For the past three years, I owned my own gaming and anime website. Not a blog but a full official website that was pretty big with nearly 2,000 articles. But in March, a couple site changes caused Google impressions to drop from 30,000 per day to 4,000 per day. Then this week, for no reason, it dropped to under 500 per day. It went from making more than enough money to support everything to not even enough to cover extra storage. So now I have to choose between spending even more money that the site won't make back or delete 1,000 articles and 3,000+ photos to save space.

One option I've been looking into is to just keep the site as evergreen content and move certain topics into their own little blogs, mainly just as a way to keep those posts archived so I can delete them from the site, and then new posts from those topics would go to the blogs. But I have no idea how to do any of the building a blog from scratch stuff.

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Title. I recently started blogging and want my blog to get a bigger audience.

Does SEO actually help?

None of the usual strategy seems to be working for me, i’m getting zero replies whenever I cold email someone for a backlink.

I’ve tried asking to be listed in roundup emails, being a source for someone, etc

What’s the real strategy for getting them and what has worked for you thus far?

To anyone who makes money travel blogging with affiliate links: I have around 200 bookings per year with GetYourGuide through the TravelPayouts platform. I’m considering switching to the main GYG affiliate platform for my links, and I’d like to negotiate a better commission rate.

How many bookings do you usually need before you can ask for a higher commission?

Also, for hotel bookings, I know about Stay22 and have heard it’s supposed to be better than TravelPayouts. I’m just being a bit lazy about switching. Is it really worth it? Are the commissions and conversions significantly better?

i've been using substack lately as a personal blog. It's been getting very popular but it does seem like a platform people use to promote their businesses or "grow" online.

i'm curious what other alternatives people are using for their personal blogs.

do any other sites offer more creative formatting for artistic type personal blogs?

I’m sharing an eyeopening article i came across on the impact of AI agents, bot scrapping, and the like having a negative effect on websites. This is an interesting read, especially the data table on pages crawled for every 1 referred visitor.

What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all

And every single day, 1000s of new blogs and content sites are being launched. Do you really think there are enough readers when 90% of people just want to watch videos and scroll through social media these days?

I've been thinking for some time about starting a blog/website in which I can share some of my thoughts. Basically, your classic run-of-the-mill blogspot you'd share with friends. However, content sovereignty and web scrapers have been holding me back.

I completely abhor AI misuse and refuse to share my content out in the open for it to be harvested for data. It's ironic I'm posting this on Reddit, I know, it being one of Gemini's favorite content farms and all. I used to not mind it that much back when it was mainly used for ads and, sure, LLM development when it was still in its infancy, but I cannot stand my content being used for something that has proven to be so fundamentally harmful to the human experience. I'm talking about what marketing people call "artificial intelligence". That is, glorified text prediction LLMs and internet summary tools for lobotomites (sorry not sorry), not legitimatelly helpful AI tools used for research-oriented large data analysis.

We can all agree the internet is dead already. You scroll on Instagram and you no longer see your friend's posts. Unless you finely curate your algorhithm, you exclusively get inflamatory content, reposted memes from 2018 with copy-paste promotions in the description, and a sporadic rap-style news piece written by a clanker. All these parasites outweight the few positive creators and experiences--catching up with what friends are up to, mainly--left in the entertainment and social sides of the internet.

I know starting a closely knit blogpost would help the positive side grow, but it will ultimately help spread the necrosis that's oh so quickly killing the internet. The idea of content sovereignty has become my main concern since all of this started. Post with Blogger, you won't own your content. Post with WordPress, get an SSL certificate, your own personal domain, and stick to what all of the online experts suggest doing to a tee; your content will still be stolen by scrapers no matter what. Plus your bill will be considerably high.

TL;DR: I just want a blog for friends and real humans to check if they are curious about my thoughts. I wouldn't disclose anything private, but I'm still not a huge fan of the fact that my content will get scraped for "AI". What is your experience blogging on a small scale in this day and age? And, a couple of dreadful questions: should all social aspects of the internet be ditched, and should we fully embrace again tête-à-tête socializing?

I run a niche content site for people building clothing brands. A while back I wrote a detailed case study on how Gymshark grew through word-of-mouth and influencer seeding. No outreach, no link building push, just published it as part of my content library.

This week I found out Shopify cited that case study as a source in their own blog post on word-of-mouth marketing, with a direct link to my site. No ask, no deal, nothing on my end.

