I Grew My Blog to 169,595 Visitors and Shut it Down
Here are the lessons learned.
When I decided to shut down my blog, I knew it wouldn’t be easy.
But I had no choice. My blog was failing. I had to bear its expenses. I could not afford it any longer. So I decided to quit.
Over the course of my blogging journey, I have grown my blog to 169,595 visitors and 253,534 views in total. But I never made more than $50 from my blog.
Can you believe this?
I know it’s hard to swallow. But it is what it is.
Now you understand there was a reason to say ‘I quit.’
But it’s only one of the reasons. Even if my blog didn’t make much through AdSense, I knew if I crossed one million page views, I would get some sponsorships.
This is what I thought.
My blog saw a dip in traffic in early 2021 and kept falling until May. The downfall was obvious because I didn’t post anything between October and April. My blog’s traffic, which was around 500 per day before October, went to 15 a day.
When I started publishing posts again from April end, it rose to 150 and remained there until I stopped publishing in September. Well, it was the time when I decided to say goodbye to my blog.
To summarize, I wasn’t making enough money from my blog (at least to bear my hosting and domain expenses); my traffic hit a plateau that didn’t see a rise for three months straight, and I wanted to focus on my YouTube channel (which I co-owned).
Now, when I have finally quit my blog, here are the lessons learned.
Blogging isn’t for everyone
I don’t want to discourage you. But it’s a fact.
According to a study, only 5% of bloggers make a living out of their blogs. 14% of them make enough to support their families, and the rest never make more than $100.
That’s the harsh reality of blogging that no blogger wants to tell you. If they did, there would have been no affiliate sales by signing you up with their promoted hosting platform.
By no means do I mean that promoting products is bad. It’s just that you can imagine how many people are drawn into the boss-free life of a blogger where they can make tons of money by selling stuff to people. But only 1% of them are willing to put in the hard work. Others can’t imagine investing two or three years writing a blog when you don’t know whether it will rise or fall.
So if you are willing to do whatever it takes, you are most welcome. Otherwise, don’t waste your time, energy, and money on this.
Pick your niche and write every single thing about it
I wrote about SEO and blogging when I first started my blog. Then I switched to smartphones. Then to PC builds. I was just dabbling here and there.
It was hard for me to decide on one niche and write about it. I was trying to be a jack of all trades. I thought, why not write about everything that interests me. It will get me more traffic. That was my mistake.
When you write randomly, you lose the core purpose of your blog. Your blog is not made to write whatever interests you. It’s made to write what your reader wants. And I can bet they don’t want you to talk about tech and history altogether.
Imagine a YouTuber talking about Apple products in his video and about Hitler in his next video.
Wait! What just happened?
It doesn’t sync well. Does it?
It’s the same thing with a blog.
So pick a niche like health, tech, finance, or whatever you want and write about it. Be a master of your niche and see your traffic grow.
WordPress (Self-hosted) vs Blogger
People always ask me this — where should I be writing? WordPress or Blogger?
This has always been a topic of hot debate. New bloggers are often confused about where they should start first. WordPress requires you to invest in hosting and domains while Blogger doesn’t. And I know few people aren’t ready to spend their money on something they can’t trust yet.
But I don’t even consider Blogger to be a competitor. If you are serious about blogging and want to earn money, go for WordPress. No doubt about it. But if you still want to make money but don’t want to spend money, start writing on Medium.
With an audience of millions, Medium can give you a good start in your blogging career. Writing here will help you analyze if you can take the next step and invest in your blog. Writing here is free so you don’t have to spend money on it (unless you want to read other people’s content).
The only problem is that not everyone can make money on Medium and you don’t own your content. So I would recommend you to start writing on Medium and later, when you launch your blog, republish your Medium content to your blog. Problem solved!
Be Consistent
You know, what is the difference between an unsuccessful blogger and the successful one — consistency.
Being consistent is hard when you don’t see any results. It’s easier to give up than to wake up the next morning and work again. Lots of people, who wanted to be a blogger, quit easily when they don’t get any results.
At that time, you, being consistent means you’re taking over thousands of bloggers who would have become your competitor, had they remained consistent. But they didn’t. You get the chance to be on top of them and work consistently without any failure. And that’s when you get results.
When I was running my blog, I wasn’t consistent. Sometimes, I would write 5 articles a week. But sometimes only one in a week. There would be days when I would go without publishing anything for one month straight. This inconsistency never gave me any positive results.
But I saw the magic of consistency when I worked for 7 months straight. I published 3–4 articles a week every month. That resulted in consistent traffic of 15,000 visitors and 24,000 page views per month.
It worked. Consistency worked.
If you want to be called a successful blogger, be consistent.
Have some patience
Blogging is a time-consuming process. You won’t see results in a month. Expecting results quickly is a fool’s errand. Even if you somehow see results within a month, it won’t last long.
Ranking your article high in Google search results and getting a lot of traffic takes months, even years.
Remember this — Rome was not built in a day.
It takes around 7–8 months for an article to rank on the first page, provided you have worked hard on your on-page SEO. Otherwise, you will never get results. For me, it took 7 months for my first article to rank no.1 on Google’s first page.
Do not focus on results in the beginning. Instead, write and publish every week without any failure, and your luck will shine one day.
The Takeaway
If you are ready to work your ass off and invest a part of your life in blogging, do it right now! Even if you fail (I know you won’t), at least you’ll have a story to tell and teach other people who are on the same path. There’s no shame in failing.
I proudly say I failed my blog. But that experience is now helping other people (like you) to learn from my mistakes.
I haven’t quit blogging though. I’ll soon launch a new blog about SEO, making money online, and some other stuff. Stay tuned for more!
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