GUYS IT FINALLY HAPPENED. I MADE SOME MONEY AHHHH. I’ve literally been holding back ALL WEEK from announcing this information so I’m super excited to finally be able to share it. Anyways let’s not wait any longer and dive in to this weeks updates, insights, and stats!
What I’ve been up to
General updates
This week is the first week I made money!!! I was actually really surprised! I mean I know I’ve been doing this for nine weeks so far so one would hope that by now something would have happened, but it’s still kind of a shock lol. I made a grand total of $9.02! That is a little less than 5 cents for every hour of work I put in lmao.
I will note that this money is kind of “on hold” for now though, since I made it through affiliate marketing. This means that the first I will see of any money I make will be in at least one and a half to two months from now, to account for people making refunds. So I’m calling it money on hold and treating it as such until I actually get a payout!
Also I have different tracking ID’s for my affiliate links to know which of my blogs/social media accounts is the source of my revenue, and it actually came from this very website! I’m very proud of that because it means that at least one person actually found my recommendations useful. I do honestly only recommend things that I would personally buy (with my current income, not if I was rich lol) and that I am using.
Blog updates
This week for my blog I just focused on my pinterest account. I talked last week about my new pinterest strategy, so I’ve been following that and just posting one list pin every day or so. I did see an increase in my followers, and my list pins are getting more clicks than any of my other pins did (although it’s still a measly amount- like seven clicks instead of just two). Anyways I’m going to stick it out for a couple more weeks before I try a new strategy.
Now that my blog is pretty much fully setup, there’s nothing that’s been cropping up besides actually making any content. So that’s been really nice actually, cause I get to devote pretty much all my time to my actual outfit side hustle project. By the way, the first month update for that is coming out next week on Sunday, so keep an eye out for that!
Also I wanted to say, one of my technical posts (How to Bulk Upload Pins on Pinterest) that I posted on medium made it to the front page of google! I just checked, it’s the fourth search result! It has 90 views and 57 reads, with most of the traffic coming organically from google. So I made a few edits to it this week so that it has a link to my website and to my newsletter.
My actual blog post doesn’t show up on the front page though. I was thinking about whether or not my medium article was competing with my website article but I decided that it doesn’t really matter. Either way if someone was going to subscribe to my newsletter after reading my article, they would do it whether it was on medium or on my blog. That’s kind of the important thing anyways, because then they can get to my blog from my newsletter!
Outfit side hustle updates
I’ve been largely focused on making content this week. My goal is to get it filled out so that all my pages have a couple of posts in them, and then apply to more affiliate programs before launching. I’ve applied to 4 so far and have gotten in to 2, rejected from 1, and waiting to hear back from the last one.
It’s been fun working on making the posts. It’s easy to do while something else is running in the background as well so I’ve been able to make a lot of posts (I made 7 this week).
Unfortunately, I’ve been having some stability issues with my main server (I’m self-hosting, if you recall). The site would occasionally go down for no reason, so I had to constantly keep an eye on it. I ended up moving the outfit site to a backup (i.e. an old laptop) which is not the best. I think my website is probably too heavy for it because it’s been running slower. I’m temporarily resolving that issue with a caching plugin since it’ll take me roughly two weeks to have things properly running again.
Insights and takeaways
Patience and celebrating the little things
The key takeaway from this week is being patient. It’s taken me a long time to see any type of financial gains- 9 weeks, and over 150 hours. My advice would be to just celebrate the little things as you go along, which will help you stay motivated. If you put in effort, then every week there will definitely be something to celebrate- like adding a function to your website, someone commenting on a post you made on social media, getting any sort of traffic on your site, and so on.
Finding and interacting with your reader community
It’s really important to find groups to join within your niche/subniche. These groups are the most likely to want to read your blog and become returning visitors, since they are already interested in the topic you blog about. It also helps you understand your readers better, to see what problems that they might want solved that you might have the answers to. You might find answers to problems that you had as well!
Now in my time in some of the subreddits that I frequent, I got the sense that doing the above is kind of a touchy subject. On the one hand everyone recommends that you do join and interact with communities to push traffic to your blog, but on the other hand, there seems to be all these rules against it. I understand that this is probably because a lot of people will take the opportunity to just spam their websites, so most people have a negative reaction to seeing any sort of link that takes them to your website.
In my personal opinion, it’s okay to share your blog as long as it’s not the only thing that you ever contribute to any discussion. Definitely don’t post your blog in other people’s comment sections unless related to the topic. Usually I like to give enough information about a blog post that I’m linking to so people don’t feel like they have to click on it unless they want to. I’m okay with not gatekeeping the content of my post because primarily my goal is to share what I’ve learned- that’s why I have a blog in the first place. I think that if people can see that, and resonate with my experiences, they will want to follow my blog by themselves.
Nobody likes to feel that the person they’re talking to has an ulterior motive or is trying to sell them something. Try to put yourself in your reader’s shoes and think about whether or not the way you present your blog to a reader would make you want to read your blog. My biggest piece of advice is to just be genuine, and not lose sight of why you’re starting a blog in the first place.
Stats
This Website
I was surprised this week to see that my stats didn’t dip at the end of the week like they normally do! Instead I got an increase in visitors over the last few days.
All time stats last week vs this week:
Traffic sources:
Outfit Website
With my server going down a bunch this week I’m not surprised that my traffic is kind of all over the place. It shouldn’t go down again so we’ll see what it looks like next week.
All time stats last week vs this week:
Traffic sources:
This Website Pinterest
I was at 3.8k monthly views last week. My monthly views keeps dropping for some reason :(. On the bright side I’m getting more outbound clicks!
Outfit Website Pinterest
Since one of my pins went viral starting last Sunday I got a large boost in my stats! This pinterest is doing a lot better :).
Outfit Website Instagram
Medium
My story stats (to monetize (and make money) I think I calculated that I need to get 500 monthly reads). This is already more than I got last month:
Email subscriber count for both websites
This website: 3 (1 is me) (+1 subscriber this week!)
Outfit website: 3 (2 are me)
Affiliate marketing
Money/Time Stats
Total money spent this week: $0.00
Total money spent: $18.05
Total money made this week (on hold): $9.02
Total money made this week (paid out): $0.00
Total money on hold: $13.32
Total money paid out: $0.00
Total hours spent this week: ~25 hours (I’m usually doing something else while making outfit collages but I included that time anyways)
Total hours spent: ~169.5 hours
Those are all the updates for the week! I hope this was informative! Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or concerns in the comment section below!
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