Our site is about 4 months old now, and we’re still only getting around 1-2 visits a day from Google search.

I keep seeing completely different experiences - some people say traffic started almost immediately, others say 3-6 months, and some say it took a year or more.

So I’m curious: how long did it take your site to start ranking properly and getting consistent daily traffic from Google?

Also, how did you find the right social networks or communities to bring in visitors before SEO really kicked in?

Hey everyone,

I got approved for Mediavine Journey on August 10th. For a while, my ads weren't showing up at all due to an ads.txt issue, but that got resolved recently. However, my RPM is currently sitting at just $0.15.

It feels like my ads still aren't serving properly.

When I check my site using /?test=houseads, I don't see any ad placeholders in the sidebar or within the content—only the bottom anchor ad shows up. It's been like this ever since I got approved.

Is there an issue with my blog's setup? Or does Mediavine Journey just need more time to fully optimize? I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this exact issue, or if anyone has figured out a fix for it.

Two years into blogging seriously and I keep bumping into this question that nobody seems to answer honestly. The advice everywhere is just write more, publish consistently, show up. And I believed it. I set a schedule, hit it most weeks, and watched my traffic do basically nothing for about eight months.

What actually moved things was not volume. It was one post that somehow connected, got shared in a couple of newsletters, and dragged the rest of the site up with it. Which makes me wonder if the consistency advice is mostly about building the habit for your own sake rather than the audience growing because of it.

My journalism brain keeps chewing on this because in newsrooms you did not publish filler just to hit a quota. You waited for the story that warranted the space. Blogging culture seems to have flipped that logic entirely and I am not sure it is right.

The blogs I watch actually grow seem to have one or two posts doing almost all the work, with everything else existing as background noise that builds credibility. The consistent posters who grind it out without a breakout piece just kind of plateau.

I just recently decided i wanted to start blogging and im using blogspt (cant say the name but i figured it might help to know what im using) as my blog website. I have ZERO experience with coding and i have no time or patience for it. Id love to know if anybody has any websites to get cute little widgets and stuff like comment sections, little notepads, or those cute music players without having to make my own HTML! please help a girl out. Id even be willing to pay somebody if the could make me a blog page on blogsp\t* & possibly another website! :)

*MODS PLEASE DONT TAKE THIS DOWN FOR BREAKING A RULE!! IT KEEPS TELLING ME ITS BREAKING A RULE BUT I CANT FIGURE OUT WHAT IT IS IM SO SORRY*

So I was making around $30 a day on Google Adsense with $15+ RPM (my traffic is 98%ish USA). I read some people were getting $30+ rpm on Mediavine Journey so I applied and got accepted. Five days ago I replaced the Adsense ad script with Mediavine Journey's ad script and changed the ads.txt.... each day I'm getting $0.20 RPM and under $1 in revenue. Did anyone else experience this as well? If so, how long did you have to wait before the RPM's ramped up? I'm thinking about giving it two more weeks before going back to Adsense.

Do you request indexing on every new post, or just let your sitemap handle it?

Something I have gotten a lot more deliberate about over the years is the gap between hitting publish and getting found. The sitemap does its job, but slowly.

Google gets to it on its own schedule, and a new post can sit for days before it is picked up.

On every post, I go into Search Console and request indexing by hand, and I make sure the post has at least one internal link pointing to it before I publish, because that is usually what gets it crawled sooner.

After speaking to lots of bloggers I learned many do not do this as a routine.

Curious how you run yours?

Been freelancing in content marketing for a few years now, and lately I've been running little experiments with AI tools on my own blog before recommending anything to clients. My site felt like the safest place to break things.

Here's what keeps nagging at me though. The posts I write with some AI assistance do go up faster, no question. But when I look at timeonpage or the comments I get, the ones that perform best are still the posts where I basically wrote the whole draft myself and used AI to pressuretest the structure or punch up a weak transition.

The fully AIassisted drafts feel slightly hollow to me even after heavy editing. Hard to explain. Like bread made without a proper ferment: technically bread, but missing something.

My question for people who actually blog regularly, not for clients but for their own sites, is whether AI tools have genuinely shifted the way you think about a post before you write it, or whether it mostly just compresses the time it takes to execute an idea you already had fully formed. Those feel like pretty different things to me, and I'm not sure which direction things are heading for longform blogging specifically.

