Last Updated on November 2, 2021 by Scott Charleboix
October 1st, 2020 was the third anniversary month of my blog. I published my 1st post in July 2020. It’s amazing how the time has flown by since my 1st post. I’m writing this post Self-Reflection: Three Months of Blogging to keep track of my principal goals.
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Table of Contents
Self-Reflection: Three Months of Blogging
In many senses I still consider myself a new blogger, because I haven’t broken the threshold of getting a lot of subscribers to my blog.
Two weeks ago, I made a daring choice to open up my $30 Online Course and I’ve offered the first FIVE (5) subscribers to my Blog that they’ll be provided with the promo code to take the course for free. The Free course expires at the end of the month. Done, over, finished. No longer free! Subscribe now to get the Free promo code.
By blogging, I continue to learn new material. It’s going to take a little time before I reach my first year of blogging. Between now and that point in time, the format of this monthly reflection post will slightly change. Once I’ve got a year’s worth of blogging underneath my belt, I’ll keep the same format to write my 2nd year’s post on blogging.
Right now, the primary emphasis for the blog is to grow my Pinterest followers. The principal goal is to have between 500 – 1,000 Pinterest followers by July 1st, 2021. It’s mid-October and I’m nearly there. Yippee, at least one of my goals should be reached by July 2021.
I was very fortunate enough to come across a post that talked about SEO and that it takes 3 months for SEO to kick in. I started learning as much about SEO as I could. It’s paid big dividends in the area of Pinterest with continued growth. However, I can’t say the same about the Blog. Like most people I didn’t spend much time worrying about Metadescription. Now that’s an automatic process before I publish a new post. I feel that I’m making good progress as a Blogger by providing quality content and promoting the Blog through Pinterest. I’ve got good pages, Landing Pages, Freebies, Magnets, and all that information that should be encouraging people to subscribe to my new posts.
Just yesterday I created a post (although I should have made it a page) for my Free Resources Library. Also, today I finished Part I of the five part Blogging Series posts.
The goal of the blog is to get more than 100 subscribers by July 1st, 2021. At the rate I’m going, I’m getting traffic to the blog; however, I need to concentrate on increasing the subscribers which is why Part I of the five-part Blogging Series post requires visitors to subscribe. I put a lot of time and effort into finding all of these Pinterest Group Boards. If you’ve tried to join the Pinterest Group Boards, you know it’s not an easy task. I’ve put all of the “potential 145 or so Pinterest Group Boards into one. Once you subscribe, I’ll send you the password to access the password-protected file. Also, for subscribers only, if you e-mail me I’ll send you the file in PDF Format to use as a ready reference.
By continually providing 2 – 3 daily pins, equating to 14 – 21 weekly “new” pins I’ll get there.
Pinterest Challenge for October 2020
In October, I’ve been challenging myself to pin regularly on Pinterest, in order to gain more blog traffic (and hopefully more subscribers) by participating in an event called Blogtober.
Here’s a summary of the Pinterest strategy that I’ll be using:
- 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
To show improvement the numbers are necessary so here is my stats for the middle of October 2020. That I’ll be able to compare in another 3 months in January 2021.
| July 2020 | 16 Oct 2020 | |
| Pinterest Followers | 0 | 466 |
Using Tailwind to schedule pins
Currently, with the number of pins that I have, I’m only able to pin for about 4 – 5 days out. I don’t like using all of my pins in one swoop, but I do plan to space my pins out in intervals of 3 – 4 days. With the fact that I’m creating 10 pins for each post, in theory I should have 52 posts with 10 pins for 520 collective pins.
As of Sept 18th, 2020 I have 139 pins made, 381 to make for 520 pins.
The hardest part about making the pins right now is getting them organized. I had all of the pins located in one folder which made it quite difficult to locate.
I developed an Access database and put in the file location so now they’re easier to locate.
There’s a free program called XnView that can be used to look at your PNG files. This made it relatively easy to locate the files and I transferred series of pins that I have made into separate folders. I have an Excel spreadsheet with the Title Name, the Hyperlink Location, the Pin Description (this comes in handy to quickly update a series of pins, once they’ve been made), the number of pins on each post/page, and the number or pins that need to be made.
Sometimes accidents can actually work in your favor. I was playing around with the Blog Master Content List and it wasn’t sorting alphabetically. I knew that there were a number of blogs that had been posted, but the Master list hadn’t been updated. I tried sorting it and the sort feature wasn’t working properly.
I inadvertently tried to import the Excel file into Access but mistakenly exported the file from Access into Excel. One of the rare times that I didn’t have the files backed up. I should know better; I’ve been working with computers for years. Anyhow, I regrouped, got all of my posts updated, restored the pin description into the spreadsheet and now all that’s left to do is to make the new folders for each respective post and then start creating the pins.
