[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.

Click to expand...

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!

General Update for the thread: September 15

Hey guys! Time for another update. The summer is finally over, and universities/schools are officially starting back up here in Italy. Time to get back to the grind!

Let’s look at how the site performed during the absolute "dead" season for an educational niche.

The Numbers (Last 30 Days): As expected, with schools and universities closed, traffic took a dive during August.

• Google Clicks: ~2.18k
• Google Impressions: ~114k
• AdSense Earnings: ~€18.5 (Around €0.60 a day)
• AdSense Page Views: ~8.8k
• AdSense Page RPM: ~€2.07

It’s definitely lower than my May/June numbers, but honestly? I am super happy with it. Making almost €1 (yesterday i made 1.15) a day completely passively during the lowest seasonality possible for a history site proves that the baseline is solid. Now it's time to build on it!

What I've Learned & New Features: Remember when I said quizzes were a goldmine? I doubled down on that!I built a few interactive tools, and the results have been super interesting:

1. "Higher or Lower" History Game: This is crushing it! The page for this game and my specific quiz pages (like modern history) are holding incredibly strong, bringing in insane Google CTRs of around 17% to 19%. People love the simple gamified learning.
2. Daily History "Wordle": I got ambitious and coded a daily Wordle-style history game. The idea was to give people a daily challenge to create a habit loop and get returning visitors. The reality? It’s kind of flopping right now lol. It's just not getting the traction or engagement I hoped for compared to the simpler quizzes.

The Plan for Q4 (Back to School!): Now that university exams are coming back, I am pivoting back to the content strategy. I am going to aggressively write more articles and evergreen summaries. I need to feed those topical authority "silos" I started building in June to capture the student traffic wave that's coming over the next few months.

I'd love to hear your feedback guys: Have any of you successfully launched a daily challenge/Wordle-style game on your sites? How do you actually get people to come back every day and build that habit loop? Maybe I should push it more on Reddit/socials, even tho i'd like not to sound too spammy?

Any tips or feedback are always super appreciated.

Ciao, back ob this interesting post. Checked your site again and I love it.
I’m in a similar Italian seasonal niche and back to school are a goldmine.
I’d like to know what you use as backend, something like ghost or directus?

Adsense on mobile seems little bit invasive, I need avoid too many banners to read a content.

Anyway i love the idea.

Wow, you would need to at least 5x your traffic just to get to $100/month, running display ads with an Italian site looks terrible. However, i can't think of a single affiliate product you can promote on a history site so you don't have another option.
Good luck with your journey

py3r said:

Ciao, back ob this interesting post. Checked your site again and I love it.
I’m in a similar Italian seasonal niche and back to school are a goldmine.
I’d like to know what you use as backend, something like ghost or directus?

Adsense on mobile seems little bit invasive, I need avoid too many banners to read a content.

Anyway i love the idea.

Click to expand...

Ciao!!! Thank you! I used node.js and express as backend, I like to code myself so it was the easiest choice.
I know that on mobile google's auto-ads are quite invasive, but they are too profitable to remove. They make about 53% of all the earnings! Tonight I worked on optimize existing ads, in order to improve rpms. Yesterday's Page RPM was 3,37 €, almost double (maybe even more) than general italian websites!

Beklink said:

Wow, you would need to at least 5x your traffic just to get to $100/month, running display ads with an Italian site looks terrible. However, i can't think of a single affiliate product you can promote on a history site so you don't have another option.
Good luck with your journey

Click to expand...

It's not looking terrible imo, I'm really satisfied to be honest! Yeah I don't think there would be much for me to promote via affilate marketing. If it keeps going like these last few days, I'd just need to do 2.5x to get to 100 dollars/month (considering conversion), and not 5x haha. Right now I'm aiming at keeping it at least 1eur/day!

metlivewin said:

Ciao!!! Thank you! I used node.js and express as backend, I like to code myself so it was the easiest choice.
I know that on mobile google's auto-ads are quite invasive, but they are too profitable to remove. They make about 53% of all the earnings! Tonight I worked on optimize existing ads, in order to improve rpms. Yesterday's Page RPM was 3,37 €, almost double (maybe even more) than general italian websites!


It's not looking terrible imo, I'm really satisfied to be honest! Yeah I don't think there would be much for me to promote via affilate marketing. If it keeps going like these last few days, I'd just need to do 2.5x to get to 100 dollars/month (considering conversion), and not 5x haha. Right now I'm aiming at keeping it at least 1eur/day!

