I Grew a Blog to 1.7k Pageviews with 12 Posts and 0 Backlinks. Here’s How!

I recently sold my first blog for $2k USD, and one of the main ways I was able to do that was able to do that was strong SEO strategies. All of that traffic (bar 1 pageview 1 month) was from organic Google searches.

Starting a blog the right way is incredibly difficult. Many people get it wrong without meaning to, because they have no idea how to actually start a blog. That’s because we usually start them for fun.

My first blog had over 180 posts and was getting about 5k pageviews from Google because I did everything wrong.

I want to help you avoid those same errors. So let’s go through exactly how I set up the site to have success.

What I Didn’t Do

Before I dive into the specific strategies I want to clarify some things that I didn’t do that would have made this easier.

Some experienced SEOs even asked me if I did these strategies when I listed the site for sale on Twitter and they saw how much traffic it was getting.

I like to be fully transparent so I want to share that these are options but aren’t what I did:

• Aged Domain – I bought a brand new domain that had no history.
• Ads – I didn’t buy ads of any sort.
• Pinterest – I posted 5 pins on Pinterest 3 weeks before the sale. That’s where 1 of the clicks came from, but I wasn’t extensively doing Pinterest.
• Web Stories – I did 0 web stories for the site.
• Social Media – Didn’t even create accounts beyond Pinterest.
• Redirecting Posts From Aged Domains – They were all original posts I wrote for the site. They never existed anywhere else.
• Giving Tons of Backlinks From My Other Sites – I did 1 backlink 1 time from a post that was relevant to the niche from my DA 40 site. It’s less than what someone would have gotten from doing a guest post.
• Parasite SEO – Never done it.
• Reddit – I never posted about the site on Reddit.
• Buying Backlinks – I didn’t buy a single backlink for this site.

My SEO Strategy

Step 1: Keyword Research

This site is in the recipe niche – which is notoriously good for ads, but not as good for affiliate income off the bat. My plan was basically to get it on an ad network and watch the money roll in.

My keyword research focus was on finding anything with high volume but low difficulty.

I used a few methods for this, but largely my Zero Volume Keyword Strategy.

Of the 12 posts that I published, 6 were zero volume and 6 were extremely low difficulty.

I found all the keywords on Keysearch by either using the competitive analysis feature or filtering for low difficulty (under 39) keywords.

I was targeting any keyword around the niche and the type of recipes I needed. So I filtered by things like “mocktail” as well.

After about an hour of work, I had a list of 2,000 keywords to sort through.

Step 2: Audience Avatar Creation

Having a list of 2,000 keywords actually isn’t helpful.

Keywords themselves don’t do anything. It’s the topical authority you create with them that matters and the actual posts you write.

You might think I dove right into topic clusters at this point, but you’d be wrong.

Before I got there, I figured out my audience avatar.

This is something I learned back in my Publishing Master’s in the one marketing module I took (I thought it’d be so boring, and look at me now marketing full time!). We created a full on persona for our ideal customer that included their education, income, interests, family, etc.

I do this for all my sites now before I work on any content.

I figured out that people who were interested in mocktails had a few personas I could choose from: kids party drinks, sober adults, healthy conscious adults, and religious adults.

I didn’t want to target all of the above as those are pretty different people, so I went with health conscious and sober adults, since that’s the reason I got into mocktails in the first place.

Usually I’d do the audience avatar creation before the keyword research, but I was doing the keyword research to verify the niche, and then it just spiralled into finding too many great keywords.

Step 3: Topic Clusters / Silos

That’s when I started the topic clusters.

I decided on 4 content silos based on my audience avatar: healthy, classic, summer, and winter mocktails.

If I’d chosen kids party drinks, I’d have gone in a very different direction since kids don’t really care about health and likely don’t want “classic” cocktails like mimosas. They want fun, sugary drinks with bright colours.

This is why it’s vital to start by knowing your audience.

Of the 2,000 keywords, I filtered down to 112 that I wanted to work on the first year of the site to make it less overwhelming and ensure I had enough in each content silo.

Where Things Got Off Track

You’ll notice I said I had 112 keywords, yet the site sold with 12 posts.

So what happened?

I ran out of time.

I started the site largely based on shiny object syndrome and some desire to be a niche site mogul with a massive portfolio of sites.

I’ve since realized that I really don’t want that.

I want to spend time on 1-2 sites – which is what I did, neglecting this site.

I put up 5 posts when I bought the domain in 2022, and left it alone.

Those posts got good traction over the year and a bit, bringing the site close to 800 pageviews a month organically while I hadn’t even bothered to create an About page or Contact page. I’m pretty sure the homepage was still a half filled out Kadence template at that point.

It wasn’t until November 2023 that I decided to try to spend some time on the site, where I published 7 more posts that quickly took off and grew the site to the 1700 pageviews it was at by the time I sold it in mid December 2023.

How I Wrote the Posts

I used original recipes on the site – which apparently isn’t super common in the recipe niche. But I was trying to be a purist and felt like I needed to hand create every recipe I published.

I always started with the recipe, then I’d go in and write a post to accompany it.

I kept posts short (gotta love the recipe niche for not needing 5k word posts!). They usually ended up around 1,500 words long targeting 3-10 secondary keywords.

I focused on the methods of making the mocktails, substitutes for different dietary requirements, and tips on how to play with the recipe to make it even more creative.

I tried to avoid the whole “here’s my life story about how a cranberry saved my grandfather in the war” trope that usually happens in recipes online.

