How much traffic is good for a blog? (& traffic goals to aim for)
How much traffic is good for a blog? The annoying short answer: there’s no one right answer. It depends on what niche you’re in, how old your website is, and what your goals are.
If you’re just getting started, getting 5,000 page views each month is an amazing milestone. If you want to treat your blog like a business, reaching 100,000 sessions can be a promising sign for monetization and even the possibility of going full-time with their blog.
(In this post, I mostly talk about sessions rather than page views, as that’s what I pay the most attention to. However, you can also think about these numbers in terms of page views instead. I get about 1.2 page views per session.)
Although traffic goals are different for every blog, some traffic benchmarks are correlated with certain milestones. For instance, qualifying for high-quality advertising management like Mediavine, or making a part-time or full-time income from your blog.
I’ll dig into those soon, but first, a quick review of…
The key principles for increasing blog traffic
In my freelance work, the reason that many of my consulting clients hired me was to increase their blog traffic. Regardless of whether it was a small or large brand, my approach always involved one key goal: increasing the ratio of great content on the site.
Increasing the ratio of great content on a blog requires two things:
- Optimising existing content
- Publishing new content
Sometimes you can get the quickest wins by optimising and republishing existing content that will index and show results much faster than new posts.
However, in other situations – especially for new blogs that don’t have a lot of content yet – fresh new content can be the most powerful lever for growth.
A combination of optimising old posts + posting brand new content tends to work best. You’ll know it’s working when you start working your way through these four blog traffic goals…
How much traffic is good for a blog in 2023?
5,000 monthly sessions: your first goal
Reaching 5,000 monthly sessions is one of the first key milestones for any blog. With 5,000 sessions on a new-ish blog, especially if it’s mostly from organic traffic, you know you’re heading in the right direction.
To get to 5,000 monthly sessions, aim to publish as much quality content as you can to let Google index and get to know your posts.
For a brand new blog, you could publish ~40 quality long-form posts as soon as possible and leave them to “season” while you work on other projects. After six months, you can start to check how these posts are performing.
Pay attention to what topics and formats are gaining traction most easily with Google and try doubling down on this. What does Google want you to write about?
20,000 monthly sessions: you’re in a good position to scale
It can take a decent amount of time (often over a year) to get to 20,000 monthly sessions, especially if these are mostly from organic visits. However, you can get to this position faster with a lot of high-quality content that’s written with keywords and search intent in mind.
The same applies to every stage of your blog growth: often, the most important thing to grow blog traffic is publishing more content. Not paying more attention to your analytics, not tweaking your social media strategy, but publishing regular, quality content.
To reach 20,000 monthly sessions, aim for 100+ blog posts that are long-form (2,000 words is a good goal) and optimised for search engines.
Once you get to 20,000 monthly sessions, you’ll probably find it’s easier to scale to higher levels of traffic, such as…
50,000 monthly sessions: you can qualify for Mediavine and monetize your blog
By posting a lot of new content and updating existing content, I quickly scaled my blog from 20,000 to 50,000 monthly sessions.
To get to 50,000 monthly sessions, I’d recommend having around 125 quality blog posts, but your mileage may vary.
On my blog, I had closer to 80 posts that were actually generating good traffic when I reached 50k sessions. That said, as they were on a website I started a decade ago, the domain had built up some authority.
When I reached 50,000 sessions on my blog, I could apply for Mediavine as my ad management program. This is one of the friendliest (and highest quality) ad companies you can work with, and it can provide you with a decent income from your blog.
How much do blogs on Mediavine make per month? The amount you can make from a blog with 50,000 monthly sessions depends on your RPM, but an estimation is $500 – $2000 based on RPMs of $10-$40.
A low average RPM from Mediavine is about $15, so with 50,000 monthly sessions you can expect $750 per month after joining. However, if you can double your RPM to $30, you double your monthly income from ads to $1500 – even without getting more traffic.
At 50,000 monthly blog sessions, you’re also likely in a decent position for applying to affiliate programs and sponsorships.
100,000 monthly sessions: you can make a decent amount from your blog each month
Reaching 100,000 is a milestone worth celebrating! You’ve built this from the ground up, so it’s worth giving yourself a pat on the back. When you have a blog with 100,000 monthly sessions or page views, you have what many people will define as a successful site on your hands.
How to get to 100,000 monthly blog sessions? More. Great. Content. (Yep, I’m sorry to keep repeating it, but it really is the best recipe for traffic growth.)
With my books website, I found that getting from 50,000 to 70,000 monthly sessions was the easy part. I flew between these in only a month or so.
Increasing traffic from 70,000 to 100,000 was a bit slower for me, though. I found myself at a plateau and it felt like Google was capping my traffic. However, suddenly this changed and traffic started increasing again. (After, surprise surprise, publishing more content.)
Why aim for 100,000 monthly blog sessions? With all of the eyes on your site, you’re in a good position to generate a nice bit of income from ads, affiliate programs, or selling products.
If you have an RPM of $15, that’s a $1,500 monthly income from your blog. If you’re lucky to have a decent RMP of $30, this will be a $3,000 monthly income. If you have a higher RPM, you’ve hit the jackpot.
Based on numbers shared in the community group, a decent number of Mediavine bloggers are able to make a full-time income on 50,000-100,000 monthly sessions because of their good RPMs.
If you have other income from affiliate programs or products like ebooks, that will also boost this number. (And it’s always a good idea to try and diversify your income – and traffic sources – for greater stability and resilience.)
Other goals for growing blogs
What other traffic goals can growing blogs pay attention to? I also monitor these blog metrics:
- Increase traffic by 7% each month. During high-growth months, my traffic can jump up by 10-20%. In more average months, it’s great to see an increase of around 7%. This signals that traffic is increasing rather than plateauing.
- Increase the number of keywords ranked 1-3. To monitor keyword rankings, you don’t need to be paying for Ahrefs or SEMrush. Google Search Console is more than enough to check rankings and chart progress. I import the data into a spreadsheet to monitor my most important keywords and how new posts are performing.
- Maintain the avg. time on page. I find this to be a more insightful engagement stat to pay attention to than avg. session duration, so I have it pinned on my Google Analytics dashboard.
What blog traffic goal are you working towards? Regardless of your next milestone, the best way to reach it is likely to publish more good content.
Sharing more content tends to be what really moves the needle, especially when combined with good SEO and thinking about your readers. How can you be the most valuable to them? Go and focus on that and you’ll likely be rewarded in turn.
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