Click to expand...

This journey is becoming better and better! Following and I wish you also good luck OP!

General Update for the thread: September 27

Hey guys! Quick update after about two weeks since my last post. Schools and universities are now in full swing here in Italy, and the numbers are finally starting to look exciting!

Also, in my last update I asked you guys how to get people to come back every day for my history games instead of just playing once and leaving. Well, Instead of just writing articles, I spent the last 10 days coding a whole ecosystem around the games to fix that. And some crazy/funny stuff happened along the way lol.

First, let's look at the numbers!

The Numbers:
- Google Search Console (Last 28 Days): 2.96k Clicks (up from 2.18k!) | 170k Impressions (up from 114k!)
- Google Analytics (Last 30 Days): 15k Page Views | 7.1k Sessions

AdSense (Last 7 Days - Sept 20 to Sept 26):
Since traffic is growing fast week over week, looking at the last 7 days shows the real momentum right now:
- Last 7 Days Earnings: €10.83 total (Average: €1.55/day, up from €0.60/day in my last update!)
- Best Days: €2.16 on Sept 24 and €2.05 on Sept 21!
- Worst Day: €1.03 on Sept 26 (still above €1/day every single day of the week!)
- AdSense Page Views (7 days): 3,508 (around 501/day, peaking at 571)
- AdSense Clicks (7 days): 157 clicks (22.4/day average)
- AdSense Page RPM (7 days): ~€3.00 average (up from €2.07! Switching to a bigger 970x250 billboard ad on desktop + back-to-school advertisers really helped here).

Seeing my first €2+ days completely passively feels amazing considering where this site started.

What I Built in the Last 10 Days (Fixing the Retention Problem):

1. User Accounts, Weekly Leaderboards & Public "History Passports":
To make the "Higher or Lower" game (Chrono) and the daily "Wordle" game (Chronosfida) addictive, I built a full user system with a live Weekly & All-Time Leaderboard, plus public user profiles showing win rates, streaks, and stats.

2. Frictionless "Guest-to-User" Score Transfer + 1-Click Google Login:
At first, I used standard email + password registration with email verification. Big mistake: teenagers playing a game on their phone don't want to type a password, open Gmail, check the spam folder, and click a verification link just to save their score.
So I coded a "guest cookie" system: people play immediately as guests, and right inside the "Game Over" popup it says: "Don't lose your X points! Save them to the leaderboard with 1 click". I integrated the "Continue with Google" button directly inside the game-over modal. When they tap it, my backend creates the account and automatically transfers the points they just scored as a guest to their new profile.

3. Pushing the Games with AWS SES (Newsletter):
Remember the emails I collected over the past months by giving away free PDF study summaries? I set up AWS SES and sent an email to my list to push the new games and leaderboard. Instead of a boring newsletter subject line, I used a challenge hook like: "I scored X points on Chrono. Can you beat me?".

The 2 Funny Fails of the Week:

Fail #1 - The Cloudflare Cache Disaster:
Right after I sent the newsletter, people started clicking and playing... but nobody was showing up in the database! Why? Because I had a "Cache Everything" rule on Cloudflare that was caching the HTML of the game page, including the anti-cheat JWT game token! So everyone was getting an expired token from hours earlier and the server was rejecting the scores with a 403 error. What a rookie mistake lol. Fixed it immediately by bypassing cache on all dynamic/game routes and extending token life to 24h.

Fail #2 - My First "Lawsuit Threat":
An old guy who probably downloaded a history PDF for his grandson months ago replied to my newsletter in ALL CAPS saying:
"STOP IT!!! I AM NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR SERVICES. At your next email I will proceed with legal action / court!"
Welcome to email marketing in Italy I guess haha. I manually deleted him from the DB :O

Next Steps:
Now that the login, Google auth, and leaderboards are live and stable, I want to add unlockable badges/medals (like scoring 10+ in a row, 3-day streaks, etc.) to boost the habit loop even more, and get back to publishing new history summaries for the fall exam season. I would also like to sell something, like "donors" accounts that would make users browse the website with no ads, and maybe a coloured nickname or something like that. But first i must see how many people actually subscribe and play the games.

What do you guys think of the 1-click Google login inside the game-over popup? Any other gamification tricks you'd add to keep students coming back? thank youuu