Building a Blog in Public – 0 to 10k Monthly Visitors

📢 The update on Jan 1, 2023 will be the very last update for UntalkedSEO. You can access it here.

It wasn’t the plan to create and grow a new blog (Untalked SEO) all in public, but then I thought it’d be interesting to see how it plays out. And then I decided to share the journey publicly.

I am sharing weekly updates here on deepakness.com Medium, and IndieHackers.

For more frequent updates, you can follow me on Twitter.

Now, let me take you back to where it all started.

I and Bikash were talking about doing something interesting in our free time in the 1st week of Feb 2022. We love writing so much that we only get writing-related ideas, especially when I am involved. We finalized the idea of starting an SEO-related blog on the same day and started collecting more information on that. And, since we both are already earning enough from other sources, we didn’t even talk about how we are going to monetize the website — we still don’t know.

On Feb 6, 2022, we registered the domain untalkedseo.com. And for the domain name idea, I had heard the words like “untold” and “unheard” somewhere and it suddenly clicked to me that why not “untalked”.

We spent the next few weeks designing the blog. It was very confusing at first, we had no idea what to put on the homepage. However, after weeks, we came up with a simple one-section design that’s currently there on the website. We will be collecting emails by providing a 7-day SEO email course (the email collection system is not ready yet).

As I mentioned earlier, there was no plan to start sharing the whole journey of creating and growing in public. However, we were already fascinated by the idea of #buildinpublic and decided to give it a go.

In fact, it all happened yesterday (March 1, 2022) when I announced the same on Twitter. You can see the tweet below:

A few people reached out to ask what the whole setup is, how the website is created and what’s the tech stack. Well, let me mention everything here:

• Created in: WordPress
• Hosted on: Digital Ocean (aff. link) Litespeed server
• WordPress theme: Twenty Twenty One

And, here’s the list of all the WordPress plugins that I am using:

• Akismet Anti-Spam: for auto-filtering spam comments
• All-in-One WP Migration: for downloading manual backups of the whole site
• Insert Headers and Footers: for inserting Google Analytics and other scripts in the site’s header
• LiteSpeed Cache: for caching and site optimization (this works only on the Litespeed server)
• Rank Math SEO: for on-page SEO optimizations
• SVG Support: for enabling the support for SVG images
• Twentig: for adding extra customization options to the Twenty Twenty One theme
• WP-Sweep: for cleaning unused, orphaned, and duplicated data in WordPress
• Zoho Mail: for sending emails from WordPress site through Zoho servers

For now, we are creating pages under SEO Hub, and then we’ll start creating high-quality guides and case studies. Bikash and I are collecting information about all our previous projects that we’ve worked on, talking to a few old clients, and then we’ll be putting together amazing SEO case studies.

To be honest, we do not have any idea how far it will go but we’re doing it and aiming to hit 10,000 monthly visitors by the end of this year 2022.

That’s it.

You can see the other updates below:

See ya!