12 month blog review

I’ve already posted my FIRE update for 2020, this is just a review of the blog itself.

Introduction

I’d been wanting to start for a blog for a number of years- as I found myself talking to multiple people about the same thing- and it would been much easier if I could just post them a link to what I was saying/thinking, and then talk about it- rather than explain it for the 15th time (to different people). Having read others like mrmoneymustache & Monevator, I thought- hey I can do that!

Slow slow start

I’ll be lying if I said I wasn’t slightly dishearted with how slow it seemed to be before I started to get any visitors at all. In January I wrote nearly 3,000 words:

53 Users over the entire month- half were probably me (before I worked out how to exclude myself).

On I went though- originally trying to write every week, ended up more like every other week- until later on in the year where I would go weeks without writing anything. Even in my worse month- June, I still managed one article.

Year End

So, as we get to the end of the year, I’ve written 35 posts (including this one), with a total of 28,000 words. You know what, I’m happy with that, 500 words a week, every week on a new post isn’t bad.

Visitors increased as well- without decreasing the average session duration or bounce rate increasing as well. I still get very little organic traffic from Google/Search engines, but quite a bit of referral traffic, especially from Reddit (there is a weekly post that pushes traffic if I manage to post something)

Ads/revenue

I always knew making money online was going to be really difficult- especially on such a new blog. I did manage to get Adsense approved though- and a couple of people even clicked ads. It is almost covering the cost of the shared server that this blog sits on, so I’m happy about that.

Let’s hope 2021 brings more posts & content, and continues to be helpful for anybody reading. Thanks!