Hi there!
Welcome to my series, Mom to Mompreneur Blog Growth Update! Wow! that was a mouthful.
For those of you who are new, my name is Elna Cain and I’m a freelance writer and a mama to twin toddlers.
I started TwinsMommy back in March as a way to blog some more – because I just love blogging 
– and engaging with a new audience.
It wasn’t until about a few weeks later – in April – that I really wanted to grow this blog.
I wanted to start a new blog and grow traffic, readers and income and share my story because I know a lot of you are struggling growing your blog too!
I also want to help mamas go from being a mom to being a mompreneur.
Blogging just for the sake of blogging isn’t going to earn you income. Turning your blog into a biz and then creating products, well that’s where all the money is. And I’m chronicling that journey with you!
To catch up with how I’m growing my blog, check out my blog growth series:
- How I’m Going to Grow TwinsMommy + Free Checklist
- Month 1 Blog Growth Update: 4,000 Pageviews Later
- Month 2 Blog Growth Update: 1.6k Pinterest Followers Later
Before you get into the nitty gritty of this post, if you’re reading this and don’t have a blog, but want to start one, I have an easy step-by-step tutorial on how to start a blog using SiteGround!
1. On My Site
I can’t believe how fast my site is growing!
Okay. Maybe it’s not super fast as other sites, but for me – a fairly new blogger in a new niche – this is pretty neat.
Here is my traffic growth comparison from end of March to April and from end of May to June:
I tripled my traffic in only two months! I’m totally shocked BTW.
Like – how did that happen?
Let’s look at last month’s analytics:
This month just continued to grow! Here is a snapshot:
That’s a 60% increase in pageviews in only one month! Not bad eh?
My bounce rate keeps decreasing and I’m gaining a tribe of loyal followers since my return visitors count is growing.
What’s nice is that my growth is continual and consistent. There are no hiccups – yet – no highs or lows. I’m hoping it stays like this although I wouldn’t mind a viral pin
And my goals?
Did I Accomplish My Goals from Last Month?
I set some large goals for this site last month so let’s see if I accomplished what I had planned.
- Generate 25k pageviews – Big fail. I almost reached 19k. I see how that was a HUGE goal of mine and not sure if I ever would have been able to do that in one month with a new blog – unless something went viral overnight.
- Bump up my visitors from 200+ a day to 300+ a day – Success and exceed! I’m averaging over 450 visitors a day (more on this in a bit)
- Get ready to do some affiliate marketing – Big fail. I’ve been so working on growing my traffic and subscribers that I haven’t had a chance to look into affiliate marketing (and I might switch focus a bit too).
So, I didn’t meet all my goals, but I’m still growing and I’m totally happy about that. Here are my reasons – I think – for this growth.
My Visitors Increased Overnight
One thing that I was very happy about was how my visitors increased from around 200 a day to over 450 a day with one day having over 600 visitors.
This jump happened starting on June 1 – like overnight.
What the heck happened?
I think two things I did that may have helped increase my visitors was I decreased my page load time and submitted a site map.
I don’t know if you know, but if you have a long page load time (like 3 seconds or more) Google doesn’t like that. And well, you don’t want Google pooh-poohing your blog, do you?
And according to this Kissmetrics post, having a site map helps Google index your pages, helping you generate more traffic (since people can find you easier). Check this out if you want to submit a site map for your blog, or just use the Yoast SEO plugin to do it for you, like I did!
How did I decrease my page load time?
My husband actually helped me by caching my site (this is easily done with a WordPress plugin) and using a Content Distribution Network (CDN).
Yes, I know. It’s getting all geeky up in here.
Is all of this necessary? No. Does it make your site faster and do all the big sites do it? Yes and yes, so why not!
Caching works by saving a copy of your webpage so that when a visitor comes along, they are served that copy, rather than having WordPress generate the page from scratch each time. This decreases page load time a lot!
Makes sense? My husband is my web developer and mentioned this can help.
As for a CDN, this is basically cloud storage of your site’s static files (like images). Web servers placed all around the world get copies of your files so that when a visitor from Sweden visits your site for example, they receive files served from a European server rather than one from say, California (if that’s where your web host is located).
So the bottom line? Having faster page load times means that you’ll get more traffic.
