February ends on Tuesday. How have your writing goals progressed for the month? Mine didn't go as well as I hoped, but I did manage to get quite a bit done. Wow...I feel like I say that a lot, actually. I'm starting to sound like a broken record.
Huh...I wonder how many people will get that reference?
Even though this month was quite a bit less productive compared to January, I'm still on track to do a lot of great things this year. In fact, hitting a million words isn't all that out of reach. That is as long as I can keep myself on task and get things rolling again. After all, it's not like I don't have plenty of content to create for myself let alone my monthly clients.
This month was just one of those that didn't really have a good flow to it. Maybe it was the cold, or maybe it was spending too much time in my own head...or maybe it was a mixture of both. Still, I am trudging forward to make something spectacular of this year.
Finishing Greed Today
I'm working on the final parts of Greed today and will probably start the next chapter. As I continue to rewrite the book, I forgot a lot of what was in VII. Though, I did write a lot of it back in 2016...and it shows.
Some parts of Greed actually dialed up my anger a bit...mostly because of the inspiration of the story. But then I remind myself of where I am today and how awesome my career is in comparison to where I was 10 years ago.
I'm looking forward to dumping as much time into VII as I can. I would love to finish the Wattpad book in the near future so I have extra time to work on Kingmaker as well as start the Kindle Vella project. Then again, I would like to finish writing the story on Inkitt so I can review that platform.
So much to do and so little time...
Spending Quality Time with Themes
As I'm working on rebuilding a dead blog, I've decided that all of my websites need new themes. Or, at least new layouts. I've stuck with the same theme for nearly a decade on several of the sites and really don't like how MichaelBrockbank.com turned out. Keep in mind that I don't have a lot of time to work on finding themes throughout the week. My life is too chaotic for the most part.
Still, I've decided to dedicate blocks of time next week to get them ALL squared away. This means less time working on blog posts or perhaps videos. But it's not like I'm wasting time. The homepage is essentially your storefront. If you walk into a place of business and it looks like a trailer park exploded in the lobby, you'd probably turn around and walk out.
While I like the magazine-type appearance, I think a more simple and minimalist view of the homepage is probably better for the sites I manage. Well, except for ColoradoPlays.com. I'm going to keep the magazine look for the gaming site.
In any case, putting in a block of time to work out the theme will ensure all of them are spruced up a bit for 2023. I should probably knock on wood considering how things often have a tenancy to break when I make changes.
Setting Up Post Revisions
Part of fixing up the dead blog is revising old blog posts. That's because I've seen first-hand at how updating older content can vastly improve traffic to a website. I'm paid well by my clients to do just that. I managed to rewrite a few this month and started using the PublishPress Revisions plugin for WordPress. It has a lot of nifty features and I started slating several rewrites for all of my blogs.
Some will have complete rewrites while others just need a bit more umph in the topic. If I can grab even a fraction of the success my clients have, this year should end amazingly well for the blogs.
After an update, I've seen posts take anywhere from three to six months to gain traction in Google. That's about par for what a new blog post takes. Though, I did see one update take less than a week before traffic tripled from organic search. So, it really depends on the topic and what Google thinks of it for search results.
In any case, I plan on getting a lot more articles revised in March for all three of my major blogs. Some of the older pieces are severely lacking in meat.
Dialing Back AdSense Ads - Kinda
After setting AdSense to enable Autoads, the site looks quite chaotic with advertisements. I don't mind the side space or anchor ads. I just don't like how ads are injected into an article, especially within a tutorial with images. In some cases, you get one sentence after an image before an ad is shown.
Although I suspect the move to Autoads has increased the blog's revenue, I'm going to dial it back. Before, I was manually placing ads within the content in a way that wasn't interfering with the text. I'm going to go back to that format. I'll keep Autoads doing the anchor ads and such. But I'm going to use the direct snippet for in-content ads to place them logically.
I'm relatively sure I'll lose a little bit of that income boost. But I'd rather deliver an article people can read without being bombarded by advertisements.
It's all good. Perhaps fixing the older posts and driving additional traffic to the site will offset anything I lose by disabling in-content Autoads. Or, maybe I'll get lucky and there won't be much of a hiccup in revenue at all.
I guess we'll have to see what happens. I'll make this switch on March 1st and record the data. Perhaps someone will find it an interesting case study of how in-article ads actually work between automatic and manual placement.
Wrapping Up February
Looking back at February, I guess I didn't do too bad, all things considered. I still haven't done much with the YouTube channel, but that's a me thing. Hopefully, I can figure out video stuff over the next couple of days.
In the grand scheme of things, though, this year has been progressing better than this time last year. So, I'd still call that a win. Then again, I did have a few major personal issues at the beginning of last year that kind of sucked the wind out of my sails.
How are you going to end February as a creator?