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Last month’s post is here, if you want it.

The second half of this month was absolutely brutal.

And not the way last month was, like the sick kid, family trip kind of thing where you’re too busy to blog. This month, blogging stuff specifically sucked and was really hard. It’s hard to write a blog income report when you kind of want to trash your blog.

I almost didn’t want to write this post because I’m feeling frustrated. But I’m writing it because I hope it will be helpful to someone, and because there were basically zero resources out there for some of the problems I was having. (Or, zero resources if you aren’t a professional web designer.) So hopefully at least all this mess will be useful to someone at some point.

(And I guess I’ll also give the caveat that I’m not positive that what I’m saying is the problem is the problem! I should come back in a couple months and update if it works.)

A month of decline

So, during the first half of the month I was seeing a lot of really healthy growth. Around July 10 I was thinking that I might hit 6,000 sessions this month!

I tested out Pinterest Ads and it was a bust. More on that later. So I wasted about $50 — there was some traffic, but really not enough to justify what was spent. But overall, traffic was trending up, especially Google traffic.

And then traffic was flat.

A lot of blogging stuff talks about the summer slump, so I didn’t worry too much. Kept posting and pinning. I told myself that once summer ends and people are back to reality, I’ll see that same growth again.

And then….traffic was declining. And I freaked out.

You’ll see later that my Pinterest stats look crazy from the ads. But look at my Google Search Console info:

See that nosedive in the second half of the month? Bad scene! And I was starting to really worry. This wasn’t summer slump…this was something else.

Core Web Vitals help for beginners (aka rookie mistake of the month)

While I was clicking around in Search Console looking for a note from Google that just said “we hate you now”, I found the Core Web Vitals tab by accident.

You need a certain amount of traffic for Google to even calculate a Core Web Vitals score for you, so I had never noticed it before. It looks like they started calculating mine about mid-May.

Every single page that was assessed was “poor”. So I had 50-something pages with Poor Core Web Vitals. And, my best-performing page that had suddenly dropped off the SERPs was now listed as the worst offender!

I’m going to fast forward through days of kicking, screaming, and weeping to try to figure out how to fix it. (I’m not positive that I have fixed it! I won’t know for at least 28 days.) Believe me when I tell you that it was an ugly few days.

Here’s what I did to fix it:

• converted the Pinterest pins that I embed into the post to JPEG files, which are smaller and load faster, then ran them through tinypng.com to shrink them further. (Canva defaults to PNG files, so I figured that was what I should use, but PNGs are large and slow!) I’m also messing around with the webp file type, but I can’t say yet if it’s any better.
• ditched my website theme and replaced it with one of the light, fast, free WordPress ones.

Honestly, I do think the images were the majority of the problem. I might try to reinstall my theme in a month or so and see what my site speed issues look like. But right now, I don’t want to do anything that might prevent my Core Web Vitals score from coming back up.

So, a couple quick notes for beginning bloggers:

• Save all files as a .jpeg unless they need a transparent background for some reason, and run them through tinypng.com before you upload them to your post.
• If I was doing it again, I would not have bought the theme that I bought. (It was from 17th Avenue — I think they get a lot of recommendations because they have an affiliate program, but for me it was a waste of money.) I had already taken out a lot of the widgets and plugins that slow down a site, like the Instagram widget and all that. But the site was still much slower with the theme. If you’re more tech savvy than I am, Lighthouse said that the theme had several shifts and didn’t defer Javascript. I have no idea how to correct this.
• I tried to use the Smush plugin to resize the images for me, and that wasn’t too helpful. In some of my tests, the sites were actually slower after installing Smush. If you’re starting from the beginning: change your Canva settings to default to JPEG, and run your pins through tinypng. Don’t end up like me, needing to fix 100 posts worth of pins!
• (And about plugins: many slow your site down. I deleted everything I didn’t use and am now running a lean six plugins. I might still delete Smush.)

At this point, I’ve corrected the images for my top 20 posts, which make up nearly 90% of my traffic. I’m going to correct ten a day until they’re all fixed, but I do think that knocking out these higher-performing posts will help. 90% of my users are now going to be getting a good experience.

Unfortunately, the Core Web Vitals re-check can take up to a month. So I’m not sure how long things will take to improve. I hope it’ll be better by next month’s blog income report, but I don’t know. This was a super defeating setback! It did make me glad that I also have a Pinterest strategy.

Pinterest Ads for bloggers

You know, I could not really find any info talking about promoting pins as a blogger before I tried it? Not in any blog income report posts, not even on Pinterest’s website.

Put briefly: I don’t recommend this, and I won’t do it again.

Pinterest ads are very much set up for ad agencies, and it was not user-friendly to try to set up a campaign.

When I set up an initial campaign, It prompted me to pick 2-4 pins to promote. I picked four newish posts that I expected would eventually do well. I wanted to see if I could use ads as a strategy to speed up the 6-8 weeks it tends to take for a pin to take off.