Bloggers Are Linking to My Blog
*happy dance*
I’ve recently learned that other mama bloggers and lady bosses are linking back to my blog posts and I’m lovin’ it!
This is another reason why I’m getting traffic back to my site.
I thought I’d featured some of them.
Kate of Hustle and Highchair, wrote a post on managing chores and linked to this post as well as feature my site a bit:
Elise from House of Brazen included my blog in her post on her favorite blogging and business resources.
I’m included on the list with some awesome bloggers and there are some new ones that I don’t know so I’ll soon be visiting them all.
Kate of Layered Indulgence included this post of mine and talked about me and my blog in her post about growing her blog (yay! I love reading other blog growth strategies)
Finally, Heather of Mutrual Weirdness featured my blog as one of the Top 10 Blogs to Follow.
Thank you everyone! I’m hoping to include more bloggers that feature my blog or post when I do my blog growth updates!
My goals for July are:
- Generate 25k pageviews – This might be possible in July, but not entirely sure if everyone will be summering it up rather then blogging. So we will see!
- Increase my daily visitors from 450 to 600+ a day – I’ll have to be more strategic with my blog growth plan by commenting on other blogs, using my traffic trick and pinning more.
- Keep continuing to provide useful and epic blog posts of at least 1k words twice a week – although this wasn’t a goal for last month, I did fail twice this month by only posting one time in a week instead of twice. I don’t think that hurt my traffic, but this blog is still new and it needs pages and content to help it grow.
2. Pinterest Marketing
Last month I had around 1.6k followers. This past month I have 2.5k followers!
That’s almost 1k new followers in only 30 days!
I’m lovin’ that my growth is on the up and up. It’s not 10k by a long shot, but to gain almost a thousand new followers in a month is unbelievable to me! So exciting that this happened!
I know having lots of followers doesn’t mean more traffic back to my blog. My average monthly viewers tells me how big of a reach my pins are generating.
Last month I had around 123,000 viewers. And this month?
I practically tripled my monthly viewers on Pinterest! This is the most exciting part because this tells me that my pins are reaching more and more people – not just my followers.
Pinterest is recommending my pins to others and I’m pinning to tons of group boards with hundreds of collaborators and thousands of followers.
Last month I mentioned that many bloggers see huge leaps and bounds by the third month and I wasn’t sure if I would see the same. Well, this seems like a big leap to me!
Did I Meet My Goals?
- Gain another 1k followers – I’m gonna say yes to this!
- Increase my pinning strategy to 200 pins a day – I’m still working on this. I’m averaging around 130-150 pins a day.
- Repin my most popular pins and more – Check! I’m scheduling my most popular pin and other high repin Pins of mine.
Pinterest this last month has sort of been on autopilot for me. I’m using Tailwind to schedule my pins and it doesn’t take long to set up. I go in every 10 days to 2 weeks and schedule my pins with Tailwind. This takes me about 10 minutes to do.
So, in total I spend around 20 minutes a month scheduling my pins. But, I also visit Pinterest daily to check it out (since I L-O-V-E Pinterest!) see my notifications and my group board.
Speaking of my group board, more and more pinners are requesting invites and it’s becoming a bit popular now!
I have over 70 collaborators and over 2k followers for my Mom to Mompreneur group board. Feel free to email me and ask for an invite! I welcome mama bloggers, mompreneurs and freelancers.
My goals for July:
- Generate 500,000 monthly viewers on Pinterest
- Have around 4k followers
- Move to pinning 200+ a day (80% mine/20% others)
3. Growing My Email List
!!! This is the MOST exciting part for me.
I absolutely love email marketing. It’s my freelance writing niche.
Okay, last month I had around 267 subscribers. These were all from people who wanted my content upgrades since I STILL don’t have a lead magnet.
But, this month?
I gained over 370 new subscribers!
That’s amaze-balls mamas!
So, how did I generate all these lovely new subbies?
I hosted my FIRST ever Twins Mommy Webinar!
I can’t believe I actually pulled it off – thanks to my moderators who helped with some minor tech difficulties.
On June 29th I hosted my first Twins Mommy webinar on using Pinterest to grow your traffic, subscribers and followers. I had over 200 people subscribe to the webinar.
