I think it was in 2012/13 when I completely moved from using Blogger to WordPress. I had decided that I was going to start taking blogging seriously and no longer treat it as a mere ‘side’ hustle. Before then, I didn’t take it seriously and Blogspot was my darling.

I still like Blogspot for the simplicity it comes with, yet dislike it for Google’s reluctance to update the features. The default themes, and text editor are still as boring as before but the internal layout setup is super cool in terms of the simplicity of customizing it to give your blog a good feel. Plus it’s cheaper to operate as a beginner.

After a while of moving to WordPress, I integrated Search Console and Google Analytics to monitor my website stats. Then my real frustrations began.

No matter the amount of keyword research I did and wrote articles on, only about 20% to 25% of them were daily ranking on search engines. They may be ranking for different keywords as my Search Console revealed but it’s still the same set of articles.

I hadn’t started traffic arbitrage then so the majority of my site’s earnings depended on traffic from organic search on Google.

Being a lone ranger (cos I didn’t have a mentor then), it took me a while to understand that this was a general experience for most bloggers. And there are ways to work with this rule in mind and scale. Thank God for research.

First I came up with a content plan to write at least 1 article of 500 words daily. I will mostly do this on my phone and then send it to my computer and post it. Since you don’t know which articles Google’s algorithm will decide to push up, the common sense thing to do is to simply increase your chances of having more articles ranking on SERP by having more articles on your blog. My competitors wrote more, some up to 10 articles daily. Since I couldn’t compete with them at that level, I had to do the 1 daily that I could.

Next, I started editing every article that made it to the 1st or 2nd page of Google SERP and started passing their ranking juice to similar articles I had on my site. I did this by simply adding their links in between, more like interlinking them.

I also normally checked my Search Console. The minute I see any article averaging between position 1 and 10 on any related keyword, I’d quickly edit the old posts to properly reflect those keywords or write an entirely new article on it and put the link in the old one.

Lastly, I started taking seriously details like meta descriptions (I kept this as short and straight-to-the-point as possible), image keywords, and focus keywords placement in the 1st, 2nd, and last paragraphs as well as in my subheadings. Thanks to superb plugins like Yoast and the rest.

Now I didn’t successfully break the 20-25, 75-80 rule by doing all of these, but I did increase my organic traffic volume and overall monthly earnings that way.

If you have no money to invest in traffic arbitrage blogging aka Adsense Arbitrage or ADX Arbitrage, the above is what you could do to grow your blog’s traffic and earnings from scratch till you have enough to start arbitrage.

If you are already in the arbitrage system, you can choose to do the same and increase your normal organic traffic so all of your traffic won’t be coming from paid sources alone.

Peace and blessings to you. Happy Sunday