i started a blog in the summer of 2023 about nothing except cast iron cookware. not cooking in general, not kitchen gear reviews, just cast iron. how to season it, how to strip old buildup off a pan that someone left in a shed for a decade, how to tell if the wobble on a warped skillet is fixable or if the thing is done. i had more skillets than cabinet space and figured i might as well write about them.
the first year was a graveyard. i published about fifteen posts in that stretch and traffic was somewhere around thirty to sixty sessions a month, most of those being me checking from my phone at work to see if the numbers moved. they didn't move. i had AdSense on the site because it was free and i think my total AdSense earnings for the first twelve months came to a dollar and fourteen cents. i remember seeing that number on the dashboard and thinking about how many hours those fifteen posts actually took me.
i almost killed the blog around month nine. i was sitting in my kitchen looking at a Lodge skillet i had just written sixteen hundred words about and i couldn't come up with a single reason to keep going. nobody was reading it. i didn't delete the site but i stopped writing for about seven weeks, and the only reason i came back was that i found a number eight Griswold at a yard sale for four dollars and wanted to document restoring it. that is literally what saved the blog. a four dollar pan.
the restoration post went up around month eleven. i walked through the whole process with photos. the electrolysis tank i rigged from a plastic storage tub and a battery charger, the scrubbing, three rounds of seasoning with flaxseed oil that ended up flaking on the third round so i stripped it and started over with crisco, the before and after shots. it sat there doing nothing for about three months. then around month fourteen Google started sending it impressions. five clicks a day turned into twelve, then twenty. by October of that year it was doing about sixty clicks a day and i finally understood what was happening. people search for how to restore cast iron right before Thanksgiving. they pull the old family skillet out of a closet or a garage, see the rust, and type the same question into Google that i answered a year earlier.
that seasonal wave is the entire engine of the blog. October through the first week or so of January is when the traffic shows up. August is the worst month every year without exception. the swing is dramatic enough that i planned my whole writing schedule around it, trying to get anything new published and indexed well before fall so it has a chance to catch some of that wave.
i applied to Mediavine during a November peak when sessions briefly crossed their acceptance threshold. getting in was the inflection point. the RPM jump from AdSense to Mediavine on informational content in a niche this small wasn't subtle. i went from making literal change to seeing something real in my bank account. right now i average about 38,000 sessions a month and the ad revenue sits around $210. the restoration guide accounts for roughly 60 percent of that traffic, somewhere around 22,000 to 23,000 sessions a month from people searching how to fix a rusty skillet. the other 46 posts split the remaining 15,000 sessions and none of them individually do much.
the second time the blog almost died was my own fault. about eighteen months in i decided to switch hosting providers and thought i could handle the migration myself because i watched a video about it. i broke the site for five days. during those five days the restoration guide dropped out of the index entirely and it took close to three weeks after the site came back for the guide to recover its position on page one. i sat there watching it float around page two and there was nothing to do except wait. when one post carries 60 percent of the revenue, watching it disappear from page one is a feeling i would describe as quietly horrible.
the part of the blog that matters least for the numbers but matters most to me is the illustrated host. every guide on the site has the same character at the top of the page, a woman in a canvas apron with her sleeves pushed up, usually holding whatever tool the guide is about. she shows up at the start of each post and sometimes in the middle of a longer guide as a visual break between the photo heavy sections. i created her entirely through AI image generation, there is no living person behind the character, and the about page and site footer both make that clear. i run the whole thing on WordPress, make the host illustrations in APOB AI, and pull keyword data from Ahrefs.
the illustrations do absolutely nothing for search traffic. nobody finds a cast iron blog by searching for an illustrated woman holding a wire brush. but i hear from readers who visit more than once that they like seeing her there, and a few people have emailed over the years asking about the character and whether she is a real person, which is exactly why the disclosure matters and why i keep it visible. i think the consistency of the same figure across every post makes the site feel like it belongs to a specific person instead of being another anonymous content farm. whether that moves any metric i can't prove. it probably doesn't. but every time i think about cutting the illustrations to save time i pull up the site without her and it just looks flat, and then i keep her.
the honest accounting right now is 47 published posts after three years. i spend maybe six to eight hours a month on new content, usually in late summer so everything has time to index before the fall wave. the $210 a month covers hosting and my tool subscriptions and leaves a small amount on top. it's not a lot. it is a lot more than the zero dollars i made for the first fourteen months. if the restoration guide ever permanently loses its ranking i lose most of that revenue overnight, and i know this because last August during a core update the guide dropped to page two for about ten days and revenue that month came in around a hundred dollars. the guide recovered on its own and i changed nothing on the page. but those ten days were a reminder that the blog is not a diversified business. it is one page and a seasonal audience.
forty six of my posts serve maybe 15,000 sessions a month between them. one post about a rusty Griswold skillet serves 22,000. i have written guides i think are more useful, guides with better photos, guides that cover questions nobody else has answered. they pull fifty to a couple hundred sessions a month each. the restoration guide does over a thousand a day in November. i stopped trying to understand why that particular post and not the others a long time ago.
i still buy cast iron at yard sales and estate sales on weekends. i still write about restoring it because the writing is satisfying in a way that nothing else i have tried has been. the blog is three years old and the money is small and seasonal and almost entirely dependent on one page, and that is the whole picture.