It was the last day of September when I realized I might actually hit 500 blog views for the month. I was sitting somewhere around 425, so I still had quite a ways to go, but I wanted it. My previous highest month was 477 views back in March, and I had never crossed that 500 mark before. It felt like this barrier I had been waiting to finally break through.

So I shared a post about it, sent the link to my chosen family, and basically said, Hey, I’m trying to do this thing. I knew we’d get there because I have incredibly supportive people in my life who were willing to click over and help me reach something that mattered to me. And yes, I refreshed my WordPress stats like a crazy person while we did it.

Then there it was. 501 views. I honestly just stared at the number. I told my husband. I told my close family. I was so freaking excited because I had finally done it. After starting blogs before that nobody really read, after months with 71 views, after reaching 477 and then watching my traffic drop again, The Gathered Kind had officially crossed 500 views in a single month.

And I know myself well enough to know how easy it would be to immediately move the goalpost. Okay, we hit 500. Now let’s get to 1,000. Then 10,000. Then 100,000. I have huge dreams for this blog, and I’m excited to see how far I can take it, but I don’t ever want reaching those bigger numbers to make this one feel small.

Because 501 views didn’t feel small to me.
It felt like we did it.

This Wasn’t My First Blog

The Gathered Kind wasn’t my first attempt at blogging. Years ago, I had a blog literally called Tamara G Fogle Blog because I had no idea what else to call it. I knew I wanted to write, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to write about, who I wanted to help, or what I wanted the blog to become. So I mostly just wrote about my life.

Looking back, that’s kind of wild to me because I had plenty to talk about. Even then, I already had six or seven years of experience working from home and building businesses. I had knowledge. I had experiences. I had things I had figured out the hard way that probably could have helped somebody else. I just didn’t see myself as an authority figure who had any business teaching those things yet. I was younger, I didn’t have the confidence in myself that I have now, and I don’t think I realized that my experience counted as education too.

Now I have 13 years of experience under my belt, and I see myself completely differently. I know I’m highly educated in the things I’ve spent more than a decade actually doing. I know I’m a leader, even though I didn’t always feel like one. More than anything, I’ve finally given myself permission to take what I’ve learned and use it to help somebody else.

That’s what feels different about The Gathered Kind. I’m still writing from my life because obviously my life is where a lot of what I know came from. But now I’m turning those experiences into something useful. Instead of simply writing about struggling with money, I can write about how to pay off debt when there isn’t extra money. Instead of just talking about working from home, I can take what I’ve learned from doing it for 13 years and help another woman figure out where she can start.

I think that’s probably one of the biggest differences between the woman who created that first blog and the woman writing this one now. I finally believe I have something worth teaching.

I Finally Gave Myself Permission to Just Start

When I started The Gathered Kind in August 2025, I didn’t have some perfectly mapped-out plan for what it would eventually become. I basically decided, I’m doing a blog. It’s going to be The Gathered Kind, and we’re just going to do whatever we can do to get a blog out there. I committed to publishing two posts a week, and for quite a while, that’s exactly what I did.

Then February came around and I didn’t really feel like I had anything else to add at the time, so I paused. I published a few random posts here and there, but in April, May, June, and July, I published nothing. And the funny thing is, the blog was fine. It didn’t disappear because I needed a different season. Blogs can pause. The things I had already written were still there waiting for me when I was ready to come back.

Apparently August is when my brain likes to have a creative spurt, because August 2026 rolled around and I was ready again. On August 31, I started figuring out what I now call my Search-to-Sale Method, and then I went a little crazy. I published six posts that day, six more on September 1, another six on September 3, six on September 9, five on September 26, and one more after midnight on September 27.

That was 30 blog posts in less than a month, which is slightly unhinged when I actually write it out like that. But I was excited because something had finally clicked for me. I wasn’t just asking myself what I felt like writing about anymore. I was thinking about what someone might actually be searching for, what problem she was trying to solve, what I knew that could help her, and where I could lead her next.

And none of it was perfect. Honestly, I’m already going back through those posts and changing things because I’ve learned more since I published them. But that’s kind of the point. I didn’t need to know everything before I started. I needed to take the imperfect action, learn from it, and give myself permission to make it better as I went.

