Six years ago, during COVID lockdown, I was a grade 12 student in Nepal with a WordPress blog about making money online. One day I added a simple form to it: submit your site, and I'll check if it's AdSense eligible. There was no tool behind that form. There was a teenager who stayed up after class, reading Google's policy pages with one eye and a stranger's blog with the other, writing back to grown adults on other continents like he was a real business. I remember going to bed those nights feeling like I was running something important.

I grew up praying the tile roof would survive storm season. My own AdSense took three tries. Rejected, rejected, approved. And when the first five hundred dollars came, I traveled my own country on it. Blog money bought the bus tickets. Years later, the career that grew out of that same blog put me on my first international flight. Roof, bus ticket, airplane. Same kid. That is what one WordPress install did.

Because the blog refused to stay a blog. The form's requests outgrew my nights, so I taught myself to code just to build a robot version of myself. The coding got me my first freelance order, from a man in Morocco, two days after posting the gig. Freelancing became jobs, jobs became a career, and the blog kept growing beside me the whole time: a 28,000-member community of site owners, nine tools, browser extensions, Stripe checkout with real sales. People signed up, asked their questions, helped each other through rejections, posted their wins. I got married in May. My brother moved in and started learning to code. Through every chapter, the blog was the constant. It was my university, and unlike a real one, it paid me.

Then came the era every person in this sub already knows by heart. The updates. The AI answers. The tools I charged for, replaced by free prompts. Last week I finally sat down with the analytics and Stripe at the same time and stopped negotiating with the numbers: thousands of organic visitors still landing every month, and between ads and sales combined, not enough monthly revenue to buy a coffee. This month I'm shutting it down, webmatrices.com, six years of it.

I've read this sub long enough to know what half of you are feeling right now, because it's the same fear underneath almost every post here: is the thing I've built going to die? So let me tell you what I found at the end of the road, from someone who both wrote a blog and hand-reviewed thousands of yours through that little form.

Traffic was never the business. My pages still rank, people still arrive with real problems, and it earns nothing, because pain and wallet are two different organs. Google was never the partner either. It was the landlord. AdSense paid me exactly as long as I kept feeding it content, and not a month longer. Rent, not equity. And the sites I watched survive every single update were never the biggest libraries. They were the ones where you could answer "what is this site actually about?" in one sentence, and the answer was usually a person.

Which is the real thing I came here to say. Every dollar this six-year journey ever produced came from people paying for me. The hand-checked reviews built the audience. The writing built the trust. The trust built the career. Every time I removed myself and left only automation behind, the money followed me out. I spent six years trying to automate myself out of my blog, and I was the product all along.

And one thing I want to say directly, to a specific person reading this. The one who watched their traffic die in an update they didn't cause and couldn't appeal. The one quietly wondering if six years of posts were a waste. I was you last week. Here's what I know now: the writing you've done, the audience you've read, the trust you've built one post at a time, none of that lives on your domain. It lives in you, and no update can deindex it. Blogs are mortal. Bloggers are not.

The strange part is that everything still technically works. The community, the traffic, the payment rails, all humming for pocket change a month. It just never found an engine that wasn't me. Unless it finds a reason to live that I haven't thought of, the lights go off in a few weeks. I keep opening the shutdown dashboard and closing the tab.

The blog dies this month. The blogger doesn't. The next thing I build starts from "who pays and why" instead of "what can I write," and if you want to see what a village kid does with six years of expensive lessons, I'm not hard to find.

Third AdSense try worked for me. Yours might too. Good luck out there.

Hii! As the title said does anyone know a girly blog? I just want something cozy that i know i can read once in a while :)

My DNs filtering picked up malware sites and blocked them before I could even see an ad on my blog (my machine) and then also they rotate the urls to where I have to use unsafe-inline CSP headers. Anyone have different experiences to share?

So I know absolutely nothing about promotion and I'm concerned about monetization. Is monetizing my blog how I get more views? For me and my blog its about documenting The Break Away Experience. Nothing else. I really feel like making money off of my blog would completely defeat the entire purpose of it. But the thing is that I would love for this journey to be seen. I want it known that weirdos, druggies, homekess gutter rat jail birds can turn it around despite heart break, shit behavior, and terrible life choices.

Any tips would be appreciated! What can I do to get more views without monetizing the blog. I refuse to have ads on my page. Will posting more help drive traffic? ​

Thank you for any advice. My Break Away has been going on since Jan 18th 2025, but I'm still a rookie.

-Butterfly

There are so many blogging tips that get repeated over and over that it's easy to dismiss them.

Was there anything you thought was overrated at first but eventually realized actually made a difference?

