Then there’s SEO, Pinterest optimization [1], etc. You’ll learn this along the way.
Don't be so sure about that. People who are telling you "I can't imagine" are probably failing to get much traffic. I don't have that kind of traffic on anything and I boggle at the idea of getting it.
So, a bit more detail and resource links would be appreciated. If a few blurbs were going to do it, then people wouldn't be asking you.
When we started, we didn’t care about the traffic. We did it because we loved it.
Content updating happens every year or during vacations when we get bored or when we learn a new technique. For example, when we learned that good photographs increase the CTR by 10x, my wife started learning photography. When we learned that Pinterest optimized vertical images get 5x+ CTR [2], we implemented that a year back. There are many Facebook groups for these discussions.
[1] https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/05/11/how-im-going-to-achie... [2] https://in.pinterest.com/pin/527554543833038696/
No matter how much SEO optimization you will put into a website if the content is bad or not regularly updated (at least 2 - 3 times per week) you won't grow enough to see a significant revenue.