I started writing this website 5 years ago. At the time, I was working on my books, a script for a miniseries, and studying a number of things – and still managed to get a large amount of content online
Blog Strategy
At first, a good blog strategy is to get a bunch of content on line. Not all at once – you want to space it all out – a post a day. Set your schedule. My original schedule was four times a week. Once you’ve got a sizeable amount of content online, you can go ahead and remove any of the “my coffee is cold today” posts. You won’t have any readers the first few months. The idea behind posting a lot is simply to get into the search engines, then extraneous material streamlined (read “deleted forever”).
SEO Optimization
There is a huge science behind SEO, and I’m sure each of the various SEO tools for WordPress have their adherents. I’ve come to prefer YOAST, which really forces you to learn more about it.
Let me say right from the outset – I know virtually nothing about SEO. It must work, because my daily numbers are five times higher than under my old SEO – but still, there’s a lot of guess work on my part as to what is an effective SEO phrase, keywords, etc. It takes about fifteen minutes to 30 minutes for me to do the Yoast. I understand Michael Hyatt says it takes him five minutes. He’s better at it than I am.
I estimate I still have about 95% of my blog is still unfinished in Yoast. That means it will take around nine thousand minutes (or 150 hours) for me to finish all that.
Website design
I literally could spend (I’m guessing wildly) probably about ten to fifteen minutes on each blog article doing the SEO optimizing. When I get a post set up on my website, that’s really as much time as I want to spend on it. I can remember working on raw HTML websites in the ‘90’s and brother – I couldn’t do that now. I’d go out of my mind. Weebly and WIX are about where I’m at with raw website design. Notice there’s no WordPress Themes with my name on them. Even my graphics and logo took (to me) an inordinate amount of time – almost a week based upon a scientific choice of colors based upon psychology.
Again, that’s as much time as I want to spend on such things. Should have seen me back in the day with a host of freeware programs I’d discovered that ran on my old Compaq Presario where I created my own MIDI tunes to play on my old website, moving icons, etc – back in the days when people thought that was cool.
WordPress
Everything now runs almost universally on WordPress now – although much was to be said about Blog City, where I had a silly blog based upon – well, nothing. I understand that’s what blogs were about when I first got started. They had ways to do reviews of anything, so I’d watch a movie and do a review, play Age of Empires and review it, etc.
Of course, most people remember the big change a few years ago in WordPress, where the “classic” engine was replaced by the Gutenberg engine. Probably two thirds of my website is written on the old “classic” engine, and awaits conversion to Gutenberg.
Want to know a three step means of converting to Gutenberg from “classic”?
Highlight and cut all the text on your old post.
Hit backspace to remove the “classic” engine.
CTRL+V to paste the content back in again.
Publish.
Now tweak it, because I’m a writer and of course I can’t let my old caffeine fueled ramblings – often interrupted by the caterwauling of one of my cats which usually heralded two of them chasing each other around the house and a hurried sprint to grab some moderately expensive keepsake I don’t want broken before it hits the floor.
Conclusion
If you look at the bottom of my website, you’’ see at this time I have 65 to 66 pages of blog posts, ten posts per page. That’s over six hundred blog posts I still have to update to Gutenberg, do my YOAST SEO optimization, get better blog graphics on, and sometimes expand or (in a few cases) purge for the good of humankind.
I’m assuming by 2023 it should be finished.
I hope.
