by Chris Harris
It’s been a while since I last updated Building a Blog. Not through neglect, exactly, more through abundance.
My business has been, thankfully, incredibly busy, and alongside that I’ve been working on two book projects. For the last four weeks or so, those have taken up most of my attention. Writing tends to do that when it really gets its teeth into you.
Over Christmas, and for a couple of weeks either side of it, I went on one of those familiar writing runs. In four or five weeks I wrote a large number of blogs, around thirty in total. All evergreen pieces. Nothing dependent on current affairs, nothing that would date quickly, and nothing tied to the immediate churn of the football calendar. The idea was simple: write pieces that would still make sense, and still be relevant, in two plus years’ time.
As usual, when you’re trying to find a niche and letting Google work out what on earth you’re doing, nobody reads them straight away.
Or so I assumed.
I’d been so absorbed in other writing that I hadn’t even bothered checking the stats. But events, reasons I can’t really go into, meant I had to take a proper look. And I was genuinely delighted by what I saw.
At the moment, the blog is pulling in a natural forty views a day, yesterday was the first 100 in a day. My record is 600 in a day, that was a one off football blog, but I am talking non-football blogs. My football blogs are busy for a couple of days and die, but the evergreen ones are slow but consistent.
When I dug into where this increased traffic was coming from, the answer was clear: Google search. Over the last three or four months, traffic arriving via Google has effectively quadrupled. That lines up almost perfectly with information I’d previously come across — using artificial intelligence, ironically — about the relationship between volume, consistency, and the time it takes for evergreen writing to be properly surfaced.
It was reassuring to see that theory play out so precisely in practice.
In the meantime, and again, for reasons I can’t really mention, we’re now in the middle of a social media reset, personal and business. This means taking things from pretty much rock bottom competency and visually and trying to build something that’s actually functional. We’ve brought in someone local who reckons they’re up to the job, and the information they’ve sent through certainly suggests that they are.
As part of that process, I’ve asked them to take a wider look at my two blog platforms themselves.
I currently have two. One works reasonably well but is outdated, poorly presented, and largely un-navigable. The other is much newer, far cleaner, and has a phenomenally high like-to-view ratio. The obvious solution is a complete rethink: merging the two into something coherent, modern, and usable.
The plan is for the rebuilt blog to have four clear sections:
- Writing about Lewes Football Club and non-league football.
- My other blog, focused on broader writing projects.
- My business and vintage-related work.
- A fourth, more general space for the eclectic concerns that don’t sit neatly anywhere else.
It feels overdue. But it also feels like the right moment — after letting the writing sit, letting Google do its slow work, and finally seeing the shape of what’s actually starting to grow.
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop looking for results.
And then, months later, quietly notice that they’ve turned up anyway.
I have nearly finished my first book, the time taken up is phenomenal, and I am co-writing a second book, but now that Ordinary Lives/Extraordinary Messes is nearly complete, I can now ramp up my content creation and really focus on building my blog.
As you have probably worked out, if you have followed this series, my writing and general work rate is prolific, so although my attention to my blog has waned, I have still been working at it and despite attempting to build it without too much focus or work, I can’t believe the views I am bringing in. Make no mistake, it is above average for a single niche blogger, nothing more, but the growth of views has been surprisingly strong.
#Building a Blog #SEO #Content Creation #Blogging #Blog
The Rights of Fans. 