Building my Blog as a Side Hustle

​A few weeks back I vowed to make an effort to really learn about growing  my online presence.  I had been reading about ways to start a side hustle.  I had been researching ways to make a few extra dollars.  I had been trying to figure out a way to live the life that I wanted to live, financially free to follow my dreams and aspirations.  I had already dabbled with many of the ideas over the years.  I had written an e-book,  I had a youtube channel and I had a blog that had been around for 14.5 years.  I had started all of these things as a hobby.  I had never really tried to promote myself or my work.  I never even tried to do the most simplest of things to grow my internet presence.  At the end of June, I vowed to change that.  I few weeks ago I wrote about that vow.  I wrote that I  was going to commit time each day toward building my online hobbies into a side business.
Setting a Financial Goal while building an Online Side Hustle
Before we begin I would like to say that I would LOVE to be able to live off of these things that started as a hobby.  That would be the ultimate goal.  But I am not expecting that to happen anytime soon.   I wanted to set a first goal for myself.  My mind kept coming to the figure of $300 which would be enough to cover my car payment.  But that seemed high and lofty, considering my typical monthly revenue on adsense has been between $5 and $10.  I haven’t even made it to my first $100 payout yet!   My amazon affiliate links are similar, I don’t generate much at all, months can go by without any revenue being built, much less paid out.  Therefore, you can see why $300 seemed like a lofty goal.   With that in mind, my goal is to make $100 extra a month.  I will go from there to see what happens next!  But seriously, $100 a month is pretty nice.  $1200 a year.  Yes, $100 is my first monthly goal!
Research SEO to drive traffic to your Site
The first thing that I did is that I googled SEO.  I had heard of SEO plenty of times before.  But I knew NOTHING about it, much less how to correctly enact it.   In case you don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.   In a nutshell, this is the process that you can create a blog or a youtube video so that it can be easily seen and found by others on the internet during internet searches.  SEO is the methods one can utilize to get traffic to their site.
I read constantly the first few days.  I took notes.  I will not go into detail in this post.  Maybe someday soon I will write an SEO post for the Uninformed (as I certainly have been) as I continue to learn and fine tune my own sites.  But let me just touch on some of the most basic of ways to optimize your SEO.    There are quite a few ways that you can format a blog post to make it easier to pop up on internet searches.  Keywords are very important and they should appear in various locations.  GOOD keywords and phrases is even more important!   The more I read and did my research,  more that advice and ideas rained down upon me.  I was going to go into overload mode.  So I stopped with those most basic ideas.  I decided to take these ideas to my own personal weight loss blog, my personal journal that chronicles my journey.  I decided to apply some of these principles to my upcoming posts.  I wanted to see if there was any effect on my statistics if I changed how I was doing things.
The Results of better SEO to boost traffic and income on a blog
I didn’t do a whole lot different.  I still posted the same type of content.  I just started to think more about my tags and keywords.   I made a conscious effort to make sure that my keywords were included in my opening paragraph and my closing paragraph.    I started to formulate my posts so that they were in shorter sections with headings for each section.  I tell you, nothing major in terms of changes.  My regular readers probably didn't' even notice a change. I decided to give it three to four weeks before I really looked at the statistics of my blog.  That time has come.  

Results of my SEO experiment

​As you can see from the graph above, my blog was pretty level in terms of how many visitors that I was having each day.  Then, right around the first of the month, my numbers almost double  That is an incredible jump for VERY little work!   There can be no other reason for this jump other than my changes!   I will definitely call that a win.
 
These early steps to taking control of my finances by learning to turn my hobbies into side hustles have been a success.  My efforts on my personal blog made it very obvious and clear that the changes that I have made and what I am doing, is in the right direction!   This is a learning process.  I am constantly looking to adapt and adjust and grow.  That is necessary if I am going to live my dream and become financially independent.  I am on the right path now!   I however think maybe I am ready for the next chapters in the SEO book.  What else can I implement?