We have now completed our third month of our new pet blog case study.
Each month we keep a record of what happened as the month unfolded, and bring it to you in one of these reports.
This is a great way for us to learn from what worked and what didn’t. It’s easy to forget the details if you don’t record the actions you take when you are working on a blog.
We hope that our mistakes and successes will help others too.
Month 3 (November) Strategies
We have continued to build on our library of good quality articles on key topics.
We don’t expect to rank for these topics in google yet of course, as they are too competitive and we are too new.
But these will be part of our ‘pillar content’ that go towards making the site a valuable resource. And we want plenty of them to be there for people to read when they arrive on the site.
Adding a personal blog to the pet site
Our new strategy this month was to add a personal blog to the site, following the progress of one of our pets, from babyhood to maturity.
A personal blog helps to bring a site alive and give it some personality.
Talking about home life can make you feel a little vulnerable, drawing people as it does, into your life in quite an intimate way. So it isn’t for everyone.
On the other hand, the great thing about a personal blog is that there will be something to write about! And there is no research involved. You know what happened because you were there.
Every day with a pet is different, and there is always something going on, and you will never be short of material. So it’s certainly worth considering.
What went wrong with blogging this month
We are happy to report that there were no major mishaps this month. We had some interruptions in traffic across all our sites during the US presidential election, and as expected during the Thanksgiving weekend.
And we didn’t spend as much time focusing on our Pinterest account as we had planned
But other than that, things went largely according to plan
This third month can sometimes be a point where, as the novelty of the new site begins to wear off, the reality of relentless routine content production kicks in and blogging can become more like ‘work’ and less like fun.
However, as the site develops and grows, we find we are warming to our topic and enjoying it more, rather than less.
What went right with blogging this month
We managed to meet all our targets, both for visitors and pageviews, and also for content production.
We also saw steady growth in our social media accounts and email subscribers. So all in all a successful month.
What we learned from working on our pet blog this month
This month’s take away is probably simple to keep doing what’s working. And a reminder of how important it is to pick a topic that you love so that keeping going is not an onerous task
We’ve kept our heads down, kept writing and publishing, posting on social media, and writing some more.
And it’s working.
There are no quick fixes to blogging success – not that we have discovered at any rate.
Lucy and I believe you need to be prepared to play the long game if you want to succeed at blogging, so the most important thing is to pick a topic you really enjoy. That way, you’ll find it easier to settle in for the long haul.
Traffic report for the pet blog case study
Using a screenshot we’ve included some social media figures in here this month.
You’ll find two sets of figures for each category below.
The first figure is what we achieved. The second figure (in brackets) is the target we set ourselves at the end of last month.
- Users: 15,514 (10,000) for the month
- Pageviews: 19,123 (15,000)
- Articles: now published 39 (30) total on site
As you can see, we published a lot more articles than we had planned, and that’s largely down to the more personal blog posts.
Our core content publishing schedule was much the same – one or two key articles per week.
We also cleared our target users and pageviews by a long way which was very satisfying
Where our blog traffic came from
As you can see below, social media is our primary source of traffic. And this is what we would expect at this point.
We are also starting to get a trickle of visitors from our email list which is encouraging.
The total number of sessions is more than the number of users because some visitors come to the site more than once
Growth in social media & email subscribers
These figures are a new addition this month.
- Facebook 32,768 (up 414 from last month)
- Pinterest 531 (up 68 from last month)
- Email 125 subscribers (up 84 from last month)
Steady growth here, nothing dramatic, but that’s to be expected as this month we haven’t been pursuing growth goals for social media fans and email subscribers.
Income Report
As with last month, there are only expenses to report. That may change next month though, so watch this space!
For now, our expenses for November were
- Writer’s fees: $181.85 (£144.65)
- Facebook ads: $487.52 (£387.78)
Targets for next month
- 50 Articles (total on site)
- 4,000 Users (for the month)
- 5,000 Pageviews (for the month)
You’ll notice our traffic and pageview targets are lower than last month.
That’s because we are heavily dependent of Facebook for our traffic, and Facebook advertising for educational and informational posts is likely to be less effective in December when the majority of our audience is Christmas shopping.
We’ll be reducing our facebook advertising budget, and expect our traffic to fall accordingly.
In addition, although December has 31 days, we don’t expect to get 31 days worth of traffic to any of our sites. Historically our pet blogs see very little traffic over the Christmas period, and then take off again in January.
We’ll be happy to hit 4,000 users in December and pleasantly surprised if we beat this figure.
Summary
It’s been a successful third month, and we are pleased with what we have achieved.
Next time we’ll be looking at how we can get the site ranking in the search results for some interesting long tail keywords.
These have smaller search volumes, but we stand a better chance of ranking for them than we do for our key articles at this point.
We’ll also be experimenting with some Amazon native advertising on the site.
If you’d like to join us to see how we get on, just drop your email into the box below.
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