Month 7 has been quite challenging, to say the least! Right after my last update our internet was cut off at home by accident by our provider (Thanks for nothing, Sky!) so I’ve been working off a very slow tethered connection for the last few weeks – not ideal at all! As well I’ve been busy with my day job and property business, so I haven’t done nearly as much as I planned to! It’s been frustrating and gotten me down at times, but hey, when things go wrong you just have to keep going, so that’s what I’ve done!
Goals Achieved
As I said above, it’s been a tough month – my traffic and income was down, but I’m sure this was due to me not having the internet and therefore not being able to interact with the community and work on finding advertisers. I still have a backlog of things I need to do, so I’m hoping to clear this asap and get back on track by next month. This blog is a long term venture for me, and I know that life is always going to get in the way, so I’ve learnt this month to give myself a break and to get straight back on the bike when you fall – that way, you can never fail!
It’s not all bad news though – One of my favourite parts of this month was attending the Travel Bloggers Unite Conference in Austria – it was a fantastic opportunity to meet with other bloggers, many of whom I interact with on twitter, as well as PR professionals and other industry experts from all around the world. I’ve made some fabulous new friends, learnt a lot and have a head brimming with new ideas for the blog, so I’m excited about the time ahead!
New To Woman Seeks World
Over the last few months the site has definitely taken a huge turn into providing information on location independence and moving abroad, so I plan to take this even further in the months ahead. These posts have been extremely popular and it’s been surprising how many other people also dream of similar goals, so I’ve decided to ramp it up with a series of detailed posts on running a location independent business as well as ‘how to’ guides for moving to popular countries around the world.
Over the next little while you will also see a slight restructure of the site to showcase this information in a more user-friendly manner, which hopefully will be helpful to my readers in finding exactly what they are looking for.
I also have a loose plan to start compiling an eBook on becoming location independent, but I am going to put this on the backburner for a month or two while I focus on getting the site’s traffic back up and hopefully securing some more advertisers.
Month 6 Stats
Traffic – 7,565 visits (This is down A LOT since last month, but my stumble upon visits are also down, and SU hasn’t been producing the spikes I was seeing, so this isn’t surprising. On the upside, my bounce rate has dropped and page views are up…I’m just hoping things start to go upwards again next month!)
Link Building – This has definitely suffered in the last month as I just haven’t had the connection to be able to surf and comment on other blogs. I’m looking forward to catching up on what I need to and getting stuck back into interacting with the community and building quality links.
Content – I’ve been steadily posting 3 times per week which seems to be going well in terms of time management and visits. I will continue to post this way for the foreseeable future.
Twitter Followers – 1,363 (Increasing)
Facebook Fans – 463 (Increasing)
RSS Subscribers – 130 (Increasing)
Alexa Ranking – 200, 892 (Nearly breaking the 200,000 barrier, yay!)
Income – In the past month I have earnt $360 from text link ads. As with most other stats, this hasn’t grown as much as I would have liked in the last month, but hopefully once I’m back on track this will pick up again.
About My Monthly Blog Updates
I wanted to start these monthly updates to hopefully help other bloggers out there just starting out or wanting some support in starting to monetize their site or growing it in some way. I certainly don’t claim to know it all, but I’m hoping that the lessons that I learn will be helpful and inspirational to others looking to make a living from blogging.
So, I think it’s fitting to put the question out there and see what you would find helpful to read about in these monthly updates – I will do my best to include it each month, so please let me know!
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Thanks for sharing, I was actually wondering why there were so few posts in the last month… hope you got your internet fixed again! Good luck with your blog and with achieving your goals, I’m sure you’ll make it because you’re a great person with a lot of enthusiasm and motivation! Keep going!
Thanks so much for your support Alicia!
Eeek, slow internet? My worst nightmare 🙂 Thanks again for sharing your stats etc – they’re very valuable posts for my blogging students!! And I still think you’re doing spectacularly well even if you were down a bit this month.
Any ideas on how SU spikes really happen? I get a few (submitted by other people) and they are often on the oddest posts.
Thanks Amanda! Hope your blogging students are going well! I was getting strange spikes last month (sometimes 5,000 hits a day from SU!) but they have stopped now…apparently this is quite common and due to some algorthym, but I don’t really get it!
An interesting post – I’ve never thought to do a “state of the blog” type post, but it’s a nice way to reflect on your goals and challenges. I use SU for my blog as well, but have never had much luck with it – what do find is the best way to utilize SU in getting sticky traffic?
Hi Jessica, I still dont hugely understand how SU works, but I do know that the more you use it, the more traffic it gets you. Try stumbling and liking lots of pages within your niche and discovering new sites – I think this all goes towards ‘points’ which then take your stumbles (and your site) up the ranks. I used to stumble most of my new posts which got me huge traffic, although this peters out after a while. Best of luck!