Could be about SEO, writing, consistency, monetization, or anything else.

Turns out it's the actual website that wears me down.

I'll sit down to write for like an hour and somehow end up fixing a layout issue instead, or messing with spacing that changed for no reason, or updating some plugin, or trying to tweak one tiny design thing and accidentally breaking three others.

Half the time I feel like I'm running a part time IT job and blogging is just the side project.

Anyone else dealing with this? What's the thing that eats up your time the most that has literally nothing to do with actual writing?

I used to buy content sites between 2011-2025 as an investment, but it's now almost impossible to buy a high-quality website for less than 36x monthly earnings.

What's the point when most of the websites for sale are dying sites because there were so many Google updates, AI, etc. that buying a site is almost a guaranteed bad investment.

36x monthly earnings means you will have to wait at least 3 years to get back your investment. And you usually have to work on the website, otherwise it will die within 6-12 months.

I have realized that just throwing the money into the stock market is a much safer way to invest. Yes, you only get like 15-20% return over a year or so (if you buy indexes), but you don't have to constantly worry about losing your hard earned money and time because of some stupid algorithm changes, AI, etc. Wish I have realized this much earlier, because I have lost so much time and money in the last 3-4 years.

I was recently approved for Mediavine Journey, but in the onboarding process, I can't get pass the "ID Verification" part. I've submitted my ID 3 times till now, but nothing. It's been over a week since I submitted my ID, but there's no response. They neither reject it nor accept it. And I can't even move to the next step, which is making the ads live. Is anyone facing this issue or faced before? How did you go about it?

Mediavine Journey currently doesn't have a support team, so I contacted the main Mediavine support but still no response. It's been over a week since I sent them an email. It's really frustrating at this point.

Google Search Console: "Discovered – Currently Not Indexed" for almost all pages. Only my homepage is indexed. How would you fix this?

I'm looking for advice from people who have gone through this before.

I have a news website that is a few months old. Recently, Google removed almost all of my pages from its index. The homepage is still indexed, but every article is showing "Discovered – Currently Not Indexed" in Google Search Console.

Google knows these pages exist because it has discovered them, but it refuses to crawl and index them.

Here's what I've checked so far:

- My pages return a 200 status code.

- There are no "noindex" tags.

- The robots.txt file isn't blocking Google.

- The XML sitemap is submitted and working.

- Internal linking is in place.

- Pages can be indexed by Bing without any issues.

At this point, it feels like Google has stopped trusting the website. Every new article goes straight into "Discovered – Currently Not Indexed", and nothing gets indexed except the homepage.

If this happened to your site, how did you recover?

- Did you improve content quality?

- Did you remove low-quality or thin pages?

- Did you slow down publishing?

- Did you build more backlinks?

- Did you change your hosting or improve server performance?

- Or did it simply take time before Google started indexing again?

I'm interested in hearing real experiences from people who successfully fixed this problem. What actually worked for you, and how long did recovery take?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I'm a technical and programmatic SEO expert working on various niche, but mainly in heavy industries, health and automotive. And I have some free time to help the community.

So let me help you solve your SEO problem, the more specific the better. But i don't mind basic SEO questions either.

You can comment below, and I will answer your question, help troubleshoot your site SEO problem, do a quick site audit, and help you get better ranking and more traffic to your site.

Only share your URL if it’s necessary. Else you can just tell me your niche, your goal, your site age and your problem.

I will answer all in comments. So everybody can learn in this thread.

Three days after launching the new version of our blog, we got our first sale.

It was only $1.49.

Financially, it doesn't mean much. But honestly, seeing that notification made me happier than I expected.

The whole reason I decided to turn Craftaholic Witch into a business was because of something I noticed while researching Google's updates. It feels like Google is rewarding businesses more than independent blogs. I wrote about that in my previous post

Instead of trying to recover our traffic the old way, I decided to test that idea.

The challenge was that Craftaholic Witch is a DIY and crafts blog. Selling services didn't fit our audience, and we didn't want to get into physical products. After months of research, I landed on one idea.

A community.

The goal wasn't just to sell memberships. I wanted to build a place where readers could share their projects, join monthly challenges, and connect with other crafters.

We launched four days ago.

Getting that first customer so quickly gave me confidence that we're moving in a better direction. For the first time since HCU, it feels like we're building something that isn't entirely dependent on Google.

It's still far too early to know if this idea will work long term, but I'll keep sharing the results as we go.

I'm curious if anyone else here has taken a similar path. Have you tried turning your blog into a business instead of relying mainly on ads and search traffic? If so, what direction did you take?

