JosephWriterAnderson.com – A timeline

80% of blogs fail within the first 16 months. Of those that make it, still only 5% of them actually generate money.

I started JosephWriterAnderson.com back in 2020 just before the pandemic, and since then it’s grown beyond my wildest expectations. Today, we are read by over 3 million people each year. Safe to say ours isn’t one of the majority.

Still, this journey has not been without its ups-and-downs, and in celebration of over four years in the business, I’ve put together this timeline highlighting where we’ve been, where we’re at, and what’s going to happen next.

February, 2020 – JosephWriterAnderson.com is formed

If I could credit one thing that gave me the motivation to start my own website, I’d probably have to look at the life changing trip to Europe I took when I was just twenty-five years old. Having gotten my start working as a content professional early, my trip to Europe looked a bit different than your typical twenty-something backpacking around Europe. We stayed at nice hotels, ate at nice restaurant and enjoyed comfort while exploring some of the most iconic locations in the world.

There’s something about stepping so far outside of your comfort zone that forever changes your perspective on the world. When I got back from that trip, I was filled with all sorts of ideas and possibilities.

I’d already been writing online via my Medium profile and some of my posts had gone viral. So why not start a website?

I also have to credit my wife here for encouraging the idea and being willing to invest in everything involved with creating my own website. It certainly isn’t free and I’m glad she was on board with it from the start!

“Keeping Up with Joe” the podcast starts

Most people who are fans of the website may not know that we also have a podcast. The podcast, actually, was the primary reason I started the website. I already had a writing outlet in the form of Medium, but I wanted to explore new mediums (pardon the pun) and podcasting seemed interesting.

Of course, I dove hard into the world of podcasting, learning everything I could about it as I interviewed all sorts of interesting people around the world.

Being a writer, though, I still kept publishing only now to my website. I didn’t have big plans for the blog at that time – I simply wanted somewhere to publish my ideas to compliment the work I had been doing.

At the beginning, the podcast drove over 1,000 page views a month which seemed pretty cool. Today, JosephWriterAnderson.com generates more traffic than that by the time I have my morning coffee.

Summer 2020 – podcast hiatus

Grinding out episode after episode with interviews and editing and scheduling is a lot of work, especially when it’s not paid. After doing a ton of shows quickly with the pandemic looming over us, I felt a bit burned out and wanted to take a break. I took the summer off of podcasting and only wrote a few articles a month (if any). Sometime towards the end of that year I started podcasting again, but on a very reduced schedule.

December 2020 – the first viral post

I wasn’t exactly a stranger to posts going viral – I’d had posts go viral already from the stuff I wrote on Medium. However, in December I wrote my first viral post for the website, and that month I had twice as many page views as any month prior. It was pretty exciting and felt like things were finally starting to get going.

2021 – new growth and focus

In 2021, JosephWriterAnderson.com took off in a much bigger way than I had experienced before, and by the end of that year I was getting over 60,000 hits a month. By then, the website had become a blog first, podcast far second, and our focus had shifted to ranking articles and blogs about fandoms like The Witcher or Harry Potter.

Apart from writing about these topics, there wasn’t much of a content strategy for the site, and most of what I wrote was just what I felt like writing in the moment.

In total, 2021 blew the first year of the site’s traffic away, getting 250,000 hits.

2022 – The rise of trading card games

2022 saw a lot of changes in my life that caused the website to go on hold while I was busy with other endeavors. Despite that, however, the website still saw considerable growth, grossing 660,000 page views which represented a greater than 100% growth rate over the previous year.

While 2022 was largely a maintenance year for the website as opposed to a high growth year, one important thing did happen: I started writing about trading card games.

During the previous year, the Pokemon craze had gained my attention and I had written about it in brief, and explored the craze and hype myself. I was drawn in by the community and excitement surrounding the game, as well as the nostalgic pull I felt as someone who had collected and sold cards in my very young years.

By 2022, I was ready to start writing about the game. But more than this, I noticed a huge gap between the interest players and collectors had in Pokemon TCG and the amount of smart, written content online about it.

There was a need for someone like me in the space, and I was ready to fill that void

2023 – Rebranding and our 1.5 million page view year

2023 is the year JosephWriterAnderson.com really began to mature and find its identity. It moved on from being a place where I just wrote about whatever I wanted and embraced its place as one of the leading resources for trading card games on the web.

June 2023 – Website exceeds 100,00 monthly visitors

June of 2023 was probably the single biggest website for the month from a traffic perspective, and marked the fact that we were no longer a website about various interests and quickly becoming a trading card game website. Hitting such a landmark achievement as 100,000 visitors a month meant we could attract much more valuable advertisers and start making real money.

We suddenly entered that top percentage of really successful blogs seemingly overnight.

September 2023 – Disney Lorcana releases

Thanks to how much the website had grown and how quickly, I was eagerly looking for the next topic we could jump into beyond Pokemon TCG. It came in the form of the super popular Disney Lorcana trading card game.

Disney Lorcana had all of the same markings as the Pokemon TCG when I started writing about it. There was an incredible craze for products, a massive shortage, high valued cards, and not enough content being written about the game.

I quickly jumped in and grew JWA to be one of the leading sources for resources for fans of the game.

2024 – The Sky is the Limit

Today, the website continues its phenomenal growth with more than 3,000,000 annual readers. Our most popular topics are the Pokemon TCG and Disney Lorcana TCG, and we are at the forefront of creating helpful resources for players and collectors for both of those games.

I’ll continue this year to create the best content for these games, while remaining open to future expansion and growth around new topics and games in the future.