Social Media
Originally, I planned to get traffic from Reddit and direct it to my blog.
However, I found that it’s very difficult to leave a URL on Reddit without getting banned.
I spent half an hour browsing Reddit’s homepage. If you approach it with a mindset of finding something useful, you’ll get nothing. But if you approach it for entertainment and to pass the time, then it becomes quite interesting.
In the long run, I won’t waste time on a platform that doesn’t allow posting links.
Currently, X and YouTube allow direct posting of links. The traffic might not be high, but it’s not explicitly forbidden. As long as I can post links, everything else is manageable.
Search Engines
From my blog’s data statistics, I checked the visitor sources.
It’s clear that Google has zero indexing for my blog. Bing, on the other hand, has indexed it, shows some traffic, but not many clicks.
The third one is the area in the red box in the image below, which seems to be the same as the first one. It appears to be a Russian search engine, and its user base is growing.
I used site:xxx.com and found that it has roughly indexed several of my articles, mostly casual essays, not technical ones, about 7 articles in total.
Blog SEO
I haven’t fully studied SEO yet, but I think one reason Bing indexed my blog might be that I shared my blog link on X, using an image as a cover with the URL.
Although there weren’t many clicks, the URL was indeed left on the X platform. This should be an influential weighting method. I even clicked it myself and Umami could track that it came from X.
Regarding Reddit mentioned above, I posted on Reddit today, which got 2.5k views and 1 comment. However, since I couldn’t place my blog link, even with a certain amount of traffic, it’s basically useless for blog SEO.
So, I’ll still focus on X. Talking to myself there for a long time is better than Reddit, where I can’t place links.
Moreover, X has XPay, Grok, Starlink, Tesla, membership revenue, rockets, Dogecoin, etc. But Reddit? It has nothing, and won’t have anything in the future either.
Blog Commissions
Don’t count on Google ad revenue. It’s not even willing to index my blog. Just like this blog, AI told me that if you speak ill of Google, it won’t index you. So-called freedom of speech and “don’t be evil” are nothing more than that – all fake.
YouTube, blogs, and X should have their own products from the start, such as independent development, e-books, or other ways you can profit, even affiliate commissions, Amazon Associates, etc. This way, you don’t have to bet on ad revenue, which is a low-probability endeavor.
I have placed ESP32 affiliate links.
Tips
Internet income should be streamlined, but also not concentrated on a single platform. Three platforms is a suitable range.
I’ve currently chosen X, blog, and YouTube, and today I’ve excluded Reddit.
I plan to write a blog post first, then create a corresponding YouTube video for that blog post (don’t over-produce it, a casual shoot is fine). Embed the YouTube video into the blog, place the blog address in the YouTube video description, and then share the blog on X, using the blog’s cover image with the URL.
This creates a small closed loop among the three. As long as one gets traffic, the other two will also see improved traffic.
For now, I’m not considering TikTok; I’ll think about it later.
Originally, the blog was supposed to focus on homelab-related topics, but I don’t want to run a blog based on a so-called single niche. That would be tiring and uninteresting.
Instead, I’ll just write about whatever comes to mind, including homelab.