Week 5: An Update On Growth

We’re five weeks into the blog, so I feel that it is time to give you all an update on its growth. Thanks to you, the reader, the blog and associated social media has seen much greater growth then I could have expected. Starting this blog five weeks ago, I thought that I wouldn’t see any constant traffic for at least three months.

Why? Because my first “blog”, Wappcap.com never saw any real traffic. Now, I know this is because I never posted constantly, and the content that I did create was designed to bring the reader back to Seeking Alpha, the publisher that I was working for at the time. Hence me referring to the site as a quote on quote blog. Looking back now, it was never to have a blog, the site was to build credibility on my brand, Wappinger Capital Research.

But because of this, I had low expectations for the first few months of the blog. You guys, however, have completely shattered these expectations in a stunning way.

First, the actual blog. Since its beginning Millionaire by 25 has never had a day without a visitor. I’d say that for the first few weeks, this is due to me going and checking the blog — most if not all views for those days came from me.

But in the past two weeks, I have seen a massive increase in views. I usually visit the site one time per day — when I am checking if the most recent blog post got successfully published, so I only bring in 1-page view for that day. In the past few weeks, the blog has consistently been seeing 20–40 views. In the past few days, we’ve been clocking in at 100 viewers (this isn’t consistent, yet).

This is pretty mind-boggling to me. Yes, I know that the big finance blogs out there get 5,000–100,000 views per day, but I am not a big finance blog yet. I started this blog about 1 month ago. In that one month, I have built a collection of consistent viewers, to whom I can only give my utmost thanks and gratitude.

Also, Google (and other search engine) indexing has also helped out a lot. Posts are finally being seen on Google. However, the homepage of the site is not number one when searched for on Google. In time, this will change.

These consist views come from two things (I think). One, because I post daily, there is just more content going out on the web. Two is social media. To an extent, I can see where my traffic comes from, and recently a large chunk of it is coming from social media.

Social media growth has been huge for me and this blog. I started out on Twitter, @25millionaire, because that is where most bloggers and professionals reside. After about two weeks of posting, I had only amassed a stunning 11 followers. Why? Twitter is not my target audience. My target audience is 13–25 year olds, not professionals and fellow bloggers. Thinking back, it makes a lot of sense — not many of my peers use Twitter, and I hadn’t before I started writing financial articles.

I decided to move from Twitter to Instagram. Teens (myself included) use Instagram, and there is a lot more activity and posting on the platform compared to Twitter. Rapidly, I saw a major change in my accounts following. In the first two days alone, I already had 100 followers. Now, two weeks into Instagram, I am almost up to 1000 followers. Thank you all for that growth.

I think Instagram is the perfect social media platform for me. I can use the main feature of posing images to build a greater following and better community. But, even more exciting, I can begin to use the story feature to show you all my personal life. It’s going to be a lot more interesting in the near future (more on that in an upcoming blog post), and I cannot wait to keep you all updated.

So to end this one, I want to say thank you. This post was 50% update, 50% thank you all. Without you, this blog would have no meaning. And seeing so much growth in such a short time, both in views and social media followers just makes me that more motivated to grow this into what I want it to be. As long as the growth keeps happening, and people email/dm me saying that “this post gave me such a great idea”, I will continue to put my energy into this business.

So once again, thank you.

Happy Investing,

James