When I found the first income report around this time last year I became obsessed with them. An income report contains so much valuable information about how to grow your blog, write better content and overall get a better sense of your online business. I knew that when my blog launched I wanted to write them right from the start.
I understand that a lot of bloggers wait until they make money before they start sharing their first income report because they want to showcase their success. But I personally often get overwhelmed trying to figure out how they went from writing their first post to their first thousand bucks. So I decided no matter how well my blog launch would go I start sharing my very first traffic & income report one month later.
For me, this little blog is my creative outlet as much as it is the manifestation of my ultimate dream. Long term I want this blog to help women find their creative outlet and make a living pursuing it. And I know that some of my readers want to start blogging as well or already did and are trying to figure out the ropes. So it’s only natural for me to share all my learnings on my own blogging journey.
This post contains affiliate links. This simply means that if you purchase something through the links provided I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. You can be assured that I will never recommend something that I don’t enjoy using and wouldn’t recommend to my best friend as well! For more information, see my disclosures here.
June Traffic
I still can’t believe I hit 20k page views in my first month blogging. Awww! I’m so happy right now! The first big spike you can see was one day before my official blog launch. This day I shared my free printable bundle through social media and it went baby viral, haha. (You can take a look at it here.) My email list grew from 475 to around 1300 this very day and therefore allowed for over 2.5k page views on the day of my blog launch. Amazeballs!
After that, my page views decreased on a day to day basis until June 16th when I published my ‘My Bullet Journal Setup For June’ blog post. That day they went up to nearly 1k again and I decided to make sure I get at least 500 page views a day. I didn’t want to have a big spike every day I published a post and then see it fall down again. So I sat down and worked out a detailed social media strategy which is automated as much as possible so that my page views stay up even if I concentrate all my energy on my next article. I will share more details about it in a sec!
- Pageviews: 20,235
- Users: 9,412
- Sessions: 12,476
- Average Session Duration: 0:55
- Bounce Rate: 61.82% • • • the lower the bounce rate the better
- Highest Traffic Day: 4,473 (June 6th):
But first, let’s take a look at where the traffic came from
- Social: As you can see Social Media accounted for 70% of my traffic this month. Which makes total sense, since my blog is too new to account for much direct/referral traffic and search engines can’t find much content on my website yet.
- Direct: 16% of my traffic is thanks to you guys saving my website in your bookmarks and coming back to it again and again. Which is something I’m incredibly thankful for. You guys are just amazing!
- Referral: I get referral traffic whenever another blog or website links to my website. But out of some strange reason, it also accounts for you guys clicking on links in my email campaign. That said 11,84% of the 12,53% referral traffic are actually traffic I got thanks to my newsletter campaign.
- Organic Search: This is something I really wanna work on but which as far as I know takes quite some time to build up. The <1% account for you finding me through search engines like Google. I try my very best to make my content SEO friendly but I assume you also need way more content to become really relevant for search engines. Any tips regarding this matter would be highly appreciated.
Which social media platform drives the most traffic?
In the beginning of June Facebook accounted for most of my traffic. But thanks to the social media strategy I set up Pinterest quickly surpassed it. I knew when starting my blog that it would be well fitted for Instagram and Pinterest. Since it is very visual and offers a lot of topics people on those platforms are looking for. So prior to my blog launch, I build up my Instagram account. And with the launch of my first content blog post I started building up my Pinterest account.
My Pinterest Strategy
As you can see in the graphic below my Pinterest Traffic started slowly to pick up on June 16th, which is the publishing date of my very first content blog post. I only pinned it by hand this day to my personal ‘Bullet Journal Adventure’ Board as well as the ‘Bullet Journal Junkies’ Group Board. I knew that pinning by hand every day wasn’t an option for me since I’m easily lost on Pinterest reading one interesting article after another. Who else can’t resist the Pinterest Maelstrom? =D
So the next day I signed up both for the Boardbooster as well as the Tailwind free trial version. Both platforms pin up to 100 images for free for you. Afterwards, Boardbooster starts at $5 for 500pins/month and Tailwind starts at $15 for 400pins/month (or $9.99 for unlimited pins/month if you pay a year in advance).
Why both you ask? First, of course, to compare the two. But mainly because I read that Boardbooster is great at pinning your own content while Tailwind is amazing at pinning other people’s content. Since it has an algorithm which identifies the best times to pin according to your topics.