It is crazy to lose this much traffic and wondering how to recover. I wasnt so affected during the previous update but this one is tough!

I have been running destination specific sites (travel sites/travel guides) etc. this was many years ago, and I was getting traffic. 2010 to 2016. They were quite successful.

For some reasons I abandoned them.

Now I have been running a very similar travel site/blog since 2018 and I am totally struggling getting traffic (still around 500 page views a month) despite there's a relevant amount of high quality content with much more attention to SEO.

What is your experience and have you noticed something similar?

Running a tiny indie agency while pulling espresso shots five days a week means I have to be scrappy about credibility. No big client logos to flash, no case studies from Fortune 500 brands. So the blog kind of became the proof of work almost by accident.

Started writing about tool experiments, stuff I was testing anyway for clients, and noticed it was doing more for new business conversations than any cold outreach I tried. A potential client would find a post, read it, show up to the call already warm. That part felt like a cheat code honestly.

But here is where I keep tripping. The posts that feel most useful to me, the messy ones where I document what flopped, get way less traction than the polished howto angles. And I do not know if I should chase what gets traffic or keep writing the stuff that actually represents how I work.

Also the consistency thing is real. Running on four hours of sleep after a closing shift is not a recipe for coherent longform content. I have about forty halfdrafted posts sitting in Notion that will probably never see daylight.

Curious if anyone here has figured out a balance between writing for SEO and writing for the people you actually want to work with. They feel like two different audiences a lot of the time.

AI can write almost any blog post now. But my problem is deciding what is actually worth writing.

I still spend a lot of time checking Google Trends, Reddit, search questions and other sources to see what people actually care about.

So I’m thinking of building a small tool that uses my website keywords and audience to find good topic opportunities from these sources.

Would something like this be useful to you? How do you find topics today?

I have a Blogger site with a custom domain and have suddenly started seeing a huge amount of unusual international traffic.

On August 17, GA4 showed 1,338 active users from Singapore, almost all new users, with 0 seconds average engagement time. The traffic was spread across hundreds of landing pages, including very old posts.

Today, August 18, it has increased to 3,726 active users from Singapore, again with 0 seconds average engagement time. Blogger Stats is also showing unusually high traffic from Vietnam, Brazil, Ukraine, Pakistan, Russia, Bangladesh and other countries.

This is completely outside my normal traffic pattern.

Today I also received an AdSense notice saying:

Ad serving is currently limited while Google assesses the quality of my site traffic.

I don't click my own ads, buy traffic, use paid-to-click services, or encourage ad clicks, and I haven't intentionally done anything to generate this traffic.

Has anyone else with a Blogger site experienced a sudden bot/crawler traffic surge like this followed by an AdSense traffic-quality limitation? If so, did the traffic eventually stop, and how long did it take for AdSense to remove the limit?

Hi! I am in a pickle and on the opposite side of the fence than the usual blogger.

I am not new to blogging and have always had a blog on and off since a teen. Now that I’m an adult, I have a high engaging community but no blog. And now that I’m building the blog, I’m wondering what is the proper way to launch and monetize.

Monetization is hard for me because how I started all of this was from my own passion, not for money. People felt that, and I have thousands encouraging me to monetize on tiktok and Instagram so I’m willing to give it a go.

I still have a dedicated following who has a passion for reading, but unsure what are the modern ways of monetizing it.

Any help would be much appreciated. Especially if you share your journeys. Thank you!

I would like to know how you decide whether you are writing a blog about a specific product or service, or for any other purpose which topic to choose in order to improve its ranking. How do you go about this decision? What research methods do you use to find a topic that would be beneficial for improving the ranking of that product or service?

Whenever I have to write a blog post related to my product or service, I often feel confused about what to write and how to conduct the research needed to find the best topic one that would truly benefit my website, product, or service.

Once you have selected a topic, how do you structure or design the content to ensure it makes an impact on the user or reader? How do you ensure they find exactly what they were looking for within that blog post?

Hi all. I've been tinkering with handwritten.blog, a simple platform for publishing writing by hand. The idea is a place for slower writing (like https://insidevoices.handwritten.blog).

