July 2019 Activity Report & Stats

This is the first of my posts to summarize my monthly activities. To be honest it’s contains more than just July 2019 activities as planning for SideGains began much earlier than this.

So for the July 2019 report I’ll also include the activities I carried out previously to get the site up and running.

Pre-Launch Activity

So I’ll begin the story on a train in early March 2019.

I was travelling to London for a weekly meeting with a client. The train journey was a 5-6 hour round-up and required me to entertain myself while the time passed.

I sat on the train with my Kindle and devoured blogs. This gave me the initial seed idea for starting my own blog. Since I’ve got a lot of valuable experience and knowledge to share, I figured I should start to document it.

Now in fairness I could (and should) have done this on my consultancy business blog, which needs updating. However it’s always exciting to start a new project and I wanted to do something independently from my business persona. Hence SideGains.

Blog Ideas

I began to think about the sort of blog posts I might write. To begin with, I just brain dumped my knowledge around 12 different post title ideas: these have all made it onto SideGains.

From these 12 blog posts I brain dumped a more comprehensive list of ideas around topics I might use to make further posts… the list is massive, running into hundreds of titles! This has formed the basis of my content calendar.

Now the ideas for post title are not built around keyword research. They’ve just been developed from thinking about the things I’ve picked up over the years and the experiences I’ve had such as:

• Working with search engines;
• Building out websites;
• Running PPC campaigns;
• Affiliate marketing;
• Blogging…
• yada yada yada!

Anyway, as the 3 month contract for my London client came closer, I decided I’d start Side Gains at the end of June when I had some time on my hands.

When that time came, I worked like a dog to get SideGains up and running. You can read about the steps involved in setting something like SideGains up in my post on how to start a blog: this will give you an idea of what I did over the course of around 7 days!

Basically though, getting SideGains live meant I had to:

• Choose a domain name;
• Register a domain name;
• Install WordPress, add a theme to it, customize it and install plugins;
• Look for affiliate programs;
• Set up Google Analytics and the Google Search Console;
• Create accounts in YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram;
• Publish posts on the SideGains blog.

A Spanner in the Works

Perhaps the biggest unexpected overhead was having to migrate SideGains to a new host.

Initially I’d installed SideGains on a reseller hosting package I had with HostGator. As it’s a fairly busy server, page load speed was very slow so I needed something faster.

I moved SideGains from HostGator to SiteGround in early July and the page load speed improvements were dramatic! But it was extra work I hadn’t initially planned. I also decided to move my consultancy business site across to SiteGround at the same time.

SideGains went live around 24th June 2019… and I’ve been busy ever since!

So as my first monthly report this one differs from the ones I’ll do in the future. From next month onwards I’ll focus upon activities within the month I’m reporting on… this June 2019 was a short month for SideGains so I’ve combined it here with a bit of background. From next month the report will take the form of:

• Search Console Stats
• Details of the blog posts I’ve written and published in the month
• Videos published
• Slideshows published
• Social media growth
• Comment counts
• Backlinks acquired
• Revenue made (if any!)

My aim is to be as open as I’m able to give you a real appreciation of what is possible to achieve and what it takes.

Without further waffle then, here is my combined report for June and July 2019.

SideGains Search Console Stats July 2019

Blog Posts & Pages

Date	Post Title	Word Count
2019-06-24	What Happened and How the Heck Did I Get Here?	2,354
2019-06-26	The Law of Attraction: If You Build it, They Will Come	1,804
2019-06-27	How SideGains Makes Money	410
2019-06-27	Privacy Policy	2,435
2019-06-27	About SideGains	878
2019-06-28	Free eBook? Yes Please… But I Don’t Want Your Spam	1,398
2019-06-29	High Quality Content: Is Yours Good Enough to E-A-T?	1,565
2019-07-01	The Google Manual Penalty: An Anatomy	2,503
2019-07-02	Are Broken Links on Your Site Really a Big Deal?	1,453
2019-07-03	Why do Domain Prices Vary So Much?	1,620
2019-07-04	How to Register a Domain	1,253
2019-07-05	Bill Hicks It’s just a ride – The Importance of Perspective	881
2019-07-06	Choosing a Domain Name	2,492
2019-07-08	The Wayback Machine and How it is Useful	1,785
2019-07-09	Wayback Machine Search Video & Transcript	1,119
2019-07-12	Google Adwords Mistakes: Don’t Take Your Eye Off the Ball	1,039
2019-07-14	10 Inspirational Shawshank Redemption Quotes for Bloggers	2,139
2019-07-18	Why is Page Load Speed so Important?	1,825
2019-07-20	What Would You do if You Won the Lottery?	1,109
2019-07-22	How Long Does it Take to Write a Blog Post?	2,042
2019-07-24	My 11 Worst Jobs & the Experiences I Had in Them	896
2019-07-26	SideGains Page Load Speed Test	2,010
2019-07-28	How to Start a Blog	6,268
	Total Word Count	41,278

YouTube Video

Date	Video Title	Duration
2019-07-09	The Wayback Machine – An Introduction	7.04

Going forward I’ll plot some of this information onto a chart that I update so I can show in a more visual way the relationship between traffic growth, activity and time.

Bye for now and thanks for reading!

Paul

Please share your own experiences in the comments section below or feel free to ask me a question.