If you look closely at the graph above you can see that my Pinterest traffic drops down again on June 27th. This is due to my free Tailwind trial ending. Seeing that it was clear to me that I would need to invest in at least one of those tools, so that I can concentrate on my next article instead of worrying if people are able to find my current blog posts.
Why did I choose Tailwind?
After crunching some numbers, I choose the annual plan of Tailwind because . . .
- Posting a lot of other people’s content takes up way more time than pinning my own images here and there. Additionally, I can schedule my own pins with it as well, it just takes more time to set up then in Boardbooster.
- The ‘best times to post’ feature worked just great for me and I didn’t want to miss it again.
- $9.99 for unlimited posts/month is a better deal than $10 for 1000 pins/month. Because currently, I pin 20 times a day other people’s content + 3-5 times my own content, which adds up to 690 – 750 pins a month. And so I have way more possibilities for growth.
- Tailwind has a great tutorial plus detailed videos which explain you exactly how everything works.
- You have access to detailed analytics regarding your pins. So even if you can’t see on Pinterest anymore how often an image got pinned from one of your boards, you can see it inside the Tailwind Analytics.
- The customer service is top! I wrote an e-mail to them about what I like about their platform and what I wish they had (one of the Boardbooster features). They responded multiple times that day. Explaining in detail to me why they haven’t implemented certain features (yet). They asked detailed questions why I would like to see the feature added and overall they were very encouraging and helpful. They even took a peek at my website and gave me feedback. I was blown away!
- And most importantly, Tailwind is an official Pinterest Marketing Development Partner which means you are always acting inside Pinterest’s Acceptable Use Policy. This area is a bit grey in regard to other pinning services you can use.
This doesn’t mean I won’t get myself the paid version of Boardbooster as well. But currently, I can only afford one of those two and Tailwind had more to offer for me right now.
How exactly do you use both tools?
Once a week I pin all the images needed to fill my Tailwind schedule for the next week. So I end up with around 140 pins. Some of them show up multiple times in my schedule since I schedule them to different boards on different days. Their shuffle tool is great to spread them out easily. Besides that, I always save the most pin-worthy image of a blog post I just read and really enjoyed in the Tailwind drafts. That way I already accumulate a number of pins for the coming week, of which I know I enjoy the content a lot and would love to share it with my Pinterest followers.
Boardbooster is a bit more complicated. Currently, I only use their campaign feature. It allows me to pin all the images of my newest blog post to a secret board. And Boardbooster will then add one of those pins each day to my campaign schedule (this avoids spamming a board). You need to set up the schedule manually only once. Telling it exactly at which times of a day, on which days and to which boards it should post your pins. I plan to create one campaign for each of my blog post categories so that they get pinned to the appropriate boards.
Explaining Boardbooster campaigns in detail deserves a full blog post of its own and would be an overkill for my traffic report. So if you are interested in it let me know in the comments below and I will create one in the future.
Wundertastisch Club Members
The Wundertastisch Club grew by 1243 Members in the month of June, which results in a 263% increase in my email list. I still can’t believe this happened! Thank you so much!!! This is mainly thanks to the Free Printable Package I talked about earlier, but still over 400 of you joined after the blog launched and those printables weren’t available anymore.
June Popular Posts
Blog Investments Pre-Launch
Bluehost $207.92 = $84.97 (June 2015-June 2016) + $122.95 (June 2016-June 2017) – Website Hosting + Domain
Genesis Framework $59.95
Restored316Designs • Darling Theme $50.00
Building a Framework E-Book $28.56 – has evolved since then into a full fletched course. So amazing!
Your Best Year 2016 $12.50 – Your Best Year 2017 is already released & even greater than the last one! Don’t miss out on this amazing workbook if you care about your business goals & want to crush them this year! Grab it here!
MockUp Graphic $11.90
Total: $370.83
June Income Report
Income
None, since I haven’t monetized my blog yet. June was all about growth, finding my voice and learning all about blogging there is. Not that this will ever stop, haha!
Expenses
MailChimp $20.00
Adobe Creative Cloud $65.60
The Luminaries Club $34.00 – currently closed to new participants
Tailwind is not part of this months expenses yet since I bought it in the beginning of July
Total: $119.60
NET INCOME FOR JUNE: -$119.60
I can’t wait to see a happy plus in front of this number!