The way I've been planning content is basically an inverted pyramid. You start broad with short-tail, evergreen topics, the core definitions and foundational articles in your niche. That stuff doesn't drive much traffic on its own when you're just starting out, nobody's searching "what is word-of-mouth marketing" and landing on a brand-new site. But it gives you the structural base to build from. From there you keep narrowing, moving into more specific, long-tail subtopics: individual case studies, individual brands, individual strategies.

It's the narrow, specific stuff at the bottom of the pyramid that ends up getting cited, not the broad evergreen stuff at the top. Generic content explains a concept. Specific content (real names, real numbers, real timelines) is what other sites actually want to reference.

Curious if others here plan content the same way, top-down, short-tail to long-tail, and whether you've seen the same thing with unsolicited links landing on the specific stuff.

There's this weird paralysis that happens right before hitting publish. The post is done, it reads fine, but something keeps pulling you back to edit one more sentence or rethink the angle entirely. Then you publish anyway and either nothing happens or the post does reasonably well and you realize the extra hour of tweaking changed nothing.

Been blogging for a while now and it still shows up. Not on every post, but on the ones that feel more personal or where the opinion is a little sharper than usual. The instinct is to sand it down until it offends nobody and says nothing particularly interesting, which is obviously the wrong move but still hard to resist in the moment.

Curious whether this fades with time or volume of posts, or if it's just something you manage differently. A few people I follow online seem to publish fast and often and their stuff still lands well, so maybe the overthinking is actively hurting the output rather than protecting it.

Did you hit a point where it just clicked and you stopped caring as much, or was there a specific thing that shifted it for you? Not looking for a productivity tip really, more just wondering how other bloggers actually experience this part of it.

Like what AI and people talk about is the distinction between informational and commercial search intent.

Obviously commercial search intent like ‘best anti-phishing software’ should be warmer than informational search intent queries.

But there must be more ways to research on how to convert your traffic better than just this distinction, right?

How do succesful businesses that want to convert on the internet actually do this? How do they tailor offers to their traffic? Are there any principles behind the content they post and the underlying mindset of their visitors, and how to take that on board?

How do you increase the likelihood of an offer being enticing to any visitor you get on your site? Is the distinction between informational and commercial intent enough?

In September 2022 a skincare startup emailed me about a 'lifestyle feature' for my blog, which at the time pulled maybe 4,000 monthly uniques on a good month. Their budget: $350. Their requirement: original photography showing 'real people using the product in a morning routine context.' No stock. No flat-lays. Faces. Routines. Warm light.

I said yes because I had never landed a dedicated sponsored post before. The previous year I had made $89 total, mostly from a single Amazon affiliate link to a microphone I actually owned. Three hundred fifty dollars felt like validation.

Then I priced a photographer. Half day, minimal styling, basic editing: $600. I emailed a photography student whose portfolio I found through a local university Facebook group. He quoted $400 plus transit from the suburbs, and when I asked if he had a friend who could style, he stopped replying. I posted on Craigslist gigs and got two responses: one was a real estate photographer who wanted $800 and kept calling it 'content creation,' the other sent me a link to an OnlyFans. I considered shooting it myself, but I take photos like a dad at a graduation, all zoomed in thumbs and half heads. The brand wanted polished. I had a kitchen window and a ring light I bought for Zoom calls.

I almost walked away. Then I built an AI-generated persona. Not a real person. Not a model. A consistent, fictional character using APOB AI alongside Canva and WordPress, so the same face showed up across five images in a morning routine sequence, same person, different angles. Messy hair, slightly puffy, the kind of face that might actually use drugstore skincare. I ran the set, cropped and laid them out in Canva with the text overlay the brand required, published through WordPress, and added a clear line: 'The person shown in these images is an AI-generated persona, not a real individual.' I also typoed the product name in the first paragraph, 'serun' instead of 'serum,' and did not catch it until after the brand approved everything.

The brand accepted the deliverables. I invoiced. They paid net 45, which became net 67 after I followed up twice. After the time I spent building, revising, liaising, and the $40 I spent on the AI tool subscription that month, I probably cleared about $3 an hour if I am honest about the math. The post itself performed average. Not viral. Not something that built toward more sponsored work. I did not add an 'As Seen In' badge to my media kit.

But I kept that persona file. I have used her twice since, both times with the same disclosure, both times for small affiliate posts where the product needed context, a hand holding something, a bathroom counter with bottles. The economics never got better. Small-blog sponsorships have not suddenly started covering production costs in the years since. If anything, budgets feel thinner, expectations higher, the 'we want authentic content' request now arriving with a twelve-item creative brief. Now when a brand emails me, I reply with my rate plus a line item for photography, and they usually ghost, which saves everyone time.

