Retirement in Washington State

Just to let my regular readers know, Marlene and I have retired!

We have moved to Washington State to be closer to Marlene's family.

We'll surely miss the beach and the desert of San Diego County. And all our friends we made there in Escondido and elsewhere.

Our view!

Our long term goal for the next few years is RV living. Arizona in the winter and Washington in the summer. But we'll see what life brings instead of what we plan.

Right now RVs are unavailable or extra-expensive. People are buying them for their summer vacations, since other types of flights and vacations are on hold until the pandemic is over. And many RV campgrounds are closed, for the same reason.

In the mean time, the blog I started a year ago is bringing in income. I am still adding articles to it. If all continues, we can delay taking SSI and avoid going back to work (other than the blog). https://www.whatbirdsareinmybackyard.com/

So, this, then is the end of this blog.

Thank you for reading and joining me on this journey!

Greg

What has Greg been doing lately?

I haven't posted anything new for several months. Some of you have asked me about it.

Well, in July I was working on art for a post I was writing on the at-sea identification of California's dark-rumped storm-petrels.

Then I watched a YouTube video on writing the perfect blog post in an hour. That led down a rabbit hole (I didn't realize until just now this idiom was in reference to Alice In Wonderland... oh, oh, distracted again) to writing blog posts for niche websites and earning income. Wait! I could write blog post and earn income? I've been writing blogs for over a dozen years and not getting that many readers. This niche website idea was talking about each web post being read by 1000 people every month! Most of my articles rarely reach 100 views, total in 5 or more years!

Oh, you're supposed to write long-content blog posts based on questions people ask Google? Not on what I think people should know about? Thousands of people monthly aren't searching Google for dark-rumped storm-petrel identification off California? Well, that might explain why most of my posts have very few pageviews!

My most popular posts? They're all on backyard birds. My best San Diego site guide posts get 20 to 30 readers per month. My backyard birds of San Diego post gets 350-500 visitors per month.

So I created a new website on backyard birds in the United States following the method developed by the Income School. I am now 6 months in and have written 90 blog posts. I'm on schedule. If all goes according to the typical website using this method, Google should start increasing the ranking of my pages in the next 3 months or so. Yes, it takes at least 9 months for a new website to start being trusted by Google so that it sends organic search traffic to well-written articles.

The good news is that many of my new posts immediately ranked very high on Bing and Yahoo. But very, very few people use Bing and Yahoo compared to Google. Google takes longer, but should be 90% of the total organic search traffic eventually. Once I get significant traffic (30,000 pageviews a month) then it will be worthwhile to monetize with ads. At least, that's the plan.

I've been writing articles on common backyard birds of every state, articles on bird feeders, bird foods, binoculars, and hummingbirds--popular topics.

If you want to see my latest project website it is here.

I expect that my posts to this San Diego blog will continue at a much slower pace, concentrating on adding birding site guides to areas I haven't written about yet.

Good birding!

Greg