I’m very happy with my traffic numbers for June and I’m totally ok with my negative income this month. For me, every dollar I spend is an investment in my future. And I personally think that everything that is really important to you needs some kind of investment to prosper. It doesn’t matter if that’s spending a lot of time on refining a skill or spending money to buy the right tools or automate a process. If what you are doing is nothing worth to you it can’t be worth anything to someone else.
For me, this blog is the first step towards the bright future I imagine for myself and I’m ready to invest whatever it takes to make it work. I want to keep waking up in the morning being totally excited about what I do. And feeling excited to work further on it and grow. This blog does this for me and so I will give it my all.
If what you are doing is nothing worth to you it can't be worth anything to someone else! Click To TweetThat said let’s have a look at my goals for next month, shall we?
Goals for July
Since I’m on the road from July 2nd till 23rd I, unfortunately, don’t have much time for my blog this month. But this won’t keep me from making a few goals and try to keep learning in the evenings.
- 2 New Blog Posts So one more post next to the income report you are currently reading
- 500 Pageviews a Day Like I said in the beginning of this post, I don’t want my blog posts to be like mayflies. Shining bright on launch day and then getting lost in the abyss. So I will try my very best to drive traffic to them continuously no matter how old they get.
- Increase Pinterest followers from 398 to 1000
- Increase Instagram followers from 4117 to 5000
- Increase Twitter followers from 159 to 200 I haven’t done much on Twitter yet, so it will take a while to build up some momentum
- Increase my Email List from 1715 to 2000
- Re-read Building a Framework E-Book (relaunched March, 7th 2017 as full fletched course • I highly recommend working through her Free Guide: 5 Types of Content that will Boost Your Blog Traffic if you are unsure about buying) This is an e-book written by Abby Lawson (owner of both the ‘Just a Girl and her Blog‘ as well as the ‘Building a Framework‘ blog) which taught me a lot about blogging and got me started on my own journey. I did a lot of additional research as well, but this is a great starting point and something I come back to again and again to improve my content and social media strategy.
Wow, this was my most wordy blog post so far and I hope some of you stayed with it until the very end. If you did please write ‘wordytastisch’ in the comments below, so I know you like a lengthy post once in a while.
This post contains affiliate links. This simply means that if you purchase something through the links provided I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. You can be assured that I will never recommend something that I don’t enjoy using and wouldn’t recommend to my best friend as well! For more information, see my disclosures here.
I read the whole article, it was very interesting. I’m trying to get more views from Pinterest. I tried Tailwind, but I only got 2 views in my blog with it. I’ll try the other one too. Thanks for the article 🙂
Jenniffer, thank you so much for your kind words! They mean the world to me 🙂 <3
May I ask how you used Tailwind exactly? Like I said I use it mainly for other people's pins and focus on Boardbooster for my own. BUT utilizing Tailwinds interval tool and lists I'm sure it's possible to grow your blog reach with it as well 🙂 If you like we can talk a bit strategy.
Many thanks again and have a most wonderful weekend!
Sandra
Hi Sandra, I started joining different group boards and this has brought more views to my blog from Pinterest. I use Tailwind for my post only, what other strategy do you think I should implement?
Thank you for the reply 🙂
Great post! I’m just getting around to utilizing Pinterest. It wasn’t a social platform that I used before starting my blog, so I’ve had a bit of a learning curve, but I know it’ll be helpful to drive traffic to my site! Thanks for the tips! Also, this made me really want to track my expenses, since I’ve done a terrible job at that so far. Thanks for the inspiration!
Thank you so much, Natalie! I just discovered Pinterest for myself a few months back. Before I did have an account but never really used it since I just didn’t understand how the platform worked and what it had to offer for me as a consumer as well as a content creator.
I think as long as we are open to trying out new things and always try to keep learning and improving it doesn’t matter how fast something happens. Being a person who strives for her personal best is the most important thing you need to become who you wanna be. At least in my humble opinion 😀
If you have any detailed questions regarding Pinterest feel free to ask here or shoot me an email to sandra@wundertastisch.com. I always love talking blog growth and I’m sure I can learn a lot from you too!
Tracking my expenses really motivates me to see my blog as a business and treat it that way too! So I hope tracking them will be beneficial to you also.
I just checked out your blog and I’m in awe. Your product photography is amazing!!! I directly wanted to eat most of the yummy treats you presented. So good!
Many thanks again and have a most wonderful weekend!
wordytastisch ?
Interesting article and well done you!
Emelie, thank you so much!!! Are you planning on launching your own blog soon?