What I’m going to be aiming to do is that I can schedule all of my pins for a whole month in advance. It wasn’t until now, when I did the math above, I realized why working with nearly 139 pins it’s difficult to schedule my pins. One important note to mention is that after you’ve scheduled your pins to look and see if you have any pins that are scheduled back to back. If so, either move them around slightly or use the Shuffle at the top to mix them up. I usually shuffle the pins twice to give them a thorough mix and then look for the duplicate pins that might have to get moved.
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. Right now, it’s a little bit of a struggle because I don’t have that many pins to work with.
I’m pretty goal driven and realizing that I know I’ll need to have 381 pins made to reach my goal I’m wondering how I’ll realistically be able to make that many pins in just two weeks. That would be nearly 30 pins per day. Therefore, I’m allowing myself to make this goal of 381 pins by October 15th, 2020. That’s closer to 10 – 11 pins more day and is attainable.
Today’s October 16th and I haven’t been updating my spreadsheet with the number of total pins and now that’s it’s in Access, it’s harder to get that magic number. With Blogtober I’ve been pretty busy working on lots of posts, so I’m extending my goal from mid-October to mid-November ensuring I have 381 pins. Off of the top of my head, I’m probably relatively close to that number. My curiosity got the best of me and I had to check and I’m actually further away than closer with a total of 245 pins. 136 more pins and I’ll make my goal. I’ve got a lot of pins for the month of Blogtober so if I were to include those pins, I’d be a lot closer to my goal.
I’m glad that I took the time to write this post because it’s a reminder to self to check out the total number of pins for the Blogtober posts. If I had to venture to guess it’s probably 50 pins or so (because I’m counting pins and not images) for the tallies.
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.
Tailwind did come out with a new version to easily colorize your pin which I haven’t played around with. Your able to change the whole color scheme of the pin relatively easy, more to come. I still haven’t toyed with it, I’ll need to find the article so I can experiment with it. It was really cool, because with a single click you can change the background color from one color to another.
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.
Tailwind Profile Performance recommendations.
At most times, the percentage of recommendations I need to take for Tailwind to improve my boards is at an average of 98%. I like to check it every now and then to see what might need improvement that I may have overlooked like:
- Adding a description to a board
- Forgetting to assign a board to a category.
- Not having more than 10 pins in any one given board.
Did it work?
In short, I was hoping to see if there was a dramatic improvement in mid-October; however, they were having a problem with the reporting figures so I’ll need to look and track the numbers in Tailwind over the next month.
I fully expect to see an increase in the viewers, engagement, and virality and Pinterest Followers.
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.
By making new fresh pins on a consistent basis, I’m optimistic that it’ll have a noticeable improvement on 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.
Canva
I’m using the Pro version of Canva to make nearly all of my pins. Although once in awhile I digress to some of the other free stock image websites; however, they are overused which is why I tend to stick with Canva which I rarely find a duplicate image used in the same fashion.
To prospective bloggers this is the preferred tool of the trade to make your pins.
Things I have learned during my three months as a blogger
- I’ve learned how to lower my Bounce Rate
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very important thing that you need to learn the basics because it involves so many different elements.
- Bloggers are willing to help Bloggers. Reach out to your fellow bloggers for help. You can do this by signing up for the various Facebook Groups for Bloggers. Here are a few to mention.
- Don’t copy other people’s blogs, be unique, different, and original.
- I’ve learned how to use Canva, Pinterest, and Facebook. Before I started blogging, I used Facebook from time to time. Now the frequency of using Facebook has changed that I’m forced to use it at least once a week.
- I’ve earned a tiny amount of money from an Affiliate link ($15). But it’s going to take considerable time and consistent good content to get the big bucks.
- Most blog stats go up and down from day to day, and sometimes it can seem very erratic! But focus on the general trend over a longer period, rather than expecting a steady increase each day.
My blogging achievements
These are things that I am proud to have achieved in 3 months:
- Wrote and published 80 posts to cover mainly Pinterest and SEO.
- Consistent posting usually one post every 2 – 3 days.
- Being nominated for 4 different blogging awards.
- 466 Followers on Pinterest
For some odd reason, I haven’t received comments for quite a long time.
I’d greatly appreciate a comment or two to know it’s actually working. Especially for a blog post that you like.
Plans and goals for my blog’s fourth month
These are some things I plan to work on to achieve in my fourth and fifth month of blogging:
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.
- 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)
- 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)
- Learn about how to write guest posts for other blogs, and accept guest posts on my blog (fifth month)
- Continue to post at least once every 6 days (quality over quantity), on-going.
- 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.
Financial goals:
- Earn money from my Affiliate programs (mainly Tailwind and Bluehost) on-going.
Goals in a year from now
- Hoping to have achieved the goal of 500 – 1000 Pinterest followers.
- Having more than 100 subscribers on the Blog. I sure hope that the Pinterest Traffic Avalanche Course changes this.
- Between 50 – 100 Group Boards on Pinterest. At the moment it’s at 68 Group Boards. Two of them were just added and I haven’t updated the page yet.
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.
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