Today is the official blog update from autumn 2019. We hit 10,000 pageviews!
This post may contain affiliate links.
Autumn is a time of reflection. As the breezes turn crisp and the leaves brown, I find my thoughts turning to this past year. It’s been a year of incredible growth and change.
When it comes to this blog, I’d say that it’s achieving its main goal, which was to serve as a creative outlet. The decade I spent in medical school and residency offered little opportunity for creative expression, so writing these posts has been a wonderful way to flex my writing muscles again.
The blog is swiftly becoming much more than just a creative whimsey, however. Personally, it’s serving as an accelerant to my plans for financial independence and real estate investment. There’s something special about putting my plans into a written, public form that holds me accountable in a very robust way.
10,000 pageviews!
I recently reached an exciting blogging milestone: the site hit 10,000 total pageviews! I had hoped to hit this goal by the end of the year, so I’m two months early on this.
Another featured post on The Physician on Fire!
In September, another post of mine was featured on The Physician on Fire’s Sunday Best, which is a compilation of quality FI posts from around the web.
In this featured post, I discussed my decision to purchase a Tesla Model 3.
This feature brought a big spike in visitors, which bumped me over the 10,000 pageview mark earlier than I expected.
Experienced bloggers might feel that this pageview goal was too low. It’s true: larger blogs may have 10,000 pageviews in just one week! But I wanted to choose a goal that I saw as achievable. After all, I’ve read that most blogs die out within 6 months.
I can see why most blogs don’t last.
Starting a blog is hard
There’s a steep learning curve to the technical aspects of building a blog and gaining readership. It can be difficult to carve out time to write consistently. And Google isn’t too friendly either. Their algorithms virtually ignore new blogs for about 6 months.
But with time, things do change. My Google traffic has steadily increased after the 6 month purgatory period. It’s now to the point where the majority of my day to day traffic is comprised of random people from all over the world finding my blog.
Here’s a visual showing the blog’s worldwide reach, which currently encompasses 115 countries (out of that approximately 195 countries in existence as of 2019).
Alexa site ranking
Interestingly, in the same time period that my daily pageviews have increased, my Alexa ranking has steadily decreased. Over the last few months, it’s decreased from a rank of about 1.5 million to about 3 million a couple of weeks ago, and 6.4 million today. (Lower is better when it comes to Alexa rank.)
This ranking is supposed to represent how well your site is doing relative to all other sites out there in the world.
I think this drop probably mirrors my posting frequency, which has fallen slightly over the past couple of months. I would hazard a guess that the Alexa algorithm doesn’t value random pageviews as much as site growth and user interaction.
The future is bright
I’ve been super busy over the last month or two evaluating and purchasing a duplex in Indianapolis, so I haven’t had as much time to write. But I just closed on the property this week!
Renovations are getting underway, so I’ll hopefully have energy to direct back towards the blog now. Of course, this property is going to provide tons of good material for the blog over the next few months.
I hope to see this Alexa rank moving in the right direction again soon.
That’s all for this autumnal blog update. Have a great weekend!
— TDD
Want to support the blog?
- Join our investor club at Cereus Real Estate
- Visit my Recommendations page
- Check out my wife’s food blog: Eat Dessert First
- Stay at our luxury short term rentals
- Check out my TikTok channel
- Follow me on Instagram
- Follow me on YouTube
- Contact me with questions
Congratulations TDD on achieving your goal ahead of time. What is great is that it typically is a snowball effect. As you get more pageviews, more people hear about you and it is a positive reinforcement cycle.
You are preaching to the choir about how difficult blogging is. I never knew the behind the scenes stuff required to put out a 3-5 min read on a blog before I had to do it myself, so mad props to anyone who does this.
Physician on Fire helped jumpstart my blog as well with an early Sunday Best Feature that was my best day of traffic until November when I had a guest post on Financial Samurai that just had an insane amount of traffic because of it.
I don’t get Alexa either. Sometimes I have posts that have higher than expected pageviews yet my Alexa score turns for the worse.
I will say that it is persistence that eventually pays off and I can’t believe I am hitting an Alexa score that I thought was never possible a few months after I started (think the highest I peaked at was 288k).
Blogging for me as a creative outlet. I like the interaction with commenters and doubt I will ever get to a size where monetization will be a sizable income component but that’s ok with me.
Thanks Xrayvsn! I’m constantly in awe of your activity in the financial blogosphere. More times than not, when I read a post, I see a comment of yours at the bottom.
Congrats on your website’s success! Well deserved.
I agree that the rewards of blogging go beyond possible monetization. Having a creative outlet has made me so much happier with my life overall.
— TDD
Congrats on your rapid growth.
Don’t worry about Alexa. I don’t think those are very reliable. Alex ranks my site higher than it deserves and likely is rating yours unfairly.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks WealthDoc! Luckily I view the Alexa site rank as more of a curiosity at this point.
With time, perhaps this will change. But for now I’m just glad to still be creating content in a regular manner.
— TDD
Look no further for evidence that Alexa is bunk: I’m at #3,700,000 and I post once a month and get about three views a day. Keep up the strong work!
Hahaha, thanks for the reference point, Dr. Payitback! Maybe it’s the quality of your posts. They’re beautifully constructed!
Congrats on your newest child, by the way.
— TDD
Nice blog Its very useful for me thanks for sharing great information.
Thanks for stopping by! Good to know that my blog is popular in the Culinary and Hospitality Management world.
— TDD