I checked out your link and can’t wait to see it get filled with wonderful content even if I don’t speak Swedish.
Many thanks and have a most wonderful weekend my dear! <3
Great post Sandra! I love income reports as well, they are so interesting!
It’s kinda funny, but i’ve been using tailwind before and just recently made the move to boatdbooster. I loved tailwind, but boatdbooster works a lot better for me as i can create a more streamlined strategy for my own content.
Thank you for sharing!
Thank you, my dear Tale!!! My eyes always light up when I read one of your comments 🙂
Yes, I totally agree with you. Boardbooster is amazing to schedule your own content repeatedly. But since my Pinterest following is still very small for me growing my Pinterest is my main focus right now. And thanks to combining the interval and list feature of Tailwind I can get nearly the same result as with Boardbooster just that I have to reschedule it again every 2 weeks. But this is okay for me for now. As soon as I make some income with this little blog of mine I surely will it invest it back into my blog. Boardbooster is definitively on the list of tools I would like to get at some point.
I’m very happy to hear that Boardbooster is working great for you, I always love to see wonderful blogs growing and yours definitely deserves it! <3
Have a most wonderful weekend my friend, I hope to talk to you again soon!
I was never really into income reports because that is all it was, income reports and not how to get to where they got. Your article not only shows your income report but breaks it down piece by piece. For a non-techy person like me, this was wonderful and it was an easy read. Thanks so much for taking the time to write it.
Wow, thank you, Alexis!!! I’m super excited to hear that it was that helpful to you. I always try to get as much information out of an income report as I can so that I can learn something new and implement it into my own blog. So I’m very glad I could give you an insight and that it was easy to read :3
Many thanks again and have a most wonderful weekend!
I loved your wordytastisch post, Sandra! As a new blogger myself, I’m still doubting if I should or not post my traffic and income report yet, so we’ll just have to wait a little longer and see if I can get myself to post it. I just started using a Pinterest strategy similar to yours, except I’m using BoardBooster. I didn’t want to make yet another investment on my blog, but as you said: everything that’s really important to you needs a little investment. So I’m going to invest on BoardBooster (which has saved me hours of work I can invest in other things like printables and posts) and hopefully more awesome readers will stumble upon my blog!
Thank you for writing such a helpful post! It’s always great to see a fellow member of the Luminaries succeeding in her goals! 😀
Pia, thank you so much! I absolutely would love to see your traffic and income report. Especially since you are just starting out too! That way people get a realistic view on how hard it is to build up an online business and what steps you took to improve it month by month to reach your goals. Should you write it please let me know right away, I would love to read it! 🙂
Great to hear you already found the Pinterest tool of your choice! I always love to hear what others are using and why. So that I always can review my own tools and see if I can improve on it!
I just checked out your website and I love what you did with it and how fast you got so many blog posts up. Did you write them pre-launch or are you a content creation machine? haha
I will comment in detail over there. Many thanks again and have a most wonderful weekend! <3
Thank you! 😀 My blog is still a work in progress, but I’ll be hitting the 2 month mark soon. Maybe I’ll finaly post the traffic and income report then. I’ll be sure to let you know!
Thank you for your lovely comment on my blog! I’ll be sure to check out the blog you recommended since I’m always looking for new bloggers to connect with and new tools to improve my creative business 🙂
Wishing you a wonderful week!
Awesome! We really did start our blogging adventure nearly at the same time. I hit my two-month mark 3 days ago 😀
I still hope to read a traffic and income report from you very soon! I just checked out your newest posts and I just enjoy reading them so much that I’m sure I could learn something from your report 🙂
I hope we will keep supporting and learning from each other moving forward and have a most amazing 2016!
I am blown away of your transparency! The only blog article that I read and re-read this year. I love how you provide content + resources links. Very inspiring! Keep on shining, girl!
Thank you so much for your kind words!!! I’m very glad my income report was so useful to you that you even re-read it 🙂 I wish you a most wonderful weekend!
Sandra, I read it all – wordytastisch :). Love the detail on your income report too, really interesting.
Hope you’re well and enjoying your holiday.
ps – did you see my Instagram pic I tagged you in?
Thank you so much, Sarah! This is so very kind of you to say 🙂
Which Instagram post, I’m not sure right now. Can you send me a link to it? This would be amazing!
I had a great holiday btw and are super excited to see what August has in store for us!
I wish you a most wonderful week!
