When you first begin your blogging journey, you will notice that it will be some time before you gain any traction. I don’t mean the writing part. I am talking about the traffic part. Your website will be slow to gain traffic. It will be slow before Google indexes your content. In fact, it could be months or maybe even a year before you see anything.
I’m glad that I have many different blogs and websites at different parts of my traffic journey. I have my author’s website that I began in 2013 when I started writing YA novels. I have my children’s clothing website that I began in 2019. Which, ironically, is more established as far as traffic than my 2013 blog. I have my teaching blog and my cooking blog, both of which are ranked. Then I have my baby sites that I’m starting to work on. These are the ones that I have to remember that all of those other sites were once here.
When you begin your journey, you will have those moments of how do I continue to write when I have no audience? Who is going to see this? When will they see this content?
It is during those moments when you have to push through. You may feel tempted to say, “Well, no one is reading it, so it is okay if I skip weeks at a time of writing.” No. It’s not. Creating that new content is what will make Google sit up and take attention. They will crawl your site more often to check for new content. That new content is what is going to grow your site.
I once read that it wasn’t until your site had 30 posts that it would be indexed. Not true. It’s the older content and that content needs to be quality content. I recently started an experimental blog that I hope to have some feedback on to use on this site, but it is fairly new. All content on that site is much longer, but it is still a rather new website that just launched this month. I’m tracking it to see how long before the content is indexed and ranked on Google.
When you begin to pump out daily blog posts, it can become tiresome. One reason I keep a content calendar is so that I know what I’m working on several days in advance. This allows me to write double or triple the content in one day and give myself a break to avoid burnout. I already know that I’m going to have to work through that dead patch of zero traffic to get to the good stuff. This way I will not throw my hands up and just walk away from all of the work. With that said, you shouldn’t either. Push through the hard part: the waiting. Only then, will you reach the reward.