Grand Little Place

After a painful April slump May proved to be a bit more active, and considerably more enjoyable.  Let’s dig into the current state of affairs:

• Blog Posts:  5 (vs 1 in April)
  • I feel good about the content I added to the blog last month.  My goal was to post 1 time a week, which I didn’t do because the end of the month got busy with end of school and early summer activities. Better planning and prep on my part could have resolved this, but I’m still glad to see that new content that I felt good about was added.
• Pageviews:  303 (vs April 588 )
  • Overall pageviews are down.  Obviously that’s not good.  This isn’t a huge suprise considering that a lot of traffic comes from social media referrals.  Since April was a very slow month on the blog there wasn’t a lot of repeat pageviews this month.  I need to be more active overall to get this number up.
• Pinterest:  May 448/13.7 Monthly Page Views (vs April 448)
  • Pinterest is an area I need to significantly beef up.  I did invest in a Pinterest training course last month that I’ve just barely been able to dig into.  From the bit I’ve been able to do so far I can tell that it’s going to challenge me but I’m really excited to implement some of the changes.  Pinterest has been doing a lot of algorithm changes as well as interface updates which seems to have everyone in the blogging world on end.  I’m not concerned about my amount of followers as that number doesn’t seem to really do anything like it once did.  Pinterest recently started showing your monthly page views which is interesting, I’m such a small blog that again the number doesn’t bother me but I have read a lot of larger blogs dislike that.
• Instagram: 441  (vs April 386)
  • Still unsure how much I should focus on Instagram, but I continue to engage with my followers.  I had been averaging about 100 new followers per month but April put me behind.  In May I tried to close the gap the best I could but still came up short of a monthly 100.  I’m trying hard to show up and engage with followers there to continue to grow that number.  Overall I feel solid about the instagram following.
• Facebook: 76 (vs May 76)
  • I put very little into the facebook page and add little content there so I’m 100% fine with whatever number it ends up being.
• Email Subscribers: 14 (vs April 14)
  • Since I haven’t gotten my freebie set up yet I haven’t been pushing anyone towards the email list yet.  I haven’t gained any new subscribers, but I also didn’t expect to.

Money Talk:

Finances are still in the red but that’s still to be expected.  None of the numbers below are impressive but I still believe that they show that there is potential.

• Amazon Affiliate:  $0
  • I haven’t done much with Amazon yet.  I’ve added a few misc links but so far have preferred the ease of the widgets I can create on Shop Style Collective.  I need to utilize it more or they will revoke my account.  Yikes.
• Shop Style Collective: $0.40, up 10 cents, woo hoo!  😉
  • I love the ease of use of their site and the widgets make great additions to my post.  Will continue to utilize this heavily in the future.
• Google Ad Sense:  $4.69 (vs $3.90 in April)
  • S-L-O-W but steady.  When traffic goes up this will go up too.

June Blogging Goals:

• Dedicate time to setting up a blog schedule so I can have an active blog 1x a week
• Dig into the Pinterest

Thanks for following along everyone!