Update #28 – September 2024 Traffic & Income Report

Yay for cooler months!!

I’m a huge sweater fan so I’m super excited cold weather is upon us!

Thanks for checking in on how me and the website are doing!

This is a place where I share how much money I’ve made (if any 😅) and if traffic is picking up (or slowing down) for the previous month. We’re now in October 2024 so I’m sharing how things went in September.

Let’s dive in!

September 2024 Traffic

First, let’s talk about search engine clicks. I’m still not doing anywhere near as well as I was doing prior to Google’s core update in March.

I had 3 (three – this is absolutely not a typo) clicks from Google in September and seven from other search engines.

Here’s a snippet of where I am with Google impressions/clicks for the last twelve months:

See the drop off a cliff that happened in March of this year?

I still haven’t recovered. I am continuing to stay positive…sort of.

Actually, I can’t even believe that I’m sharing this snippet of my Google impressions because I can’t stand looking at it.

Basically, I was doing better a year ago.

However, Pinterest is still driving a lot of traffic, thank goodness. Let’s look at the total visits and ignore that I received only a total of 10 clicks from search engines this month.

Yay for September being the largest month of the year so far!!

Social Media Updates

My Pinterest goal was to go from 60 to 65. I ended September with 69!! YAY!!!

I’m debating giving up on Facebook. I feel like it’s just a distraction that doesn’t bring in nearly what Pinterest does.

Plus, I’m tapped out with time right now. I want to spend my free time created pins, not figuring out what to share on Facebook. So maybe I’ll delete the FB account…still debating.

I didn’t keep up with pinning as much as I should have this month because I spent three weeks being pretty sick. Ever since Covid, when I get sick, I get really sick and I’m out for over a week. I don’t have time in my life for being sick.

Challenges

The challenge this month was writing. I only posted two articles and one of those was my monthly income report.

I need to get back into thinking of this as a second job and dedicate blocks of time to writing.

While I was sick, I wasn’t mentally up to par and I didn’t feel like I could put my thoughts together well enough to write a decent post.

I’m 80% back to normal and hope to be back to 100% in the next few days.

I think with thirty minutes Monday-Friday and a few hours each weekend, I could get at least five articles out per month and work on pinning.

I think I need to start getting comfortable writing “on the go”. Sometimes I’m in my car waiting on a kid or I’m in a reception area waiting for my name to be called. I need to get more comfortable writing on my phone or take a small tablet/laptop with me.

I have this mindset that I have to be at home at my desk to write. Somehow I need to change this and get out of my comfort zone to make the most of my free time when I’m not at home. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with writing as much as I want to if I don’t change my habits.

Successes

Although I wasn’t mentally ok enough to write articles, I did do something pretty cool in September!

I made bingo card that visitors can download for free if they sign up for my newsletter!

As of right now, nobody has taken me up on the offer, but that’s ok! Super proud of myself for trying something new and getting it out there.

The Bingo Cards I posted, if you want to check them out, are in my Movie Night Birthday Party and Taylor Swift Themed Birthday Party articles.

September 2024 Income

Second month with ads on the site! Still not breaking $100 a month though…

This is the largest amount I’ve made off the website in a month so I’m happy! Last month was $34.80.

Ads really do make a difference since I don’t have anything I’m trying to sell on the website. At least not for now…

As for what I have spent, eh… a whole lot more than I’ve made.

I don’t have many monthly expenses. I purchase Divi Lifetime Membership as my theme after having a whole lot of crappy themes and I’m super happy that I did! If you’re new to website building, check out Divi as it was a game changer for me.

So there were a lot of startup costs that I’m not calculating in my current monthly website spend.

Currently, I spend $29 on Sellfy to sell digital products. I really need to up my game and utilize this a bit more.

For WordPress, I pay $29.50 per month total for domain, email, and site plan. (I actually pay for this yearly to get a discount.)

So I actually lost around $13 for the month of September.

Ok guys…that’s way better than I thought… You may be like “whoa! You’re losing money!” But I’m starting to offset my costs a little bit so I’m happy.

I was earning $0 for a long time.

October Goals

Write more.

I’d like to post a total of four articles.

Pin more.

Set up scheduled pins so I don’t have to go into Pinterest daily. I’d like to schedule the full week of pins over the weekend. Let’s see if I can do this in no more than an hour.

Remainder of the Year Goals

Eh…I just want more organic clicks from search engines.

I think to get that, I need to concentrate on writing.

Getting as high as the beginning of the year isn’t going to happen overnight… I think I’m going to have to build back up to that.

So what’s the goal? To post something once a week.

I want to see small baby step improvements to my search impressions before the end of the year.

Yay for the holiday months!