One month. Same posts, same effort, three places. This is how it split.There's a Korean expression, 일타삼피 — one hit, three points. It comes from a card game and it means getting three things done with a single move.
July was the reverse. Three swings, one point.
I'm glad about the one.
What I did
I posted to three blogs every day in July. Naver (Korea's dominant search portal, which has its own blogging platform), Tistory (also Korean, also blog-focused), and Google Blogger, which you're reading right now. Same topics, same day, adapted for each audience. Thirty-two posts on this one; one day off in the whole month.
Here's what came back.
Naver: 554 views. Blogger: 179. Tistory: 50. Total 783.
I don't know whether that's a lot or a little, because I have nothing to compare it to. One thing is clear though: Naver alone did more than twice what the other two managed together.
The part I'd rather not write
Tistory got zero visitors from search in the entire month.
Not a few. Zero. Naver search: 0. Google: 0. Daum: 0. Bing, Zum, Yahoo: 0. All thirty of its cumulative visitors typed the address or followed a link from somewhere.
Blogger isn't much better. Thirty-two posts, 179 views — about five and a half views per post. No followers. No comments.
I put the same hours into all three.
What actually worked, and it wasn't what I expected
Meteors. The single biggest source of traffic in July was people searching for the Perseid meteor shower. Four or five variations of the query — Perseid meteor shower 2026, August 12 meteor shower, where to watch the Perseids — added up to more than 15% of all search traffic.
The post went up on July 27. Five days before the month ended. Those five days produced the month's number one topic.
I already knew the rule — publish event posts well ahead of the event. This is the first time I've watched the rule pay off in a number. The shower is August 12; the post ran two and a half weeks early. That gap is what let search find it at all.
Wildfire smoke and air quality came second, around 12%. New York wildfire, Canadian wildfire smoke, excessive heat warning.
And then something I didn't predict: people looking up what words mean. What does bracket mean. What is AQI. Close to 10% of search traffic was somebody typing a word they'd seen and didn't know into a search box. Write the explanation and those people show up.
One more. Hope US release date — a Korean film opening here in September — was 3.5% of traffic on its own. The follow-up post goes out tomorrow. When I decided to write it I didn't know people were already searching for it.
The thing I didn't earn
A third of Naver's traffic didn't come from search at all. It came from other places on Naver — and 40% of that was Naver's own mobile front page.
The platform put my posts in front of people. I didn't do that. I don't fully understand why it happened, and I can't take credit for it. What I can say is that neither of the other two platforms has anything like it, and that difference is most of the gap in the numbers above.
Two more honest things
Three subscribers. On Naver, the 이웃 (neighbor) system is how posts travel. After a month I have three. Five hundred and fifty-four views and three people who chose to come back. People arrive and leave and nothing sticks. I don't yet know how to change that.
And the posts I worked hardest on did the worst. Looking down the list, everything that performed was timely and informational — meteors, smoke, word definitions. Not the pieces I spent days on. The longer I held something, the fewer people read it.
I haven't worked out what to do with that yet.
What changes in August
One. I decide about Tistory this month. Another month at zero search traffic is a month spent for nothing.
Two. Event and seasonal posts go up earlier. That's what the meteors taught me.
Three. I find out how people actually build a subscriber base, because clearly I don't know.
About the money
There isn't any, and I want to be precise about why.
It isn't that I tried to earn and failed. There was no ad account open in July at all. Naver's AdPost accepts applications starting August 10. Kakao's AdFit comes at the end of September. AdSense around early October.
So this report has no revenue line. Writing "$0" would suggest I ran ads and nobody clicked, and that isn't what happened.
I apply to AdPost on August 10. The next report will have that outcome in it, whichever way it goes.
One caveat on all of this
Everything above is one blog, one month. It's true, and it doesn't prove anything general. If a month of my numbers happens to match your situation, that's useful. If it doesn't, that's normal.
The people selling guaranteed blog income never make that distinction, and it's the whole distinction.
I wrote every day for a month, and on most of those days nobody read it. I knew going in that this is how the first months go. Knowing it and watching it happen daily turn out to be two different things.
Three swings, one point. I'll take the one.
If you're a few months into a blog of your own — what did your first month actually look like? I'm asking because I have no reference point and genuinely can't tell whether 783 is encouraging or dismal. Tell me in the comments, and subscribe if you want to see how month two goes.
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