How I Reached 100,000 Monthly Pageviews

I did it. I finally reached 100,000 monthly pageviews this month! If you are a blogger, newbie or pro, you know how much of a big deal this is.

The term ‘pageviews’ refers to the number of pages people viewed or clicked on a site during that period. And that is one of the most powerful web analytics parameters for a blogger. Your blog’s popularity is measured by many parameters but – in a nutshell- that number alone of monthly pageviews says a lot about your blog.

Now, 100,000 monthly pageviews are not nearly as much as you’d like to reach in a given month if you want to be a popular and well-established blogger. This is just a milestone. When you finally reach it, you need to keep working hard to retain those readers, maintain those monthly pageviews in the high end and surpass the 100K, and attract new readers, brands, and advertising networks.

How Long Does it Take to Reach 100,000 Monthly Pageviews?

Reaching 100,000 monthly pageviews was a goal I wanted to achieve before 2016 ended. Turns out I was one month off. On January 25th of 2017, I finally reached this important milestone in my blogging journey.

I am sure you’re curious to know how long it took me to reach 100,000 pageviews in a month. Ready? It took me 2 years (my 2nd anniversary was on December 20th, 2016). This is a hard pill to swallow, especially when Pinterest is blasted with articles of other bloggers that had reached the 100K number in less than a year. But, don’t let my case lower your expectations because each blog is different, and we (you and me) are different.

If you are new to my blog, let me tell you real quick: I am a mother, a wife, a homemaker, the bookkeeper of my husband’s business, an Etsy seller, and a blogger. Probably in that order. I always put our son, my husband, my family, my friends, our stairs business, and our home first. Balancing life and work is one heck of a job.

Could I have probably reached those 100,000 monthly pageviews sooner?  Yes, definitely. Although there were many factors that prevented me from reaching them, I believe that the bottom line was not publishing as much content as I should have in those 2 years. I  was too hung up on the details, and it took me too long to craft one single post. 

But not all time was wasted time; each day I learned something new. It may sound cliche, but it is the absolute truth. Just to mention a few things that helped me get there:

• Joined the Elite Blog Academy and I am spending a lot of time reading, studying, and taking it all in.
• Studied many other bloggers’ strategies and learned how to implement online tools
• Improved my photography skills and Pinterest strategy.
• Networked and virtually met other bloggers (and made friends!)

Implementing Online Tools

Blogging is all about content. If you don’t write articles, good articles, your blog won’t thrive. Although I worked hard to publish awesome and compelling content, with original photography (except where otherwise noted), I could not have done this alone. Blogging is a job, where part of your success is thanks to your readership, and other bloggers and websites. Social shares, too. spread your word like fire. In the end, we are all intertwined with inbound and outbound links, and that makes it a big one blogosphere where we all ‘coexist’ and support each other.

Like I mentioned above, I learned how to implement online tools. If you’re involved in DIY projects, you’ve probably heard about Hometalk. This is a website where you can create a personal profile and have your own little space on the web where you can share your own DIY projects, include step by step tutorials, and pictures. But, if you’re a blogger, you can create your profile as a blogger and join the Hometalk Traffic Program for Bloggers.

All you have to do is share high-quality content with the Hometalk community and the Hometalk team will feature qualified bloggers in their daily emails. To qualify, you must share 3 high-quality posts within a 90-day period. After you share those posts, all you have to do is plug your blog post links (direct to your blog) in your Blog Links section within your Account Settings.

It is important that you pay attention to these words: high-quality content. This means that your posts shared on Hometalk must:

1. Contain a minimum of 4 high-quality pictures and 200 words.
2. Give readers a good understanding of how the project was done.

My First 100,000 Monthly Pageviews!

I joined the Hometalk community in 2015, and whenever I had some spare time, I shared some of my DIY projects. But it wasn’t until the Hometalk team approached me, and we discussed the newly launched traffic program that I took seriously posting on Hometalk. Once I understood the potential that was hiding in this online community, I shared a few more posts, plugged in my links, and boom!

Hometalk featured my project DIY Wood Covers for Wire Shelving in their December 30th email newsletter and that day alone I had just under 19,000 pageviews. Unheard of, for me.

Now, here is where I want you to understand how powerful this feature was. The 100,000 pageviews of this month do not include the 18,795 pageviews of that day (that enters in the December report since the feature was on December 30th). But, that was the day when my blog traffic changed.

I jumped from averaging 2,500 daily pageviews to almost 5,000 daily pageviews (I doubled it!). My traffic on January has been mostly traffic from Pinterest, Referral, Organic, and Direct (newsletters, direct link).

So, what happened? It doesn’t take much to understand it: I had 7,600 visitors (users) that day. This is a powerful force of people (readers) that read, liked and shared my content. They also subscribed to my newsletter and started following me on social media. Today, these readers are coming for more. My job now is to keep them engaged and keep them coming back for more.

To give you a better understanding of these stats, these are my monthly pageviews for the last 6 months:

[su_table]

Month / Year	Pageviews
August / 2016	70,072
September / 2016	59,428
October / 2016	57,411
November/ 2016	51,974
December / 2016	77,725
As of January 25th / 2017	102,103

[/su_table]

If you take a  look at December, my total pageviews were 77,725. If you take away the 18,795 pageviews from that spike on December 30th, I would’ve closed the month with just around 60,000 to 62,000 pageviews.

And that is how I just reached (and surpassed) my 100,000 monthly pageviews. This was definitely a team effort. Although I owe the Hometalk Blogger Traffic Program the boost, the feature would not have been possible without the high-quality content I have written and shared on my blog.

I hope my experience and tips, help you reach your first 100,000 monthly pageviews too!

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Happy Blogging!