After two and a half years, my blog has become a business.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first began, I decided to purchase this website and domain. I was nineteen, pretty depressed about my life, and then the pandemic happened. So in order for me to focus on what made me happy, I threw myself onto things.

I volunteered virtually, wrote a lot of poems, and then began crafting how to set up this website as an author. I primarily work as a journalist and writer, and knew that I needed a place to showcase my portfolio in order for people to find me. That said, I began learning more and more about SEO.

The deeper I got into search engine optimization, or SEO, I realized that this could be something that really helped me build a platform as an author. I started blogging on this website because of the marketing potential, but also because I really enjoyed reading, writing, and talking about the kinds of things I was consuming on a daily basis.

That said, it’s now grown into something that resembles a full time income. I never ever thought it would have gotten to this point, but I’ve started seeing not only as a marketing tool, but a business as well.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the past two and a half years.

Blog growth is not linear, and there are ups and downs.

It took me around the two year mark to really see any improvements with my blog. For a while, I was only getting about a hundred hits a day, and I was thinking about doing what everyone else said to do: start doing keyword research.

But then something miraculous happened: while everyone else despaired at what the HCU Google updates did to their websites, it actually made my website traffic skyrocket in a way that I’d never seen before. Suddenly, I was now getting up to three thousand and more clicks a day.

That said, since then it’s been up and down, but still slowly and surely growing. When I look at my Google Search Console graphs on traffic growth, it becomes more obvious that the process of growth isn’t linear. Usually when I hit peak traffic, it has a sharp decrease.

But, as I keep creating content, that decrease only lasts for a week or so. My traffic almost always recovers. I never did any of the SEO keyword research—instead I just follow my instincts and keep writing about things that interest me, versus following the trends. Sometimes it helps me with my income, sometimes it doesn’t.

Mediavine completely changed my income from the blog.

I didn’t realize about monetization tactics, especially adding ads to one’s website, until pretty late in the game. I was getting pretty consistent traffic when I had applied to Adsense in May 2023, and the first time I was rejected from the monetization platform.

Here’s the thing: I did absolutely nothing to change my website, but reapplied a few weeks after my rejection from Adsense and got into the program. I had Adsense until January 2024, and I made a grand total of about $400 during my time there with my gradually increasing traffic.

Mediavine was my goal, though, once I realized how much better it was in December. I had to wait until January, as I did not have Google Analytics, and I had to collect all of the necessary data it took to be accepted into the program.

I applied to Mediavine officially at the beginning of January, when I was on an extended trip to Malaysia. It took about two weeks for me to be fully set up with the platform, and on January 12 I began running ads.

I’m writing this towards the end of February 2024, although this blog post might come out a bit later. It’s now making me really good money with my traffic, even though the first financial quarter of the year, Quarter 1, makes less than the rest of the year.

Truly life changing right here on top of my additional income streams.

The future of my blog is looking bright, and I’m looking to expand my business.

With the switch to Mediavine, it has really made me so hopeful about the future of this website. I’m going to obviously continue with my regular poetry and writing, but I do genuinely enjoy what I’m doing with this blog and how it connects to my broader interests about reading, writing, and watching.

It also keeps me sharp with my writing, as it’s built a pretty consistent writing practice for me overall. Every weekend I write out several blog posts, and it’s usually long form content I’m posting on this site. I usually don’t work well with longform content, but the blog has really put me outside of my comfort zone.

I am looking to expand this website into selling my photography in the near future, and I want to see how I can leverage the blog in a way that builds my personal brand even more. A corporate job looks very unappealing to me right now, especially considering the mass layoffs that have been happening as of late.

Hope you stay around to see this journey! It has been so exciting throughout the past year.

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