I Stopped Treating Every Blog Post Like It Was on Its Own

One of the biggest things that has changed recently is the way I look at the posts I’ve already written. When I first started The Gathered Kind, the goal was pretty simple: get the posts up. I didn’t have this giant library of content to link to yet. I didn’t have nearly as many products, affiliate relationships, resources, or places I could send someone. I was building the pieces before I really understood how they could all work together.

Now I’m looking at the blog completely differently. Instead of thinking of every post as one individual piece of content that leads to one specific thing, I’m connecting them. If someone lands on a post about paying off debt, there might be another post that helps her find extra money. There might be a budgeting resource that makes sense for where she is. There might be something I’ve personally used that could help her. She shouldn’t have to finish one article and go all the way back to Google to figure out what to do next when I might already have the next answer sitting somewhere else on my website.

I’ve been calling it deep linking, but in my head I’m basically building hallways. The blog already has all of these rooms, and now I’m making it easier to move between them. I’m also not nearly as afraid to link to things as I used to be. I used to worry that adding too many links would make my blog look spammy. Now I realize that if a link is actually useful to the person reading, I’m helping her find what she came looking for.

I don’t know yet exactly what is causing the growth I’m seeing right now, and I don’t want to pretend that I do. But I do know what I’ve been changing. I’ve been updating older posts, adding more useful links, connecting related content, building Pinterest pins that lead people into the blog, and paying much more attention to what people are actually clicking. And as I’m writing this on October 6, I haven’t published a single new blog post this month, but The Gathered Kind has already crossed 200 views.

That is absolutely insane to me. I spent September creating, and now I’m spending October working on what I already built. Instead of constantly asking myself what else I need to make, I’m finally asking a different question: How can I make what is already here work better?

Every View Means Somebody Found Me

The more I’ve watched my blog traffic grow, the more I’ve realized I don’t ever want to get to a point where a certain number of views feels too small to celebrate. If I get 50 views in a day, that’s a good day. If I get 30, that’s a good day. If I get two views, that’s still a good day. As long as it’s not zero, we’re in the green.

I read something once that said to imagine two people showing up at your front door, and how you would feel about two actual people coming to see you. Personally, thinking about two random people showing up at my house makes me want to throw up, so we’re changing the analogy a little bit. Imagine two people walked into your store today. Two people who probably didn’t know about your store yesterday found it, walked through the door, and looked at something you created. That’s a crazy win.

Then imagine ten people came in. Heck yes. Fifty people? Even better. One hundred people? Oh my gosh. A thousand people walked into your store today? Now I’m wondering if I can serve a thousand people. Ten thousand? One hundred thousand? At some point I don’t even know what I would say.

That’s what I want to remember when I look at my analytics. Those numbers represent people finding something I created. They might read one post and leave. They might click around and find three more. They could subscribe to my email list, find one of my products, purchase something, save a Pinterest pin and come back later, or simply read what they needed that day and move on. I don’t get to know what every single view turns into, but somebody still found me.

And the longer I’m visible, the more chances people have to find me again. Someone could discover The Gathered Kind today because she found one of my debt posts on Pinterest and then come across me again a year from now for something completely different. She might remember the name and think, Oh hey, I’ve been here before. Maybe years from now she comes back and thinks, Wow, she really cleaned this place up. It looks fancy now. Hopefully still cozy, though.

That’s the perspective I don’t ever want to lose as the numbers grow. I want to be excited every day that people are finding this place because being found at all is worth celebrating. Every view means somebody walked into something I built.

The Gathered Kind Can Hold Every Season

I think part of what makes me so excited about where this blog is going is that I don’t have to figure out one single thing I’m going to talk about for the rest of my life. The Gathered Kind is an overarching brand. It can evolve as I evolve, and it can hold every season of my life without me having to burn everything down and start over every time something changes.

There are seasons when I’m talking a lot about making money from home because that’s what I’m figuring out. There are seasons of homeschooling our boys, paying off debt, building a business, navigating blue-collar-wife life, growing in my faith, and trying to figure out what matters most to our family. Ten years from now, my life could look completely different. Honestly, if you had shown 2016 me what my life would look like in 2026, I don’t even know what I would have said. I had two boys and I think I was pregnant with our third. I couldn’t have imagined five boys, the life we have now, or the version of myself I would become.