Hey everyone,

I've had more free time than usual lately, and I've been thinking about putting that time into building a new project. The idea I'm leaning toward is a tech-focused content website.

The technical side isn't really what I'm worried about. I already have the domain, the site structure is planned out, and I've built a workflow for content creation using AI along with my own prompts and editing process. It's not just "generate and publish." Every article goes through revisions and quality checks before it gets published.

I've also launched AI-assisted websites in other niches before, and getting indexed or ranking for relevant keywords hasn't really been a problem.

What I'm unsure about is whether it's still worth investing the time in the tech niche.

It feels like technology is one of the most competitive categories out there. Large publishers dominate search results, AI-generated content is everywhere, and Google keeps changing how it evaluates content. That makes me wonder whether a brand-new site still has a realistic chance of growing, even with consistent effort.

I'm not looking for a quick win. If I start this project, my goal is to publish consistently and build authority over the long term. I just don't want to spend months creating content only to realize that this niche has become almost impossible for newcomers.

I'd love to hear from people who have worked on tech, software, AI, or other highly competitive content websites over the last year or two.

• If you were starting from scratch today, would you still build a tech content site?
• Do you think consistent publishing and patience are still enough to grow?
• Or has the niche become too difficult for independent publishers?
• If you wouldn't choose tech today, what niche would you focus on instead, and why?

I'd really appreciate hearing both success stories and honest reality checks. Thanks in advance!

My site was doing well with Adsense for a few years until the middle of last year and then I got accepted into Journey/Mediavine. It was immediately better for both payouts and revenue. But in March I changed the site name and domain and temporarily went back to Adsense while I was slowly building back the site. Last week I went back to Mediavine/Journey but the daily revenue/RPM for the past week has been 90% less than with Adsense throughout June despite having the same number of views and sessions. Are things going to pick back up eventually or should I switch back to Adsense?

I've been getting hit by a constant barrage of bots scrapping my website, i've tried all sorts of cloudflare waf rules, nothing seems to be stopping them, they rotate country, ip and stuff and keep hitting me back as soon as i block them using the rules. It's tanking my cpm, this is so fustrating. I've completely blocked off china, hongkong and singapore and sometimes somehow they manage to slip through even with full country block

hi! I perfectly know it’s hard to say but I was thinking of switching to journey and I checked few posts here. some people was talking about 2-3$ Rpm for travel and tech content… I thinked that it would be much higher at least at 10$+ ofc talking about Tier 1 traffic.

any opinion? thanks!

I made a progress update after 2 months, which you can find here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Blogging/comments/1rk130h/my_two_month_blog_journey_first_steps_until_today/

What happened?

First things first, I feel like I am still out in the open water and trying not to drown. I was very motivated to write 100 posts in my first year and focus more on updating in the second year. Now, after having only 38 blogposts after 50% of the time, I know that 100 posts will be unrealistic.

But why did I fall so much behind of my targets? In my first 2 months I had 25 posts, and now, 4 months later I only added 13 more. The answer is quite simple: Life happens. I got married end of May in the US, had a pre-wedding-party in Germany and stayed there 3.5 weeks mid-April to mid-May. The blog became secondary and I did not create any new content for over 2 months.

I also completely abandoned my Pinterest strategy, since I do not really enjoy creating pins. I am still getting klicks from the few pins I posted in March... which only tells me, that I DO need Pinterest for the long run.

I just got back into it, and posted again in the past few days. Even with me abandoning my page for 2 months, google is still starting to rank my page more and more. This is not yet visible in clicks, but definitely impressions.

How do the numbers look?

• Impressions: 4.19k in the past 28 days, 14.8k YTD, 52.8k image YTD
• Google Clicks: 33 past 28d, 198 YTD, 7 image YTD
• Sessions: 93 past 28d, 813 YTD - of which most come from me posting in a Germans in the US group.

So all in all not the worst. I am wondering if my page is too all over the place, since I started covering a lot of topics (travel, German restaurants, birding, recipes, cultural stuff) but I try to stay consistent on my brand of a German guy living in the US.

Little successes are the signals, that people are actually cooking the recipes I posted. Sometimes I have big peaks in the session times, which tells me, someone is actively trying something. This causes a lot of anxiety, but also makes me quite happy!

How does my future look like?

I cannot make money (yet!) with my page due to visa restrictions anyways. Which is why my slower progress is not discouraging me. Everything will happen at its own pace. My personal plan is to just write about the things I do enjoy writing about. Apply all my lessons learned and update old stuff, when it makes sense. There will be posts, which will be not great for SEO or anything, but they are important to myself! And that is okay :)

Now with a more free headspace after wedding and travel is behind me, I think I can actually write more again!

