Reviewing Our Goal For The Month: September 2019 Reality Check
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As I sit down to write what will be a short post, I can’t quite believe that it’s already the last Friday of the month.
Time has just flown and I guess this is what happens when you’re too busy living life. You don’t really notice how much time has passed until you stand still and really focus on what’s going on with your life.
It’s a bit scary, isn’t it?
I swear, it seemed like it was only yesterday when I first held my newborn son and this month, he’s just started nursery. 3 years have already passed, leaving nothing but memories.
It’s insane.
Anyway, this Friday, I really just want to take a quick look at the goals we set for the month and see where we’re at and what we’ve done. Did we accomplish any of the goals we set on the first Friday of the month? Did we even come close? Or did we fall flat on our faces?
Let’s take a look.
1. Accelerated publishing
Last month, for various reasons, we decided to publish a post every day.
I’m happy to report that we’ve been successfully publishing a new post (complete with a new pin!) every single day – no exceptions and no re-doing old posts and republishing them (which is actually an excellent strategy too, just not our strategy at this moment in time).
The past few weeks, we were inspired to write back-to-back posts about picky eating children and then about Christmas. Don’t ask me why since they’re not at all related to each other but when the muse hits, you’ve just got to keep writing.
2. Create a month’s worth of posts
Okay, so we did do this and we did follow Niklas Goeke’s recommendation on creating an in-and-out spreadsheet, which is conveniently saved in our laptop.
Unfortunately, so far, we’ve only used a few of those posts.
A few days into the month, we got inspired to focus on parenting posts. And by inspired, I mean, kept awake most of the night until I finished writing.
After that, came Christmas-themed posts.
So, anyway, the point is – yes, we did meet this goal.
Just that we haven’t had much use for it.
3. Get active again on Quora
Erm, this was a bit of a fail.
The thing with Quora is that it’s an amazing way to connect with people. However, I don’t like just copy-pasting my posts as answers to the questions I’m asked.
To me, that’s just not on.
I prefer condensing or summarising my posts into mini-bites, essentially.
Which means that it sometimes takes almost as much time for me to answer a single Quora question as it does to write and publish on my blog.
I should have realised that with the accelerated publishing schedule we’re following just now, it’s not realistic.
So, we’ll be cutting this out of our goals for the next month -at least, for a while.
4. Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest
I’m not sure what the people over at Pinterest were doing this month but they were definitely up to something!
Nearly every single blogger I asked saw their traffic from good ol’ Pinterest go waaay down. Mine was cut in half (although that was also partly my boo-boo, which is a story for another day).
That said, this is still a success for us because we did adjust our publishing schedule to accommodate Pinterest. So, we were publishing at least one new pin for one new post a day, and then scheduling it in a loop via Tailwind.
And thank God for that because we’re really just barely keeping on top of the promotional side of things, what with me only being able to work 20 hours per week (if that!) and having to juggle writing, graphic design and digital marketing by myself. Kevin had just started a new full-time job so was obviously focussing on that.
In any case, horrendous traffic aside, this section was a win!
5. Doubled traffic
Speaking of traffic…yeah, massive fail on this.
Aside from Pinterest not cooperating (seriously, guys, couldn’t have chosen another month?? :-D), there was also the fact that our tinkering with our permalink structure finally bit us in the back.
From 12,186 page views per month, we’re currently down to 9,668.
So, we’re sad – so sad.
The only silver lining to that is the fact that we know why the traffic’s gone down and, thanks to our daily publishing, we’re actually able to offset it.
Also, strangely enough, although our traffic tanked this month, our Amazon affiliate earnings doubled so I guess we’re not too bothered about it.
Hopefully, though, Google and Pinterest will both see our traffic restored and start going back up by next month.
We succeeded with Pinterest – managing to grow it from 479 followers to 543 (yay!) but we failed with the others. Twitter only grew by 4, Instagram by 2 and Facebook by 9.
To be honest, this result is hardly surprising though because we only really managed to focus on growing Pinterest.
In fact, we haven’t posted anything on Instagram for weeks now (sigh).
7. Finish WA Online Certification
This has been pending for months and would’ve remained pending if not for the fact that whilst writing this post, I realised that if I don’t finish this certification, it will be another fail.
And I didn’t want that.
Luckily, I was already at Lesson 8 anyway and so was able to finish the training before this post was published. Yay!
Final thoughts
And there you have it, so this month was a mix of success and failures but to be honest, we’re quite happy with the way things are going.
I’m sitting here looking at my stats and whilst there are a few dips, overall, the general trend of our blog is showing that we are definitely growing.
So, what will we be doing this coming month?
Will we continue with our daily publishing schedule? Or are we going to stop?
Find out next Friday. :-p
In the meantime, how about you let us know how your plans for this month went and what your plans are for October? Share them below!
