Welcome to my first ever Blog traffic update.
After toying with the idea of starting a blog for almost two years, I finally started it in July.
What was the primary intention to start Crowd Work News?
I wanted to help others to find online work opportunities and side gigs that can be a good source of income.
So, how was my first month?
Traffic
Within first two days of the launch, my traffic was over 1k page views.
I did a lot of ‘word of mouth’ marketing before my launch. I knew that many of my friends, people I know and many others were looking for work from home job opportunities and could not get past the scams.
I posted about the blog in forums, talked about it in different Facebook groups related to remote jobs.
Now, after one month of blogging my page views are over 16k.
The things that helped me to get this traffic
- Popular Posts
- Pinterest (My biggest traffic source – 60%)
- StumbleUpon
- Facebook (this is from the Facebook groups I participate in)
Some of my posts had massive page views, maybe that is not much for a seasoned blogger, but for me it was HUGE.
7 WAH Jobs without any Expertise (3,634 )
Top 25 Companies Hiring Remote Workers Regularly (2,208)
I had zero followers on Pinterest and now I have 280 and it is growing. I want to increase the monthly viewers to 200,000.
Two things helped me to get most of my traffic from Pinterest
- Group Boards
I joined about 15 group boards and started pinning on them. I would say this is the most effective way if you want to see your traffic coming from Pinterest even with fewer followers
Boardbooster
Automation is something you should do if you want to up your Pinterest game. I was manually pinning my pins to the group boards, and it was taking all of my time
Boardbooster automates all of your pinning processes. You can schedule your pins to the boards, decide the best time to pin, see your best-performing pins, run campaigns and so much more.
The monthly plans start at $5 and your first 100 pins are free.
If you are having trouble getting a hang of Boardbooster, Rosemarie Groner of The Busy Budgeter has awesome videos on every feature of this tool.
Update: The MOST USEFUL resource that helped me to get traffic from Pinterest is Pinteresting Strategies. This is by far the most useful ebook for beginner bloggers to get started with Pinterest. I jumped to over 2.5 million views on Pinterest after implementing tips in this ebook. It’s gold!
Most of the traffic came from my participation in the groups.
One resource which I found very useful for understanding the Facebook game was Brittany Ann’s ‘Strategies Worth Sharing‘. This ebook comes with super actionable tips on making your Facebook page look awesome and getting likes.
This was a BIG surprise for me; I was not sure if I would get any traffic from this social media channel at all. But as it turns out, StumbleUpon is my second biggest source of traffic.
Once I knew it was bringing good traffic, I started making some changes to my profile.
The things that helped to get some traction were
- I stumbled in the ratio of 1:9 of my posts to others posts. Quicksprout has a very good post with tips on how to get started on StumbleUpon
- I made it a point to be consistent in adding pages or stumbling. I read that it makes an impression on StumbleUpon to participate on a daily basis
I know, that’s not a big number, but it is growing slowly. I am aiming to double that number for the month of September.
I am a bit slow on Instagram. It is a visual media, and I find that along with your content, photos do well on Instagram. Lucky me, I am photography buff, so I keep posting the photographs that I take along with my posts. Hope to see the number grow next month.
Related:
Month Two Traffic Update: How I Got Over 25,000 Page Views With A New Blog
Month 3 Blog Update: 50,000 Page Views and My First Income Report
How I Made $2,347.17 in 4th Month of Blogging
How I Made $3,226.89 in 5th Month of Blogging
Email – 45 Subscribers
I am totally new to email marketing and did not have a plan for the list building when I launched.
I did have a pop-up with my newsletter and job leads opt-in. What I had learned is, content upgrades and opt-in’s are the starting points of building a list.
If you are new and struggling with building your email list, then you will find Meera Kothand’s blog extremely helpful. She has many posts which are exclusively meant for newbies.
Things I did
I believe in doing at least one thing every week towards the growth of my blog. Maybe, I should do more, but for now, I want to learn a lot and do things slowly.
I created a simple content upgrade for one of my posts and promoted it.
I reached out to a transcription company to interview one of their freelancers.
Monetizing my blog is one of my goals and in that process, I signed up for Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course. I have followed Michelle Schroeder-Gardner’s blog ‘Making Sense of Cents‘ for a very long time now. She makes $50,000 a month only from affiliates. Awesome, right!!
I know the power of affiliate income as I have some Amazon stores from which I earn a good side income, which is entirely passive. So, investing in this course to learn more about affiliate income strategy was something which I would definitely go for.
I will be publishing a review of the course soon in detail.
If making money from your blog is your goal, I suggest you should invest in this course.
What I learned
You have to promote on different platforms. I thought promoting on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram was enough. But, StumbleUpon surprised me.
It is a good strategy to promote on different platforms and see which one gets you the most traffic and then work more on that channel.
Researching and writing posts take up most of my time. I do love promoting but what I have learned is automating the promoting part can save a lot of time and can give the best results.
What’s next
Traffic
I know my traffic spiked because of my pre-launch promotion, but I will continue to follow the strategies I am using now and see how I can grow further next month.
I am aiming for 25,000 page views in September. I know that’s a big target, but I think it is achievable if I try harder.
Subscribers
I am focusing on growing my list. I am trying to work on getting the list up to 100 subscribers. Fingers crossed!
With many more posts about making money from home, interviews and a super useful freebie, I am excited about my next month.
Stay tuned!
Update:Â All the below resources have helped me immensely to reach this point. I highly recommend them, and they can be quite helpful to all of you no matter at what stage of blogging you are. I am happy to answer any questions you may have about these resources.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing – This is by far the best course I had ever taken, and it has helped me in many aspects of affiliate marketing. This course is a must for anyone who is serious about making money from a blog.
Pinteresting Strategies – Carly’s Pinterest strategies helped me grow my traffic exponentially and in turn my income. I have tested them, and they work.
Facebook GPS – Tracie is a pro when it comes to Facebook strategies, and her course is a complete guide to growing your Facebook growth. My reach is increasing every day as I keep implementing tips from this course.
Traffic Transformation – I love Lena’s eBook for the fact that she dives into the areas of getting traffic from less frequently used platforms like StumbleUpon and Google+.
Strategies Worth Sharing – An eBook which I bought even before starting my blog, and it helped me to reach 700+ likes on Facebook. With Facebook being the second biggest referral for traffic for many bloggers, you need to invest in this resource to grow your traffic.
How was your first month? Please share in the comments, I would love to know about your update.
