First Month Blog Report

How I Crushed My Goals in My First Month of Blogging! 

Curly Bun Mom is one month old! YAYYYY I didn’t think I would be this proud of myself.

Reading other blog reports was incredibly motivating and inspiring and I hope to do the same for others with my first blog report. Before I launched my blog, I spent SO much time reading Blog reports to get an idea of what to expect and growth rate possibilities.

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The thought of blogging had never occurred to me as I don’t consider myself a good writer. However, I came across Suzi Whitford from Start a Mom Blog and she truly inspired me to go for it. I didn’t have to be the best, I could pace myself and most of all my perspective could help someone.  

Shortly after I started seriously looking into starting my blog, I realized there was way too much information out there for me to sift through with two young boys and a new baby. I invested in Suzi’s Blog by Number Ebook. It was so easy to understand and informative that I also purchased her signature Blog by Number course. It was my number one resource to get this blog up and running. In fact, it’s still my number one resource as I frequently refer to it. The best part of her course is that you have access to every future update.

I used her step by step, super simple guides to set up my:

• BlueHost account
• WordPress account
• Pinterest account

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First Month Blog Goals

My goals for January 2020 were conservative. I had no idea what to expect and I planned to launch with two posts and post every Monday thereafter. I wanted to dip my toes in the water before I started monetizing (as I’m extremely confused where that’s concerned).

January 2020 goals: 

• Blog page views: 300
• Pinterest followers: 25
• Pinterest unique monthly viewers: 2K
• Email subscribers: 5

 

First Month Blog Performance

Blog Launch

Launching my blog was exciting, to say the least. While my main goal was and remains to help others by sharing my experiences, I want to ultimately be able to contribute financially to our family.

Pageviews

I surpassed my page view goal of 300 in my second week, with three blog posts and I was blown away. Maybe it’s because I set a low goal for myself but I feel pretty great sitting at 1175 page views in my first month of blogging. I didn’t even dream of making it to 1000 in my first month so I’m definitely sticking to what I’ve been doing and I will invest in a course to try to increase my views.

My family and closest friends are my biggest supporters which means more to me than I could probably ever express to them. They read my posts religiously and really help with motivation. My husband believes in me when I doubt myself and pushes me to go beyond the limits I sometimes set for myself. My sister has probably always been my biggest cheerleader with everything in my life and this was no different.

Joining Facebook groups and Pinterest have proven to be the most helpful for my pageviews. I will admit that in the beginning, I didn’t love the promotional aspect of blogging and I wanted to just continue writing and forget about monetizing. But because my main blogging goal is to help others, I had to be able to reach them and so I continued with promotions. It’s still not my favorite part but I love the community and I love helping others by reading their posts and promoting them. My issue was purely a time management one and so I’m working on creating a better schedule for myself.

Pinterest 

Oh, boy, did I feel awesome on Pinterest. I followed Start a Mom Blog’s guide to set up my Pinterest account. In terms of a posting strategy though, I was clueless and confused. I read lots of blogs and looked at many YouTube videos and I felt like I just wasn’t understanding.

The great thing, though is that I like to pin and so I just pinned things from Pinterest that interested me before I joined Facebook groups. At that point, I also pinned fellow bloggers’ pins from groups.

Using only this strategy, I crushed my Pinterest goals of 25 followers and 2K monthly viewers.

• Followers: 0 to 137 followers
• Unique monthly viewers: 0 to 37K

Honestly, seeing my Pinterest analytics (even though I don’t totally understand it yet) kept motivating me to continue. I understand that these numbers don’t mean much since my click-through rate isn’t great. It definitely needs some improvement and so, my goal in February is to find a good Pinterest course, that includes a simple guide to Tailwind – please let me know in the comments below if you have any good recommendations!

GOALS for Feb 2020

• Followers: 250
• Unique monthly viewers: 40K
• Impressions: 50K
• Improve click-through rate on pins

 

Email Subscribers

I didn’t hit this goal of having 5 email subscribers and to be honest, I didn’t try at all. I launched my blog with a freebie that I promoted in the first couple of weeks. When I passed my page view and Pinterest goal, I didn’t promote the freebie anymore. I focused more on blog promotion.

In the third week of January, I noticed that there was a broken link on my blog and visitors were able to download my freebie without entering their email address * facepalm *. I had a total of 93 visitors and 2 subscribers (one being my sister – thanks sis!)

My February goals will still be pretty modest, though. I intend to focus on learning how to grow traffic in February.

Goals for Feb 2020

• Create a new freebie
• 8 new email subscribers

I hope this has helped to get a good idea of what a first month blog traffic report can look like. I’d love to hear from you! – What was your experience in your first month?

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