Blog update: Autumn 2020. 100k pageviews!

Today, I share the official Autumn 2020 update for The Darwinian Doctor blog. We hit 100,000 pageviews! Read on to see how it happened.

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My last blog update in Spring 2020 celebrated the blog hitting 20,000 pageviews. I was really happy about this milestone, because it represented a quick doubling time from the 10,000 pageviews just four months before that.

A lot has changed in the 6 months since that last update. Covid-19 exploded and continues to ravage the world. My real estate empire grew to 10 rental units. I successfully recruited the Dr-ess to actively support our real estate investing.

Also: The Darwinian Doctor blog surpassed 100,000 pageviews!

Bending the curve

We were trucking along slowly and steadily throughout the summer towards 50,000 pageviews, but then a recent post was shared by Doximity. This site is essentially Linkedin for medical professionals and has over 1 million members.

In the post, I wrote about “golden handcuffs“: that heavy combination of high income, specialized skill sets, and debt that keeps physicians trapped in their day jobs despite an epidemic of burnout.

This single share completely wrecked my nice geometric curve and pushed it exponential. In the span of a few days, we shot past 50k views and hit the 100k mark!

100,000 page views!

I was incredibly excited to hit this mark. To put this into perspective, it took roughly two years for the blog to hit 50k page views, and only about one more week to get to 100k page views.

Almost the entirety of this gain was from that one blog post.

Humility

While I’m proud of this achievement, I write about these numbers with a big dose of humility. To put things in perspective, major physician finance websites like Passive Income MD and White Coat Investor get millions of page views every year.

For the last year, the blog has taken a back seat to my real estate investing and day job. While the most successful blogs blogs post every couple of days, I had resigned myself to posting just once every 1-2 weeks. I’d fit in writing sessions into slow on-call days or rare days off.

But with greater blogging success comes tantalizing possibilities and tough choices.

The road less traveled

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about that Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken”

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

When it comes to this blog, the easy path is to continue to view this as a simple creative outlet, with infrequent posting and few thoughts about growth.

The road less traveled might be to seize upon the blog’s newfound popularity with more posts, extended social outreach, and all that other stuff that make blogs popular. It’s a harder path for sure, but perhaps a worthy one.

Which way should I go?

Goals

I’ve found that having specific goals are a powerful way to focus activity and energy.

For example, my real estate goal is to achieve the equivalent of $150,000 of cash flow by 2025. This is in direct support of My Why, which is to have more freedom and time to live life to the fullest with my family and friends.

Having this measurable goal has added urgency to my investing. It’s a big reason why we’ve recently hit 10 units of rental real estate.

But what about for this blog? Should I set a big goal for this blog as well?

Conclusion

I honestly wasn’t sure how I’d answer these questions when I started writing this post. This is one of the reasons why I love this blog. It helps me think through many topics in a way that yields clarity. As I write posts, the clouds clear away and by the end of my writing process it’s usually all blue skies.

The newfound popularity of The Darwinian Doctor blog forced me to find clarity on its purpose. Here it is:

This blog will continue on as a chronicle of my path to that bright future of moFIRE. Achieving financial freedom will, for me, be the road less traveled.

Documenting this journey and motivating you to follow me down the path of intentional living is purpose enough for me. I’m going to worry less about the business side of the blog and more about living a life worth sharing.

Having made this determination, I feel peace and clarity. I feel a sense of all my goals aligning down this windy but rewarding road. Come along with me on this journey. It’s going to be a fantastic ride.

— TDD

Have you faced a dividing path recently? Which direction did you choose?

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