Starting the Blog - June Recap

Welcome back!

Hello, it’s Leah again! I’m writing this post on June 30th to recap all that Samuel and I did in June for Little Moments blog. We started the blog earlier this month and decided to give ourselves about two weeks before posting the first blog on our site. That was a good decision for us, but of course if you’re thinking about starting a blog you don’t have to do precisely what I’m doing. Take a look at your schedule, the amount of time you can dedicate to the blog each week, and anything else going on in your life that might affect your blogging output. If you want to read about everything I did during that two-week period, I wrote it all down in my last blog Starting the Blog – The First 2 Weeks Before Going Live.

Anyway, now that it’s the end of June I have a lot of progress to update you all on! We officially have five blog posts up on the site! The first four blogs we posted were all related to our niche of travel (leaning towards European travel specifically, but we might post about some of the other places we’ve been to in the future too) and then the fifth blog post was the first “episode” of my Starting the Blog series. I’m treating these posts as “bonus content” so they don’t count towards the 2x a week posting goal we have set since it’s not related to our niche. If you’d like to check out our blogs so far, I’ve linked them all below!

Our Goals for Month 1

While those blogs have been going live, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes too! Below are some of the goals we set for this first month of blogging –

Create a Content Calendar for Blog Posts and Pinterest Posts
Post 2 Niche Blog Posts a Week
Post on Pinterest 2x a Day
Prepare all July Blogs and Pinterest Pins
Document the Starting the Blog Journey
Apply to Google AdSense
Apply to Amazon Associates Affiliates Program

Below are the “leftover” goals from my last post. I’m writing them here just to document them, but they are not my biggest priorities right now. Samuel did some research into the SEO keywords and modified some of our posts accordingly, but I think we still have a lot to learn when it comes to SEO.

Research SEO keywords
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Goal 1 – Create a Content Calendar for Blog Posts and Pinterest Posts

I will start off by saying that I’m a pretty organized person, at least when it comes to planning. I love planning our trips in detail, trying to plan out our future (even though it doesn’t always go according to plan lol), and researching everything! When it comes to the blog, I want to make sure that I’m organized too so I decided to make a content calendar to help me stay on track and know what my priorities are.

I created a Google Calendar to plan out blog posts and Pinterest posts. Google Calendar works great for me because I already use it for my personal calendar and I can share it with Samuel so he can see it too! Below is a screenshot of my Google Calendar for the month of June, so you can see how it looks.

Blue: Blog Posts
Green: Pin Posts

Samuel and I decided to post blogs twice a week on the website. We’ll also post some bonus content, like this blog post, once or twice a month on Saturdays!

Blog Post 1 – Tuesday
Blog Post 2 – Thursday
Bonus Blog Post – Saturday

My Pinterest schedule is a little more complex. This will probably evolve as time goes on, but for now I decided on the below schedule where I post Pins about each blog four times in the seven-day period after posting the blog, and then once in each of the following two weeks. Creating this schedule helped me immensely in scheduling the Pins because it took the thinking aspect out of it and allowed me to focus on making 7 pins for each post and then posting them according to this schedule.

Tuesday Blog Post	Thursday Blog Posts
Tuesday	Thursday
Wednesday	Friday
Friday	Saturday
Saturday	Monday
Tuesday	Thursday
Monday	Wednesday
Sunday	Sunday

Goal 2 – Post 2 Niche Blog Posts a Week

As I mentioned earlier, we successfully posted 2 blog posts during the last two weeks of June. We went live mid-June with our first post scheduled for Tuesday, June 18, 2024. Samuel and I decided to set a posting schedule for ourselves, but not everyone does this. For example, we will be posting our blogs on Tuesday and Thursday of each week. This gives us a deadline to help keep us on track, however, not everyone operates best that way. If you have a less predictable schedule or want to get both posts out of the way in the beginning of the week, then do that instead. Ultimately, you need to pick a schedule (loose or strict) that you can stick to over the coming months.

Obviously, the post you are currently reading does not fit into my “European travel” niche. Even though this isn’t content for my travel blog, I still think it will be helpful to others to document my journey about the process of starting the blog. I found this type of content to be super useful when I was researching starting my own blog, and so I can only imagine that this will provide helpful tips and structure to others also starting a blog.

Whether it’s in the travel niche or not, I think it’s important to treat your blog as a second “career” or second source of income, even if it’s not either of those things yet, and for me setting deadlines and posting schedules helps it to feel like I’m working towards something and making progress towards my goals.

Goal 3 – Post on Pinterest 2x a Day

In my first “Starting the Blog – The First 2 Weeks Before Going Live” post, I set a goal to post on Pinterest once a day. This is proof that goals can change and if you see room for improvement, take it! Over the past week or so, I decided that I wanted to really dedicate some time to the Pinterest posting side of the blog. Most of the bloggers I’ve been seeing have one thing in common, and that’s that they grew their audience through Pinterest first! I’m going to follow suit and put some extra effort in there and up my posting schedule to 2x a day.

