How I Built a $0 Blog That Gets 100k Views
The blog cost me zero dollars and it gets about a hundred thousand views a year. Both of those are true, and the gap between them is the whole story — because the free part took an afternoon, and the views took a year. I'm writing this because every "build a blog" post sells you the afternoon. The stack. The deploy. The green checkmark. And the stack genuinely is free now, in a way it wasn't five…
This story is about how someone built a successful blog with a budget of zero dollars that receives around 100,000 views each year. The author emphasizes that the process of creating the blog took an afternoon, while the views took a year to accumulate.
The blog was created using a free stack of tools, including Cloudflare Pages for hosting, Astro for static site generation, giscus for comments, Buttondown's free tier for newsletters, Cloudflare Web Analytics for tracking, Pagefind for search, Fontsource for self-hosted fonts, and using free images from Unsplash and Pexels. The only cost associated with the blog is a custom domain, which typically costs around $10 to $15 per year.
The author breaks down the process into two halves: the zero-cost stack and the traffic generation. The zero-cost stack is achieved by using free tier services that provide unlimited bandwidth, a global CDN, and no server maintenance. The traffic generation, however, is not achieved through the tools themselves but through consistent content creation and promotion.
The author shares three key factors that helped their blog gain significant views:
1. Writing for a specific question rather than for themselves, focusing on providing answers to common search queries.
2. Actively promoting the blog on platforms like dev.to, Hashnode, and Medium, and using canonical URLs to link back to the original content.
3. Accepting that occasional spikes in traffic are due to luck and focusing on consistent, long-term efforts such as publishing a post a week, building an email list, and answering real questions.
The author concludes that the blog's success was not due to the tools or features used but rather to consistent content creation, promotion, and a focus on providing valuable answers to searchers' questions.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
