First Year Blog Report- Income & Traffic Review

Welcome to my first year blog report. I can’t believe Curly Bun Mom is one year old already.

Writing the content for this blog has improved my life so much and touched the lives of so many others. It has truly been an honor and pleasure creating content to help others.

Before continuing, catch up with my first month, second month, third month, fourth month, fifth month and sixth month of blogging 🙂

Looking for more ways to make money as a stay at home mom? Check out the best jobs for stay at home moms.

Affiliate Disclosure: “This post contains affiliate links, which means I receive a small commission, at no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase using this link.”

How Much Did I Make In My First Year Of Blogging

Let’s kick things off with the burning question of income. While I didn’t make a profit in my first year of blogging, my income totaled $75 USD from affiliate sales and I’m really pleasantly surprised and happy.

While it’s true that I could have made more if I pushed harder, it was more important for me to listen to my body and of course, prioritize my kids’ and family’s needs.

2020 wasn’t a walk in the park for most of us and I’m really proud that I stuck it out and didn’t go down the easier road of giving up.

As I write this review, I don’t have an income goal for Curly Bun Mom. My main focus will continue to be on family as our kids are still going to be homeschooled and we’re hopefully going to be settling in into our new home.

First Year Blog Performance Review

I’ve learned so much since my last blog report. I slowed down since my blog’s sixth-month mark and honestly, it did wonders for my traffic and for my Pinterest account. I work less and my traffic is hovering around 8k monthly views with no facebook traffic threads! This is honestly a dream for me because I really didn’t have the time to continue with the threads.

Pageviews

Pageviews : 8,847
Sessions : 7,588

Below is a screenshot of my Google Analytics for the last 30 days. Of the total pageviews, 90% is from Pinterest, 3% from other social media and 7% from organic google traffic.

Pinterest seems to be a long term strategy for my account. Over the past few months, my older pins began ranking and now I have a few pins that bring in a consistent flow of traffic every month.

If my current traffic trend continues, I should be able to hit the 10K pageviews mark once again. The main difference this time would be that the traffic is not dependent on Facebook share threads.

Google Ranking

In the past 6 months, I’ve learned so much more about organic traffic and ranking on Google. The main thing I’ve learned is that I have a lot to learn!

So, this year my focus is on learning all that I can on how to rank on Google and hopefully rank on the first page for a higher traffic keyword. That’s my main goal this year.

I have a handful of posts that are responsible for bringing in organic Google traffic:

First Year Pinterest Performance Review

Pinterest was a rollercoaster in 2020 and I was honestly giving up on it and that’s how my account grew. I was spending so much of my time trying to churn out 8-10 pins a day that I wasn’t getting much time to do anything else with my blog, especially as I’m homeschooling.

At the sixth month mark, I decided to limit my posting to 1-2 pins per day and whatever happens, happens. One day I put up a video pin, just to see what it was all about, and the results were AMAZING! Video pins became key in my Pinterest growth. In 6 months, I went from 281K monthly viewers to now, 3.1M. Below you can see my stats from the 6 month blog review.

As a reminder, this is a quick look at overall stats as at June 2020

Followers: 418 – 520
Unique monthly viewers: 116K – 281K (139% INCREASE)
Impressions: 147k – 343k
Engaged Audience: 2.89 – 5.91k (104% INCREASE)

These are my monthly stats after 6 months, as at 17 January 2021

Followers: 520 – 2600
Unique monthly viewers: 281K – 3.1M
Impressions: 343k – 4.95M
Engaged Audience: 5.91k – 232.5K

This screenshot from my Pinterest analytics shows the growth in the last 90 days from my pins only (no third party pins)

It’s true that the click through rate on the video pins isn’t always fantastic, but it really doesn’t bother me because I still get more traffic than I used to and I don’t spend as much time as I once did to create pins.

This year, I don’t really intend to change too much with my Pinterest strategy this year as I would really love to focus on SEO and getting at least one article with a good keyword to rank.

Overall Goals for 2021

Overall, I’m really happy and proud of my blog’s first-year performance. When I started Curly Bun Mom, my intention was to grow at a slow pace and eventually earn a steady monthly income over time and I think I accomplished all that I set out to do in my first year of blogging.

I hope this first year blog report has helped to get a good idea of what a year of blogging can look like. Lots of bloggers devote more time and effort to their blogs than I did and get stellar results. Consistency is definitely key. If you’re now starting out, I think learning SEO may be the best place to start.

Happy blogging 🙂