My New Blog Had Almost 1,000 Views in Month 1

It’s a much better start than I was expecting

I started my new blog on 23 October. The results below are for the month of November. I’m extremely happy with my progress so far. If I can keep this up it should be a great success.

The blog is SideHustleMonkey.com.

Stories published

I’ve published 14 stories on the blog so far. These are all articles that were previously published on Medium. I was hoping to upload more than this, but it’s quite a tedious process. I plan to do better this month.

I’ve made sure that I set the canonical link for each Medium story to point at my blog, as I want Google to rank the stories on my blog not the ones on Medium. If you’re planning to copy Medium stories to your own blog, you need to make sure you do this. You can edit the canonical link under the Advanced Settings of your Medium stories.

Users and Views

Google Analytics shows that I had 375 users and 917 page views for November. I thought I would be lucky to get 500 page views, so I’m more than happy to reach almost double that.

Google Search Console Impressions

Google Search Console shows information such as how many pages on your site are indexed and how many impressions and clicks you’ve received from Google search. 

As you can see above, the side had 29 impressions and 4 clicks. That may seem low, but it’s pretty good for the first month. It can take 6 months or longer to start getting high numbers of impressions.

You can also see from the chart that I was only getting one impression now and again, to begin with. During the last few days, I’ve started getting 3–4 impressions a day. That’s another good sign.

As more pages get indexed, this number should grow quickly. I’ll also try to publish a post per day this month, so that should also help.

Google Search Console Page Indexing

As you can see above, only around half the pages on my site are currently indexed. The indexing took a while to get started, but it seems to have picked up in the last few days.

As more of these pages are indexed, I should get more impressions and clicks from Google Search.

Earnings

I earned $65 in October from an affiliate link. I didn’t earn anything in November. I only have an affiliate link on one story though, so this isn’t unexpected.

I want to get 50–100 articles published before I start adding ads. I think it’s easier to get ranked initially if your site doesn’t have many ads. 

Valuation

A blog like this could sell for 30-50 times its monthly profit. I’m going to assume a 40X valuation here and in all future updates. This is just to help motivate me. If I can see the value of the blog increasing over time, I’m more likely to keep adding content regularly.

I’m not entirely sure how to start the valuation. I haven’t made any profit in November, so that would mean the blog is currently worth zero. Note that I’m ignoring the value of the content and only basing my figures on profit multiples. 

The blog earned $65 in October, so that would value the blog at $2,600. 

Maybe the value is somewhere between $0 and $2,600. This will get clearer as I go along.

Note that this is a very rough estimate. The blog would need to have a consistent monthly income of at least six months to reach those valuations. 

What’s next

My plan for the next few months is to keep adding all the relevant articles from Medium. It’s a very tedious job.

Other than that, I’ll keep an eye on the stats to make sure they’re heading in the right direction. 

I may also write a few dedicated posts specifically for this blog.

I’ll keep promoting the site wherever I can.