Since I’m not great at taking photos, I’d source them from VAs selling services in FB groups or use a custom GPT that makes great photos.

I definitely think using a recipe card plugin helped heaps with the schema. It allowed the site to get more traction from that extra area in the SERPs.

I used the free WP Recipe Maker plugin at the recommendation of a friend of mine who is a successful food blogger. I liked it a lot better than Create by Mediavine.

The posts didn’t take very long to write or create since I was able to use recipes I already had/made often. The only slow process was sourcing photos initially before the custom GPT came into my life.

Once I was done with writing the post, I ensured I internal linked it to other posts on the site as best I could. With the few posts, I didn’t hit my usual 10 minimum. I was doing more like 5 minimum. Considering how little content there was, that was pretty good in my books.

Link Whisper helped me automate that so I could add links from older posts to the newer posts.

The Site Architecture

Site architecture matters to a site’s success and topical authority.

At first, I left the site kinda half-assed to be honest. I picked a Kadence Pro template I was trying for a speed test (it wasn’t very speedy because of some animations), and then didn’t even finish filling in the homepage.

It literally had an email opt in section that I didn’t even connect to an email.

But I let it sit like that for over a year and it still did well.

One of the reasons I think the site had such an uptick in November 2023 is because I finally set up the site properly.

I took the time to actually put together a homepage, About page, and Contact page. I linked the privacy policy that I had forgotten to attach. And I actually put the categories of the site in the menu for people to find.

Both users and Google could now move through the site more easily which definitely worked in my favour.

In the end, I used Generate Press’ free theme to try it out. It was speedy and pretty sleek looking, but very simple.

My plugins were:

• WP Recipe Maker
• Link Whisper
• Short Pixel Image Optimizer
• RankMath
• Easy Table of Contents
• Generate Blocks

My host did daily backups so I didn’t worry about backups and they have security measures so I got lax with those plugins. I’d usually use Login Lockdown and Updraft as well.

What About Backlinks?

I built 1 backlink to the site from my main travel blog. I had a food-related post where I was able to connect the two sites.

Otherwise, I didn’t build any backlinks.

I didn’t have the time.

I’m sure if I’d spent more energy on links, the site would have been able to do even better even faster.

Recipes are an easy niche to build backlinks in from recipe round ups in Facebook groups. If I’d had more time, I’d have done more of them (although having more posts also would have helepd that).

The Niche Played a Role

Niches matter massively.

Some niches take a really long time to get off the ground. Many travel blogs take months to get their first 1k pageviews and dozens of posts (albeit, often because the person is new to blogging and doesn’t really know what they’re doing. Been there). Other niches can take off very quickly.

The recipe niche is surprisingly easy if you can find a subsection for yourself that isn’t YMYL (it seems like the helpful content update of September 2023 made a lot of gluten free and allergy blogs a kind of medical niche requiring insane qualifications to rank).

But just because a niche is kind of “easy” to do, doesn’t mean it’s actually right for you.

I’m not a fan of writing recipes it turns out. I prefer long form content like this where I can talk ad nauseum about a topic. Slapping out a quick recipe feels weird to me, and I’m constantly annoyed by having to measure things and not just say “a 2 second glug of X”.

The photos were a real hindrance and to build the site into a profitable brand over time would have been hard without professional photos.

It also would have been hard to expand. I tried for months at first to hire a recipe developer and photographer but no one got back to me. And the ones who did would cost over $200 per recipe for a 6 ingredient recipe.

I’m sure they’re worth it cause of resale rights, etc. but since I was nowhere near reselling the recipes in an ebook, it didn’t make sense for me.

Why I Sold a Successful Site

The site was a success. It was getting over 100 pageviews on average per month per post, even though most of those posts had been published under 1 month before the sale and the site had a DA of 2 at the time of sale.

The trend was continuing to go up, so I expect it would have kept growing if I’d put more work into it.

But I had no time.

Just because something could work, doesn’t mean you should spend the mental energy on it.

I felt constantly guilty for not working on the site (I don’t know how all the domain hoarders out there don’t combust!). That guilt was holding me back from working on the sites I actually wanted to work on, so I decided to cut it loose.

It’ll make someone else a lot of money, especially cause it’s one of the best blog names I’ve ever come up with and it’s highly brandable.

I’ll keep following it to see what they do with it and to hopefully get some new recipe inspiration.

I’ll continue to focus on my other sites – including another one I’m planning to sell in 2024 – using the same strategies. Because I always use the same strategies for success on all my sites, regardless of the niche.

It’s the exact strategy I teach in my Profitable Part-Time Blogger program!

Read More About Monetizing Your Blog

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• How to Make Money as a Travel Blogger: 15 Ways I Made $30k
• Ezoic Review: Will it Increase Your Blog Revenue?
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• Travelpayouts Review: 6 Figure Travel Blogger Weighs In
• How I Made $26.5k on Black Friday by Blogging & What I Learned Along the Way
• Blog Business Planning Workshop: Setting Profitable and Achievable Goals
• How I Made $110k in a Month in June 2023 👀
• 19 Best Ad Networks for Bloggers to Make 6 Figures
• How to Make $6k on a Digital Product Flash Sale
• I Sold a Starter Site For $2k. Here’s Exactly What I Did!
• How to Use Link Whisper to Increase Affiliate Conversions
• Selling Digital Products with Email Marketing for Beginners ft. Kate Doster
• Growing a Niche Site to $50k Series
• How to Make Your First $10 From Affiliate Sales in 7 Steps
• Are ConvertKit Email Ads Worth It? 6 Week Case Study Review

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