But the meaning behind The Gathered Kind hasn’t really changed. The name originally came from wanting to create a safe space where people could talk about the things they’ve been through without feeling like they needed to show up perfect. We’re all human. We all have flaws. We’ve all made mistakes, learned things, changed our minds, and found places where we could improve. I wanted a place where we could set aside the perfectness and just be on the same level.

I still imagine The Gathered Kind like people coming into my living room and sitting down to have a conversation about whatever needs to be talked about. I went to a friend’s house recently and we sat around a table talking for an entire night, and I still felt like there was so much more we could have talked about if we’d had more time. That’s what I love about this space. The Gathered Kind doesn’t get one night. It’s here 24/7. We can keep coming back to the table and talking about whatever this season brings with it.

Maybe that’s why I don’t feel like I need to perfectly define what I’ll be known for right now. I’ll figure it out as I go. The people who find me will probably help me figure it out too. But whatever changes, I want this to remain the kind of place where you don’t have to have everything figured out before you’re welcome here. We can admit what didn’t work, talk about what we’re learning, take the messy action anyway, and keep growing together.

The conversations might change. The season might change. I might change. But there’s still a seat at the table.

I Want to Remember What 500 Felt Like

I think that’s another reason I wanted to write this post now instead of waiting until I had some bigger milestone to talk about. There is only one life. I can’t go back and experience this exact moment again. I could wait until someday when the blog is getting thousands of views and write a post about the time I first hit 500, but it wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t be writing it while the excitement was still fresh or while I was still opening my stats and thinking, What in the heck is happening?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between 2016 me and 2026 me. There is so much about my life right now that I never could have pictured ten years ago. And that makes me realize that I have absolutely no idea what 2036 me is going to be doing either. I hope she has an insanely successful blog. I hope The Gathered Kind has reached more people than I can currently wrap my head around. I hope I’m making the kind of money from something I built that right now feels a little bit delusional to say out loud.

But I also hope that version of me remembers this one. I don’t ever want to get to a point where 500 views feels like it didn’t matter just because I’ve experienced bigger numbers since then. We all have a beginning. We all start somewhere. I want to be able to sit across from someone someday who is absolutely freaking out because her blog just hit 500 views and genuinely be excited with her because I remember exactly what this felt like.

I don’t want success to turn me into someone who feels better than the beginner. I want to still relate to her. I want to be the friend who tells her to take the messy action, create the thing that’s on her heart, put it out there before it’s perfect, and learn as she goes. I want to remember that I didn’t build The Gathered Kind because I had everything figured out. I built it because I finally gave myself permission to start.

So if Future Tamara ever comes back and reads this when 500 views is a fraction of what The Gathered Kind gets in a day, I hope she doesn’t look at this milestone and laugh at how small the number was.

I hope she remembers staring at 501.

I hope she remembers how proud she was.

And I hope she still knows how to celebrate the person who’s staring at her own version of 501 and thinking, I freaking did it.

And Now We’re at 202

The funniest part about writing a celebration post for 500 monthly views is that I’m sitting here on October 6 watching the number climb all over again. As of right now, The Gathered Kind already has 202 views for October, and this is the first new blog post this month. I keep checking it and basically saying, How? What in the heck is happening? because it still feels completely insane to me.

I don’t know what October is going to end at. Maybe this pace keeps going. Maybe it slows down. Maybe one of these Pinterest pins takes off even more. I genuinely have no idea, and I think that’s part of what makes this so exciting. I’m still figuring it out while it’s happening. I’m paying attention to what people are clicking, adding more Pinterest pins, going back through old posts, building more hallways between them, and making it easier for someone who finds The Gathered Kind to keep looking around if she wants to.

What I do know is that I want to keep doing this. I want to keep building my Pinterest. I want to keep improving this blog. I want to keep sharing what I’ve learned and giving someone else the confidence to actually take action in her own life. I want to keep putting things out there before they’re perfect, learning what works, changing what doesn’t, and seeing where all of this goes.

September 2026 will always be the month The Gathered Kind crossed 500 monthly views for the first time. No matter how big this becomes, there will only ever be one first 500-view month, and I’m really glad I stopped long enough to celebrate mine.

Now I’m going to keep the store open and see who walks in next.