We’re 6 Months Old! The First 6 Month Blog Traffic Report

Woot woot! Please ignore how late this blog update is. I’ve put it off because there were a lot of things I wanted to say for my 6th month. It was surprisingly complicated to write. The original blog report had over 5,000 words. I finally trimmed it down because most of it was rants and blogging lessons I’ve learned. Those would be much more helpful if I took the time to organize them better than laying it all out there. Some topics deserve a chapter all on their own.

I’ll give a quick index of the list of blog topics that I want to get into – would any of these be of interest?

Biggest pet peeves of blogging itself.

Tech issues make me want to vomit.

How blogging evolved my marriage.

Is it sad that blogging changed my life?

How to prevent ticking other bloggers off by accident.

Possible reasons why some blogs do well and others don’t.

How many times you can refresh your page views before crashing your website.

How to kiss Google’s ass.

7 blog things I know I’m failing at and why it’s important.

How a donut like me survived the first 6 months of blogging.

Do I actually like blogging or do I just like my niche?

That’s just the partial list of what I wanted and been wanting to say for months. FOR MONTHS.

Unfortunately, it’s not personal finance related so I’ve refrained. I like writing about money. I like reading and writing storytime and money diaries. But I have to get some blog rants out there because it’s just not natural to spend 20-30 hours a week working on something (i.e. blogging) and not say a word about it.

Finance and Airbnb may consume a good portion of my life but blogging has eaten a chuck out of it too! Blogging is as much social interaction as I care to get from people these days. Blogging about blogging is basically what happens when feelings get bottled up and your life becomes consumed by it. It’s a pretty fair and common occurrence. It feels weird to have blog advice on a personal finance blog but I have nowhere else to put my thoughts.

Maybe once in a while, I’ll sprinkle that in because blogging is a life changer. If I wrote out the things that I’ve learned about blogging then it would be an epic rant of nothing less than 30,000 words by the time I’m done. If you have no interest in blogging, please skip these posts.

I should have copied my blog sister over at Frugal Asian Finance sooner. The girl knows what she’s doing. She has sprinkled in some of her content on blogging and I love reading them. I never thought to write any myself until her post about blogging and marriage that got to me. It felt so relatable. I share a lot of the same points of view as her.

Monetization

I get almost spammy requests about product testing/putting links on my site/advertising etc. I’ve not taken any of those requests seriously. I also don’t want to put ads on my website. They are ugly and not worth it unless you have 50,000+ pageviews.

I signed up to be an Amazon Affiliate last night just to recommend those Amazon sample boxes that I get. I have all of them (except the fitness box) and they’re definitely worth it for the credit back. The only downside is they’re not eligible for Prime shipping. BlueHost reached out to me again recently and I’m in talks with Wesley (he’s so nice!) Lastly, I added my referral code from Airbnb (where you can get $40 off if you book a trip costing more than $75.)

There’s 8% of me that wanted to wait for Ms. FAF to monetize together. I guess I can be the guinea pig by dipping my toes in first. If I get more of an idea of what to expect then it’s less confusing for her later on.

Expenses

My year of Tailwind and Michelle’s affiliate course were my biggest expenses. The rest was just BlueHost, domain, and domain privacy. Ms. FAF and I are pretty frugal about blogging. I know for a fact that you do not need a lot of money to blog successfully. Me and Ms. FAF discussed this briefly on Pete’s podcast.

Past Blog Reports

May 1st Month Blog Report – 1,110 Pageviews

June 2nd Month Blog Report – 6,603 Pageviews (+494.86%)

July 3rd Month Blog Report – 8,616 Pageviews (+30.49%)

August 4th Month Blog Report – 9,833 Pageviews (+14.12%)

September 5th Month Blog Report – 15,457 Pageviews (+57.2%)

Blog Traffic

October was my best month ever. We got 28,850 page views in 31 days. It was like Christmas came early. The successions of traffic jumps are all thanks to fellow blogger love. It was like one right after another. Here are some of those who gifted me the gift of blog traffic.❤

1) That story about my husband’s remarkable dumb luck was featured in the good doctor’s Sunday Best series. Along with Physicians on Fire, the lovely Gen Y Money also threw me into her blog roundup. My husband’s dumb luck is my favorite post. It was a completely impromptu write-up.

The reception I received was surprising. I didn’t know it was good until other people told me they loved it. To us, it was just a succession of things that happened. It is sort of crazy when you think about it. I have my own version. I believe we all have our own version of that story if you sat and pieced it together.

2) I wrote a guest post for Mr. AE. The post is on my husband’s side of the family that I wanted to keep away from this blog. It’s a personal dive into why some parents withhold financial information from their children.

3) Christmas definitely came early! Mr. Groovy wrote a post that totally made me blush. He addressed the perils of Asian Americans and the odds some of us / our parents had to overcome. It was an honor being featured and cherry on top was being there with Ms. FAF, RetireBy40, and Financial Samurai too!!! Mr. G got 3 out 4 right haha. One may have snuck by with just dumb luck.

