How My Website Got Its First Million Visitors

JosephWriterAnderson’s Editor-in-Chief as a much younger man.

Wind back the clock five years and I’m sitting at a coffee shop writing my first article on Medium on a challenge from a friend. Already, I’d been working in digital marketing for a few years, but in reality had hardly dipped my toes in the water. 

That article, though, was noticed by some folks at the British Broadcasting Channel, and I ended up being featured on a live show. 

That has almost nothing to do with how I got my first million visitors on my website. Other than it lit a spark.

What is a Writer? 

I used to think a writer was someone like Earnest Hemingway or Jack London or, most of all, Oscar Wilde. Mysterious. Larger than life. Quietly tortured. Out of place in ordinary life. 

It’s fantastical to think this way. But in reality, writers aren’t usually like that. They’re people who sit behind screens and write a few things and then go to meetings.

Writers like words. They’re comfortable with them. And if they’re lucky, they can make a few dollars at it as they go. 

For Web Writers, Finding Your Voice Still Matters 

At college in the Pacific Northwest, I wrote a play. It was about giant rabbits attacking a rabbit farm. Simultaneously, it was about the futility of greed, social classes, youthful angst, religion, destiny and love. 

Instead of recommending me to therapy, the drama department asked me to have the play produced. I wanted to, but I went east instead, ending up somewhere near Pittsburgh. 

I only mention that because symbolically, that’s where the writing journey I had been on hit a major fork in the road.

Going east, to see what else lay out there in the world, and not limiting myself to an art form that seems (unless you are Lin-Manuel Miranda) to have passed its zenith was the moment that I stopped being one kind of writer, and began to become another.

It was necessary for me to begin my writing journey far, far away from the internet, however. It was important because it was a step towards finding something that so many people never find: a voice. 

“Boys, you must strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all. Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Don’t be resigned to that.” — Dead Poet’s Society

If you make the mistake of trying to find your voice amidst the chaos that is the internet, you’ll be hard pressed to hear it over the din of those reverberating chambers.

Dreams Come into Plain Sight As You Grow

Writing on Medium was fun. I got noticed, and put on publications. What I soon saw, however, was that the most impactful stories I wrote were not those selected by a peer group. They were those that Google selected to rank highly for search terms – my articles were answering questions being asked by the masses.

It wasn’t long after this that I abandoned the idea of needing institutional recognition altogether. The internet has evolved to give writers something that they rarely had throughout history — their own channel to go directly to the reader. 

Traditional publishing ,  institutional recognition for the arts — these are all nice things. But they are unnecessary, and in many ways, a little boring. 

Would-be novelists line up and query agents only to be turned down, time and time again. They’re putting themselves at the disadvantage from the start by submitting themselves to a higher power for an outside hope of becoming a bestseller. 

My website gets more readers in a week than a New York Times Bestseller does. Traditional ways of writing need not matter so much.

Be A Builder, Not a Writer

As much as I still love great writers like Hemingway, they don’t exist anymore. Literary fiction as a genre doesn’t exist anymore. The path to become a traditional artist grows narrower, while the road to being a writer broadens. 

I quickly found, through this writing journey, that the web would be the future and final frontier of the written word. Not because of ChatGPT. But because it finally enabled writers to build audiences of their own.

Instead of looking up to great tortured artist writers like Oscar Wilde, I began to look up to great creative builders, like Walt Disney. I began to understand that, like Walt Disney’s concept of a theme park, the web was a living, breathing thing. It would change and grow. It wasn’t like a book that you wrote that sat on a shelf collecting dust. It would continue to reach new audiences overtime, and overtime it can be developed and improved.

I began to realize I wanted to build a website. 

The park means a lot to me in that it’s something that will never be finished. Something that I can keep developing, keep plussing and adding to — it’s alive. It will be a live, breathing thing that will need changes. A picture is a thing, once you wrap it up and turn it over to Technicolor, you’re through. Snow White is a dead issue with me. [..] I can’t change that picture, so that’s why I wanted that park. –Walt Disney

The First Step to Building the Website

After finding my voice, what actually caused me to create a website was at first my desire to explore a new medium. I had read about podcasting and podcasts have been growing in popularity. I figured it would be a nice change from writing and something new for me to explore. So I asked my wife if I could buy a web domain and build a website and use some money for that so I could podcast. 

Additionally, getting back to the beginning of the story, I had been interested in podcasting ever since I spoke on that BBC show. I was listening to various talk show podcasts and figured I could do something like that. 

This all happened right at the time the pandemic started. I didn’t have much else to do – neither did anyone else. It was easy to get guests onto my show, even though my website had just been built and my show was brand new.

I went hard at developing that show. So hard, in fact, that I needed a break by the time I hit summer. But I didn’t stop writing. 

Californians Left California and My Website Grew

I got some modest visits to my website thanks to an aggressive organic social media/influencer campaign. But after I grew tired of the grind of growing the podcast, part of me wondered if the website would ever grow into anything on its own. The first article to make it big, however, happened late in 2020. I happened to capture the zeitgeist of Californian’s wanting to leave the golden state, and I wrote a rather unpopular article on the topic that gained a lot of attention from, once again, people asking Google questions. “Should I leave California?”

That article was read thousands of times, and I couldn’t believe the traffic I got from it. Of course, that traffic would pale in comparison to the kind of volume my website drives every day, now. 

My Interests Continued to Drive Traffic

As I mentioned earlier, this wasn’t my first brush with viral content. I’d written trending articles before. But never for my own site – something that I actually owned. With those few hundred reads per month, I felt like I could do anything. I began to write about more of my interests, and those articles began to rank, as well. As I saw trends emerge, I doubled down on strategies to help content rank even better.

Out of this furnace of creativity, craze, and seemingly impossible odds, JosephWriterAnderson would eventually take shape into what it is today. It looks almost nothing like what it started as, and yet its name is true to the journey that birthed it.

The Advice Everyone Gives a Writer

When I was younger and just starting out, I, like every writer, wanted to know how to actually become a writer, one day. There was one piece of advice I heard so often I began to despise it. The advice was this – 

if you want to be a writer, write. 

I didn’t understand what that meant all those years ago when I sat huddled over pieces of paper in a dark and empty room. One million visitors to my website, and plenty of life, later, I’m beginning to understand.