A Frugal Doctor 1 year update!
Hello readers!
My blog, A Frugal Doctor, has been up for 1 year now! (technically, the site was launched on December 9, 2020, so this update is slightly late).
Major milestones in the past year include:
Finished the entire Investing 101 series
Interactive FIRE time to retirement calculator
41 articles/blog posts
Approved for Google Adsense
As mentioned in the 9 month update, I did sign up for Google Adsense, but you can always use an ad blocker if you like. My hope is that Adsense revenue can eventually pay for the cost of the domain name and hosting (currently about $250 per year).
My main goal for 2022 is actually to revise and update my book. I believe that my book’s message remains strong, but some sections could use a little updating. Also, the book pre-dates this blog. There will always be some redundancy in information, but the book should represent additional value to people who buy it, compared to blog posts that anyone can read.
As far as audience, for the whole of 2021, the blog saw 13k unique visitors, 16k visits, and 23k total page views. The first few months were very slow, and most of the traffic came from September to December.
From squarespace analytics
The above analytic chart shows blog traffic by source per month. In January, when the blog first launched, there was significant traffic from friends, co-workers, and family, who will visit the site to support your efforts and check out your content. This interest dies out pretty quickly, however. By February and March, the site only received 67 and 63 visitors the entire month, respectively.
But starting in April, I noticed that I was getting more traffic from Google and other search engines. The articles I posted 2 or 3 months ago were finally beginning to attract strangers on the internet, who were searching for a similar topic.
Search engine traffic really picked up around June and has continued to grow, although I expect the growth to plateau a little bit going forward. Again, this is without any paid advertising or traffic, and is 100% organic. My most frequently searched article by far is the one on leveraged ETFs. It’s very difficult to predict which topics/articles will garner the most interest, but I’ve certainly got a lot to learn still about traffic and SEO. Although blog traffic depends on a number of factors, including niche, it seems that many bloggers have a similar experience. Patience is key, and Google works in mysterious ways.
My pace of new articles will probably slow down further in 2022. I’ve found that its very difficult to publish a lengthy (2000 words or so), high quality article weekly or even bi-weekly. This blog remains a hobby, but I’ll try to write an article every month.
As always, I intentionally hide website/personal updates from the rest of the site so as to not mix them with normal articles. If you’ve found this post regardless, you have my sincerest thanks for being such a diligent and dedicated reader. Happy New Year!
