[Journey] Growing a Historical Blog from 100 Clicks to 10k Clicks a Month

For a fresh italian domain that RPM is honestly not bad, I wouldn’t rush away from Adsense yet. Most alternatives will pay worse until you have more volume, unless you can get into some proper display network later.

For Reddit, the less “come read my article” it looks, the better. Post the quiz/fact as the actual content, then put source/more context in the comments or profile... much safer than dropping links every time. Also with history articles I’d spend extra time on internal links around people, dates, wars, places etc, because those topical clusters can snowball pretty well if you keep them tight.

Adsmith2026 said:

For a fresh italian domain that RPM is honestly not bad, I wouldn’t rush away from Adsense yet. Most alternatives will pay worse until you have more volume, unless you can get into some proper display network later.

For Reddit, the less “come read my article” it looks, the better. Post the quiz/fact as the actual content, then put source/more context in the comments or profile... much safer than dropping links every time. Also with history articles I’d spend extra time on internal links around people, dates, wars, places etc, because those topical clusters can snowball pretty well if you keep them tight.

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Hey man, thanks a lot for the tips! You are completely right about Adsense! I checked my stats deeper today and my page RPM for Google organic traffic is actually around 3.27 euros! For an italian education niche I think it's amazing, so I'm definitely staying with them. I just need to scale the volume now! About Reddit, yes! That's exactly my new plan. I will do "native storytelling". I will just tell a crazy historical fact directly in the post to entertain people, and then maybe put the link in the comments for those who want to read the full context or see the maps. Much safer!

For the internal links, I am actually working on this right now! Since I write articles based on the university exams I am studying, I am building tight "silos" (like: Main Summary -> specific events -> quizzes) and linking them all together to build topical authority!

General Update for the thread:

Anyway guys, time for a quick update on the numbers!

June has been a bit slow, traffic went down from 3.5k clicks in May to about 2.6k clicks now. But it's completely normal because schools are closed here in Italy and nobody is studying history right now lol! I'm still making my ~1 euro daily from AdSense anyway!

But I analyzed my Search Console and Google Analytics today and I discovered some things:

1. Mobile is king! I thought I had mostly desktop traffic (because I rank very well on Bing), but my GSC says I have 82k impressions on mobile vs 40k on desktop! I need to optimize my SEO titles for mobile screens immediately because they are getting cut off!
2. Quizzes are a goldmine! Guys, my history quizzes are crushing it. Some of my quiz pages have a CTR of 30%, 40% or even 80% on Google! People love them, they stay on the page a lot (which is great for AdSense anchor ads). Plus, they are super easy and fast to make with AI!

So, my new strategy for the summer to prepare for the "back to school" in September is this:I will stop writing random articles. I will divide my work into 4 pillars:

• Evergreen Summaries (the boring stuff students need to pass exams, pure SEO)
• Specific concepts/definitions (long tail keywords)
• Quizzes tightly linked to the summaries (this is where I make the real money and engagement!)
• "Ethical Clickbait" stories (short, entertaining articles about crazy history facts to push on Google Discover, Bing hub? don't really know how it's called, and reddit for viral traffic spikes).

The goal for September is to reach 1.500 pageviews a day to make a stable 3-4 euros daily. I'll keep you updated! Thank you again for following my journey!