Wordytastisch! I have to copy and paste that word! Lol! I loved your post! Very encouraging to new bloggers such as myself and informative! I didn’t realized that you can set up your blog to keep getting views everyday. I mean I think I know that but I just didn’t think that it can happen until you have written lots of valuable contents in your blog. Thank you for sharing!
Hi Ria! Haha, yeah wordytastisch 😀 I totally know how you feel. I thought the same thing too and therefore never knew how you should be able to grow your blog. Thank you internet for all your information and resources! I’m super happy that my blog post could help you out and I would love to see your blog. Can you link to it, please? Many thank for your kind words and have a most wonderful week!
Congrats on a great start!
Btw, you like increasing Twitter followers as one of your goals but you don’t have your Twitter handle listed or linked with your other social media accounts. ?
Thank you so much, Liz! Especially regarding your pointer to my Twitter Handle. When I started the blog Twitter wasn’t on my radar and so it totally fell through the cracks because of course, while writing this blog post, I assumed I had linked it. Haha. So nice of you!!! I have linked it now in the sidebar as well as my contact page. If you are too close to something you can’t really see it, right? 😀 I wish you a most wonderful week!
Wow!! You killed it! Read till the end â wordytastisch! I’m 2+ years in and looks like I could learn a few things from you. Way to go!!
Just a sidenote, I work for Simple Pin Media, a Pinterest management company, and we launched a mini-course on How to Master Tailwind last week. Lots of tips and tricks on how to save time to pin in Tailwind quickly and efficiently. I’m not an affiliate or anything, just thought you might find it helpful. 🙂 http://simplepincourses.com/courses/tailwind
Hi Amanda, thank you so much for your big compliment! I’m blushing over both ears right now! Your website looks super professional, I’m sure there is more I can learn from you than the other way around 😀 I totally will check out your Tailwind course, there is always something new to learn. Thank you! I wish you a most wonderful week and I will check out your blog in detail now 🙂
wordytastisch
I too am researching the blog world. Nowhere near ready to even start. Thanks for the helpful info!
Hi, Jaime! Research is super fun, I did it so much I nearly forgot to start what I wanted to do: blogging 😀 But it is super important so take your time with it. It can save you weeks later on 🙂 I’m very glad I could help you out! Many thanks for your kind words and have a most wonderful week!
Congratulations on your amazing growth! It’s lovely to see the process right from the beginning. Thanks for sharing it x
Hi, Catherine! Thank you so much for your kind words! They totally made my day 🙂
I just checked out your blog and I’m in love with your social media icons. They look super cool! Also congrats on hosting your first art retreat! This is a super exciting and big accomplishment 🙂 I wish you more successes like that and hope you have a most wonderful week!
Thanks for sharing all that info, very interesting! I love Pinterest too, and I wonder if the platforms we find the most useful are the ones we enjoy using for our personal interests as well?
Thank you so much for your kind words, Elissa! In regard to your question: I never used Pinterest before I got into blogging. I just didn’t get the platform. I always loved Instagram though. That said I assume it’s a bit of both. There are platforms we love so much that we make them work for us. And there are some that just work out naturally for our niche when we try them out!
I just checked out your blog and it all looks super yummy. I sure will try a few of your recipes 🙂 Also I would love to ask which social media plugin you are using? It looks great. Does it cost something? Many thanks and have a most wonderful week!
Thanks Sandra! My social share buttons are the Share Buttons & Tools by GetSocial.io It’s a Wordpress plugin, I use the free option, there are paid versions too. You can choose from a range of floating or horizontal buttons.
I just found your blog/website today. You are a breath of fresh air. Your posts about the Bullet Journal caught my attention. I have so many lists, projects and plans in so many places. The Bullet Journal sounds like it is exactly what I need! Loved your creative approach. However, I am totally “left brain”, with little artistic flair, but I still think I can make the journal work for me. Thanks so much. I look forward to reading more from WUNDERTASTISCH!
Hi, Vicky! Wow, I’m totally blown away by your super nice comment! Thank you so much 🙂 <3
I'm very glad that bullet journaling might be exactly what you need right now and that I could lead you to it! Also, you don't need to be artsy to make the bullet journal work for you. Not one bit! BUT if you like to look at something pretty every morning I just shared a bunch of free printables on my blog so that you can create your own bullet journal based on it. I send out a new version for the setup every month 🙂 Thank you so much again and have a most wonderful week!
