Many, if not most of you have seen bloggers’ blogging income report posts titled How I made $10,480.82 on my blog last month or How I made $372.07 on my blog in September. I see those posts and start to salivate. Pant like a dog. Yeah, yeah! Let me, let me! I wanna do that, too! So I put some ads on my site. You just had to scroll past one.
Now, there’s more to blogging than “build it and they will come.” In my case, I have to be un-lazy and actually do something. I have to redo a booth or go estate sale shopping or come up with a crafty idea. I have to do it, take pictures along the way, edit those pictures, write about it and then the work starts. If you want anyone to actually see it, you have to get the word out. You have to work it. Work it like a dog! (Another dog analogy? What’s up with that?) And hope a few people will read. I fail miserably on all those points.
I have a million excuses. Some pretty good, too! The most legitimate is I simply have too many irons in the fire. Three booths, Etsy, the blog and everything that entails, social media, my home, family, etc., and I’d really like to fit sewing in there somewhere. I like to sew. Did I ever tell you that? No? It’s because I never get to! And, as so many of my grammar school report cards said, “Wanda does not use her time wisely.”
Lately though, these have been my excuses:
Too much gloomy weather takes the wind out of my sails. I have no creative urge, no urge to purge – or clean or neaten things up. No urge to get out. Plus it’s impossible to get good, indoor pictures with no sunlight. Think those beautiful decor pictures on blogs were taken with a flash? No. Not on your life. There might be a few bloggers with fancy, lighting systems set up, but the majority of those luscious pictures are taken with good, ol’, natural sunlight. We haven’t seen much of that lately.
Then there’s this:
What a mess! I’ve been playing fruit basket turnover with some rooms and sorta got stuck with a mess. This room, the “formal” living room, by the way, ha! is by far the worst in the house at the moment. Those boxes? They aren’t even mine. They need to go back to our daughter’s house, but she has less room and time to deal with them than I do. Some of the table mess is from my dad’s. And, of course, I have my own mess mixed in with all that. I’m going to claim that my mess is paltry compared to the overall picture. But I do still see the little bit of Christmas I had out. Groan. Feel better about your own house now, do ya?
Please don’t call a TV show or the city out to us. Our cat is alive and well, there are no Burger King bags to be found and a stretcher could actually get all the way through the house. Honestly, the rest of the house isn’t like this. It’s just not blog worthy at the moment and hasn’t been for months.
So. My goal for March:
- Have a clean living room picture to show you in April
- Make $5.00 on the blog. This blog.
- Get my total number of Etsy items back up to 150
- Paint a trunk and um… one other thing to be decided on later
- Actually blog at least once a week with something you might like to see
Hey! Don’t judge my lack of ambitious goals! You don’t know what kind of goals are in my head! I just don’t want to set myself up for public failure. Although that $5.00 and get the living room back in order is a lot harder than you’d think.
So. Here’s my blogging income report for February 2015. Which ad networks brought it all in?
- Google AdSense: $2.98 ($1.50 of that was from the old, no longer active Excuse Me While I Buy This Junk blog. Go figure.
- Amazon affiliate: $0.00
- eJunkie affiliate: $0.00
How much traffic did I get and where did it come from? We’ll look at this blog only. Forget the other one I’ve moved away from. This is the one I want to focus on.
Overall traffic: 1062 which breaks down to:
Organic search: 373
Pinterest: 327
Direct: 280
Facebook: 51
So let’s address my traffic. 1062 visits for the whole month of February? That’s it???! Obviously, nobody knows I’m here. Or cares.
- Facebook has, if you’ll pardon my out of character language, screwed us over royally by not showing all our business page posts to all our “likers.” It’s frustrating. Especially if you try to have a life outside of the internet.
- Still, I should be posting more to Facebook and Pinterest. Forget the life. We like to eat, so we need money.
Organic search showed 373. Search terms for 312 of those were not provided. Thanks a lot Google. The term “painted” brought in 25 visitors and different searches to do with the Silhouette Cameo brought a total of 18. One with this search term, 1 with another. The rest were single incidents.
What did I learn from all this? That no matter how much I read, I still only have a vague idea of how to get traffic and to get that traffic to equal money. I need to take some time to read all those pins on my Pinterest board, Pinterest, Blogging and Business. There are some good pins there. You might want go in and take a look and follow the board, I’m always adding to that collection, or repin and read some of the articles.
And for a shameless Facebook plug, I’d absolutely LOVE to have you follow the page! It’s Just Vintage.
Hmmmm…. Now to take action. Work on getting people here so maybe I can reach that $5.00 goal! And what should I do now that I’m finished writing this post? Do the whole social media thing to get the word out? Get up and try to clean that room? Get started on that trunk? Get some stuff ready to take to a booth? Color my hair? Have a snack? By the way, this little post took me over 4 hours to write. Gah!
Update: I didn’t post this when I finished. Didn’t have the nerve. I colored my hair, stared at the living room, ate, a few times, slept on it then came in and edited it and added to it this morning. Maybe I’ll post it this time.
