More Milestones

About a year ago, I wrote a milestones post in which I reported reaching 40,000 page views and 100 posts in DivGro. I also reported crossing $200 in projected monthly dividend income and having published my first 1,000 page view post. Today, I'd like to give updates on these milestones and show what a difference one year makes...

I wrote my first DivGro post on 10 January 2013. The post you're reading is number 201! It has been quite a journey for me, committing to writing a blog about something I knew very little about – and then sticking to it for 27 months. I've learned a tremendous amount in this time, not only in the preparation needed to write posts, but also in reading the blogs of fellow dividend growth investors.

At 2,640 views, the most popular post on the blog remains Popular Dividend Growth Stocks. The second most popular post is Tracking your DGI Portfolio, in which I describe several ways to import data into a Google Docs spreadsheet. That post has received 2,180 views to date. Whereas in March last year I had a single 1,000 views post, today I have four. The other two are Recent Buy: VNR (1,416 views) and 10 Dividend Growth Stocks for September, 2014 (1,124 views).

Yesterday I crossed the 200,000 page view milestone!

28 March 2014  daily average: 90 page views  25 March 2015  daily average: 249 page views

In August last year, I contemplated publishing original articles on sites with a wider readership. My objective was to network more actively with other investors focused on dividend growth investing. To that end, I started submitting original articles to Seeking Alpha, a platform for investment research with broad coverage of stocks, asset classes, ETFs and investment strategy. At the same time, I gave permission to Seeking Alpha to republish DivGro posts.

I have no doubt that the exposure at Seeking Alpha is generating additional traffic to my blog. Seeking Alpha has an extensive readership and more than 7,000 contributing authors. So far, my articles on Seeking Alpha have generated just more than 156,000 views since publication of the first article on 4 September 2014. So far, I've published 11 original articles at Seeking Alpha. For comparison, my most popular article on Seeking Alpha has 7,831 page views and I have 591 followers.

In October 2014, I became an Associate Member of The DIV-Net, a "network of investors focused on dividend investing, value investing and a long-term buy and hold philosophy." This past week, I wrote my first original article for The DIV-Net – it is scheduled for publication on 1 April.

Of course, there are more important milestones to strive for than page views. Looking at my goals for 2015, I'm hoping to increase projected monthly dividend income to $625. I'm making good progress, with projected monthly dividend income currently at $467. By the way, that is 60% above the March 2014 amount of $292.

I'll report on the other 2015 goals in my next monthly report. So far, so good...

With one quarter of 2015 nearly behind us, how are you doing with regards to your 2015 goals? Are you on track? Please share your most important milestone reached during the first quarter of 2015.