Ah, here we are again. This month end seems to have rolled around very quickly, so it seems like it’s time to share my blog progress report with you and update you on how I’ve got on with last month’s plans and goals.
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Blog Progress Report
Looking back over this month, I have had moments of feeling a little more flat than I have done since I kicked all of my plans into action.
I have had several days where I really struggled to get motivated. I have given myself a few more breaks to allow for this and it seems to have worked as I am getting back on plan again and the ideas and creativity are flowing back.
Recharging myself has allowed me to see things with fresh eyes again and get back to being excited about everything I am doing, so I am glad I made time to rest a little.
OK, so here’s what I have been up to, checking in on my plans and goals from last month.
Blog behind the scenes work
I know I mentioned that I had booked in a blog audit, well it has now come round.
That is taking place now and I know that it is a big undertaking. I don’t yet know all of the work and actions that will come from it, but I am setting aside plenty of time next month to work on them.
This should also see me moving my hosting over, which makes me nervous! They are handling it for me, so hopefully all will run smoothly and I can update you more about all of this next month.
New digital products
I did manage to launch the new digital products into my shop at the end of last month, as promised.
I have also added a couple more Pen Pal Fun Packs this month, and I absolutely love those designs, I am really pleased with them. They are selling, so they seem to have hit the mark.
I also set up an Etsy shop and added my products over there, to widen my audience. I need to create more products now in order to fill that shop and get eyes on it. One for next month!
Content creation
As always, this one keeps me busy. Which is how I like it.
I am ensuring that I share posts on my new schedule, every Monday and Wednesday, and there have been a few extra posts on other days too scattered through the month.
I like to create something around #BringBackPaper every week and then at least one other post, and this normally covers family life, home and garden inspiration, organising tips or reviews. It keeps things interesting for me, and I do hope, interesting for you too!
I have not been as active on my YouTube channel this month, but I have got some fresh content out there this month and there is more to come next month.
I have then been following the new Pinterest strategy in creating fresh pins regularly. I tend to add a between 3 and 5 new pins a day, and then Tailwind has scheduled more pinning for me. I normally pin around 20 pins daily altogether.
Tailwind means I can pin ahead for the month, and then drop in fresh pins daily on top of that. If you’ve yet to try Tailwind and are looking to work on your Pinterest game, you can give it a try here.
With the algorithm changes over there, my traffic has still dropped significantly and I was not seeing much difference when making these changes. I reached out to Pinterest and they have advised me they had found a bug in their spam filter that was causing some issues with my account.
They say things should be back to normal soon, so we will watch and see (and really hope!).
Search Engine Optimisation
I mentioned at the outset of these growth plans that SEO would be an ongoing area to prioritise.
It is not the most exciting thing to spend my time on, but I have worked on it, little and often, every week since starting this work. And it seems to be starting to pay off.
I have noticed an increase already in my search engine traffic, which has given me the boost I needed to keep on working at it. This is on page SEO that I am focusing on currently, as my behind the scenes blog audit will pick up the off page stuff for me.
I have been working my way through old posts and updating them and I am seeing an improvement already with search engines finding my content more often. I hadn’t expected to see anything yet, so this is great news and has been helping out with the reduction in my Pinterest traffic.
I have been improving content, refreshing images, and working through a checklist of on-page SEO. I have a lot, a lot, a lot of old posts, so I have plenty of work still to do!
Email development
I am continuing to see growth in my email list, it’s now nearly doubled since I started working on it in August. This is beyond my expectations and I absolutely love sending my newsletters out.
I have been sending my emails out Friday lunchtime, UK time, and seeing a good rate of opens and clicks so I think I will stick with this for now.
As I have mentioned, I did switch from Mailchimp over to Flodesk in August and I could not be happier with them.
Their email templates are just beautiful and I enjoy using them and putting my emails together. They are easy to use and when designing with them, the whole process just flows so well.
If you are interested in trying them out for your own blog or business, I do have a 50% off affiliate code. They are in beta testing which is why they are offering this as a lifetime offer. This impresses me as so many email providers hike up their charges as your list grows, so I am happy to have got in on this offer now and I can’t imagine moving away from them.
I can keep growing my list and chatting to everyone regularly, without having to think about charges rising if people keep signing up. I want people to sign up, I don’t want to put a cap on their numbers! And as I say, I love the actual process of sitting down to share with everyone weekly, it’s a real pleasure.
Other stuff
This month I have been running my pen pal sign up. This is always very popular and keeps me really busy.
This has taken up quite a lot of time this month, as I had anticipated. I love doing it, it’s great to make a difference in this way. It just means I have had little room for other activities this month, but it has been worth it.
I have worked on Mediavine’s RPM challenge which took a week of my time. I really enjoyed doing this and made quite a few changes to the site and to posts as a result of it.
Plans for next month
I am leaving a large chunk of time aside to work on any areas that come out of my blog audit. At this point, I have no idea whether this is a week’s worth of work or a couple of month’s worth, so I am going to take care not to pile on too many other plans this month.
I will be running a new Bring Back Paper activity that I will need to take a little time to arrange. Should be fun!
I plan to add a further three printables to the shop, including a Christmas design.
I want to keep working on that SEO and I can see this taking up most of my time next month. I am keen to get this one right.
Then there is content, content and more content! I have it all mapped out for the month ahead, I just need to get on and actually create it for you now!
I do have another idea that I am keen to explore, but it might get bumped to December depending on how much work comes out of my audit. But it is there, a little idea buzzing around in my brain that I will no doubt have to dip in and explore at some point!
So that’s this month’s blog progress report, what do you think? I have felt a bit slower this month, but when I look back over this I can see that I have still being moving in the right direction.
Slow progress is still progress, right?
Until next month!
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