2nd Month Blog Growth And Income report

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Welcome to my 2nd blog growth & Income report. I have made these from day one, not just for you guys to read and hopefully gain something from, but also for myself so I can look back and see the areas I need to concentrate on.

When I started out with this blog I was looking at other bloggers income reports and came across Michelle Schroeder-Gardner. She runs a great Personal Finance blog called Making sense of Cents. You can find her Income reports here

However as amazing as Michelle has done with her blog and as much as it gives me motivation, I was looking for blog growth & income reports from beginners to see how it was going to be at the beginning of my blogging journey. It turned out there wasn’t that many. The ones I did find were a good mix of honesty, hard work, mistakes, and learning.

So to that end, I’m am going to try and be as transparent as possible so as you readers out there see not only my successes but also my failures.

Also if your new to this blog and would like to read any of my other blog growth and Income reports then you can find all those reports here.

Articles:

So again my aim was to write one article/post per week. I try and keep one week ahead and I schedule them to release on a Sunday morning. The reason for that is I have free time to post Pinterest pins linking to the post as soon as it drops.

I’m pleased to say I have managed to keep up my posting schedule and released 5 Posts. 4 for the month and 1 extra which was my 1st blog growth and income report

All the articles/posts again have good SEO and have been received reasonably well.

Traffic Report:

My traffic has increased, although a lot of this has been through the fact I joined up to Bloggers Traffic Community This is a site where lots of bloggers join forces to help increase traffic etc.

It does help a lot, however, I’m yet to be sold on whether it is a good thing to use or not as it is not genuine search engine traffic. This means the figures could give me false hope. Hopefully, my posts start ranking for some keywords soon.

Please ignore the number of tabs I have open at the top of the picture above. It stresses me out but it has open all the tabs I use when writing and generally doing anything blogging related. I think I may need help. Please someone else tell me their screen looks the same.

So as you can see my traffic spiked somewhat in the middle of April when I started using BTC. It peaked out at 180 page views right at the end of the month. Great results but would prefer if most of it was search engine traffic.

So here is the actual figure so far for my 2-month-old blog. 1274 page views and 701 sessions is a big jump from last month. The average session duration has increased as well from around 40 seconds last month to 1 minute and 21 seconds this month.

My bounce rate has also dropped by around 10% which is pleasing. This basically means people are not leaving my site and are navigating to other pages within my site.

Traffic Breakdown:

So above you can see the figures for returning users vs new users plus where my readers are from plus the top referrals.

I would like to up my returning users slightly but I guess upping my email subscribers will help with that. Top 10 countries are self-explanatory and won’t change much I doubt.

Pinterest is head of the referrals and rightly so. I put a lot of effort into Pinterest so its good to see a vast amount of my traffic is from there. More on that in a moment.

Social Media:

Pinterest:

Pinterest Is my main form of social media mainly because it is also effectively a search engine which makes Pinterest a greater tool than Instagram or Facebook.

I know you’re not looking at the numbers, its the fantastic profile image drawing your eye. But please stay focused. So this month we are up from around the 14,000 monthly unique views to just over 60,000.

Pretty pleased with this, However up until around 2 weeks ago, it had been steadily increasing on a daily basis. But it has stalled somewhat and has been going up and down ever since. It is a little disheartening considering this month I also purchased a years subscription to Tailwind. (More on that in a bit).

As you can see from above my figures are a bit up and down but that’s to be expected. They are certainly all up from one month ago and that is the main goal. The average monthly viewers are the one that is important to me.

A good overlook of some of my Pins. As you can see the 10 best things to do on a no-spend-weekend was one of my most popular pins and did drive a good amount of traffic to my blog and that article in particular. Nearly 24000 impressions and 157 link clicks mean it is my best pin yet.

I have gone from 270 followers to around 402 followers since last month which is a nice steady increase. Not quite as much as I was expecting but decent enough. It was around 450 but some of those I had to block as they were not real accounts and not suitable for my audience shall we say.

Facebook:

So I didn’t really concentrate too much on facebook as Pinterest was my main goal for last month. I have however gone from around 16 members to 24. Whenever I post which is usually once a week I get around half of those members seeing what I posted so I should try and up the member count this coming month.

Twitter:

As I said in my last income report I dont really use twitter too much. I have the account in my blog name and have made a couple of tweets but I dont want to spread myself too thin with social media and leave myself no time to write quality articles. At the time of writing, I have 15 followers on Twitter up from 5 last month.

Email:

At the very end of last month I signed up to Mailchimp and that was as far as I got. Well, it hasn’t got much better. I realize how important a good email list is but as of yet I haven’t quite got my head around it.

I have a subscription box on my blog although I got rid of the Mailchimp drop down plug-in as It didn’t drop down half the time and now have a static sign up box. At the time of writing, I have 4 subscribers and 3 are known to me.

Also apart from my subscribers getting notified the second a new article drops I’m not overly clear on how I’m going to make the most of it at the moment. If anyone has any tips then feel free to message me as I clearly need the help.

Shameless Email Subscriber sign up:

Changes Made:

So some of the changes I have made to my blog are as follows:

I have purchased a premium theme which I absolutely love. It’s on the Genesis platform and is really easy to set up and navigate as well as having tons of options. You cant have a blog growth and income report without the growth and a premium theme is essential in the growth of your blog as it conveys professionalism

Email subscription service as mentioned above.

Tailwind subscription for Pinterest. Not sure about this at the moment. It does enable me to pin consistently while I’m at work or busy doing other stuff but I’m not convinced it has helped with regards to followers or views etc. I do have it for a year though so I’m making the most of it.

I have signed up to media-net. They provide ads which I place onto my blog and they are tailored in terms of color and being specific to the article I’m writing about. These will bring in a little money but you do need a huge amount of views to be totally worthwhile.

Income:

I will always include any earnings from reports not just earnings that have hit my bank account.

Ok so for all of the people who scrolled right through all of this just to see my income again you are likely to be disappointed.

Have I earned any money? The answer is YES. Ok, so I added the adverts onto my blog from Media-net and have not really played around with them too much. It also takes a few weeks to optimize however I have made the grand total of 2 cents……. I know rolling with the big dogs now!!.

Its a start and to be fair I wasn’t expecting any earnings for at least 6 months. Let’s see what next month brings.

Goals:

My goals for last month were as follows

Hit 1000 page views (Success)

Hit 500 followers on Pinterest (Failure Although close)

Gain 50,000 monthly unique views on Pinterest. (Success)

Gain 30 followers on Twitter (Failure)

35 Members in Facebook group (Failure)

Sign up for Tailwind package (Success)

Look further into monetisation (Sort of a success)

Set up Mailchimp and gain my first Email subscribers (Success, Only 1 genuine one (Hi Jen)

Look into guest posting (Failure)

Improve the look and style of the blog (Success)

So what are my goals for this month?

Goals For May:

Reach 100,000 unique monthly views on Pinterest.

Expand my email subscribers to 20.

Gain 600 followers on Pinterest.

Hit 3000 page views on my blog.

Gain 35 members in my Facebook group.

Sort Amazon account.

I’m pleased overall with how this last month progressed. some bloggers see better results but a hell of a lot more see worse results so I’m happy.

Thanks for sticking with me through this overly long and rambling blog growth & income report.

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Thanks for the continued support and Lets see what the 3rd month blog growth and income report brings.