Wow this was super helpful. I’m at about 1/20th of what you’re at and this inspired me to shoot for the moon! Thanks so much for sharing 🙂
Hi there, Sarah! Thank you so much for your kind words. I’m super happy that I could inspire you!!! Also, I just checked out your blog and I love it. Super gorgeous, super interest blog posts and well written. Can’t wait to dive into it fully – after working hours 😀
I wish you a most wonderful week & wish you lots of success with your blog! Hope to talk to you again very soon 🙂
Great article 🙂 Really intersting to read! I can not wait to see your business grow the next month 🙂
Aww, thank you so much, Nadin!!! 🙂 You are the first of my personal friends commenting and it excites me so much! You rock girl <3 Also I love your new drawings and can't wait to see them for real! Many thanks, can't wait to see you later today 😀
This is amazing, I had no idea of the amount of work having a Blog is !! it is certainly not easy ! =O
I have 1 suggestion to your blog and 1 post idea haha
* the suggestion is to move the comment box to the top of all the comments so that the person who just finished reading can immediately comment haha =P
* the post idea, maybe you can make something like a bullet journal sharing post, how your viewers handle their own BuJo or schedules or planners… hahaha
You’re doing a great job so far, I love your blog !! I’ll be waiting for the next july post <3
Read you later =)
Hi, Ale! Thank you so much for your kind words 🙂 You are so right, blogging is a full-time job! And I’m still struggling to find a healthy routine with it!
Thank you so much for your suggestions, I love reading those!
Moving the comment box up might be good, especially when reading on a smartphone. But then again people might miss out on helpful information. Because a lot of comments to a topic have super smart suggestions, tips and questions in them. If you move the comment box up, a lot of people won’t scroll past it and therefore never see them. I have to think about this and do some research 🙂
Your blog post idea is awesome!!! Love that a lot! I’m currently thinking about starting a link party exactly for that. What do you think? I plan on adding it to the bottom of each monthly setup blog post so that we have all setup for a month in one spot 😀
The July Income Report is in the works and should go online next week if everything works out as planned. What life seldom does, but we still try 🙂 <3 I wish you a most wonderful week!
Hi Sandra – that was wordytastisch awesome!
Thank you for help, I found your story to be very inspiring and extremely resourceful and would highly recommend for new bloggers like myself!
I will be signing up for both products and look forward to seeing your numbers grow in your next income report!
Congratulations and wishing you much continued success
Aww, thank you, Cydney! Your comment totally makes my day 🙂
I can’t wait to hear how the tools worked out for you by the end of the month. Also, your website looks great and I’m super excited to see what you do with it moving forward! Very well designed <3
I wish you a most wonderful week and thank you so much!
Thank you for sharing your progress so openly. This is amazing!
I also tried both board booster and tailwind and made the same decision you did, choosing tailwind. I’ve had great success with it (Pinterest is now >50% of my site traffic) and am really happy. A friend of mine choose board booster instead at the same time and had a nice initial bump in followers, but has seen a big decline in traffic. She’s now coming over to team tailwind with me (which is great because I’ll get a free month for referring her too hehe).
I think we made the right choice!
You are most welcome, Jen! I think being transparent and sharing our learnings with one another is the way to grow your own business. We all have great ideas of our own, but combined we can reach a whole new level 🙂
I’m very thankful for sharing your personal tailwind story with me. Tailwind is really great in driving consistent traffic to our blogs, so it’s great to hear how boardbooster is doing in that regard. Congrats on your free tailwind month! 😀 I’m very happy for you two and hope you keep helping each other moving forward. I also think we made the right choice and I can’t wait to see where our blogging adventure will lead us 🙂 Thank you so much for your kind words and have a most wonderful week!
Love your transparency! I plan to launch my blog within the next moth, and you have truly encouraged me. Keep it up!
Hi, Ayanna! I’m super happy to hear that you will be launching your blog within the next month. This is such an exciting time for you and I wish you the best of luck! If you have any questions regarding the super early stages of blogging please let me know. I love to talk blogging and online business 🙂 I hope I can read your first traffic report one month later <3 We all have so much learning we can share to encourage and help each other out! Many thanks for your kind words! I wish you a most successful launch!
Hi Sandra,
I’m the Director or Growth and Marketing at Tailwind but I also happen to know a lot about SEO. When I saw that you get 1% or less of your traffic from search engines I thought that was very strange for a blogger. My personal blog gets 70% of its traffic from search engines, for example and the Tailwind blog gets perhaps 60% of its traffic from organic search.
