A few years after finishing a History of Art degree, I landed my ‘dream’ job at an auction house on Bond Street. I was pleased initially as the journey to get there had been rigorous. I had to interview for four separate jobs at the company. The jobs I was applying for kept being given to internal candidates. It was an eight month process from start to finish. I finally landed one of the roles. It turned out I had to take a pay cut. Typical. I thought sacrificing a few thousand pounds a year was worth it because I would have the company on my CV forever. 

The reality was, I undersold myself and while I felt like I had taken a step forward in many ways, not being rewarded financially meant I felt a bit resentful. Even if I got promoted within the company, it would probably take me 3+ years to earn £30k a year there. This was in central London where it’s at least £8 a day to get to work. 

After tax, national insurance, my student loan and pension contributions, it worked out roughly that every £1000 pay increase equated to an extra £50 a month. 

And, I was working really hard. Leaving the office at 7 or 8pm, doing an hour’s commute home for the evening to be basically over by the time I got home. Not bad, but it’s not great. 

I figured there had to be easier ways to earn an extra £50 a month, than being stuck on an average wage, slogging my guts out and feeling pretty shattered most of the time. 

So in 2016 I was looking for an escape and was wondering what to do next with myself. 

On my commute, I would listen to side hustle podcasts. Two of my favourites were Ctrl Alt Delete, Coffee Break Blogging and of course Pat Flyn.  

These podcasts inspired me to start my own website. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing or how to get started, but after a trip to Italy I thought a good way to get started was to set up a travel blog. It obviously wasn’t the most original website idea, but it was very important that I just got started. 

I was pretty embarrassed by how terrible the website looked. I didn’t tell any of my friends or family about it. I just knew I wanted to create something and learn how to start a website. 

I didn’t know what I was doing and just started adding photos from my trips. 

But I found the whole process SO EXCITING. 

The fact I had my very own website out there for the world to see really got me excited. 

I could monitise the traffic, build an email list, sell a product, create a portfolio and much more. 

Don’t get me wrong, the website was terrible and Google Analytics looked a bit like this:

I started wanting to learn more about how to drive traffic to the website. So I started consuming more information on SEO and how to drive traffic to my blog. 

I installed an SEO plugin on my website and decided to go for it and optimise a post for a keyword. 

I started to get more visitors to the site. 

The post started increasing it’s position in Google rankings. Instead of being in position 9, it was in position 3. Eventually it moved up to position 1. 

I was hooked. 

I had consumed so much information on growing your traffic, I thought it was super complicated and you had to have a data engineering degree to understand what needed to be done. Actually, that’s not true.

Turns out you just need to:

• Find appropriate keywords. 
• Write great content. 
• Optimise your content.

If you replicate this process across all your website, have a different keyword for each page and start optimising your content. Your traffic is going to increase. 

It’s actually pretty simple. You’ve just got to get started. 

If we skip ahead to now, I’ve now helped over 100 entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners create content and optimise their websites to get not just more traffic, but more of the right kind of traffic.