It was a flop! In retrospect, two of the pins I picked were too niche for a wide audience. One was about color analysis, and the other was words of affirmation for your best friend. (Honestly I have posts that I really like that don’t get much traction, and that’s one of them. That’s the only reason I picked it for the ads.)

Pinterest recommended that I stop those ads almost immediately. That left a pin about hair capillary schedule, and a pin about line nail art. These are more general pins that will have a wider audience. The hair capillary schedule pin probably wasn’t ideal because a lot of people don’t know what the phrase ‘capillary schedule’ means, so they might have kept scrolling even if they would have been interested in the content.

The ads flag kept sending me these messages that said “Improve creative on (xyz pin)” for better results. Which, like, if I knew what to make, I would make it? And there weren’t a lot of resources on their end to help you figure out how to improve.

So, all this to say…I won’t do Pinterest ads again. Since I did it, I’ve been paying more attention to who promotes pins, and it seems to be mostly people selling courses anyway.

Pinterest stats for July

Get ready for a weird graph.

Here are my Pinterest impressions for July:

Okay, you can see the big spike where the ad campaign ran. Remember, those are impressions, not outbound clicks. Even the best day of the campaign, it only added about 30 outbound clicks to my typical.

And then you can see that after the ads are over, it’s a flat line, about 2k impressions per day lower than before I did the ads. I actually feel a little sheepish admitting in this blog income report that I paid for this!

A cynical person would guess that this is because they’re trying to get me to pay for more ads.

(Not a chance!)

And you can see that my outbound clicks do increase towards the end of the ad campaign, but not enough to justify the money:

I’m going to keep grinding. The numbers are coming back up a little bit, and my outbound clicks are lower but not that much lower than they were before the ads. I’m going to wait until the end of August before I freak out about this.

I did keep seeing growth in Pinterest followers — I now have 35.

(That is also part of what makes me think that my impressions are being suppressed a little! New followers but the exact same number of impressions?) In last month’s blog income report, I had 21, so that’s a pretty good increase.

Sessions and pageviews

So, despite all this doom and gloom, I did manage 4,333 sessions in July, a 1,100 session increase over June. I should be happy about this!! It’s not like the wheels fell off.

But since the beginning of the month was so strong and the last ten days have fallen so much, it’s a little hard to feel encouraged. The monthly session numbers have actually fallen since the middle of the month. So, June 28 was better than July 28, etc etc.

I also hit 5,300 pageviews. This is a strong area for me — when people click on the site, they often stay and click around for a while. I’m proud of this! It won’t help me get into Journey, but it’ll mean more income once I’m in.

Here’s my Jetpack pageviews. I can’t link Google Analytics this month, because when I uninstalled my theme I accidentally also disconnected the site from Analytics for three days, and the data didn’t correct. 🙁

Writing, posting, and a new schedule

I hit 100 blog posts in the middle of this month! That felt like a huge milestone, and I immediately shifted my publishing schedule after the 100th post. Shooting for a daily post was not fun or sustainable.

So now we’re looking for four posts a week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Wednesdays are earmarked for making pins for the week. I think this is going to really improve balance in my life. Once I go back to school, I’ll probably have to go back to writing on the weekend, but even having three weekdays per week where I don’t feel that nagging sense that I should be writing is an improvement.

This also means that I can consistently write from RankIQ reports too. I’m now four months into writing with RankIQ , and of my top 20 pages from Google search, 19 are from RankIQ reports. (The other is an app review!) Of the 796 clicks that show up in Google Search Console this month, all but 70 are for pages I wrote from RankIQ.

So, to me this is a no-brainer. My only viral pin and 19 of my 20 best posts are from reports — I’m sticking with the reports, no matter how shaken I am by some of this Google stuff.

(I’m also working on the old blog, posting twice a week there. I hope to get that blog into Journey as well and then sell it. I don’t really enjoy the topic too much anymore. I’m having more fun with RWT…even though nothing about this blog post’s tone is probably saying “fun” to you.)

I go back to school in a few weeks, so we’ll see how things shift.

July 2024 blog income report

• I earned $25.60 for Really Well, Thanks!, completely from Amazon affiliate links. That is the only existing source of income at this point. Someone bought a super cute golf outfit this month and it kind of made me want to try golf.
• I spent $49 on RankIQ. I still think RankIQ is worth it, and I’m going to keep it. I also spent a total of $55.16 on Pinterest Ads, which was a more expensive lesson than I actually intended it to be.
• So the total blog revenue for July 2024 is -$78.56, a loss.
• The year to date revenue for 2024 is -$294.26, a loss. – update
• And the revenue for the life of the blog, since December 2023, is -$557.56, a loss.

Ugh, I hate to end this post on a negative note. I trust I’m going to figure out this site issue, put that best-performing post back on top, and get my site vitals back where they belong. But the learning curve on this has been awful, and I skipped the last three posts to try to get a grip on everything, and I’m just so bummed about it!

I hope I’ll have better news by the next blog income report.