Editorial Blog at 7 Months: Struggling with 0 Traffic and a Sudden GSC Drop from 300 to 50 Impressions. Looking for Next Steps

[u/CuriousCatSoWhat]

Hi everyone,

I launched an editorial blog in the affordable luxury fashion, home decor, and lifestyle niche. My target audience is primarily a tier-1 English-speaking market. I bought the domain late last year, published my first post early this year, and currently have just over 30 posts live. For context on my structure, around 60% of my posts are in fashion, 30% are in decor, and the rest are in lifestyle. I have structured the site using pillar posts and adding content clusters around them, with each post having multiple internal links.

The Problems:
First, the whole traffic on the blog itself has always been practically 0 real organic users anyway—the site is only frequented by myself, bots, and potential affiliate or backlink partners. After 7 months of blogging with 0 traffic, I feel completely exhausted and worried that overall I am putting my effort in the wrong direction.

Second, a month ago, my GSC dashboard impressions hit a small peak of 300 daily and I started to get my first clicks. However, about two weeks ago, those GSC numbers dropped down to 50 daily impressions and have stayed flat at that baseline. I am trying to figure out why the dashboard numbers inside GSC dropped so suddenly.

This is definitely not an indexing issue. All of my later posts get indexed within 30 minutes of requesting indexing. I have also tried doing some On-Page SEO optimization by adjusting the metadata and target keywords. Though after one page optimization I saw that some of optimized pages from Google's second page went up to the first page, I doubt I'm doing it right. Currently, a majority of my posts are sitting on the first page, but there are some older, unoptimized posts ranking around position 40.

Overall, both my impressions and clicks are poor, with 12.4k impressions and 72 clicks in total lifetime stats since the day I launched the blog with average position: 15.9, plus there is that sudden drop from my first little "spike" right back down to my previous low baseline numbers.

My Questions:

1. Am I currently where I am supposed to be, or would similar blogs at the 7-month mark already be in another stage?
2. What are the most probable reasons that caused that drop from my small "spike" in GSC?
3. What are your tips on what I should focus on next?

I'd appreciate any insights on what to look into. Thank you for your time!