Operation Vegas: 2020 - February Update

bycld111

5.7K followers

5 years ago

I seriously can't believe how fast these months pass by. It's already March, which means it's time for another update on my Vegas 2020 progress!

Every month gets more and more whirlwind-y. (Yup. New word I just made up.)

I saw a video where Alex & Lauren from Create and Go described the different phases of blogging.

You have the boring phase where nothing happens for a long time. Then the teenager phase where it's very up and down and there's a roller coaster of emotions. Then the rocket phase where your site just blasts off.

Well, I think I'm in the teenage phase. It's very up and down right now. That's exciting though because I can see how it can turn into a rocket at any moment.

Anyway, let's see how I did this month...

Last Month a Few Things Really Helped Me.

#1. Asking for help. #2. Poking around other people's sites - especially if they made it to Vegas (and signing up for their emails.) #3. Going though Jerry's awesome training (https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/wa-bootcamp-hacks-h...)

These are all things that I'm still doing this month.

I find all the really successful people on here and I see what they're doing. I try to duplicate it (in my own way, of course). This really helps me see the different ways that people do things and gives me great ideas

Also, I'm going back through Jerry's training that I posted above and making sure I hit everything! This training is awesome. If you plan to make it to Vegas, then definitely check it out.

A Couple of New Courses This Month

I'm not afraid to spend money when I know it will help me make money in the long-run. This month was no exception.

There are two awesome courses I bought that have been really helpful.

The first came from one of our very own WA members, Chris Lee. He has an SEO course, and it's seriously great. Not only that, Chris has been kind enough to help me with advice via email.

And yea, I've been poking around his site too!

The other course is one that I need to finish going through, but our member Kim Wolfe sent it to me. (Thanks, Kim!) It's called The Fletcher Method and it helps you focus in on a target market and create a sales funnel perfect for that market.

It's been great so far, and I think that will really help me in the long run.

Things I've Done This Month

• Updated my Free Guide and started putting links for that everywhere.
• Added a pop-up to my site. I actually had 2, then I took those down. Now I am testing 3 different types of pop-ups / lead captures. (This is done using Thrive Leads. I LOVE Thrive!)
• Scaled down my email sequence. I didn't feel that it was quite right. I currently have just 2 emails in my sequence. Just trying to simplify the process for me and my subscribers.
• I learned how to properly use Yoast for SEO, thanks to Smarketeer's definitive guide. I wasn't even using it properly!! https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/smartketeer/blog/yoast-seo-d...
• Started a new Twitter account
• Lots of writing!

Things I Missed

• Creating a WA landing page / updating my WA Review (My guide hits all the major points, but I think I still want to create a WA Landing page)
• I started working on a project related to this Vegas goal and then decided to scrap it for now
• Pinterest views plummeted instead of going up

This month I plan to...

• Continue testing different lead captures / pop-ups on my homepage
• Focus on finding better keywords with more searches
• Get my Pinterest going again
• Start a new Instagram account
• Writing, writing, writing and writing some more!

Traffic & Status Updates

One thing that slowed me down a bit this month was Google. I couldn't (and can't) get into my original Google account. One that I've had for at least 10 years. :(

(You have to know the month and year that you started the account, or else you can't get back in. I have no idea! It's been at least 10 years.)

I had to start a new email address and I've been working to switch everything over to the new email.

Thankfully, my Search Console still has all of my data. However, my Traffic data was lost, so that started over.

Here's what my status looked like last month:

And here's this month:

Slowly, but surely...we're getting somewhere!

For fun, here's the last 6 months:

I have about 35 posts on page 1 in Google versus 16 last month. (But, as you know, these bounce around and this isn't consistent.)

My traffic:

Again, I had to start over. I was at about 750 per month before it re-started. I was kind of bummed about that, but Chris Lee told me this is very good, which made me feel better. :)

I am working on updating posts that have a high bounce rate. I really want to bring that down. I have been getting the time on page up, so that's good! Some of my posts have between 4-8 minutes time on page.

I'm getting a pretty consistent 30-40 people per day right now. Of course, I am planning on this rising this month.

Pinterest

As I mentioned, my Pinterest died down quite a bit this month.

Last month it looked like this:

This month it looks like this:

Oopsies! Wrong way! I'm not too worried about the monthly viewers. That doesn't mean too much. But the monthly engaged is important.

The good news is that I did gain quite a few followers this month. I'm up to 537 followers. I know that Pinterest is a great place for traffic, so I definitely want to go back and find a better pinning strategy.

Honestly, I haven't been focusing on Pinterest enough this month, and it shows!

Content Update

My goal was to post 22 articles, but the Google sitaution derailed me a bit. I still managed to get 20 articles up, so I'm pretty happy with that.

Going forward, I plan on writing my articles directly in Wordpress because I have Thrive Architect, and I'm not utilizing it for my posts. I really want to use it because you can do some cool stuff with it.

So I won't be sharing this graphic next month, but I'll still keep track of how many posts I put up.

Referrals

I should mention that I do have some referrals. I don't think I posted how many from Jan, so I'll do both months.

January = 10
February = 11

No one has moved to Premium yet.

I would be worried, except for Jerry's post from last year helps:

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/jerryhuang/blog/feb-monthly-... (this is why he created the training I posted above.)

Just gotta keep moving forward!

Goals for March

• At least 25 posts up
• Increase email subscribers (I had a few subscribers in January, but nothing to write home about)
• Finish going through The Fletched Method training to understand who I'm targeting and why
• Improve on old blog posts to decrease bounce rate
• Improve on old blog posts to make SEO better (using the plan that Chris lays out in his SEO training)
• Increase Pinterest engagement (create new pins for content that worked. See what others are doing to get people to click on their pins.)
• Create a new Instagram account
• Increase traffic to at least 1k per month
• Keep writing, testing, failing, testing, failing some more until something works! :)

Thanks for reading. These posts sure are getting long! I commend you if you read through it all. ;)

- Christina

P.S. Here's a thread that has all of the updates.