Let me start by saying, if this is not feasible for you, then don’t do it. This was quite time consuming. I’d say I spent about 5-6 hours on setting up 60 pins for July and the pins for the last couple weeks of June. I think there’s definitely some things I can do to be more efficient when this time comes around next month though. My hope is to only have to set one day aside for prepping Pinterest posts each month. That way I don’t have to consistently worry about if there’s two pins scheduled and if they’re for the right blog posts all the time. Now I know I’m set.

This might be helpful for you all to know, but I looked into setting up a Tailwind account as I heard some people use that to make and schedule Pinterest pins. After researching it, setting up an account, and looking at the plans and their costs, I decided not to use it. For now, at least. My current plan is to use Canva’s free plan to create all the pins and then schedule them directly through Pinterest. There are limits to how many Pins you can schedule on Pinterest and how far out, but neither of them messes with my plan to post 2 a day for the upcoming month. I think the limit is 100 pins can be scheduled and up to one month in advance. Currently, I’m only putting out about 60 pins in a month’s timeline, so I’m going to keep up this method for the time being.

Goal 4 – Prepare all July Blogs and Pinterest Pins

As I mentioned in the last goal, I successfully created and scheduled all my Pins for July over the past two days! Technically, the two posts for July 30th aren’t scheduled yet because of the 30 days in advance scheduling zone on Pinterest, but I do have them set-up and ready to schedule once the 30th becomes available to schedule on. I’ll probably do this tomorrow morning, July 1st!

For July, we will have 9 blogs go up throughout the month (standard Tuesday/Thursday niche content). Currently, we have 7 written, edited, and scheduled on WordPress. That means we still have two left. I thought I would have been able to get them done this month, but the Pinterest situation took A LOT longer than I thought it would. Oh well, lesson learned to allocate more time for it next month.

Anyway, I’ll try to get those 2 written in the next couple days. Samuel and I are going to visit family for the 4th of July weekend, and I don’t want to stress about these posts while we’re there, so I’ll make sure to get them ready before that! That’s one of the nice things about having a blog, is that you can work in advance and set your own hours!

Goal 5 – Document the Starting the Blog Journey

There’s not much to say for this goal, other than read this blog post hahah!

Here’s my first blog from this series: Starting the Blog – The First 2 Weeks Before Going Live

Goal 6 – Apply to Google AdSense

I’ve done a lot of research into how to monetize your blog and the main two sources seem to be ad revenue and affiliate marketing revenue. Each of these require blog views and engagement, which I don’t have yet, but I’m prepping for that day! On June 20, 2024, I applied to Google AdSense. It was a pretty simple process, and I used the Google Site Kit WordPress Plug-In to take the automated route. Part of the application requires you to add coding to your website (like, computer hacker, programming code) and I have no idea how to do that. The Site Kit Plug-In does that on your behalf, which was super nice.

As of today, June 30th, I haven’t heard back yet. I’m not expecting to get accepted quite yet, but thought I’d try anyway! Google is supposed to take anywhere from a few days to 4 weeks to review your site and deem it worthy of placing ads on. I’ll keep you all updated on how this journey goes!

Goal 7 – Apply to the Amazon Associates Affiliate Program

This is another program I applied to this month, the Amazon Associates Affiliate Program! Affiliate marketing is another way to monetize a blog site. How it works is content creators link their favorite products and if people reading your blog click the link and make a purchase, you get a small commission on the sale. This comes at no extra cost to the buyer. I’m not sure when I’ll start linking products in my posts, but I have an idea to do a post about my favorite travel products at some point. The Amazon Associates application was a much quicker process than the Google AdSense one. I think I also applied for this program on June 20th, and I received an email saying I got in on June 26th.

Summary: Month 1 Down and Lots of Admin Tasks!

June is officially over and Samuel and I are in a good spot! We accomplished almost all of our goals this month and learned a lot along the way. I spent a decent amount of time on admin tasks like signing up for the ad and affiliate marketing programs, setting up the content calendar, and fixing some website design things. I like the idea of being about a month ahead when it comes to blog posts, so I think I’ll try to catch up on the last two blogs I need for July so I can stay ahead. That’s a good “safety net” for Samuel and I since we both have full time jobs and travel a lot!

~~Create a Content Calendar for Blog Posts and Pinterest Posts~~
~~Post 2 Niche Blog Posts a Week~~
~~Post on Pinterest 2x a Day~~
Prepare all July Blogs and Pinterest Pins
~~Document the Starting the Blog Journey~~
~~Apply to Google AdSense~~
~~Apply to Amazon Associates Affiliates Program~~

I hope these posts are helpful to those of you thinking about starting a blog! I’ll post another recap for July next month. Hopefully there will be some exciting updates, like maybe some outbound Pinterest clicks to the blog site and hearing back from Google AdSense. I’ll update you on it all next month!

-Leah and Samuel