Wrote the blog about 5 years ago, to a non-existent audience. The blog writing was simply to motivate myself to complete the application, which is an arduous process and, for me, was optional career-wise. At first I did things like create a Twitter account, follow people, tweet it out, etc, but that didn't work at all. I basically had negligible traffic for the first year at least. Then Google organically started picking it up because I had written useful content in an underserved niche - one of the things that got me writing the blog was searching for free help in the first place and not finding anything. Even after a couple of years, I was earning maybe $15/month in AdSense. Then the affiliate site reached out to me out of the blue, we tried some tests, and they failed miserably (no one converted). Months later he came back to me with an actual affiliate program, we tried it and it slow started to work and has scaled up to what I described above.
So to summarize, by far most of my time was spent writing the blog posts and watching my non-existent analytics. Nothing I actively did to market the site (and I did very little) worked. It was a project that didn't intend to make money, that ended up making money.
So to summarize, by far most of my time was spent writing the blog posts and watching my non-existent analytics. Nothing I actively did to market the site (and I did very little) worked. It was a project that didn't intend to make money, that ended up making money.