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This’ll be a short one!
I didn’t do a great job this month. I posted the November income report, scheduled a week’s worth of pins, and then struggled for the next two weeks to make time.
About midway through the month, I got serious with myself. I wasn’t posting, wasn’t pinning, but most certainly was berating myself every day for lack of focus. And that isn’t helping.
So I said, affirmatively, okay, I won’t post in December at all. I needed permission to take a break, instead of taking a break anyway but beating myself up about it.
I’ve spent some of my school break preparing posts and pins for January, but it felt different knowing I didn’t “have” to. I feel like what I’ve been doing here has been a lot like binge dieting — getting off track, coming up with a super-strict “plan” that I then fail to comply with….
(Can you tell I have some history here?)
Anyway: the truth is, last year I had a miraculous school schedule where I had a lot of freedom of time. This year, I have a really difficult schedule, and a lot of extra commitments, and a lot of family commitments. And it just is what it is. I don’t need to be posting 35 times or whatever like I did in May 2024 every single month.
So in January I’m going to target Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That’s plenty. By the time this posts, I hope to have written the first four or five.
Pinterest planning
The Pinterest stuff has been tough. It’s tedious.
Carly Campbell just put out the new version of Pinteresting Strategies (called Pinteresting Strategies 2025), and I’m working my way through it on the treadmill. What I had loved about her old stuff was that it was a very low-pin strategy; this one is definitely calling for more pins per day.
I won’t get into it further out of respect for her course, but she’s suggesting more pinning than I was currently doing. And that’s not ideal! But I’m going to attempt it.
Now that I’m not trying to post every day, I think I can try to charge myself with either writing or pinning every day. I think that when I get this blog making meaningful money, the very first thing I will do will be to hire someone to do Pinterest for me. But in the meantime… gotta tough it out.
Money stuff
I didn’t do much this month, so I don’t really have any business expecting much. But….
The blog made $162.92 from Grow and $40.64 from Amazon Affiliates, for a total of $203.56.
I paid out $29 for RankIQ in December, and I did run my reports, so it wasn’t a waste. I’ve paused my membership for now because I have such a report backup. The pause was really easy to do, and I appreciate that they offer it. I’m going to work on getting caught up, and I’ll resume the membership when I do.
I also paid the $210 for my annual hosting through Kinsta this month. All that trouble I had in the summer with my site speed literally disappeared when I switched. I wrote this up in last month’s income report, but I would highly recommend that a new blogger start with a super inexpensive host like I did with Bluehost, but know that once you have traffic, you’re going to feel the lag quickly. Switching to Kinsta resolved all my Core Web Vitals issues immediately.
Because I paid out the whole year’s hosting in advance, the site is underwater again! Ah, well.
So the total blog revenue for December 2024 is a loss of $35.44. The hosting is a once-a-year expense, so we’ll be back to profitability in January.
The final year to date revenue for 2024 is $194.11.
And the revenue for the life of the blog, since December 2023, is -$69.19.
I can’t take these setbacks too hard because I knew the annual hosting costs were coming. All I can do is work hard this month and get it into the black permanently.
My blogging resolutions
(let’s do this instead of goals this month, shall we?)
- Post on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, all year. Get ahead when you can.
- Give Pinteresting Strategies 2025 a good solid 3-month trial. I trust that it will work if I’m willing to stick it out, so I have to be willing to stick it out.
- Keep my mindset right: this is not homework or punishment. This whole blog is an exercise in betting on myself: that I have something to say, that I can create value for others, and that I can create financial ease and freedom for myself and my family. This blog is a joy and a gift and a vote for myself.
Happy new year!