Okay, let me tell you a little secret. I’m a big introvert. No, really
I never really knew that but looking at myself I see that I don’t mind being alone or with a small group of people (+1 really). I also don’t have gaggles of lady friends, only a few close ones.
And I currently work from home
But, I knew early on when I first started blogging that video and webinars are the way to go for generating income and more business. So in February of this year I did my FIRST EVER webinar for my freelance writing site.
And it didn’t go that well even though I generated almost $1k in sales. I waited too long for people to show up. I focused too much on the chat rather than my presentation, I went too fast, and I didn’t practice.
Since I knew my faults, I started to prepare for my Twins Mommy webinar. I read Allison’s post over on Wonderlass about doing webinars for introverts (and even signed to her webinar and opt-in freebie).
I also watched several webinars in early June to get an idea of what the format was and how to present.
And when D-day came, I was prepared. My twins were napping and I went right into the webinar. I’m so happy that so many people signed up and showed up to my live training. I was also shocked and humbled by the flood of emails I received after the webinar (I emailed my replay and slides to those that signed up).
Like Alessandra’s email:
And Salina’s email:
Thank you, thank you, thank you every one! I’ll definitely have more webinars (joint and solo) in the future for sure
Let’s See if I Achieved My Goals This Month
- Create a resource library for my lead magnet – BIG fail. I STILL don’t have a free offer, but I think I have one now.
- Provide more content upgrades – I created some more, but slowed down to focus on getting ready for the webinar.
I’m still not on target with reaching 10,000 subscribers in a year. I roughly need 800 subscribers a month and I didn’t reach that goal, but it was totally more than last month.
I’m hoping with my new lead magnet, maybe a new blog design and my EPIC plan for late summer/early fall, I can speed things up a bit in terms of generating a bigger list.
I’m currently using MailChimp and OptinMonster to help grow my list.
What are my plans for next month?
- I’m going to roll out a Welcome email series for those who subscribe to my list – I will have the option to opt-in to this so my current subscribers can also go through the welcome series. My plan is to introduce me, my blog, and offer juicy tips, strategies and freebies.
- I’m going to edit and clean up my webinar and use that as my lead magnet along with a resource library too – I’m hoping that my webinar will be enough of an incentive to opt-in and grow my list faster. We will see!
4. Blogger Outreach
I’m going to have to say it was a pretty slow month in the blogger outreach arena. June was such a hectic month for me in terms of client work, family obligations (I was a soccer mom!) and my webinar that reaching out to other bloggers and commenting on their blogs was low on my list of priorities.
Also, I can’t find my master list of blogs I visit – yes, I’m old school and wrote it in my notebook. So, I’m going by memory.
The top blogs I like to visit and comment on are:
- Single Moms Income
- Embracing Simple Blog
- Believe in a Budget
- Frugal on the Prairie
- Start a Mom Blog
- Badass Business Mums
I have a boat load of other blogs I visit and even have some new ones like this one, but overall, I’m going to have to sit down and start a blog commenting plan.
What About Last Month’s Goals?
- Continue to network with other bloggers in my niche – Half fail. The only connections I did were on Facebook and if I shared their content on social media.
- Promote others’ content on my blog and in client pieces (freelance writing work) and on social media – Yes. I’ve been linking to other people’s content on my blogs and sometimes in my freelance writing work.
- Be open to any collabs – Yes. I’m in the works for one or two joint webinars for this blog and some collabs over on my other blog (webinar and membership idea).
For next month’s goals, I’m going to take a little pause since it’s the summer and I want to enjoy what little warmth and sun we have here.
Will I Keep Growing?
This is always a concern for me. I don’t like looking at my stats every day, but it’s hard when you have a new blog right?
I’m already noticing less traffic for July, but then again, early July is a holiday so it figures. People are outside and having fun.
For July, I’m going to work hard at creating epic content that will help mompreneurs and bloggers succeed.
I’ll also devote time to networking with others, commenting on their posts and sharing their content.
Finally, I’ll focus on my subscribers. They are my followers and loyal group. I want to provide the best tips, strategies, and freebies I can muster!
Make sure to check next month and how I will continue to grow my blog!
Are with you me mama? Let’s grow our blog together!
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