Self-Reflection: Five Months of Blogging

Last Updated on November 26, 2020 by scottkandh

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means if you purchase something through my link, I will earn a small commission. This does not affect the price you pay for the item. I only advertise products that I have used myself and would genuinely recommend.

Overview

December 1^st, 2020 marks the fifth anniversary month of blogging (and begins month #6). I didn’t write a self-reflection for the fourth month of blogging and a lot has transpired that has forced me to reevaluate my goals. This post looks at the past as well as looking into the future to see what can lay ahead.

One of the reasons for not writing that 4th month blog post was converting my website from Pinterest Artwork to PinArtwork. It wasn’t a daunting task, but it did create a lot of extra work that I hope you won’t have to endure.

In the course of self-reflection, I no longer consider myself a new blogger. I have to admit that I would be ecstatic if I suddenly started getting a lot of subscribers. The tools are in place; the landing pages are in place; however, the simple fact remains that you can’t force people to subscribe to your blog. It appears to me that people don’t want to be inundated with a whole bunch of e-mails.

I have created a new program called PinArtwork Graphic Ease (P.A.G.E) that depicts how to make good graphics. The program is on my sidebar but it’s currently not on my Pinterest board (i.e. the URL link in the main description). So that’s one of the first things I’ve fixed.

My primary emphasis used to be to grow my Pinterest followers.

I was right on track to get nearly 1,000 Pinterest followers by February 2021. The principal goal was to have between 500 – 1,000 Pinterest followers by July 1^st, 2021. But I got greedy and didn’t look close enough at the Pinterest Community Standard guidelines that pertain to spam. In a nutshell, I was (note the past-tense) repetitively sending too many of my own pins to multiple boards.

My web traffic has gone through the roof and I’m averaging 300 pageviews per day. I owe most of that to building good SEO habits.

The monetization of my blog is my biggest hurdle right now. Christmas is fast approaching and this month I’m going to be doing the Blogmas 2020 Challenge. It’s a blog per day starting on the 1st of December, and one blog post every day until Christmas.

Blog Training Plan

After Christmas and New Year’s, more than likely I’m strongly inclined to take the Pinterest Traffic Avalanche course.

However, I did sign up for one other course, Pinterest Strategies by Carly, so I need to put my time and effort into that course 1st and then the Pinterest Traffic Avalanche course if that doesn’t produce the outcome that I’m hoping to achieve.

I’ve only updated two parts of the Blogging Series post that’s in my Free Resources Library. 

To-Do list item: Put all of the plug-ins that I use on the Free Resources Library page.

Less emphasis on Pinterest Group Boards

I was placing too much of an emphasis on Pinterest Group Boards.

There’s a post that I wrote about Pinterest Analytics for Breakthrough impressions and I’m going to stick to that method of Pinterest scheduling. If you want to grow your blog’s traffic I highly suggest that you take a look at this post for some suggested pinning strategies.

I had a total of nearly 75 to 80 Group Boards. The most important Board is your own Group Board. Now I have about 20 Group Boards and they’ll be easier to manage. I’ve found that’s is easier to collaborate better with a smaller amount of Group Boards as opposed to having too many Group Boards.

Your pins should be pinned to the most relevant board first. Then you can pin “your” pins to your Group Board later and devote some attention to your other boards by creating fresh pins for them.

I’m on a task right now that going’s to keep me busy for two-three months. It’s creating a minimum of 3 -5 pins per day for my Motivational Quotes and Inspiration Board. I’m hoping to do at least 15 per day, but I’m not going to sit down and count the number of pins that I do on a daily basis. I like to do the required amount of pins per day when I’m in the zone to do some pins and can use some creativity to create them.

Pinterest Challenge for October 2020

In October, I challenged myself to pin regularly on Pinterest, in order to gain more blog traffic (and hopefully more subscribers) by participating in an event called Blogtober.  Challenge met and completed.

 Here’s a summary of the Pinterest strategy that I used:

• Pinning at least 26 times per day (mainly through Tailwind). 
• At least 5 of which should be my own pins.
• At least 2 – 3 of which should be newly created each day.
• Make at least one improvement to my Pinterest profile each day
  
  • Update the description
  • Ensure the category is assigned
  • There’s more than 10 pins in the board
  • Look for various pins that can be added that are suggested by Pinterest

By the numbers

As I mentioned earlier, I had nearly 700 followers, I’ll plan on closely analyzing this information when it gets closer to July of 2021. That’s a long way for now. Hopefully, with a new Pinterest account, I’ll still be able to get at least 500 followers. I’ll give myself another five months to grow my following and I can look at the stats in May 2021 to see if I’ll be looking at 500 or 1,000 followers as initially planned for July 1st, 2021.

Using Tailwind to schedule pins

Because I’ve been flagged twice for spam and both instances was due in part to using Tailwind, I recommend using caution with Tailwind (i.e. don’t pin from within Tailwind). Let the program work as it should to schedule the pins at the required times and intervals. And periodically shuffle your queue (at least daily or review your pins to ensure there aren’t any back to back pins).

