My first blog was a personal blog that kind of functioned as a mashup of book reviews, experiences, pictures, and philosophical thoughts. I’ve since taken down that blog, but I wanted to look back and share some of the statistics from the blog.

I’ve included screenshots of the blog’s all-time stats below. Keep in mind, I was not “writing for anyone,” so these are the kind of stats you might expect for basically keeping an online journal.

As you can see, 2009 and 2010 had some huge spikes (relatively), which all came from google search. I had no desire to write for an audience at this time, so the spikes are pretty much dumb luck. I was ranking for terms that no one in their right mind would think of targeting because they were so out there. To give you an idea,  I’ve also provided some stats below on the top posts and blog clicks.

 As you can see from the screenshots above, my book reviews were bringing in some good traffic relative to the rest of the posts. In addition, when I blogged about my experience about interviewing for Harvard during Junior year of high-school (or was it Senior year?), it turns out that a lot of other students were searching online, trying to figure out what the interview would be like, which led to a lot of traffic from google.

I was also picked up on another “how to” blog, which linked to my Harvard interview experience, pushing it up in rankings and giving me a lot more traffic relative to the amount of traffic I was already doing.

I also ranked for a strange term “cigar butt investing” at the time, which was Warren Buffet’s approach to stock investing that I was trying for a bit.

Since 2014, I’ve taken down the blog. It was up for about 5 years. Seeing as it was more of a personal blog, I had outgrown it and wanted to venture onto new things, even though it was averaging 50 views a day and I wasn’t adding any new content.

Below, I’ve listed out some of the lessons I learned from blogging with this first personal blog.

1. You need to keep blogging.

As you can see, there are huge swings in my traffic. This is primarily due to the inconsistency with which I was blogging. I would go for weeks/months without blogging, and then pick it up again. I found that my site overall ranked better in google when I was consistently adding content (3 times per weekish).

2. You can build a business from blogging.

When I launched my very first business, Book2eBooks, which I’ve catalogued here, most of my customers found me from my blog with the search terms “convert books to ebooks,” because that was the title of my post.

The business website was relatively new, but my blog’s domain had been around for a while and ended up ranking well for those terms. I had discovered content marketing, without realizing it.

I also validated the business idea. The traction on the blog post proved that people were looking for a way to convert their books into ebooks. If you look at the stats, you can see it drove 684 people to the business website.

3. You can get in trouble blogging. People are listening.

Despite the fact that I was receiving visitors, I didn’t actually think people read my posts. Boy, was I wrong. I was interning at this company one summer and ended up writing a bad review of the book that the owner of the company had written.

It showed up in google, got thousands of views instantly, and I had a very awkward talk with management, where they very nicely asked me to take the post down. Phew. Could have been worse. Kudos to the company, they also didn’t fire me. The owner had a notorious streak for being…demanding, but apparently he/she had just laughed it off. Again, phew.

I’ve also recently had another fiasco with one of my professional blogs that I might get into in another post. Be careful what you say and post online!

4. Time is not your enemy.

Sounds backwards right? You heard me right. Time is not your enemy when blogging. The longer your domain is around and the longer you put out quality content, the easier it will be to rank for new key terms and have your posts picked up by other sources.

If I had to do it again, I would have started a professional blog way earlier than when I did. Think about it…at certain points I was averaging over 300 views a day, simply from dumb luck. I wasn’t trying to write for anyone.

Start blogging as early as possible. Write quality articles. Post at minimum once per week, at most 3 times per week (hard to keep up the focus and quality if you post more than this), and over the course of a few years you’ll build up a small traffic generator that you can use as a base to launch products.

5. Think about your audience.

Although I say that I wasn’t “trying to write for anyone,” the posts that did well had a specific audience. The Harvard interview post would be useful for people who wanted to get a sense of what the interview was like when you applied to Harvard.

The cigar butt stock investing answered questions about what the technique actually is that they may have read about from Warren Buffet’s biography (and then typed the term into google).

The book reviews clearly had an audience. People who wanted to get a sense of what the book was like would read them. Remember, GoodReads and other book review websites didn’t really exist back then (at least to my knowledge).

6. Blogging is the Ultimate Networking Tool

I’ve met so many people through my current blog now and I also did then. You tend to meet/attract people who have similar interests as the topic you are writing about, whether that’s books or investing.

When you are beginning to blog, don’t just think about what kind of customers or followers you might want, but think about what types of people you want to meet.

Conclusion

Do you have a question about my stats or about blogging? Leave a comment below! Hope the post was helpful.