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Starting the Blog – July Recap

ByLeah & Samuel

Hello again!

Hi, it’s Leah again! I’m back with my monthly updates for the blog. This post will cover everything Samuel and I did in July for my Little Moments blog, which is the second month of the blog being live.

Overall, I’d say July was a pretty smooth month. We were really prepared going into the month and had all the Pinterest posts and almost all the blog posts written before the month even started. That being said, there were still other tasks and goals we were working towards this month and we traveled twice this month, which means less time to work on the blog. That will be a balancing act moving forward, but obviously traveling is the topic of my blog so going on trips leads to more content ideas!

I’ve linked some of our favorite new blogs we posted in the month of July as well as the other blogs in my Starting the Blog Series if case you want to take a look at them for formatting ideas or inspiration!

We have kept up with our blog posting schedule of two times per week, which means we had nine travel niche blogs go live and the one bonus post documenting the June blog journey recap. Next month, August, should follow the same schedule with nine travel posts and this one post updating you all of the July blog journey recap.

Starting the Blog Series

Travel Blog Posts

Our Updates for Month 2

This was our first full month of operating the blog all while working our full-time day jobs! I’d say it went pretty well and we are learning as we go. Below are some of the topics I wanted to touch on in this July recap:

  • Update the Content Calendar for Blog Posts and Pinterest Posts
  • Prepare August Blogs and Pinterest Pins
  • Google AdSense Application
  • Go on Two Trips!
  • Website Traffic Analytics
  • Income Report

Like last month, the below goals are left over from my first recap post: Starting the Blog – The First 2 Weeks Before Going Live. I didn’t really touch on these goals again this month, but I am starting to think about taking some sort of blogging course soon.

I know there are mixed feelings about these courses and I definitely don’t want to be throwing money away on them, but I am new to this and want to make sure I’m setting myself up for success. Maybe I’ll invest in a more affordable course in a couple months, but if I do I’ll be sure to let you all know if I think it was helpful/worth it!

  • Research SEO keywords
  • Set-up a subscription email

Update 1 – Update the Content Calendar for Blog Posts and Pinterest Posts

Last month, I shared my Google Calendar that I created to keep track of what blog posts and Pinterest posts are scheduled for what day. While I love the aesthetic of a pretty, color-coded calendar, I quickly realized how time-consuming it is to create an event for every Pinterest Pin on top of the blog post calendar reminders.

My day job is in in corporate finance, which means I do pretty much everything in Excel (even personal things like budgeting, planning trips, and tracking house down payment savings I do in Excel)! So I made a new content calendar in Excel, one where it automatically tells me what Pins to schedule for each day depending on what blog posts I have scheduled. That is a nice little time saving component! We currently have the posting ideas finalized two months out, so through the end of September.

Below is a snip of the Excel spreadsheet I now use to plan my posts. All I do is type in the Blog Post Idea in the third column on a blue highlighted line and then Excel tells me what Pins will need to be posted each day. This is based on the same Pinterest posting schedule I shared in last month’s blog.

Update 2 – Prepare August Blogs and Pinterest Pins

At the time of writing this July recap post, we currently have eight of the nine blogs written that will go live in this upcoming month of August! I think we’re good on that front and should have the last blog written sometime this week.

On the Pinterest side of things, I have all the Pins created (two Pins a day means 62 Pins for August) and am working on scheduling them. I’ll have that complete by the end of July 31st! This month, I created a few templates in Canva to streamline the Pin creation process. Since I post 7 Pins per travel blog post, I created templates that have 7 different designs each. I made three template sets, one for normal travel guide blogs, one for this location VS that location blogs, and one for other travel related blogs (like our recent Chase Sapphire Lounge Review blog)! This helped speed up the process of actually creating the 62 Pins, but the scheduling side is still the part that take a big chunk of my time.

Update 3 – Update on My Google AdSense Application – WE ARE ACCEPTED!

Last month, I shared that I submitted my site’s application for Google AdSense! Google AdSense is one of the ad agencies that are supposed to be easier to get into when you have a newer site. I submitted my application on June 20, 2024. At that time, I only had two live blog posts, so I wasn’t expecting to get approved at that point in time, but for some reason I did! A little over two weeks later, on July 5, 2024, I received an email saying my site is ready to show ads!

Once you get this email, you are able to turn on AutoAds and make any specific updates to the default settings that you’d like. For example, you can decide where ads can be placed on your website or how often they pop up over your website. There’s a bunch of options and for now we just did some simple adjusting, but maybe I’ll change some of the settings in the future once I have more views!

I don’t plan to be on Google AdSense for the long-term though as there are more premium ad agencies out there that have much higher payouts. To get on those platforms require hitting some milestones that I’m not at yet, so for now Google AdSense suffices.

Below in my income report update section, I share how much I made this month from ads!

Update 4 – Go on Two Trips!

Our niche is travel because we truly love to travel and experience different cultures and food around the world! This month we went on two trips, which is great because now that we’ve started this blog, we need to make sure we’re getting new content ideas.

Our most recent trip was weekend getaway to New York City where we ate our way through Manhattan and Brooklyn! You can read all about it here: How to Eat Your Way Through NYC Over a Weekend!

Update 5 – Website Traffic Analytics

Below is a screenshot from Google Analytics of our site users for the month of July. It looks like we had 37 new users (a little less than half of those came from Pinterest) and 4 repeat users from June.

This shows how Pinterest did for the mo th of July. I posted two Pins every day, so about 60 Pins in July and that resulted in 14 outbound clicks that took people to my blog. Hopefully that number goes up next month!

Update 6 – Income Report – $0.47

Well, here’s the exciting part! This was our first full month of blogging, so I didn’t really expect to make any money. Somehow, we made 47 cents though! Whoop whoop! It’s not much, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Google AdSense only pays out once a month and only if you have $100 or more that you have earned. Realistically, I’m not thinking we’ll see a payout until at least 6 months into blogging. From reading other’s blog starting posts, that seems to be a good timeline to work towards.

Summary: First Ad Revenue, Traveling, and More Admin Tasks!

July is over which means we’ve been working on the blog for over a month now! I’m so excited to see where this goes in the future. We kept to our schedule, made some improvements on the Pinterest side of things, and made a few cents in ad revenue! All good things!

We also have a SUPER exciting trip coming up in August that I am pumped about! You’ll have to wait and see where, but a hint is it’s in Europe!!

I’ll talk to you all again next month!

-Leah and Samuel

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