How I Had More Than 8000 Pageviews My First Month Of Blogging – Part One

Today we’re going to take a departure from the home decor and sewing projects that I usually share with all of you here.  Instead, I wanted to share with you how I had more than 8000 pageviews my first month of blogging.

This post was getting too long, so I decided to make it a two part series.  Stay tuned for the second part in this series later this week, where I share the 5 things I did to start my blog off on the right foot.

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First off, I want to say that I’m not writing this post to brag about how successful my first month of blogging was.  Instead, I’m hoping that maybe these posts can help some of you who may want to start a blog.  Or maybe you already have a blog,  and want to take it to the next level.

My blogging story starts couple of years ago.  My husband had just retired, and we knew we wanted to travel more now that he had more free time.  The problem with that was my drapery sewing business.  It would be impossible for me to work while we traveled.  It’s kind of hard to drag a drapery business around, and if I’m not sewing or working on client’s projects, then I’m not making any money.

I’d been reading home decor and lifestyle blogs for 2 or 3 years at that point.  I remember the moment that I read one successful blogger’s story about how she was making a full-time income from her blog.  It really hadn’t clicked with me until then – you could make money from blogging!

So, I decided to start a blog.  It seemed like the perfect solution, I could blog anywhere I could be on my computer.   How hard could it be?  Ha!  Little did I know!

So, I started researching how to blog.  I’m a big researcher, and I love to learn.  I read everything I could find about how to have a successful blog.  I had so many questions – how were these “big” bloggers were so successful?  How did they have so many readers?  How were they making an income from blogging?  How could I make money from having a blog?

Right away it became apparent that blogging is not a way to get rich quickly, and that you’d better be passionate about blogging and what you blog about, or you’ll get burned out way before you made a penny from your blog.  No problem, tenacious is my  middle name!

How I Had More Than 8000 Pageviews My First Month Of Blogging

So, back to pageviews, and how I had more than 8000 my first month of blogging.  The number of pageviews per month a blog has can be very important in the blogging world.  Some of you may be wondering – what is a pageview?

Pageviews are the total number of pages that visitors look at on a site.

One way to see how many pageviews your blog has is to have Google Analytics installed on your blog.  Google Analytics gives you a lot of information about your blog, including pageviews per day, week, month or year.

Pageviews can be important if you’re wanting to monetize your blog.  Some ad networks pay per 1000 pageviews – which is called cpm.  Companies who want bloggers to write sponsered posts like to see that the blogger has a good amount of pageviews, so that more eyes are on their product.  It’s also a good way to see how many people are visiting your site, so you can track your blog’s growth..

Here’s a screenshot of my Google Analytics for the first month that I blogged – June 28, 2013 – July 27, 2013.  You can see that my pageviews were 8,489 for that month.

Because I want to grow my site, and eventually earn an income from it, pageviews are a good way for me to gauge how well everything is working.

Later this week, I’m going to share with you 5 things that I did before and during my first month of blogging that helped me hit the ground running and build up those pageviews.  So stay tuned!