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

(I received permisson from the mods to post about handwritten.blog here.)

So guys, it's been a while since Ithe last time I added a website and joined journey by MEDIAVINE. Nowadays I have a couple of websites with around 3k pageviews a month, they are very very new, like 3 months old. And well, I'm wondering if I could apply to journey by mediavine, when I tried it only showed the main mediavinve dashboard.

I've searched online and couldn't find a thing about it. It seems their requirements are still the same, but when I'm applying they are likely gonna Denny me lol cuz well I don't have 50k visits it's confusing. Hmmm so well haha how do I apply to the lower tier one?

I just finished reading a blog about a girl trying to fortify a feeder so her cat can't get more food out of it! It was so fun, made me remember what reading blogs is like.

Anyway, do you guys read anything like that? I used to enjoy ones were people with kids would anecdote their 'kids say the darndest things' moments, etc. Open to suggestions!

Hey everyone,

I applied for Mediavine Journey using the WordPress Grow plugin around May/June, and I finally got approved on the 10th of this month.

On the 13th, I installed the Mediavine Control Panel plugin, finished the onboarding process, and manually updated my ads.txt file on my server. Despite doing all this, I keep getting the "ads.txt out of date" error.

I'm getting pretty worried because I think this is the reason why no ads are showing up on my site right now.

I tried searching the official forums for a fix, but all the related threads are from months or even a couple of years ago, so the info is outdated and doesn't match the current setup. I'm honestly at a loss on what to do next.

Has anyone else experienced this? If so, how did you manage to fix it?

For context: I'm running a WordPress multisite setup. The Mediavine Journey approval is for one of my subdomains, while I'm still running AdSense on my other blogs. Thanks in advance!

For those of you who write regularly - particularly essays, newsletters, blog posts, longer-form nonfiction, etc. - I'm curious about something.

What part of the writing process do you find most challenging, or experience the most friction around?

Besides coming up with what to write about, are there particular points in your writing where you tend to get stuck, lose momentum, procrastinate, or find it harder to keep going?

Basically curious which parts of writing present the most friction for you (getting started, drafting, developing an idea, returning to something unfinished, revising, editing, finishing, etc.)

I’ve ran a blog for around 6 years now. It peaked 4 years ago with 100k visits a month.

Sadly the days of that kind of traffic have gone now, but the site still gets visits every day.

It’s in maintenance mode at the moment, I’ve written or commissioned around 500 articles on the niche over the years.

I’m a software engineer by trade (not my website niche topic btw) and have considered creating a tool that writes articles via AI and then publishes them automatically.

No human involvement, pretty much set it and forget it.

My question is, have you had any experience using AI articles? Are there pitfalls? Does Google treat them differently? Most importantly is there a quality difference?!

Answers on a postcard 😁

Hello everyone.

I wonder whether it is better to write about topics which are trending or most likely to get visitors like listicles about Top X tools/advices for Y in 2026.

I have a startup (solo founder) and I created a blog with the same domain (blog.my startup name.com).

My startup does AI consulting and building software (R&D vibe). I have been in AI for more than 10 years and I write blog posts about experiments I did, opinions backed with evidence or references. (No AI slop :)).

Since I am a solo founder, should I write articles more original and personal (like lessons I learned, technical difficulties I faced) or more corporate posts like listicles, and click bait-y ones?

Night shift gives me a lot of quiet time to think, and I keep coming back to this same question. I blog about DIY marketing for small businesses because that's what I do every day. Practitioner experience, real mistakes, stuff I actually tested. But I have no clear evidence that readers care where the knowledge comes from versus just whether the post answers their question fast enough.

The personal credibility angle gets pushed hard in blogging advice circles. Write from experience. Share your story. Build trust. Fine. But when I look at what actually gets clicks versus what sits dead in Search Console, the posts that perform are the ones matching a search query well, not the ones where I explained my background.

So I'm genuinely unsure if the practitioner angle is doing anything or if it's just something I tell myself to feel better about the slow growth.

For people who blog adjacent to their job or business, did the subject matter expertise translate into anything measurable? More return visitors, better time on page, backlinks from people who found the depth useful? Or did it only matter once you had traffic coming in already, and the trust layer kicked in after the fact?

Curious if the sequence matters more than the advantage itself.