In two years, I had over a 100,000 hits and monetized my blog.

I first made this website back in 2020, and, if we’re going to be honest, I knew nothing about websites back then. I had dabbled in writing some mediocre blog posts on a Wordpress website, but I had decent tech skills. It was during this time I ended up doing a bunch of unpaid internships that gave me the core skills I needed to have a website, and, if we’re going to be honest, in the beginning this website did not look that good. It took me about a year to settle down just to figure out how to make a cute, aesthetic website that fit my needs as a creative writer and journalist.

But then I started evolving my portfolio and skillset. I began to take on more marketing gigs as a freelancer, which somewhat related to what my undergraduate degree is in, and then I realized I needed to get more on my website as someone who was digging so much deeper into digital marketing.

During the pandemic I taught myself SEO, and it was time to implement it. My only intention when starting this blog was to draw attention and clicks to my work as a creative writer, but at the site grew, I realized in 2023 that I needed to monetize the site for me to keep this somewhat sustainable.

Here’s my journey as someone who started from scratch and is now earning a decent side hustle off of my blog. It can definitely buy me one nice meal a month!

The Initial Phases of Starting the Blog

I made the website in April 2020, and then decided to start a blog in the spring of 2021. At first I had no idea what I was doing, and I’ve taken down a good chunk of my posts from that time period because they basically were like diary entries that shouldn’t be on the Internet.

I had my start of Internet writing as an unpaid intern and writer at several publications, which is where I really began to strengthen my skills on writing for the web. I also used platforms like General Assembly to learn the ins and outs of SEO in the basic free courses that last like an hour.

About three to four months later, I had a bit of a eureka moment when I was reading a book and realized that I wanted to remember what I thought about the book. So I began writing book reviews.

That was the first kind of content strategy I expanded out into, and I think it’s that dumb love for something that’s kept me going for so long. Sure, I was motivated by wanting to draw in numbers for my author website, but I generally just love talking about books and craft as a writer.

So I started writing about these topics. It was for myself and not an audience, and in the beginning, I really didn’t have an audience through SEO. I was max hitting ten people a day, and a lot of those people coming to my website were being funneled in through my other writing endeavors.

I began going through my old work at other publications and ensuring that backlinks were being made to my website, as I wanted to strengthen its authority for the Google search engines.

The Rapid Growth Phase

The first year and a half I had the blog, I wasn’t getting much traffic through SEO. I also wasn’t posting a ton, and was making content basically whenever I felt like it. The summer before graduate school I sat down and thought really hard about what the future of the website was, and then made a plan to write as many blog posts in advance.

When I ran out, I would get through the semester without writing anymore, and when winter break came around, I would return to the blog in order to get some work done here.

This meant I had to figure something out when it came to the kind of content I was posting. At this point I had been working as a film critic and paid for it about six months, and I realized the movies I was watching on streaming platforms for my own enjoyment was fair game. So I laid down the roads for a formatting guide for myself on what these posts would look like, then began to tap into that content.

Which opened new possibilities. I realized I watched a ton of theatre and television too, so I added those into my content strategy. I also realized I loved writing about my travels at some point, so I began writing about that and my career as a writer/freelancer/creative person.

It really helps that I genuinely find writing fun and do it as something that I don’t see as a job, so it means I’m capable of sitting down and writing up to four blog posts on a Sunday when I feel like it.

By the end of 2022, I had more than doubled my traffic. 2021 I clocked in about 10,000 visitors. In 2022, I had about 28,000. I owe this to the SEO strategies I had learned in my previous lessons, trial and error, and increasing the kind of content I was putting out into the world. I also began advertising on my social media about my blog, which was creating even more direct traffic.

The Monetization Phase

By June 2023, I realized the traffic I was getting was all-new levels I had never seen before. In the beginning, during the spring, I wasn’t posting much due to school. I was planning in advance to have posts come out every day starting in May, so I wasn’t worried about what was happening in the colder months.

I was ensuring that during the summer, content was going out every single business day. But when I was starting to hit 400-600 visitors a day just through Google, and almost 20,000 people in a single month, I began to apply to Adsense.

I’ve written about this before, but I was rejected from Adsense twice before ultimately getting accepted. The difference between the second and third time is nonexistent. I literally did nothing to fix my site. I waited two weeks, submitted my site, and had my acceptance within two days. It was wild.

But when I was monetized, I began to wake up with the possibilities this blog could take me. Sure, I wasn’t going to get rich from being a blogger, but I saw how quickly this blog was exploding.

I’m writing this blog post in August of 2023. I began curating the content all the way up until November in July 2023, as I was planning out what to do. You’re probably amazed at the sheer amount of content I’ve been consuming, but let’s not forget—my job is to watch movies and read books.

I did these things even if there wasn’t a blog to write about on. I genuinely enjoy these topics, and writing about them is how I end up remembering the sheer amount of content I consume over the course of a year.

At the time of writing this, I’ve been monetized for about 2.5 months. It’s going really well I think, and while I’m still getting the hang of this system, I’m pretty optimistic! My traffic is getting there, and I’m transitioning to the two posts a day model when it comes to September 2023.

So What’s Next for Me?

Honestly, who knows what any of us are doing. I think for me I’m going to keep this mindset of doing the blog for fun, not the money. The exposure is great, and so is the side cash, but I don’t want my motivations to due this to solely remain financial.

I find this really fun at the end of the day and I don’t want to lose that magic. So if you’re reading this, thank you for reading this far, and if you’re a regular here on my website, thank you for sticking around this long! I appreciate all of you.

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