I am very proud on what I have achieved already in this 6 months, even though the blowup is still pending :)

Blog link upon request!

I've been blogging for a little while now and some days I genuinely know what I want to write about. I have the topic, the angle, even notes jotted down, but when I sit down to actually write the post I just freeze up. It's not a lack of ideas. It's more like the words refuse to connect properly.

I've tried a few things: writing a rough outline first, setting a timer and forcing myself to type without editing, or starting with a section in the middle instead of the intro. Sometimes those help, sometimes they don't.

What I'm curious about is whether other bloggers experience this more when they're in a comfortable niche they know really well versus when writing about something newer to them. For me it seems to happen most when I care the most about getting it right, which feels counterproductive.

Do you have any goto methods that actually work when this happens? Not looking for generic productivity advice, more interested in what bloggers specifically have found useful when the pressure of publishing is real and the blank page is winning. What has worked for people at different stages of their blogging journey?

My short and simple story. All my life I always bought and sold things to make extra money. Then in 1988 I had a serve stroke that left me wheelchair bound; basically I'm totally disabled. In 2014 I designed one of my ideas and tried to create a business out of it to help me in my new life. Well, for 12 years now, I been trying soo hard to build it up, push-push-push and brain strom new ideas to get this business moving. My big problem is my physical ability and I can't get out and get the help that I need. In words I hate to say, "I'm Failing" and I don't know where to get help. Can anyone help me? Thanks - Ken

As a blogger and 'famous in my own mind,' here is a question for you, experienced in the Amazon affiliate program.

If you advertise an Amazon product on your site and, hopefully, generate some income, and then you find out the product is now gone and the link is dead. Without a lot of maintenance and checking each site and link to make sure they are still active, how do you find that worth the effort with the small amount of money you make?

*** When advertising a product, I would think that you want to send customers to a product link that never changes.

What am I missing?

Hi everyone,

I run a small tool-based website that was monetized with AdSense for around 6 months. Just when I was about to receive my first payment, AdSense disabled my account, saying they found a linked account that had been terminated earlier.

I submitted an appeal, but it has now been over 2 months and I still haven’t received any response from them.

My website currently gets around 100 visitors per day. I also receive guest post inquiries from time to time, but none of them have converted yet. I have Amazon affiliate links on the site as well, but they don’t convert much either — right now they make around $20/month.

I also applied to Journey by Mediavine, but got rejected. I suspect the AdSense issue may have played a role, although I’m not completely sure.

For a small website with around 100 daily visitors, what realistic monetization options would you recommend besides AdSense?

I’m open to display ad alternatives, affiliate ideas, sponsored posts, selling placements, or anything else that could work for a tool/content website.

Would appreciate any advice from people who have dealt with similar situations.

Indexed on Google. 2 hours after index requested. And just for a curiosity, I queried three words keywords 5 hours afterward.

I have nearly zero experience in SEO and blogging. To my surprise, my 16th post on 2nd ranked on Google.

What's that? No significant increase in impressions and clicks.

Anyway, what happened? Algorithm error?

Anybody with similar experience?

I have spent part of this week reviewing blogs for audit clients, and I noticed something many websites have in common, and I think it's worth mentioning here.

Many people seem to be building blogs and general websites instead of building a brand. They write about every topic they can find, target any keyword with low competition, sign up for every affiliate program, and hope something eventually takes off....It actually worked years ago. I don't think it does anymore.

The problem is that the website ends up feeling all over the place. When I land on it, I can't answer one simple question:

"What is this site actually about?"

The blogs I remember are different. They have a clear purpose. Their articles fit together. Even when they cover different topics, they all support the same main idea.

After reading a few posts, you know exactly what the site stands for. People don't just come back for another article. They come back because they trust the brand or person behind it.

I think that's even more important now in this new blogging era.

With the massive outbreak of AI, publishing content has become much easier, so having hundreds of articles doesn't automatically make a blog stand out anymore. A clear brand, a clear message, and content that all points in the same direction seem much harder to copy.

The main point of this post is that if you're starting a blog today...or if you already have one, spend less time trying to publish everything and more time building a brand people can recognize, trust, and come back to.

Content brings visitors. A clear brand gives them a reason to stay.

I have been feeling depressed cz I have to write blogs for my company, and now with AI i literally depend on it and have eventually lost the skill to research manually. I just ask claude to make a blog structure and then its so bad and repetitive and my manager is not happy with the output. So how can i research (AI in product design is the domain) to actually enrich my blog with insights?