{"id":2486,"date":"2013-09-16T11:35:51","date_gmt":"2013-09-16T16:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/?page_id=2486"},"modified":"2013-09-18T05:28:52","modified_gmt":"2013-09-18T10:28:52","slug":"how-i-attracted-nearly-a-half-million-site-visits-on-a-topic-thats-dull-as-dirt","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/index.php\/how-i-attracted-nearly-a-half-million-site-visits-on-a-topic-thats-dull-as-dirt\/","title":{"rendered":"How I attracted nearly a half-million site visits on a topic that’s dull as dirt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in 2005, I combined two hobbies and created a hiking blog<\/a>. I built a following writing about trails, gear, safety, adventures and the like. I had a great job on the copy desk of the biggest daily newspaper in Silicon Valley and I lived near some of the best trails in the country. It was a natural match.<\/p>\n

\"Two-heel<\/a>By 2009, the newspaper industry was in a flaming death spiral; I was out of the business by midsummer. We moved to North Carolina for the lower cost of living and I started blogging about trails in the Blue Ridge Mountains.<\/p>\n

Less than a month after my last day at the paper, one of my blog’s readers hired me to write a series of GPS-enabled hiking guides<\/a> for his iPhone app. About a month after that, I landed a full-time gig as an online editor with a popular hiking gear website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I struck out on my own in 2011 and soon found that my writing\/editing business was keeping me so busy that I couldn’t find time to update my hiking blog.<\/p>\n

Google Analytics tells me my hiking blog has attracted more than 400,000 unique visitors and about a million page views, even though I haven’t added a post since December 2011. And all those iPhone hiking guides I wrote? They’ve been read more than a million times.<\/p>\n

I did all that while writing about something people have been doing for a hundred thousand years: walking upright in the great outdoors. Dull as dirt, right? And I picked an inherently paradoxical topic: With few exceptions, hikers don’t blog and bloggers don’t hike.<\/p>\n

Over the course of a half-decade, I logged nearly a half-million visits to a blog that should not have even existed and I used that experience to launch a thriving new career.<\/p>\n

Producing Web content that people want to read takes more than an ability to master a topic and write about it well.<\/p>\n

It requires a knack for engaging readers and keeping them coming back.<\/p>\n

What I do:<\/p>\n

Writer<\/a> | Editor<\/a> | Clients<\/a> | Resume<\/a> | Rates<\/a> | Portfolio<\/a><\/p>\n

Email me at noozwiz@gmail.com<\/a> for a free quote.<\/a><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 2005, I combined two hobbies and created a hiking blog. I built a following writing about trails, gear, safety, adventures and the like. I had a great job on the copy desk of the biggest daily newspaper in…<\/p>\n

Read more \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2486"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2486"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2637,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2486\/revisions\/2637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}