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Blog income report number three!

This was really a mixed bag of a month for me — I made some progress in traffic and with Google in particular, but I had some personal setbacks and wasn’t nearly as productive in writing as I had hoped to be this month.

If you’re curious, here’s last month’s income report.

Let’s start this month with a quick overview of the goals I had set for myself for June:

• Write a total of 30 posts on Really Well, Thanks!. (bombed this – I only wrote 19.)
• Use the remaining two RankIQ reports to improve the two most popular posts on the other blog (straight up did not do this, like did not even attempt it)
• Increase my monthly traffic to 5,000 sessions. (did not achieve — landed at 3,206 sessions in June!)
• Continue pinning new pins for old posts (I did make a new pin for every post that had aged into repinning, so achieved this)
• Pin one of someone else’s posts out of the home feed daily (did this whenever I didn’t have five pins for that day)
• Continue to troubleshoot Bing indexing (all posts are indexed…Bing is just not that into me)
• Install Grow by Mediavine (did this!)

So, honestly it was a really challenging month for me as a human and this looks pretty bad, but there was some good stuff too. Let’s talk it through.

June blogging setbacks

Okay, a few things went sideways for me this month.

First: my youngest child didn’t start camp on time. She got strep and was laid up for a while, so there was some fairly chaotic care issues where I was at work in the mornings doing my little half days and then rushing home to relieve my mother-in-law and look after her.

So this was a setback. I had been planning on having about three hours to work on the blog every day this month and that just didn’t happen.

Then, we traveled to visit my family. I had almost caught up on scheduling posts ahead of this trip, but I fell a couple days behind. And I have to be so honest — even after we got back, I struggled a lot with morale and motivation.

Visiting my family is tough. And sometimes it feels like the worst and weakest parts of me still live back East. So even when I got back from that trip, it was tough to keep my motivation levels up and keep posting.

I think I had this idea in my head that I was going to have a perfectly calm summer and really be able to focus on the blog stuff since I’m not teaching. And it’s pretty disappointing that it didn’t turn out that way!

But if I’m being realistic — writing 1500-2500 words every single day is an enormous ask, and it’s not surprising that there would be some burnout. I’m a good writer and it comes easily to me, but at the end of the day it’s a lot of brain work.

June traffic

Sessions

Despite my struggles, my traffic did go up! I set the pie-in-the-sky goal of 5,000 sessions because in May I more than doubled my goal. I didn’t come near 5,000 sessions, but I did nearly double the May traffic. 3,206 sessions for June means that I am almost one-third of the way to Journey.

I also exceeded 150 sessions in a single day this week, which felt really big. The first half of the month hovered around 80-90 sessions per day, and in the past week or so it’s been in the 140s-150s. So it’s been a month of really significant traffic gains.

A full month of 150-session days would be about 4,600 sessions per month. And it’ll take an average of 334 sessions per day for a month to get to the 10k required for Journey. So where I’m sitting right now at the end of June, there has been a lot of growth despite the setbacks.

Pinterest

I had a really uneven Pinterest month!

What I’m finding is that Pinterest doesn’t just want new pins posted every day — it also seems to want new pins uploaded every day. Because before I went away, I uploaded all my usual pins: 3 new pins for recent posts, plus a new one each day for older posts. And then for the first three days of my trip, I didn’t even open Pinterest.

When I did, I was so surprised to find my traffic had dipped significantly!

It was really surprising to me, because a lot of what’s out there encourages you to schedule a whole week’s worth of pins at a time or even a month’s worth. I don’t see how that’s working for people if I saw this dip from two days of not uploading/scheduling any new pins.

Pinterest data from June — again, ignore that 2.6k dot, that’s this morning’s data so far.

So you can see there was a lot of unevenness this month. I’m still well above where I was in most of May, but I’m finding the algorithm to be much more sensitive to not logging in or neglect. I think what I’m going to try to do is set up this week’s older pins as drafts and log in every day to post them.

On the subject of older pins: I follow Pinteresting Strategies 2.0 –I don’t want to get too nitty gritty with her strategy out of respect for her course, but I am pretty excited for this upcoming month because a lot of my older posts are now old enough to apply the strategy! So even though I was a little frustrated with Pinterest this month…watch this space. 🙂

My other small victory in Pinterest world this month…I now have 21 Pinterest followers! Absolutely every single Pinterest person will say that followers don’t matter. And as far as actually making the clicks happen, they don’t, for sure. But the algorithm is definitely keeping track of what pin clicks lead a user to follow your account. I’m finding that once someone follows my account, that initial pin that they clicked on sees a much further reach. And having followers is also resulting in a better initial response for new pins. Where at first, new pins might only be seen by three people and then sit empty for weeks, now I’m seeing that followers see the pins pretty much right away, and if they engage, the pin will do well much sooner.

Followers went really slowly at first, but it’s increasing significantly and I’m now at 2-3 new ones per week. There isn’t much you can do to grow followers to your account, so I’m not sure how helpful this is to someone a few months behind me on this journey. But I thought I’d share it anyway.

Google

After that whole thing I wrote last month about Google fears and worries about the Helpful Content Update, I actually had a great month on Google Search.

I don’t have the data yet from yesterday, but I had my max click day ever on Saturday — 29 clicks on Search Console. (Search Console doesn’t actually show every click to your site…Analytics is showing clicks in the 50s and 60s to my site every day, with a high of 76 clicks on Saturday.