Tailwind is such a useful time-saver.  I still like to pin manually when I find a pin on Pinterest and save it to another related board.  But it’s nice to know that when the weekend comes up or at night, I won’t have to worry about ensuring that I’m meeting my regularly scheduled daily quota of pins.

Tailwind offers a free trial, but after that is used up, there is no free subscription option. You have to pay to sign up. It is not cheap – the annual plan cost me $119.88. There is also the option of a monthly plan for $15 per month. This has not paid off for me yet because I have only been focusing on my Pinterest strategy for a month, so my blog earnings have not dramatically increased. However, I think there is huge potential that this could pay off in the future. Based on my experience so far, I would recommend Tailwind to anyone who is serious about working on their Pinterest account to drive more traffic to their blog.

I’ve heard different stories about whether or not to use the SmartLoop feature on Tailwind.  I’m old school and still like to do things the old-fashioned way.  Personally, I won’t be using this feature because I prefer to have new, pins for Pinterest.  Relying on SmartLoop would circulate the same old pin time after time.  One thing that you need to know and learn about Pinterest is that they want to have “fresh” new pins.

Tailwind has changed their use of Tribes to what is called Communities now. So you might still see some of the settings in Tailwind for different profiles as Tribes. Eventually, you’ll see the switch from xyz Tribe to xyz Community.

Did it work?

In October, I noticed a marked improvement in the visitors to my blog but not subscribers.  In the month of November, I’ve surpassed 6,000 page views and will probably surpass 7,000 views by the end of the month. I’m hoping to continue that trend for the next month. Only time will tell.

Things I have learned during my five months as a blogger (that weren’t mentioned earlier).

• I’ve learned how to make a tripwire for my blog.
• I’ve learned how to effectively use analytics within Pinterest Business.
• I’ve learned first-hand that Pinterest wants to have “fresh” images

My blogging achievements

These are things that I am proud to have achieved in 5 months:

• Wrote and published 80 posts to cover mainly Pinterest and SEO. 
• Consistent posting usually one post every 2 – 3 days. 
• Nearly 700 down to 75 Followers on Pinterest
• Completed the Blogtober 2020 Challenge
• Started the NoBloPoMo Challenge but didn’t finish it. Na Ja (Oh well).

Plans and goals for my blog’s fourth and fifth month

These are the things I planned for my fourth and fifth month of blogging (with an update).

Goals:

• Take part in ‘Blogtober’ and write a post about Blogtober to get acquainted with it (fourth month).  What it entails is to write a blog for every single day of the month during October. Finished, completed a post for every day.
  
  
• I consider myself to be really good at Search Engine Optimization, but I don’t consider myself to be an SEO Expert (far from it).  I do have a popular post on SEO so one of the things I’ll be contemplating is to design an SEO Online Course that contains quizzes (fifth month). Didn’t get around to it, it’s moved to the back burner until I start getting some subscribers.
  
  

• To collaborate with other bloggers.  Update the Top 40 Blog list to have an index of bloggers that will help new bloggers (forth and fifth month). I’ve updated the date of the Top 40 Blog list, but I haven’t double-checked the stats to see who’s been added or deleted. Work in progress.
  
  
• Learn about how to write guest posts for other blogs, and accept guest posts on my blog (fifth month). Not my cup of tea, I’ll look into it when the opportunity presents itself.
  
  
• Continue to post at least once every 6 days (quality over quantity), on-going.  Done.
  
  
• I’ve had a small number of people leave comments on the Blog.  I’ll need to research and figure out a way to entice people to leave their comments.  This was a big disappointment, I wrote a blog post about how to use comments and I was shocked and dismayed that it only generated a total of one comment. It would have been three, but two of the others were both spams.

Plans and goals for my blog’s sixth and seventh month

• Finish the Blogmas 2020 Challenge
• Continue working on the Motivational and Inspirational pins
• Goal of 150 repins by 1/26/2021
• Goal of 200 to 300 Pinterest followers by 1/26/2021. If 200-250 is reached by that time-frame, I’ll be on track for 500 followers by July 1st, 2021.
  

Financial goals:

• Earn money from my Affiliate programs (mainly Tailwind and Bluehost) on-going.  I need to be more diligent in this arena. But right now without people subscribing I’ve gotten a little lax in this arena. So it’ll require another look if I start getting some more subscribers.

Goals in a year from now

• Strongly hoping for at least 500 to 1,000 Pinterest followers, July 1, 2021.
• Overjoyed if I have at least 12 subscribers on the Blog. 
• Seeking for 15 fresh pins/day, hoping to have 10,000 pins / 500 repins.

How long have you been blogging for?

If you’re a blogger, drop me a line (Bloggers helping Bloggers).  I’m hoping to hear what kind of ideas you might have to collaborate to build each other’s blog. 

Related posts that you might want to read on my website:

Self-Reflection: Three Months of Blogging

Self-Reflection: How I actually got my first valuable 1,000 Pageviews

SMART Goals examples