So I did a little digging this morning and it looks like all of the technical SEO basics on your site are sound. The site is being indexed by search engines, uses page titles, URLs and headings appropriately.
The biggest issue seems to be in using keywords that people are searching for in your post titles and then throughout your posts.
This is always tough to do for certain types of bloggers, like lifestyle bloggers, because people approach Google with questions they need answered, and you’re probably not in the business of answering questions.
It can be done though. Here’s an example from my personal blog:
I went to Punta Cana a few years ago and got food poisoning. I did some keyword research (here’s a great resource on how to do it – https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research) using the free Google Keyword Planner tool and discovered that there were hundreds of people searching for “Punta Cana food poisoning” and related keywords every month.
So I blogged about it and deliberately used the keywords that I knew people were searching in the blog post title, in headings throughout, in image file names and image alt text.
It’s still one of the most visited pieces of content on my blog nearly every month. The post still ranks 2nd for “Punta Cana Diarrhea” (here it is if you’re curious – http://davidmichaelchristopher.com/life/punta-cana-food-poisoning-and-iarrhea/). I’m still waiting for the Punta Cana tourist board to reach out and offer me a vacation to make it go away 😉 .
So… If you want organic search traffic, think about whether someone might try to search Google for what you’re writing about, and then use the keywords they would use to search for it in the headline and throughout the post.
Of course if thousands of other people have already written about it, and if Google values the opinion of their sites over yours (because they have more links from other websites), then you won’t rank well. But if you can secure links to your page from other sources that will push you rank up.
The Punta Cana post was one of my first on that blog, so the website wasn’t very ‘authoritative’ (didn’t have many links), but I asked some travel blogger friends of mine to mention it and link to it, and they did, plus nobody else had written in as much depth about it, so my post was in some ways they best piece of content out there about it. If you can do that, it will really help.
Pinterest really helps there too because Pins generate links back to your content. Some of the images on the Punta Cana post have been repinned a lot, to a lot of boards about the Dominican Republic.
Remember you’re aiming for the first page of Google, since 95% of traffic goes to the results on page 1 of Google. And traffic doubles for every rank you climb up that first page.
Hope this helps!
And good luck.
Hi David,
thank you so much for your insightful reply! I’m totally blown away that you took the time to check my SEO and give me so much advice how I can improve on it! I already am a big fan of Tailwind like this blog post shows, but I never thought you guys would help out even beyond the scope of Pinterest. Thank you!!!
Spending more time on keyword research beforehand sounds like a great idea and I certainly need to start to write more niche specific blog posts. Since the ones I published so far have a lot of competition, so it’s very hard to rank on page 1 in google. One of my blog posts already has over 10k shares on Pinterest, but only got 29 clicks / 441 impressions from google. So I assume Pinterest alone won’t cut it and I need a lot of different backlinks. What are your thoughts on this?
I also would love to ask you: Is every blog post fighting for its own? Isn’t it also relevant to have a well-visited website with a lot of high-quality content as well? Or is it possible to directly rank high in google with your first published blog post? Because I only have 5 blog posts published yet. So I thought it might take a while before they rank in google.
I most certainly will read the resources you linked and do way more research on the topic.
Many thanks and have a most wonderful weekend!
Hi Sandra,
I love talking about SEO, so no worries.
So, the trick is, if you have a new blog Google won’t respect it very much or rank it very highly because the domain wundertastisch.com wont have many links pointing to it. You can get around that by going after something which people are searching for, but which nobody else has really written about well (as in my example about Punta Cana), and by getting links from other websites and social networks pointing to that blog post (www.wundertastisch.com/blog-post). The more blog posts on your domain that have links pointing to them (and the more links that the domains that link to you have) the more ‘authority’ your domain will have, helping all future content to rank better.
It helps to accumulate authority in a niche, like Travel or teching, because Google looks to see what you know about.
When it comes to links it’s not just about how many, its about how many different domains they come from. Search engines also understand that some links are more important than others, social links are a dime a dozen, comment links are next to worthless, what you want if you want to impact where you rank and get authority is in-content links from domains with a high authority.
That means you need content so good that other people reference it on their own websites.
Another really easy way to uncover topics people are searching for is by using Google auto complete. Just start typing in the seach bar in Google.com and Google will tell you what people are searching for on that topic.
Hope this helps!
