By Max Sherman ยท October 2, 2023
SEO is slow so I also want to get traffic from going viral
Grade: C+
I published 776 quizzes across 81 different topics selected due to their high traffic and low "keyword difficulty" according to Ahrefs.
I'm pretty happy with the approach that I took on this, which was end to end automation. This includes GPT4 generating quiz questions, descriptions, titles, and topics, as well as using the Bing image search API to automatically find thumbnails, and the Google indexing API to automatically request indexing of the page.
As a result, all of these quizzes are indexed by google and I already do see a small trickle of organic search traffic for my oldest quizzes.
Time will tell if the organic search traffic can be converted into a productive revenue stream, but I'm looking forward to running the expriment either way.
I've been thinking more about traffic acquisition, and have decided that I need to pursue additional channels, but I'll write about that below.
Grade: B
The Google search console data is pretty broad, but it does show that I am ranking 9th position or above for few search queries like "football tactics quiz".
When I search for this manually, I don't see my website, so I'm giving myself a B because the data isn't lining up with reality. I also notice that my ranking is trending down over the month, but I think this may be because of introducing so many new pages, which should skew the averages.
I would love to see the ranking data per query but I don't see a way to do it in GSC. Regardless, AddictingTrivia has very low traffic, and I would expect SEO to be more of a long game. More and more my mindset is shifting to view SEO as a secondary reinforcing traffic source, as opposed to a primary channel.
Said differently: SEO is slow and I don't want to wait for traffic.
Grade: A-
I averaged 19.25 hours per week - just short of my goal.
I love this goal because I am confident that if I work consistently that I will be successful after enough time.
I'll have the same goal this month.
Grade: A
I have two channels for feedback, one implicit and one explicit. The explicit channel is a thumbs up/down button per question that lets a user indicate if a question is good or bad. The implicit channel is telemetry on the success rate per question, which tells me if a question is hard or bad, as well as if people are navigating away from quizzes without finishing.
I don't do anything with this data but if I can drive traffic to the site, then I can use it to automatically discard questions that are poor quality. This is especially important because sometimes the AI generated questions are ambiguous or have an incorrect answer marked as correct. That's a bad experience and this telemetry offers a low cost way to remove these low quality questions.
I am currently awaiting a decision on my 3rd application for adsense ads to be run on my site. The previous two times had a turnaround time of 8 days for a review that is automated. To me this is insane, but maybe it's a good thing, because I was looking online and saw that some random redditor said that borderline cases go to a human contractor to review. Maybe my turnaround time is so long because I always get sent to human review due to being borderline?
I tried Ezoic as well, but they rejected me due to not being in compliance with the Adsense policy. I have no idea what specifically I am being rejected for because Google doesn't say, though they tell me it's "Low Value Content". Ouch.
I've made some efforts to improve the quality of the homepage, so we'll see if the 3rd time is the charm. Fingers crossed.
I banked hard on SEO to be a driver of traffic to my site and so far the results have not been exemplary. They may improve over time but I have arrived at the conclusion that I want things to go faster.
Going viral is the best way to deliver organic traffic quickly, but how does something go viral? I don't really know, but I have a few ideas and those will be the focus of next month.
Idea 1: Generate TikToks
I have so many multiple choice questions in my DB that have been generated, why not package them up into a vertical video format and try and get some distribution on TikTok, IG, and YT shorts?
I'm already working on a system that can churn these out fast and cheap, so we'll see if we can make something happen in October.
Idea 2: Addicting Trivia QOTD
Wordle was able to get a lot of distribution from people sharing their scores, so I'm wondering if I can repeat that playbook and create a "Quiz of the Day" (QOTD). Every day there is a new one that is the same for everyone. Create a streak system and a little graphic with emojis that shares well on twitter, FB, etc.
I don't know the specifics yet, but I think there's a chance something along these lines can work.
If an account gets enough followers it becomes eligible for monetization via the creator program. I wonder if I can grow a set of TikTok accounts with programmatically generated content. If a video can get 10K views on average with $0.50 RPM, then with 2 videos per day that works out to $300 per month.
Very optimistically, if I can create videos that do 100K avg views, and post 4 times per day with $2 RPM, then this would be $24,000 per month.
Expanding out to YT and IG, there is a chance this alone is a 6 or 7 figure ARR business on its own.