4) Married with Money featured one of my least popular posts in October in his blogroll. Hey hey, I thought it was clever! *Crickets*

I made a very bad celebrity pun. To my surprise, it was featured. Thankfully I think the joke went over better than I thought and reading it over, it was pretty funny and clever. I am also thankful no one tweeted it at Nicolas Cage on Twitter; although, personal finance knowledge would do the guy some good.

I can’t beat Ms. FAF’s rockstar feature though! I said to her…”did you get just featured for writing about pee?!” LOL.

AND AND AND AND…

SLAY GIRL SLAAYYYYY!!!

I’m up there in the Rockstar Finance Directory with the BEST of ’em. Mr. Apathy, Luxe, and Bitches Get Riches!! ✨✨

If you told me at the beginning of October that I would get so much love from other bloggers, I wouldn’t have believed you. It was a perfect month of gentle rolling traffic and the support was overwhelming. I don’t know what else to say/whimper except…

Top 5 Most Popular Posts

Don’t (Nicolas) Cage Yourself In Financially

How Dumb Luck Made My Husband A Rich Man

8 Frugal Reasons To Have Two Phones

How We Keep Our Food Costs So Low

September 2017 – Family Income Report

New Post Count

Talking to Ms. Raggedly Riches.

The honest to goodness part of blogging is seeing the page views of your daily post count go up. I went from posts getting 100 views to the majority my posts hitting the 200 views mark. It’s still small fish compare to most bloggers but I’m thankful for the jump. I don’t know why or when exactly but I remember the jump was sudden. It’s like being on a seesaw, you’re either up or you’re down. Since you can’t really control it, it doesn’t matter. You gotta do you boo.

Read this: it’s better to grow your blog your own way.

Marketing & Social Media

Commenting

I try to comment on 3 different blogs daily. During my 1st and 2nd month, I was better about commenting. Now I’m just late because I listen to it on my screen reader hands-free, then tell myself I’ll leave a comment later (but forgets.)

Since I am on the West Coast, the publish time for a lot of blogs on the East Coast happens at 4 AM for me. Sometimes I miss it and sometimes I’m still up at 4 AM. It’s a bit exhausting. I still think commenting on other blogger’s content is extremely important although I wish I had the time to do it more often than 1-3 times a day.

Pinterest

I had one of my pins go viral for a few hours before it died down. It received 600 individual visits within an hour and went dead from there. Pinterest is confusing as heck. Who in the world is spreading the rumor that I know what I’m doing on Pinterest?! I would have more than 500 followers if that was true. Some new bloggers that have just started already have 2,000 followers. I have no idea what gathers followers on Pinterest.

Pinterest is just perplexing to me, I’ll figure it out eventually. There are days I get 0 new followers and then suddenly, bam, 7 new followers without executing even a slight change. I started Tailwind (use my referral link to get $15 off your trial) and deactivated my Board Booster account for now as a test. I can see there might be occasions where having both Board Booster and Tailwind would be helpful but I need a better reason than “there might be occasions.”

Twitter

I’ve crossed the 2,200 follower mark! My Twitter is where I socialize with other bloggers. It has a terrible ROI in terms of time put in but the platform is fun. Do not use Twitter to build your traffic. It simply does not work. Twitter dropped to 4th and 5th place in terms of referrals. I’ve become accustomed to direct messaging other bloggers on Twitter so it’s really a place you should start, not the place where you end.

Instagram

I have not touched Instagram in a long time. I forgot about it the entire month of October.

Facebook

I have not touched Facebook in a long time. I forgot about it the entire month of October.

MailChimp

I’ve crossed over 265 subscribers! The open rate is bad. Every ProBlogger says to hone your subscriber’s list but I don’t really believe that. I have to look into how as well. I don’t see how email sign-up numbers are related to traffic. Maybe a giveaway or something would improve open rate? I should start marketing my freebies tab a little better.

Google

I love Google and Google loves me (sometimes.) Thank you hubby, whatever you did to my SEO game. If any, I have no idea, we did these 3 things all at once. I switched my old theme to this one, downloaded a free WordPress optimizer to load the blog faster. Lastly, hubby switched my blog from HTTP to HTTPS.

Goals For November

I heard it’s really easy to get burned out so I’m not too rushy-rushy. October was a total fluke. If I can even get 25,000 page views for November then I’ll be really happy because there is no way I’m going to beat my 6th month miracle.

There’s a lot of pressure on me and Ms. FAF to grow. We’re one of the few bloggers out there who actually put our pageviews out in monthly blog reports. She and I have talked about this before. For the first few months, both of us were really nervous about having a bad month and having to put negative numbers out. It’s embarrassing. Thankfully, we’ve both lightened up. She’s burned out and I’m like ‘eh.’

I was only able to cheer her up by verbal abuse.

Ms. FAF told me I have a pretty mellow personality. She compared blogging to school and I suddenly got a flashback of me being in school. It IS exactly like how I treat blogging. I was a mellow student. I’ll study for an exam last-minute, go in half-assed, take my B grade and make it up later. I’m not the type to go out of my way to pull an all-nighter or go to tutoring unless someone forced me. I just hope for the best. So here’s to November! I hope to somehow come out OK! >_<;;

Byyeeeeeeeeee!