It took me 34 months or almost 3 years to get to the 1 million page views milestone. In this article I will reveal 3 simple tactics (no tricks here) how I achieved it.
I took the title and inspiration for this post from Chris Lema article: How I grew my blog to 1 million pageviews in 18 months (without tricks)
1 million pageviews
Now I can read with a smile my previous milestone - 10,000 users in 10 months. A lot of has changed since then, but here are things that don't.
- Daily blogging for almost 3 years. I started this blog with an experiment - Can I blog 365 days in a row? Turns out I can not only 365 days but almost 3 years. Daily blogging has been my habit ever since, and I'm not planing to stop it. In fact I got just about 15,000 page views in the first 12 months, while at the end of the second blogging year I already reported 400,000 page views. It's still about 2 months before third blog anniversary and I have crossed 1 million page views milestone. Awesome.
- I cover many topics, but these are the most covered: my travels (interesting tourism objects, churches and monasteries e.t.c) hotel reviews, restaurant reviews, home remodeling, economic trends, online shopping and Drupal development.. I would love to limit my blogging topics to fewer in future. I spend a lot of time on photography, some 80% of articles featured on this blog are photo stories from my trips around the World and living in Georgia. Actually after living in Georgia for more than five years as an expatriate I have developed quite popular Tbilisi restaurant series, and visitors from Georgia ranks 4th to my blog (after US, UK and India). Recently I developed a separate page, listing all my notes from Georgia, see All about Georgia, which is a section dedicated to my travels and food experience in Georgia. This map can serve as a virtual guide for planing your travels to Georgia. The travel destinations on the map are grouped by tourism objects,restaurant & hotel reviews. Another interesting photo project featured on this blog is Piece of Life - a photo project run by two. Here mostly are featured images that didn't find a separate photo story or in most cases just looks great. Almost forgot, I feature Digital Photography School section as well. Most of the photo stories here are created with a Canon 1200D DSLR camera I bought exclusively from income from blog.
- Organic reach, no black or white hat seo, no link building schemes, all incoming links are gathered in natural way. I have never used tools like semrush, majestetic seo or anything else to check mine or competitors position in Google SERP.
34 months later since I started this blog, I can call myself one of the lucky guys, who actually is getting paid for blogging. That 1 million page views have helped me to earn about $18,000 from different advertising channels, starting Google AdSense, including Svorn Ads, Amazon CPM, Booking.com (some other) and Affiliate marketing. In fact thanks to the blogging I have spare funds to invest in our rural country house remodeling works. Here are some major milestone were blog fund have helped in home reconstruction works: Changing roof (~$5,000), drilling a bore hole (~$3,500), digging a pond (~$700).
It would be much harder to find funds to invest into our rural country house, and probably we wouldn't even start this project without spare funds.
Yup, quite an interesting last 34 month were from text based articles at start I have developed many new categories featuring rich photography. I can say, with help of blog I have become a better photographer at least ha ha.
I hope it won't take another 34 months to break 2 million page views, if things will continue as now, I should crack second million after 10 months, let's see will I manage to double my earnings from that, but for now, thanks for being with me and have a wonderful day.