Hey Reddit,
Recently I decided to quit my second job and focus that time on my website that I started this February. I'm so happy with that decision since I am more motivated to work on my own business than freelancing.
Now I thought it would be fun to post sometimes on Reddit about how my business is doing. Mainly to get some of my questions answered by fellow entrepreneurs and help others by sharing my successes and failures.
Anyways, let's introduce my business first. I am a web developer with mainly experience building custom CMSs. That's why when thinking about a business to start, I quickly came up with the idea to create a blog. And the plan was not only to create a blog but a system allowing me to create multiple blogs around the same topic but for different niches in a simple way without setting up a whole new website every time.
After deciding this, after a while, I ended up in the travel market and decided to focus on covering certain regions for my website. Aside from that, after doing some research, I also found out that there are plenty of ways to monetize my website in the future for the travel niche. But for now, I decided to first focus on getting traffic to my website, seeing what content works and then, based on that start monetizing the working content first.
I first created a simple website, without any CMS and just a few articles, to see if ranking would be easy enough. After testing that for a while, I concluded that it's certainly possible to rank but that a CMS is necessary to push more content. I just noticed that manually adding every page in the code was too much work.
That's when I started thinking good about the next step. Ideally, I would want my own custom CMS, but considering there is only one website now, and I want to have the CMS available quickly, I decided to go for an existing one. But it still was a requirement for me to have CMS that is component-based and also feels nice to work in. After looking for quite some time, I eventually decided to use Storyblok, since it was pretty easy to use and supports most of the things I will want in the near future.
After fully converting the website to Storyblok, I couldn't be any happier with it. Ofcourse, I will still want a custom CMS in the future, but I think for now the focus should really be on growth first.
The current state of the website:
- 50 clicks in the last 28 days
- 8.000 impressions in the last 28 days
- 4 top 10 ranking keywords
- A total of 35 articles
Main focus until next update:
- Focus on improving the few articles that are starting to rank.
- Test out more ideas for articles to see if they work well.
- Create an author page so that I can add Article structured data to all posts.
- Work on creating a map component to use for every location on my website.
- Look for a potential co-founder so I can focus more on the development work and work less on the content.
I realize that the website statistics could be better, but I'm seeing much growth since I started working more on it, so I'm optimistic about this project.
Feel free to ask any questions, see you all in the next update!