Congratulations on your success so far Sandra! It is now Mid-August and it looks like you definitely reached your Pinterest goal! I just followed you on Pinterest and you have 2.6K followers! That’s awesome! Looking forward to your July report. I have had my blog for a little over a month.. I’m in different group boards on Pinterest and I get the occasional repin here and there but I haven’t seen nearly the same success as you have. I hope to adopt some of your strategies and see similar success in the future 🙂 Thanks for all the extremely helpful info!
This is awesome to see. Apparently I need to ramp up what I’m doing. Pinterest isn’t driving me a whole lot. Nor is anything else. I use tailwind and BoardBooster, but am not seeing much from it. Wonder what I might be doing wrong….
I need to read Building a Framework. I bought it and haven’t cracked it open yet.
“wordytastisch”
Very informative. I’m working on beginning my blogging journey and the information you are providing has been hugely helpful! Thank you so much for sharing from the start!
Hi Monee, you are most welcome! I’m super excited to hear that you are about to start your own blogging journey. What will it be about? 🙂 Thank you so much for your kind words and have a most wonderful week!
Hi Sandra! I’m trying to narrow down the subject matter but I’m really into creating art and home decor. I love organizing/planning too. I’m hoping that by starting a blog I’ll be able to meet other people with the same interests. I think the biggest challenge will be writing because that doesn’t come naturally to me, but I’m really excited about it. Thanks for response!
wordytastisch – I love this post! I’m planning my blog and plan to launch November 1st. Sandra, I’ve seen you in the Building A Framework Bloggers facebook group and your success in such a short time is an inspiration! Thank you!
Wordytastisch!!! This is the best monthly report I have read. I’ve been thinking about starting my blog for a long time and your post has really motivated me to finally start.
Hi Jessica! Thank you so much for taking the time and reading it all. I’m so grateful! Also if you are serious about starting a blog, today is your day. Abby Lawson just relaunched her amazing course today and I promise it’s all you need to create a successful blog! It is what I started with and what made sure I did (most) things right the first time around >> Just click here to have a look! It’s only $77 until March 16th and one of the best investments I ever made 🙂 <3 If you have any questions please feel free to ask here or per email: sandra [!at] wundertastisch.com
Love this! I am always so inspired by other bloggers! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you so much, Cassie! (I love your name, by the way, sounds so beautiful! <3) Your blog is very beautiful too as well as the printables in your Etsy Shop. I hope the sales will roll in very soon 🙂 Hope to chat with more with you! All the best, Sandra
Congratulations on your success. I have been blogging a year and 2 months now. I to hope to get 20,000 pageveiws a month.
Hi Brittany, please excuse the late reply. I have been working on my very first planner over the past couple months and so I had to take a step back from my blog. But now I’m back with new found energy and big plans 🙂
Thank you so much for your comment and kind words! I’m sure you will get there. Just make sure you promote your content as much as you spend time creating it. There is no point in having 1000 blog posts if not enough people are reading them. Pinterest is a great tool to do exactly that 🙂
I wish you a most successful 2017! All the best, Sandra
This was really great Information! I haven’t launched yet, I am writing posts so I have several when I launch and just soaking up Information as I go! Thanks so much for this!
wordytastisch- I just signed up for the Tailwind free trial. I´m already using board booster but maybe I should start using both. Thanks for such an informative post! 🙂
Thanks so much for posting this article! It has been so helpful and informative, I’ve just started blogging so I’m still a rookie and still learning 🙂
How can I start a blog
Thanks so much for this post! I’m new to blogging and am so overwhelmed with the ideas of getting people to actually see my website…not to mention being nervous about the content. But this gives me hope! 🙂
wordytastisch
This post was amazing! Iâm at the very beginning of my journey and I am loving the information and direction you have begun with.
Thank you for sharing all of your insight.
Thank you so much, Samantha! I’m very glad you enjoyed it <3 I wish you most of success on your journey!
Love this! At the beginning it can be so daunting. I love reading people’s income reports but sometimes feel overwelmed. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you so much, Tarnna! Totally, the beginning is just so intimidating. And to be honest, overwhelm is something I’m still feeling two years in. I think to some degree we have to get used to it. Because there are so many resources out there and everyone seems to be pulling you in a different direction. I highly recommend looking for 1-3 role models. And then using the information they share, as well as simply looking how they create content, newsletter, etc. to learn from them. If you try to listen to everyone you will get nowhere. I wish you the best of success with your blog! :-*