I'm doing well, but I want to be great... What am I missing?

You are currently growing your blog the right way so keep doing what you are doing and you might surpass the competition. It's just a matter of time.

To be fair, I haven't had a good look around, but it seems you're doing OK. Just focus on what you're doing and the rest (should) come.

Also, it ain't a good idea to link to your competitors... Why give them a free link? I found links to all of your competitors here: Links « The Tiny Life

At least make the links nofollow if you have to.

Thanks for your suggestion.

I just took a quick look at your blog, and there were a few things that jumped out at me right away.

First I should say that I think you have a lot going for you. I just looked at the latest post about building closets, and I saw original pictures and an original video. I think that type of thing can help you a lot, and I'm guessing that in a niche like this it's almost a prerequisite (unless you have a fair amount of resources and can "report" on the tiny house world in a professional way).

So the fact that you're actually in the trenches and doing it, and then showing what you're doing is a big plus.

As for improvements, I think there are a number of different things that could help. As I said, I just took a quick look, and so I might be off base a little here and there (I didn't read lots of posts), so take it with a grain of salt.

The first thing is an overall approach suggestion. It's good that you're in there doing things and reporting your experiences, but it might help if you put a little more focus on helping your reader. I realize you probably do help them with what you post about, but the approach might be a little more direct.

For example, in the one post that I looked at about building a closet, you might restructure it to make it a post along the lines of "How to Build a Tiny House Closet." You could still keep all your personal experience in there, but the overall approach would be geared more toward helping your readers do what you did. Or another approach might be to put the superficial emphasis on you, but still really make it about helping your readers. By that I mean giving it a title like "How I Built My Tiny House Closet in Under Two Hours" (or whatever it was ... or How I Built My Tiny House Closet for Under 50 Bucks ... or How I Built My Tiny House Closet with Absolutely ZERO Experience, etc.). Or maybe you've built a very specific type of closet (called XYZ, for example), and so you could title it "How to Build an XYZ Tiny House Closet from Scratch."

I would also say that for a post like that to take off, it would need to be a TRUE (and very detailed) tutorial of what you did/what your readers should do. The way it is at the moment seems to mention some details about what you did, but it doesn't really TEACH your readers how to do the same thing. It seems that you are just telling your readers what you did. You should be SHOWING them what you did, so they can do it too. In short, a more effective post about this topic would be much more detailed.

So that's a larger/more general suggestion I would have -- focus more on your reader and helping them solve their issues. You can still use your personal experiences and your own voice, but putting the focus on helping them rather an just reporting your experiences will get more people interested in the end.

There were a few specific things I noticed right off the bat too. One is that you should probably work on your titles more (both from an SEO point of view and a reader-enticing point of view). For example, you closet post doesn't mention the phrase "tiny house" at all. It just says, "Building My Closet." You're probably going to want to work the phrase "tiny house" into ALL your post titles. It will seem repetitive (and maybe ridiculous) after a while, but I promise you that Google will not rank you for important keywords if you don't.

Look at some of my examples from above (all of which include the phrase "tiny house). They are geared toward both search engines and readers. You'll probably want to both do keyword research (though don't be a slave to it) and also look up tips for headline writing.

As for your images, they didn't really seem optimized at all to me. One I looked at had a file name that was IMG_2225-768x1024.jpg and the alt text was "IMG_2225". I would do a little research on how to SEO images. Make your descriptions specific. One good way to think of it is write the descriptions for the blind. If a blind person were reading your site, and they came to the point in your post for the image above, they wouldn't have any clue what the image was actually about. True, you do have a caption (so that helps), but do it for the file name, the alt text, and the descriptions too. Again, make it very specific to the actual photo. This helps with image SEO, but it also helps with the overall SEO of your post.

The final more detailed point I would make is to do a lot in interlinking between posts. I see you did that in this post, but make sure you're using good link text (not always the same and not always the exact same keyword phrase). For example, if you wrote a detailed tutorial about "How to Build an XYZ Tiny House Closet from Scratch," then you'd want to link to it from other posts with link text like "XYZ tiny house closets," "building an XYZ closet," "xyz closets from scratch," etc.

One more large thing to consider -- what's your USP? What makes your site different? Your tag line is "tiny houses, tiny living," and that gives us a clear idea about the topic, but can you get more specific, something like "How to live large in a tiny house," or "How to build a tiny house from scratch for under $XX,XXX," etc.

-- there were a few other things I noticed like breaking up the text a little more with SEO-ed subtitles and making sure paragraphs were organized into one-topic chunks, but I think this is enough for now

-- by the way, you can and SHOULD link to your competition if it's logical to do so. If you show that you're a good, reliable resource, then BOTH Google and your visitors will love you for it.

I think you have a decent site. I was going also thinking of getting into the same market at one point, but I just don't have the experience of actually doing it, like you do, so my site would have just been another crappy blog attempting to game search engines and get some visitors.

Since you really seem to be an expert in the niche (well done!), I'd suggest reaching out and getting your content shared on similar sites in the tiny house movement, competitors or just other bloggers who aren't really competing (from an IMer perspective), and brand yourself as the go-to guy for this.

I've never been a big fan of full articles, 5-10 articles deep, on the main page, but that's not the SEO person talking, but just someone who likes to see it more magazine style, so I can jump to particular categories that I like to see and ignore posts in categories that I don't.

I like filling your blog with content about other people in tiny houses, but I'd certainly try to find a way to better feature your posts about YOUR house...

Good way. Just keep it up and don't forget that the CONTENT is the KING! Write only QUALITY and UNIQUE content! Everything looks good!

Also, you are not using meta description, write unique meta description for each post or page... it is very important even Google takes meta data from the content.

Get an SSL certificate

Hi - I would recommend checking the ranking for each of your keywords. If you aren't ranking for some, then make those a longer term keyword.

I checked your image alt tags on this page: What Is The Tiny House Movement? « The Tiny Life, but don't see where they are optimized.

I also looked at your internal links on that page and don't see any of your keywords linked to another page.

I'd also recommend building your email list. I don't see a list sign up available on the sidebar or in the header. You probably need to nurture your list to buy or build tiny and email marketing would help you do that.

You need to keep doing what you have been doing since it is working and be patient.