My Mediavine blog journey: This is how long it took me to reach 50k sessions
After losing freelance writing clients, I decided to start publishing my writing on my own website. It went pretty well, and in less than a year I was making more than $1000 a month. Here’s how I did it.
Before I dive into how I built up my website, here’s a few caveats to my story:
I have had the domain/website petrinadarrah.com for a while before starting to publish travel content on it. I used this site as my writer portfolio, and had dabbled in a few other blogging ventures on this site (I published a few posts on inclusive language to boost my personal brand).
I had some strong backlinks to my domain from the freelance travel writing work I have done previously.
Creating content is hard and time consuming. It’s a slog, and one I managed only because I have a lot of motivation and determination.
A month by month breakdown of building my website to 50,000 sessions
Building up traffic to a website is a slow process, but you will see results faster when you focus your efforts. I’ll walk through the whole year, even though I only really started to intently focus on my travel blog — and see results — from around May.
January — March 2023
I published maybe 2 posts in this time, targeting low value keywords. I didn’t really know what my strategy was, and had no real idea of how much work was involved in creating enough content to reach 50,000 sessions.
April 2023
I was in a scooter accident and lost my main freelance writing client in April, which meant I suddenly had a lot more time on my hands.
I couldn’t really go anywhere or do anything, and with no work in my pipeline, I was freed up to focus solely on my travel website.
I went for it.
I published around 30 posts in April, most of which were pretty poorly formatted and targeting random keywords.
I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was reading a lot of Niche Pursuits success stories and determined to make it work.
I also had to make some big changes to my website, like switching from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1.
May
July and August 2023
I did very little work on my website these months, as I was offline on extended hiking trips in Norway and Greenland.
September 2023
I spent all of September in Finland, focusing exclusively on writing as much content as I could.
It worked.
By the end of September, I finally started to see sessions pick up.
October 2023
December 2023
By the end of December, I reached around 95k page views, which put me well over the threshold for applying to Mediavine.
My key takeaways:
It’s going to take a different length of time for everyone.
Focus on writing as much content as possible
It is entirely possible to reach your blogging goals with the right efforts.
If you’re interested in starting a blog on Squarespace, you might also find these articles helpful:
