September 2019 website progress and income report

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212 followers

Wow, what a month. Difficult to find the time to write it all down, but I think I should, to help others and so that when I look back I can see where I've come from.

Okay, let's get September's negatives out of the way first:

  • As I wrote about in a previous post, on September 17th my Google AdSense account was suspended for 30 days because I clicked on an advert on my own site. Oops. I've now read lots of comments from fellow WAers that this is par for the course and have moved on.
  • Work-life-work balance. This is where I'm struggling the most. I'm still working pretty much full time in the day job as a teacher, and there weren't enough hours in the day when I was "just" doing that, let alone now. So I'm now starting work, whether teacher-related or website-related at 05:30 every morning and don't usually stop until 21:00 or so. And my already pretty minor social life is now non-existent. Never mind. Fortunately my other half is away a lot with work so he hasn't really noticed the difference and isn't feeling neglected. Still, no pain no gain etc.
  • You know when you work _really_ hard on a 2000-word and then some post, fill it with beautiful images, craft Pinterest and Twitter banners on Canva and it just flops? And then the 750 word no images post you throw together in half an hour does really, crazily well in comparison? Yeah, that. Inevitable, really.
  • I'm still not earning much from advertising nor affiliate sales but I realise it is still very early days so never mind.

On the other hand, the list of positives is huge, although some of them are a bit difficult to explain. But here goes:

  • I'm still getting the hang of all this website stuff, but I feel like I'm learning and making progress even though I have days where I find myself staring at post after post about technical SEO with no clue as to what to do about it. I suppose the difference from when I started is that I can much more quickly shrug my shoulders and say "if I need to understand this, I will understand this, but that time obviously isn't now so, hey ho, on to the next thing."
  • I've got a real process going for writing content, finding images, resizing them, adding text and image affiliate links, creating a pretty pin or three in Canva, posting to Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook. It's very much an evolving process but it's definitely there now.
  • I've got properly organised. I love spreadsheets anyway so it makes me happy to have a huge Google sheet with everything in one place.
  • I sketched out a content calendar for September and pretty much stuck to it so I've made a proper one for October with content, tweets, pins etc. all scheduled. I'm beginning to understand the differences between these social networks and the different sorts of content that might work best on each.
  • I'm enjoying the process of working this stuff out rather than being a frightened rabbit in the headlights thinking "I must get this perfect right now." Nope, life's not like that and the internet is definitely not like that. I've made mistakes, I've learned from them and, guess what? The world hasn't ended just because I missed out a hashtag or used an http rather than an https link.
  • My first real success though has been that I wrote a post in mid-September which I posted all over social media and was largely ignored. Then, four days ago, it became a *huge* news story following some scientific research in Canada and there was my ten day old post all ready and waiting to be shared with concerned consumers. So now I have my first four backlinks and a load of new twitter and Pinterest followers.

Earnings

Google Adsense (suspended until 17th October, grr): £19.34

Other advertisers (Infolinks, Media.net, Shareaholic all of which I signed up with on 17th October so not a full month): £0.51

Wealth Affiliate comments: £25.12

Grand total: £44.97 ($62.31)

Outgoings

WA membership £40.99

Balance: £3.98 ($4.98)

So, a tiny amount of money but this is only my second full month doing this and last month I made a loss, so it's heading in the right direction!

Today's big decision: to go yearly with WA. I can't really afford it but, on the other hand, I really can't afford to miss out on a 39% discount. Good thing they take credit cards!

Thank you for reading, and thank you all for your support here. I know I've been a bit quiet on here lately but that's because I'm busy doing the thing I joined WA to do, that is, writing content and publishing it on my website.

Here's to a successful October. Best of luck everyone.

Lisa

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Recent Comments

9

That is so exciting Lisa. And yes, I made the decision to go yearly, couldn't afford not to!
Way to go!
Wanda

Congrats on your progress you are doing great. Keep it going.

Way to go Lisa, great progress, keep doing what you are doing and build those results

Love the idea of the content scheduled and stick to just a few socials not every single one so you can learn the differences..

Great earnings. I have a similar experience of flops and misses but life is always like that. hope for the best and be ready for the unexpected but be always positive and determined. - Florentino

Nice google adsense earnings if you just started.. Im wondering, how many visitors do you have? I disabled google ads, still I dont get enough traffic..

I had 3,104 page views last month from 492 users.

Wooow, those are great numbers.. sorry if im boring, but how many articles you have? Congrats :)))

Since starting in mid-July I've published 33 articles - last month I published 7 new articles. Thank you!

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