Last Updated on September 27, 2021 by scottkandh
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November 1st marks the fourth anniversary of my blog. I published my 1st post in July 2020. This post serves as a useful tool to reflect on current goals, the objectives to achieve them, and a progress report on the forecasted goals.
Table of Contents
October Reflection:
To date, getting people to subscribe is my biggest hurdle. During the month of October, despite writing more than 30 posts in a month, not one person subscribed to the blog. Not only that, I wrote a post about comments and not one person replied to my post about getting comments. Right now, the primary emphasis has been to grow my Pinterest followers. The principal goal up until this time was to have between 500 – 1,000 Pinterest followers by July 1st, 2021. The day after tomorrow is November 1st and I’m nearly there with 522 Pinterest followers. By continually providing 2 – 3 daily pins, equating to 14 – 21 weekly “new” pins I’ll get there (for the Pinterest Followers).
To increase the subscribers, I created my Free Resources Library. In addition, I wrote Part I of a five-part Blogging Series post.
The goal of the blog has been to get more than 100 subscribers by July 1st, 2021. I’m a firm believer in establishing SMART Goals. And thus since I didn’t get a single subscriber (for October), I’m changing the goal to make it more realistic and attainable. Establishing a new Goal of at least one new subscriber per month so there’ll be at least 10 subscribers (instead of 100) by July 21st, 2021.
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.
Goal met for Traffic (passed).
Subscribers goal (failed).
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
I’m hoping for gradual improvement each and every month. The picture below represents all of my blog traffic with a huge spike in October. I don’t know exactly which posts they are that’s causing an increase in traffic. I’m venturing to guess that it’s a collective effort of doing the Blogtober Challenge and a couple of posts about how to look at pins to make your own Viral pins.
| July 2020 | 16 Oct 2020 | 30 Oct 2020 | |
| Pinterest Followers | 0 | 466 | 522 |
Using Tailwind to schedule pins
Currently, with the number of pins that I have, I’m easily able to pin for about 5 – 6 days out (whereas before it was 4 – 5 days).
I’m not focusing on counting the number of pins that I have. The emphasis has switched from counting the number of pins that I have to creating pins on a daily basis.
Did it work?
I fully expect to see an increase in the viewers, engagement, and virality, and Pinterest Followers. Goal passed.
Where I had hoped to see an improvement is in the visitors to my blog as well as actual subscribers. But as mentioned before it hasn’t happened. Goal failed.
By making new fresh pins on a consistent basis, I’m optimistic that it’ll have a noticeable improvement in my blog’s traffic. Traffic has remained very steady but I won’t break 1,000-page views per month. That’s one of my other main goals for the month. Taking the Pinterest Avalanche Course is looming closer and closer that I’ll be taking that course to improve my traffic. Goal passed. No need (to my surprise) to take the Pinterest Avalanche Course. I feel like the spokesman for one of those commercials where I just saved a bunch of money.
!! #1 Lesson that I’d like to share with new bloggers !!
Most blog stats go up and down from day to day, and sometimes it can seem very erratic! Focus on the general trend over a longer period, rather than expecting a steady increase each day.
Things I have learned during my fourth month as a blogger
- It’s necessary to use a powerful social media to help grow your blog called Facebook. Thus, I’ve made a new domain and switched from Bluehost to SiteGround. That will allow me to more fully utilize Facebook.
- It’s going to take considerable time and consistently good content to get the big bucks.
My blogging achievements
These are things that I am proud to have achieved in 4 months:
- Consistent posting usually one post every day (in Oct.)
- 522 Followers on Pinterest
Plans and goals for my blog’s fifth month
These are things I plan to work on to achieve in my fifth month of blogging:
Goals:
- National Blog Posting Month – NaBlogPoMo: Write a daily blog for each day in November. It’s a blogging challenge similar to Blogtober for the month of November called National Blog Posting Month. This challenge is simple. Write and publish a blog post every day in November. It’s a great way to kickstart or re-energize your blog. While there is no longer an official site for #NaBloPoMo, many bloggers participate each year.
- Concentrate on increasing the Site Speed with a WordPress optimization plugin – SG Optimizer (exclusive to SiteGround) and it was recommend to enable these options, which should help improve PageSpeed scores and the loading speed of my (and your) website (if you have SiteGround).
- In the SG Optimizer plugin -> Frontend Optimization tab:
- Minify the HTML Output
- Minify JavaScript Files
- Defer Render-blocking JS
- Minify CSS Files
- Optimize Loading of Google Fonts
- Remove Query Strings From Static Resources
- Disable Emojis settings.
- In the Image Optimization tab:
- Enable the “Lazy Load Media”, “New Images Optimization” and “Generate WebP Copies of New Images”
- Run the Existing Images Optimization and Bulk Generate Webp Files optimizations (but you should wait for the first to finish before starting the second and it may take a few hours for the optimization to complete).
These options would help lower the overall size of images on my website, without lowering their quality.
Please note that some options will be automatically enabled after the installation. In the fairly rare case, you experience any issues with the site display or layout after activating the options, you can contact SG. They can see what option may be causing it, or if some plugin file may need to be excluded from a certain optimization option.
Lastly, open a new Site Slow support request from the contact page -> Advanced Technical Help menu and SG will make a more thorough check on the website and apply or suggest possible further optimization for the website to improve the loading speed and PageSpeed score.
- Enable the “Lazy Load Media”, “New Images Optimization” and “Generate WebP Copies of New Images”
- Design an SEO Online Course (with quizzes). 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.
- Earn money from my Affiliate programs
- Tailwind
- Bluehost
- Social Warfare (new)
- Google Monster Insights
Goals in a year from now
- Hoping to have achieved the goal of 500 – 1000 Pinterest followers.
- Having more than 10 subscribers on the Blog.
- Between 50 – 100 Group Boards on Pinterest. At the moment it’s at 71 Group Boards.
Other posts that you might want to read:
Self-Reflection: Three Months of Blogging
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