Last week I posted a recap that contained mostly my stats and shared it on reddit. I received a rather large traffic influx to my website due to that post which on the one hand I was really excited about, but on the other hand made me realize something: if I just posted about my stats going up in my weekly recap and people were intrigued by that they would visit my post which would increase my stats and then I would be in this really awkward cycle. I want to provide more useful content than that so I am upgrading my weekly recaps and adding two more sections to them: what I’ve been up to and what I’ve learned, in addition to my stats. If you only want to see the stats then you can just jump to the last section!
What I’ve been up to
General updates
I have officially moved from patreon to a combination of substack and buy me a coffee! It was recommended to me to use a different application than patreon, which I was initially pretty opposed to. After doing some research though I was convinced and made the switch to substack. The basic premise is that patreon is better for creators who provide content like art, music, podcasts, etc., whereas substack is more for writers and bloggers. I can send out newsletters now and make little tweet type things where I can complain about my side hustle problems in short form! I also spent a whole hour yesterday on my email header so it looks pretty phenomenal so you should definitely subscribe to see it ;).
I have to admit I struggled with substack quite a bit more than I thought I would though, it’s supposed to be user-friendly but I had a hard time figuring out what everything does. I ended up just going through the entire settings tab and messing around with everything that was clickable. It took me basically four hours, but I feel a lot more comfortable with it now.
Oh yeah I also enlisted the help of a family member to test out buy me a coffee and for every five dollars someone kindly donates to me I make 4.30, if anyone is curious. They use stripe so there’s a transaction fee from that and then they take an additional 5% from the leftover money. This is a bit worse than patreon actually, but I think the design is much better personally. Also I have way more control over prices, so I could list my blog worksheet at half the price compared to what it was on patreon.
Blog updates
I applied for adsense on Monday, and got rejected this morning. I had already decided I wasn’t going to run ads on my website anyways so I’m not bummed about it but I was a little bit surprised to get rejected to be honest. I was under the impression that adsense was easy to get into. I will try again in one month just for the heck of it.
I added a my recommendations page where I list all the tools that I’ve found useful in my side hustle endeavors. It took me a bit of time to figure out how to make the drop down paragraph thing, which turns out to just be the “details” block in wordpress. I think it used to be called accordian or something. I also applied for a bunch of affiliate programs and have not heard back from any except one (t’was a rejection). I started applying a month ago and got rejected from all of those so I reapplied this month. It’s a harsh world out there man.
I’ve been thinking also about SEO for my website since I don’t get any organic clicks at all, but then I’m not trying to get organic clicks. This is more of a journal type of blog anyways, with the occasional technical posts (which I did SEO for), so honestly I’ve just decided not to worry about it.
Outfit side hustle updates
I haven’t really done anything with this this week besides mostly just thinking about it. I want to launch a fashion blog basically and do my affiliate marketing on there, and then market my blog on pinterest, etc., because doing just affiliate links on pinterest is not really working. I’m at a bit of an impasse though because I’m not sure how I want my blog to look like so that’s sort of what I’ve been thinking about. I’ve also been really busy with a lot of this other stuff too so I haven’t given it as much time as I wanted to.
Insights and takeaways
- Feedback is necessary pain: Since I’ve started posting on reddit, I’ve been getting a lot of feedback that has actually helped me shape this blog much better than if I just tried to figure everything out myself. I’m not going to lie it’s definitely difficult to swallow my pride and accept that there are things that I’ve been doing or did that aren’t really working, and subsequently getting rid of them.
It is also just annoying to change things around once you’ve got a bunch of things setup that interlink or depend on each other. I’ve really felt that this week, what with switching from patreon to substack and having to change all the links on my blog, but having gotten through it I can tell that it all looks and feels so much smoother than it was before. You just gotta push through it a bit. I will point out that you should be doing your own research as well! Don’t take everybody’s advice all the time, because not everybody has advice that will work for you. - Setting time limits: I’ve started implementing a time limit this week of two hours per day during the weekdays, and three hours per day on the weekends. Working on side hustles has basically consumed all my free time. I really enjoy working on it, which is the problem, but at the end of the day the motivation behind side hustling is because I want to have more free time to enjoy my life right? But that doesn’t mean that I should miss out on having other types of fun and enjoy my life now because I’m so busy working on this thing that might not even work. I even took a whole day off this week and read a book and did some arts and crafts which was nice. I’d genuinely forgotten that I had other hobbies I liked to do (which is not something you want)! Not to mention that it will help you avoid burnout.
- Pick something and start: This is something else that I’ve struggled with at the beginning of this week. I started wondering if I really wanted to commit to the outfit side hustle- I have tons of other ideas that I feel just as strongly about. Especially since I’ve hit a bit of a roadblock with the whole fashion blog setup thing, I was pretty tempted to just do something else. But then I realized it doesn’t matter whatever type/topic of side hustle I did anyways. Whatever I picked, I just had to make it interesting to myself, which is probably going to be interesting for at least a whole other group of people (I won’t flatter myself and say I’m unique lol my interests are probably the exact same as millions of other people). So I decided I’m just going to run with the fashion niche. I’ll give it a shot for six months and if it’s absolutely not working out I’ll try something else! It really is as easy as that.
- Don’t work on too much at once: This is kind of self-explanatory and also follows along from the last two point. Do one or two side hustles at the same time but not more, so you don’t spread yourself too thin.
Stats
Website
Observe the spike :). The dashed blue lines is what I was at last week, so even though my traffic dipped towards the end of the week it’s still relatively around where my spike last week was, which I consider a win.
All time stats this week vs last week:
Traffic source (I was surprised to see medium on there actually!):
Website Pinterest
Considering that I haven’t touched this the entire week I’m not surprised my stats have dipped. I was at 5.4k monthly views last week and now I am at 5.2k:
Website Reddit
I didn’t take a picture last week but I was at 14 post karma, 2 comment karma, and 2 followers! Slow growth for the win 🙂
Medium
I gained 4 more followers this week:
My story stats have been doing pretty well in that I’ve been consistently getting reads for basically a week and a half straight (except for yesterday). Compared to last week my story stats have doubled! Which is great 🙂
My story stats for October:
My story stats for November:
Outfit Pinterest
I also totally did not work on this pinterest throughout the week but my monthly views went up! I was at 3.2k last week and now I’m at 3.7k.
Affiliate Programs
Applications:
I have made a grand total of $0 from affiliate marketing lol. I’m planning on adding more fashion affiliate programs in addition to using amazon because amazon is definitely on the lower end of fashion.
Total money spent this week: $0.00
Total money spent: $6.99
Total money made this week: $4.30
Total money made: $4.30
Total hours spent this week: ~15 hours
Total hours spent: ~116 hours
Those are all the updates for the week! I hope this was informative and a better weekly recap structure! Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or concerns in the comment section below!
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