Blog Report: First Month of Blogging
Who I am and Why I started a blog
This blog report post is about what I did during my first month of starting my blog to see how much I’ve grown from beginning to current time. First, a short introduction of myself. My name is Megan, I’m a licensed pharmacist that became a stay at home mom. My husband is a current resident and we have a 1 year old with another on the way. Being at home all day can really become boring. As a new mom with no family nearby, I have been dealing with a huge shift of not only my responsibilities but also learning how to become a stay-at-home mom. This shift was NOT easy but I found myself slowly coming to terms with taking care of a tiny little baby mainly by myself.
To pass some time I would turn to Youtube and went back to watching a young lady who talked about how she became a blogger and why. Her blog is BySophiaLee and got inspiration to start her own blog from her dorm during college because of stay-at-home moms. These moms were holding down the house and running very successful blogs. I’m talking like over $20K a MONTH. I was interested in seeing where she was currently at and went through all of her videos to see her growth over the years. She is one seriously insane young lady (a few years younger than I am).
After watching her videos, I became interested in doing what she did. By that, I mean that I started a blog! I did watch a lot of other types of Youtube videos ranging from blogging, content creation, and content calendars. With this motivation of seeing how others can be successful if they just stick with it and are consistent with it, I made that dive to start blogging about motherhood.
What expenses I had
To start a blog you’re going to need to get a website url through a hosting company. I went with the typical Bluehost to start off and paid a lump sum for the full year of $47.88.
After getting my url (pharmacistmama), I decided to spend less than $20 on a template design from Etsy.
In the future I want to purchase some courses directed toward SEO and Pinterest – BySophiaLee’s in particular, but for now I am sticking with gathering free information from Youtube videos.
In total, to start up the blog and how much I spent so far is – $67.88.
What I made
- Adsense ($0) – rejected x2 for ‘low quality content’ and other reasons.
Stats
- blog posts – 8
- total blog visitors – 105
- pinterest (monthly views – 957 & impressions – 1.14k & outbound clicks – 5 )
This month’s summary
I have heard great advice to think about ROI (return on investment) in every part of my blog at the beginning. This basically means to not focus on my ‘about me’ page when starting out my blog because that will never generate me any money for the future. Making a blog is thinking about the potential it has long term with you being consistent with your content. Because of ROI, I decided to really focus on creating blog posts. Not just that, but to really understand how to do SEO and potentially rank on Google. The goal is to start setting up the foundation with keywords and content so that way Google is able to understand what my blog is about and can push this content out to other viewers.
Amazon Affiliates
I did not try to look into Amazon affiliate links because at this point I really need to understand how to get traffic to my site. I sought out so much information from Youtube videos to start my own path on getting that traffic.
Pinterest was the main platform to get my content on in order to send people to my blog to start generating traffic. This platform (Pinterest) is a great tool because it is a visual search engine which allows for your site to be directly linked to the pictures.
For every blog post I created, I made 6-9 pins and started to schedule them through Pinterest. This takes forever! I’m still trying to figure out how to streamline it, if that’s even possible. I tried doing different types of descriptions, pictures, keywords, etc. on each of those pins so that way at the end of the month I can go back and see which ones did the best. I’m not expecting a hit overnight because I am so new, but I know that with a couple of months on Pinterest I should see a difference in traffic to my blog and if I don’t, I plan on looking into that.
Some of my time also went to fixing up the blog template itself, google adsense setup, and other random things that would be on the operations side of the blog. I was rejected twice by adsense and I didn’t really change anything when I asked them to take a look at it the second time. I remember starting a separate one about two years ago and was immediately accepted, so it was a little odd that this time around I wasn’t accepted.
What’s Next & Goals
- Increase word count and include more pictures in the current ‘live’ blogs
- Continue creating 1-2 blog posts a week with additional blog posts to go live after giving birth for a few months to keep up with my goals
- Create fresh pins for the past blogs I have
- Look into adsense again and amazon affiliate links
- Add pin board descriptions, keywords, and pictures
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