This is encouraging! The HCU stuff online is so doom and gloom. And of course it’s still possible that they notice me tomorrow and smite me, but I’m working really hard to be a real person behind this blog. That’s the best advice I can give so far — in most posts, I’m trying to talk about being a human, whether that’s when my brother was on Accutane or my kid’s tangled hair or how much I hated Proactiv. (If this blog ever disappears from the airwaves you’ll know it was because the Proactiv company put out a hit on me.)

This is honestly making me nervous because I feel like it’s annoying? But I’m hoping that people don’t see it that way, and that it keeps me firmly on the human side of whatever human vs AI thing Google is trying to do.

Rookie mistake of the month

Time and motivation.

It’s a rookie mistake to assume that there’s magically going to be a special part of the year where blogging becomes easy and time is ample. (This is also teacher magical thinking — “in the summer I’ll have time for everything”!)

The motivation thing is more complex for me — I’m planning on a post about my family stuff that’s going to be mostly about my sobriety, but the fact is that even though I didn’t go home and drink, the dysfunction hit me in a different way. I got back home and it was really hard to do something extra, even if it’s in alignment with the goals that I have for myself.

I also didn’t keep up with the cleaning or make all my workouts the week we got back. It was just a major slump overall.

I don’t know what else to say about it; I think next year I’m going to try to get them to meet us in a more neutral spot rather than going back to the house I grew up in. I can’t change them and I still love them. I gotta work on how to minimize the effects on me.

Otherwise: AAWP is still going great for the linking stuff. It’s made it a lot easier to work through the product recommendation type posts, and I have stopped putting those off so much and caught up on a few of them in June!

Traffic changes

If you read last month’s report, you know that I had a single post go baby viral in the middle of last month. (It was actually a RankIQ report post that was only projected to get a thousand clicks a year! I picked it because I already knew a lot about the topic and it just took off on Pinterest.)

That post now makes up more than half of my traffic, and nearly two-thirds of my Google traffic based on what I can see through Search Console.

But!

That’s actually an improvement — all of last month, that single post was 70-80% of my traffic and probably nearly 90% of my saved pins. So I’m seeing the growth there where my other pins are also getting some traction. I used to get notifications that were just that pin, over and over again, but there are now about 5 main posts that are making up most of the other half of my traffic.

Time-wise, this makes sense based on what Pinteresting Strategies said would happen with these pins — I really only started writing most days in April. But it’s reassuring. I do hope some other pins become as popular as that one! If 5 posts did as well as that one post is doing, I’d be in Journey already!

So I’m going to stay hopeful on that. I wrote a bunch more posts on related topics and did my best to interlink them well, so I’m hoping that the demand is there, on Pinterest or Google or both, to get those posts the pull they were looking for!

blog income report for June 2024

This wasn’t a great affiliate link month!

• I earned $5.97 for Really Well, Thanks!, completely from Amazon affiliate links. That is the only existing source of income at this point. Shoutout to the girl who clicked one of my links and then did her Whole Foods order.
• I spent $49 on RankIQ. The rate at which I’m ranking up in Google convinces me that this is still super worth it. No other blog expenses this month.
• So the total blog revenue for June 2024 is -$43.05, a loss.
• The year to date revenue for 2024 is -$215.70, a loss.
• And the revenue for the life of the blog, since December 2023, is -$479.00, a loss.

I’m still feeling that this is worthwhile. I’m very fortunate to have $500 in expendable income to have put towards this so far. (If I thought about an hourly rate for all the time I’ve spent writing, that would change the calculation significantly, so we’re just not thinking about that right now.)

I know that this will be worth it once I hit Journey, and then Mediavine. I know that I’ve been writing as much as I have to do that as quickly as possible. I know that I have a ton of posts from April that are about to age up. There’s a big month of blog stuff ahead.

At this point, the growth that I’ve seen so far has proven that I can do this. Here, we’re in matter of time territory. It might take two months or six months or a year, but I can make this thing profitable and successful. I know that someday I am going to look back on these income reports and feel so grateful to the girl who worked her butt off to get us there.

My July goals are:

• Write 31 posts. Try to schedule them to keep all Pinterest boards regularly updated. 31 may not be attainable, but it’s the best goal I can shoot for.
• Update 2 old posts and write 4 new ones for the other blog. I have some vague designs on getting the old blog profitable and selling it — it has a decent domain authority, and if it wasn’t nuked under HCU, it would probably be pretty easy to get it up to snuff.
• 1 old pin every day. Through July, there will be a lot of older posts that age into reposting. So this will be pretty easy to do. I’m going to put these in the native scheduler but post them manually for the first week and see what it does to my impressions.
• Focus and mental health: Last month was really tough on me. This month might go perfectly and might be a train wreck and will probably be somewhere in between. I need to be more flexible and take care of myself better. Above all else: I can do something for the blog every day.
• So, no one ever seems to mention this and I don’t know if it’s because it’s not done, or because people do it and don’t admit to it, but I think I’m going to try to promote some pins through Pinterest Ads this month and see what happens. It’s pretty inexpensive and it might be worth it?
• Flex goal: since I go back to school in August, I’d like to try to stockpile some backup posts for things like Meet the Teacher Night where I’m just not going to have my usual time to work. If I managed to squeeze out an extra few posts, that would give me some breathing room.
• Keyboard my Pinterest boards! I’ve been meaning to do this for ages. Some of my boards are not keyworded at all and like, what am I doing.