Last Updated on by Michael Brockbank
The first month in the quest to rebuild a dead blog is finished. Although I didn’t get as much done as I would have hoped, there is still a bit of forward progress. The fun part is keeping the momentum going throughout the entire year regardless of what happens.
A lot of folks tend to get tied up with instant gratification. In reality, a month’s worth of content is only going to move the needle slightly. It could take several months before anything created today gains momentum in search.
At the end of the day, it’s going to take more than just publishing regular posts if I want to see some major changes by July.
Writing the Content
I wrote eight new blog posts in January, which is almost three times more than the entire year of 2024. It’s been a bit difficult to maintain the schedule simply because I have so many other things that take priority.
I haven’t had a chance to sit down and develop a blog-to-book content strategy for the gaming site yet. But it’s on my list of things to do very soon.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to work on updating content. It was an exceptionally busy month, so some things had to be put on the back burner. But I am almost positive that I’ll be able to get a few done in February.
Regardless, I am quite excited that I was able to keep to a routine publishing schedule throughout January. Well, with the exception of one article having to go live on a Wednesday. Still, I published two per week, which is far more than I’ve done in a single month on this particular blog in years!
Traffic for January
The traffic for January grew by 37.56%. It’s not a massive growth, but I wasn’t expecting much from eight new pieces of content. Remember, it can take four to six months for new posts to gain traction in Google search.
Nonetheless, it was growth, and that’s all that really matters for the first month. And if traffic keeps growing at this level, the blog will surpass the traffic numbers for 2022 with 67,437 visitors.
It’s too early to get excited. The more data collected, the more accurate the estimations. So, we’ll start throwing parties and such in August if things keep growing.
Income Growth from AdSense
The entire reason the dead blog exists in the first place is to generate revenue for charity donations. Well, it had a bit of growth in January with a total of $0.78. That’s 122.9% more than it generated in the previous period.
The gaming blog never really generates a lot of income from AdSense. I suspect most gamers use ad blockers, so advertisements get decimated on a blog. Still, it’s nice to see some kind of growth.
Once traffic starts coming in regularly, I’ll look for affiliates or other means for generating revenue outside of ads. But for now, at least it’s something I can feed to the charities.
No, I’m not going to give $0.78 to Extra Life for January. If the blog doesn’t generate at least $5, I chip in the rest out of pocket. So, it’s a $5 minimum each month this year.
Search Impressions
I was quite surprised to see the search impressions grew by 700 in January. In fact, it’s a lot of pages and queries that I wouldn’t have suspected that increased by more than 40 each.
This could be the effect of the blog demonstrating to Google that it’s back on a consistent schedule. I’ve seen this happen before with sites both on my own and for clients. When Google sees that a blog is producing regular content, all of the pages get a boost in search impressions.
I just didn’t think it would happen this quickly.
Since this is a year-long experiment, we’ll be able to get a better idea of how this works as 2025 marches on. But at the moment, it is very interesting and it’s difficult not to get too excited.
What Other Changes Were Made?
As I said, it was a very busy month for me in general. My attention was all over the map and I wasn’t able to fully dive into reviving the dead blog. However, I did run a few performance tests and cleaned up a few plugins that were making the site a mess.
Perhaps the biggest failing for January was not updating the older pieces of content. This is especially disheartening considering I have a lot of older tutorials that not only need updating, but they have been missing images since 2018!
What’s the Plan for (next month)
Keeping the two-per-week publishing schedule is a necessity, but I would also like to spend more time updating some of the older posts. I have no doubt that the updates I have planned will make a huge difference in traffic down the road.
I would also like to get a block of time when I can go through the performance issues and fix a few things in the backend. Improving performance is always a good idea regardless if you’re working on a dead blog or not. Google values providing the best user experience on any website.
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