Moving Forward

byhordol2013

462 followers

5 years ago

Last week, I blogged about my 6-month progress. It was kind of a downer post because while I was proud of what I had been able to do in 6 months, I was starting to realize my niche may be a dead end and I was at a cross roads.

I took the last week off of writing to give myself a break and give myself some time to do some thinking and planning out the future of my site.

In the time I took off of writing on my blog, my search engine traffic nearly doubled! I also have made almost daily Amazon sales (sometimes multiple per day) for the first time ever. The products I promote on Amazon aren't really that lucrative (and some of my sales weren't items I promoted), but it feels good to see some more progress when I needed to see it the most.

I still think my niche needs a little work. I was emailing with a cloth diaper blogger that offered to add me to the cloth diapper blogger group on Facebook (I had searched to see if there was one and couldn't find anything--I now realize it's a secret group). It seems like every cloth diaper blogger had to up their game and expand their niche, and that the most successful ones have Facebook groups and active Youtube channels.

Youtube is something I am definitely working on! I have about 15 videos I think? I'd love to have a Facebook group, too, but with so many of them out there, I think getting people to join right now when I have hardly any followers won't be very easy, so I'm tabling it for now.

Anyway, I realized my site still has potential. It may not have potential in the way I thought it was going to, but hope is not lost.

I had thought about expanding more in the "eco/green" direction, but after much thought and trying to figure out what would be best for my brand, I have chosen to expand in the green/natural parenting realm. I thought I would never blog about parenting, but now I eat my words I guess.

That gives me the freedom to blog about some eco topics here and there (as I have been already) and also some more general parenting topics for babies and small children.

I have decided to do this because I was really starting to think about my audience: who are they? Probably pregnant mamas, or mamas of babies looking to switch over to cloth diapers. What are they interested in? Well, cloth diapers, but what else? I think back to what I was interested in when I first explored cloth, and I was pregnant for the first time so I was eating up all the information I could on babies and being a mom.

These are the people I think I need to serve with my blog. I have learned there are so many motivations for using cloth diapers (saving money, reducing waste, having the freedom to avoid the plastics and potentially harmful chemicals in disposables) and while most people are highly motivated by one of those reasons, most people do enjoy that they receive all of those benefits. So I want to focus on how you can receive those same benefits in other realms of parenting babies and small children.

I feel more at peace about my blog having decided this is the direction I'm going to take. I figure it can't hurt anything, as I'm already on a path that I don't think it going to be very lucrative. But this could open me up to more relationships with brands outside of the cloth diaper world, give my blog a bigger appeal to hopefully get more traffic, and allow me to keep blogging authetically even when my kids are out of the diaper stage.

We will see. I worry the biggest obstacle I face is my blog name because it does relate to cloth diapers, but I think that it will probably be fine.

Thank you all, as always, for your support and encouraging words. I know I can always count on the WA community. I posted a blog post for the first time in a week yesterday, and I'm going to try and get one more in this week yet. It does feel good to take this breather, though. But if Google is going to start sending more organic search traffic, I don't want to disappoint!