October Progress Report (Two Days Early!)

bySelenityjade

669 followers

Updated 5 years ago

Yes, I know I'm a couple days early for this, but honestly, I can't imagine another milestone before November 1st hitting, so I just thought I'd get this out of the way.

If you haven't read one of these before, I simply chronicle my successes and setbacks each month. I don't really call setbacks failures because while they could be considered failures, they are only true failures if you let them cause you to quit!

So this month has been kind of exciting for me! So let's get on with this!

I switched niches just 4 months ago and created a new website, instead of my 'practice' website. Just turned 4 months old 3 days ago, even! I've been on a roll!

Successes

1. I had a post go sort of viral on Facebook, thanks to a major influencer sharing the link to one of my posts. All in all, I got around 1.7k visitors from that ONE post! My link was shared over 80 times that I last saw. It was epic!

The only downside was that it was a niche that only overlaps my own, not completely about my niche. The only thing we had in common was cats and rescue. She focuses on kitten rescue and I focus on fixing feral and community cats. Part of kitten rescue IS saving them from getting born and part of fixing feral and community cats IS kitten rescue, but still. Two different audiences!

2. I had an answer go a little viral on Quora this month, too. No traffic from that because that answer had no related post on my website. I didn't even think anything of it when I answered but it's been upvoted around 600 times since I last looked and that's pretty cool.

3. I made my first sale on my website! GASP! At only 3.5 months old! It ended up netting me like $11 from Amazon Associates with someone buying like 6 cat products.

I've had sales before, leveraging Facebook groups but that's more because I'm sharing things useful for the group and would have shared them without affiliate links anyway.

I've also had a couple sales on my previous website, too!

4. I was approached by a well-known brand awhile ago and I responded, but nothing has come of that yet, as I mentioned, my site AND social media presence isn't nothing to write home about right now. It's still fairly new.

5. I keep getting approached about barn homes for feral cats across the US which means that my Barn Cat Network idea REALLY needs to get off the ground because there is a definite need for that. That said, that isn't going to be a monetizing thing, unfortunately, more a philanthropy thing.

6. My social media accounts are slowly progressing for my website. But those aren't my focus TOO much yet, content is. My website is still new after all. I'm establishing my authority, first.

7. Updated an old post nicely (actually a few older posts, but one was nearly rewritten.

8. None of the posts I made for October were under 2000 words. Most at least 3,000!

9. Still creating templates for my blog planner!

10. I forgot to mention: I have SUBSCRIBERS to my push notification and email lists. ^_^

Setbacks

As with any business, there has been setbacks, but it's mostly my own dang fault or personal issues.

1. Doctors screwing with my meds is NOT helping me at all. Hard to really be productive when you hurt so badly you want to kill someone. Plus you expend all this energy just to make it through your job, it's hard to do more than force yourself to work on the website.

2. My social media growth has kind of slowly stagnated a bit. I'm still growing, but it's not as fast. I'm going to have to step that up soon.

3. Kitty issues. When is there NOT kitty issues!

November Goals

So for next month, content is definitely number 1, of course. I'm still establishing that I know what I'm talking about.

I'm also going to work on my home page since I'll be adding the Barn Cat Network to my website, even if it is only a FB group so far! ^_^; Pretty soon, there will be a static homepage and a blog section where my blog roll will be moved to.