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.
After working as a freelance travel writer for around a year, I decided to give travel blogging a go. I wanted to have more control over my time and income, as I was finding the constant hustle of freelancing tiring.
Essentially, I wanted to build my own thing — something I could be proud of, and that I could grow into a business in the longer term.
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.
The age and backlinks meant I probably hit my goals faster than you would with a brand new site — I was already well out of the Google sandbox.
I also have a background in digital content marketing, so I know a lot about SEO. I had to learn a lot about building a website, but I wasn’t starting from nothing in terms of knowledge.
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, like “best cafes in X”.
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.
I was still freelancing at this point, so I was only dedicating a couple of hours a day maximum to growing my site.
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.
This change meant I re-evaluated a lot of the content that had just been sitting on my domain. I deleted anything that was not travel related and tidied up my core site pages to be more reflective of a travel blog, instead of a freelance writing portfolio.
May
In May I kept trying to publish as many posts as I could, but I also struggled a lot with self doubt. I wasn’t sure if I would get to where I wanted to be, because at this point in time I was seeing next to no traffic.
Most of what I was publishing was what I saw others publishing, or it was generally pretty low quality content. For example, “things to do in X” posts that added nothing new.
I still didn’t have a clear strategy. I was mostly copying what other people were doing, which while might be the natural way to get started, isn’t a solid way to start off a website.
At this point, I was still developing my voice and intention.
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.
I was still writing some pretty average content, but some of the articles I churned out in this month are still my highest performing.
October 2023
I spent two weeks of October on the coast of Italy, so again, did very little work.
I was seeing a little more traffic at this point (I celebrated each incremental win) and I was also working on redoing a lot of the weaker content I had already put out.
I now had enough content to go through and do a lot of internal linking.
November 2023
I went home to New Zealand.
I reworked a lot of posts in this time, because I was starting to see some serious traffic now.
By this point, I had started to get a clearer grasp on what my unique proposition as a writer was. As in, I stopped just trying to reiterate what the top search results were saying.
I started focusing more on what I can uniquely add to the conversation.
December 2023
My timing was unintentionally good.
I was definitely helped along by the fact that December is when peak travel kicks off in New Zealand. I remember coming out of a camping trip where I had no mobile reception and checking my analytics — and numbers had shot up massively.
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:
