Progress Report May 2019

A Month Of Positives

If you've read any of my previous progress reports, you'll know I've struggled with motivation and my mood these past few months. Luckily I was anticipating this and had the strategies in place to deal with it head on (post less but with quality and consistency, focus on small targets to make sure I could feel like my site was progressing)

Things changed for me during May, and my expectations were exceeded beyond what I could ever have hoped.

What were my goals and expectations going into this month?

My goal was to keep it simple, and focus on content: two posts per week. Bit of a broken record, this has been my goal for the past few months. I have found this amount of work is what I can manage on top of my life as a mum to two kids under 3.

• 4-5 helpful information only articles of around 1000 words each
• Three review posts with affiliate links of around 2500-3000 words each
• One "best of" style post with affilate links around 5000-6000 words
  
• Four WA webinars

This is month five for my site, so my expecations for traffic and profit were same as for April:

• Zero traffic to continue
• Zero profit to continue

What has the month actually been like?

I'm happy to say what actually happened has far exceeded my expectations! Content wise I hit my target exactly, but sales and traffic wise, I got some progress:

• Five info only articles of 1000 words (one per week)
• Three reviews with affiliate links of 2500-3000 words
• One "best of" style post
  
• Two WA webinars.Maybe it was three. I need to watch these weekly, Jay always has the best tips no matter WHAT the topic.
• I made $150 from three sales. I was so surprised and excited to see affiliate income in month five of my site! I am in an expensive niche so sales get me high commissions.
  
• Clicks from Google and Bing have tripled and organic traffic is growing each week. I still only get about 2-10 organic visitors per day though, it's a process.

What are my plans for June?

For June I'm sticking to the same program. It's working well for me at the moment, it feels manageable with my kids but makes me keep pushing to see progress. I've also started to read some marketing books, starting with "The Brain Audit", which is actually written by a fellow New Zealander. I'm hoping since I'm going for quality content that I can really start to refine my posts to help my audience.

In June I'm aiming for:

• 4-5 helpful information only articles of around 1000 words each
• Three review posts with affiliate links of around 2500-3000 words each
• One "best of" style posts with affilate links around 5000-6000 words each
• Four WA webinars
  
• I really hope my organic traffic continues to grow.
• I'd be ecstatic to see some more sales this month but I won't expect them. I anticipate sporadic, stuttering sales for a while. My traffic is still too low to expect anything else.

What are your plans for this month?