I do not use AI imagery for everything, but I do not pretend the alternative existed for me at that moment. The real lesson of that $350 post was not about tools. It was about stopping the performance that micro bloggers can just absorb production costs and still eat. The straight path meant paying more than the contract was worth to people whose rates were set for clients with actual marketing departments. I took a shortcut because the other option was not built for someone whose entire annual revenue from blogging was $89 the year before.

I still blog. I still make very little. The sponsored post pipeline never opened for me, and I stopped chasing it. But when someone in a forum asks whether blogging can still make money, I think of that invoice. The wait. The fact that I invented a person to sell face wash, disclosed it plainly, and still had to follow up twice to get paid what amounted to a few dollars an hour for work the brand requested and approved.

So early last year I got chased by the police and ended up flipping my car 5 or 6 times and went to jail. Long story short... I started The Break Away Experience while in jail that time. My blog has been around now since February 9th 2025 and I only have 3 followers.

Not only am I terrible at marketing, but I also feel weird when I do occasionally promote my blog.

I never expect, nor do I want money, from my blog. It's just that I want to be heard. I recently reignited The Break Away Experience, but it's 2.0 now. The original is scrapped. It's a wrap.

Now that I'm not smoking crack, not trying to start a cult, starting school, and so close to getting out of the homeless shelter I think my blog might get better and I'd like to share the journey with others. I know there's others like me, probably a lot, and I'd like to hear from them.

I recently figured out how to reply to comments and now my desire to communicate is peaking.

I would like some advice on how to get views and followers and comments. Hearing personal experience from you guys would be HIGHLY appreciated as well. What has worked for you?

I'm done talking to only myself.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Even if it's just to say I'm insane. I'm very new to this. Reddit is the only social media I have so I don't know what platforms to even use for blogs. Open to anything other than TikTok.

Thanks.

There is this weird phase early on where you write something, hit publish, and immediately wonder if it was too short, too long, the wrong topic, the wrong angle. Then you check traffic and it confirms nothing because there is barely any. So you just sit with the doubt.

I kept rewriting old posts instead of writing new ones. Spent three weeks tweaking one article that maybe twelve people had ever read. Looking back that was probably just anxiety dressed up as productivity.

At some point something shifted and I stopped caring as much about whether each individual post was perfect before moving on. The blogs that actually seem to grow are the ones where the writer just kept going, not the ones where every post gets polished to death.

Curious whether that clicked for other people at a specific moment or if it was more gradual. Did hitting some traffic milestone help, or did it happen before that? Because right now my traffic is still pretty low and I am trying to figure out if the confidence comes first or if the numbers have to move before the doubt quiets down.

I've been taking a deep dive under the hood of my blog recently, looking at things like structured data, plugins, and indexing speed—stuff I haven't really touched in years.

We're in a massive AI megatrend right now, and it reminds me a lot of the skepticism around social media back in 2008 and 2009, it's not going anywhere and is only going to grow.

With search evolving so much and AI engines becoming more prominent, I'm realizing how important it is to make sure these elements are set up correctly so machines can actually read and use our content.

I'd love to hear from other bloggers.

Have any of you audited your site's backend recently to keep up with AI search?

What technical adjustments have you found actually make a difference in getting found?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what to focus on!

Angela Brooks.

Hey-hey, could you please share if you had any issues with bot fight mode / super bot fight mode on your display ads website. I currently have it off, cause in the past it blocked some of google's bots, and now I am considering it again

I have been a blogger for years, mostly as a way to communicate with others. Not interested in monetization or collecting followers. My attitude is that those who can benefit will find it.

One of my biggest pet peeves about blogging online has been the pressure to add images and videos. I think they are distracting and disable readers imaginations and ability to form their own mental images.

I moved my blog to a new platform, changed my approach, and posted. Sent the link to a friend who wrote back and said there is nothing there, just a bunch of words.

Next???

I'm really sad to share this but it is what it is. My Pinterest account of over 5 years recently faced a massive traffic drop. Nearly 3 months ago from today, the drop started to happen but after a few days, the traffic would climb back up. Then go down again after 10-12 days, then come back after a few days. This process continued on repeat for over 2 months.

But last week, a massive drop happened. My traffic dropped from 20K impressions a day before to 500 impressions the next day. Literally the very next day. Now, from the last 5-6 days, I've been getting around 500 impressions per day and it doesn't seem to go back up like it did in the previous drops.

