of subscribers before I get the program.

The process of optimizing my blog posts for Search Engine Optimization (with Rank Math) which started around the July 2021 time-frame has really paid off with traffic to my blog going from about 20 page views per day to way over a 100 page views per day.

Update 11/5/2021: It’s now been 16 months of blogging. I’ve learned so much in that time. The number of Pinterest followers has grown within the last year from 455 to 1,300 Pinterest followers. The main emphasis right now is trying to increase the number of page views per month so that it exceeds 1,000 page views per month.

When I wrote this post I hadn’t taken the Pinterest Avalanche Course to boost my web traffic and taking the course has been very beneficial for increasing my blog’s traffic.

Below are some of the original journal notes from first writing this blog post in the infancy of my blogging journey.

I started using Pinterest a few weeks ago. In a short amount of time I really got to like using the program and like anyone else it’d be nice to make a few extra bucks doing something I enjoy. I’ve already been able to get 19 followers to my Pinterest page. What I hope to share with everyone is things I’ve learned about Pinterest, setting up my 1st blog and keeping some notes. I’ve developed web pages in the past, but that was nearly 16 years ago and the programs that I used back then have drastically changed.

Therefore, I’m going to save the trouble and time of coding. Instead, I’ll let pre-defined recommendations guide me in my effort and take note of things that I need to change. I’m nearly completed with the first part of my 30 day challenge. If you’d like to take the challenge yourself I recommend that you visit the website: www.30dayblogchallenge.com.

The first part is pretty simple (creating a web host for the blog). This all seems pretty daunting as I feel like all of these terms are being thrown at me. Thankfully, the aforementioned people will help in the 30 day process as I continue my blog.

Please check out these other blog posts that discuss how to build your first blog

How to start a Blog – Neil Patel

How to start a Blog – Adam Enfroy