My First 6 Months of Blogging

Today is my 6 month anniversary of starting this blog! 🎉

In my First 50 Days of Blogging post, I outlined some (rather ambitious) goals for my first year of blogging (Year One):

• Publish 50 blog posts.
• Get a million pageviews.
• Grow my newsletter to 10,000 subscribers.

Here’s where I’m at as of today:

• Published 24 blog posts.
• Gotten 314k pageviews.
• Grown my newsletter to 2,000 subscribers.

I’m on track to hit my blog posts goal, but there’s still some ground to make up for the other two goals 😅.

Let’s get into the numbers more!

Pageviews

Here’s a graph of my blog’s pageviews over the past 6 months:

The spikes correspond to popular posts:

• 2/11: Can You Find The Bug in This Code?
• 3/6: Machine Learning for Beginners: An Introduction to Neural Networks
• 4/3: Why I Replaced Disqus and You Should Too
• 4/11: Random Forests for Complete Beginners
• 5/22: CNNs, Part 1: An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks
• 7/3: Mailchimp to Sendy: How I Cut Email Costs by 100x
• 7/25: An Introduction to Recurrent Neural Networks for Beginners

My top 5 posts by pageviews so far are:

Page	Pageviews
/blog/intro-to-neural-networks/	71,431
/blog/intro-to-random-forests/	33,579
/blog/intro-to-cnns-part-1/	25,148
/blog/intro-to-rnns/	14,457
/blog/build-an-io-game-part-1/	13,215

The top 5 consist of 4 Machine Learning posts, each of which got popular on Hacker News shortly after being published. The 5th is a dark horse: my guide to Building Multiplayer (.io) Web Games. Most of the traffic to that post has been organic - aside from a podcast I did on that subject, there wasn’t significant attention for that post when it came out.

Organic Traffic

Despite being behind on my Year One goals, I see a clear silver lining: organic traffic growth. 📈

My blog has gone from 20 clicks per day at the 50 day mark to 500+ clicks per day at the 6 month mark!

Incredibly, my simple Gini Impurity post is by far my blog’s biggest driver of organic traffic. It’s usually the second (sometimes the first!) result on Google when you search “gini impurity”:

One of my original reasons for starting this blog was to “learn more about and get firsthand experience with SEO,” and I’m excited to continue doing so.

Conclusion

It’s been a great journey so far, and I’m excited for what the future holds. As always, thank you to my readers from the past 6 months! See you at the Year One recap.