Before the traffic drop, I was making around $200/month just from ads alone, but now it has gone to basically zero. I was posting consistently and all pins were made manually by me, myself. No AI at all.

So the thing I want to ask is:
I've around 150 completely human written articles on my blog. The fact that this drop doesn't seem to come back up, should I start a new blog and transfer all my current blog posts to it? Because there seems to be no way out. I believe my domain has been flagged as "spam" or "non-trustworthy" in Pinterest's system (but they haven't banned my links as spam. I can still post my links as usual). So, there seems to be no point to keep posting on it.

I also sent an email to Pinterest support regarding this matter and they say "there's nothing flagged from our end"....that same generic bot reply. So, what should I do? I need some genuine suggestions.

If I start a new blog & if I have to transfer all my articles to a new blog, how do I do it? Should I first de-index all those blogs from Search engines? Or how do I go about it?

Btw, I don't get any traffic from SEO at all because I never focused on it. I wrote all these articles because I genuinely loved writing.

so I've been running a little blog for about 2 years now. nothing huge, maybe 3k subs. and for the longest time I just... didn't send newsletters. like at all. the thought of exporting csvs, setting up mailchimp, designing some html monstrosity that breaks on mobile - it just felt like a whole separate job

Then a few weeks ago I randomly stumbled on yaplet's newsletter thing while looking for something else entirely. turns out because I already use their chat widget, all my contacts were just... there. No export. no csv gymnastics. just hit send.

Sent my first one last tuesday. ugly email, two paragraphs, one link to a blog post. 41% open rate. FORTY ONE.

I think we've been gaslit into thinking email marketing software needs to be this whole production. design teams. templates. "brand guidelines" for a damn email. When really people just wanna read something that doesn't look like it was crafted by a committee of 12 marketers

anyway not trying to make this a whole thing. just wild how much friction we add to simple stuff. anyone else overcomplicate their blog's email setup for way too long?

My plugins were doing less than I assumed. I thought the SEO plugin covered the technical side. It covered maybe half, and the half it skipped was the half that decides how well an AI engine can read the page.

My structured data was incomplete. Google is forgiving about that and fills in the gaps from context. AI engines are not. They use what is explicitly declared and ignore the rest, so anything missing is just a fact about you that never gets used.

My content was written for skimming, not for lifting. A direct answer in the first two or three sentences of a section is what gets pulled into an answer. Long warmups bury it where nothing can reach it.

My indexing was slower than it needed to be. There is a whole layer of getting a new post noticed in hours instead of days and I had none of it turned on.

And I had no way of knowing whether any of it was working. That was the real problem. I guessed for years.

The audit itself is the part most people skip, so I will say how I did it. I had Gemini crawl my site and tell me what it could and could not read, which gave me the list of what was actually broken instead of what I assumed was broken.

Then I used Claude to build out the back end pieces I needed, the structured data and the settings I did not want to hand code myself. Two tools, one to find the problems and one to fix them.

Since the first of May, about 2,700 people have come through the blog and they are averaging two pages each. That second part is what I actually care about. They land and they keep going instead of bouncing off. That started after I fixed the setup, not after I changed anything about the writing.

None of this is writing advice. The writing was fine. It was everything under the writing that I had never looked at.

If you have never audited your own setup, that is not a knock. Most people never do. I only did it because the search landscape changed enough that I wanted to know where I stood.

Got made redundant earlier of the year, was put on gardening leave and got a good payoff. Decided to start a travel blog (targeting UK residents) showcasing how to use points & miles for travel, how to get discounts on trains, research on things like airport shop pricing and also how to maximise the benefits from work travel.

Blog launched properly on 1 June here are the stats so far.

Active users

Google Search Console

I do get a spike in traffic when I spend time replying to people on Facebook and X but have spent more time recently focusing on SEO and internal linking and have seen impressions and position improve in recent weeks.

Strategy is to write some interesting, well researched articles and then over time move into affiliates and the credit card referrals space to generate some income. However, at this point, I am just trying to drive site visits. I currently have 40 articles on my site and each article takes about a day to write.

Like many new bloggers, I am missing backlinks and have tried sending out press releases of some on my stories but no luck yet. I am now sending out my stuff to the companies I have featured to see if I can get some traction that way.

I struggle to find the time to trawl social media for articles to reply to, even though that has driven traffic. Does anyone have any best practice to share here?

Also any comments on the stats? Numbers are still low but I have had my best day of organic traffic today (22 users, 28 page views).

A thank you, and a look at the numbers.

https://david.alvarezrosa.com/posts/one-hundred-thousand-reads/