Welcome to this month’s blog progress report.
It’s been a month of two halves. The kids have been off for a couple of weeks for Easter, so that time was all about keeping the plates spinning and everything ticking over.
On their return to school, I have been able to focus more on everything here and it’s felt good to get so much done and to feel my excitement about it all surfacing again. I feel like I am hitting my stride again.
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The Bring Back Paper part of the blog is always fun to work on. This brings in new readers regularly and keeps lots of lovely readers coming back.
This element feels like more than ‘just’ blog posts, though. It’s a whole community and an ethos and it’s so great to see it connect like-minded people. More and more are finding it now as the Bring Back Paper Facebook group continues to grow, quite rapidly now. And yes, I know, growing it over on YouTube will work brilliantly for me, I know, I must do it!
Throughout this month, we have had a stationery swap and we also had the book readalong, both of which are fun to run and plan and arranging the sign ups keeps me busy.
I’ve had quite a few people asking me when the next pen pal sign up will be. I know these are popular, but I just haven’t had the time and resources to run this one yet this year, I have only been child-free for 20 days all year so I have been a tad pressed! It is on my radar, don’t worry, I would say it’ll be at some point over the summer but bear with me as I need to work that in as it really does take hours and hours and hours to do!
My Bring Back Paper Memberships are still going strong and I love thinking up new paper designs for our members every month and working on the exclusive activities. They allow me to do more, offer more and I love to hear how much members are enjoying it. There’s a poll currently running over there to decide what May’s activity will be and I can’t wait to see which one will win!
This week I will be adding a new product to my Etsy store and this will be an area of focus for me over the coming weeks. I like designing stationery, of course I do. I can see this being a great area of growth this year so I will set aside time every week to work on it.
I am back into regularly sharing across social media and using Pinterest. This is an easy area to fall by the wayside sometimes, I find it’s all about forming habits around it and focusing on the platforms that you enjoy most and bring in the results.
As you know, I adore my newsletters and Flodesk, my newsletter provider continues to make me happy! I usually write these midweek and set them up to go out on Fridays. They include a mixture of blog posts, from the latest to older favourites, my latest news, any new products, offers and free printables from time to time. I like to plan and share them.
I love the layouts and designs of the emails, and more importantly, they are very user friendly and cost effective. If you’re on the lookout for an email provider for your business they do offer free trials and if you use my affiliate link to sign up with, you will also get 50% off the monthly fee. Here’s the Flodesk link, do let me know if you give them a go, I’d love to hear your experiences with them.
Plans for next month
My Etsy store is going to take up a lot of my focus next month as I want to find a new rhythm with it. I would like to get into the habit of adding a new product weekly so I want to shoot for that in May and hopefully I will see the returns from that and find that I can make that work amongst my other tasks.
As with every month, there will be a new Bring Back Paper activity here on the blog and a new readalong, so I will be promoting those and getting on with organising them. They are both set up and ready to go.
At the beginning of the month I will get the Memberships happy mail parcels out and towards the end of the month, I will plan June’s activity and design the new paper for that.
I want to delve into the SEO course that I have so far been dipping into when I grab a spare minute. It is important for me to do this so I plan to set aside time every day to make progress with this and complete it.
YouTube. Ah, here we are again old friend, good old YouTube. I know this is not a favourite area to work on, and with little time this year, I was always going to push it down that to-do list. I also know that this is my business and I’ve no need to do this, I can just leave it. But I know it will work well and I know that when I do actually make time to film, I do actually like it! So it remains there, on the list, and I will get to it in May.
Blog content will keep on going out, I will work on the collaborative projects I have lined up and I will keep up with the social sharing.
What are your thoughts on my activities and plans?
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