My First Month Blogging – Plus My Goals for August

I should start by saying that I haven’t really been blogging for a whole month. I didn’t start sharing my blog publicly until July 6th, so I’m technically a little short of 4 weeks and almost a week short of a full calendar month. But I wanted to share my experience of my first month blogging with you, and the beginning of the new month seemed like a good time to do it! Don’t worry – it’s still Weigh in Wednesday and I won’t be posting twice every Wednesday. Today is just special.

When I started my blog, I read that Emma Drew thought 50 page views per day would be awesome for a brand new blog. I decided to use that as a bit of a benchmark and I set myself a goal of 1500 page views for my first month (based on an average of 50 views per day for 30 days, and because 1500 is a nice round number and I like those). You hear a lot about “sessions” in blogging, too, and I figured 350 would be a decent number to aim for in my first month (based on the previously mentioned average of 50 page views per day and 4 page views per session, which I completely made up, having nothing to compare it to).

Imagine my shock when I smashed those goals in my first week.

How did I do it, you ask? No clue. Seriously. A lot of it was thanks to Emma Drew and her #MyBlogMyBusiness group. Thanks to the help and support I got there, I hit the ground running, I guess. I made sure I had 10 posts published before I really launched my blog, I got a couple of friends to test everything before I told the world about it, I had social media accounts active and ready to go and I had a solid plan regarding how many times I was going to post each week. But how I ended up with an average of 200 page views and 50+ sessions per day in my first week? No clue. Although, my guess of 4 pages per session was pretty accurate!

Obviously, I had to update my goals for the month. I decided to aim for 1000 sessions and 4000 page views before the end of July. As I mentioned before, my blog would have been live for less than 4 weeks by that point, so it felt fairly ambitious.

By the end of my second week, it was starting to feel pretty achievable… And by the end of week three… I’d smashed my goals again!This is insane. I never imagined, for even a minute, that my blog would do this well in the first three weeks! And at the end of 31 July, my stats looked like this…

The other thing I was working on improving this month is my Domain Authority. All new domains start with a DA of 1. I wanted to build on this because, simply, the higher the DA, the easier it is to monetise your blog. I wish I could say that I blog for the love of blogging. That is actually partially true. I do love blogging and I find it really therapeutic, which is great for my mental health. But I’m also hoping that I’ll be able to make a little bit of money out of it, so that I never have to work in an office again (which will also be great for my mental health).

To help build my DA, I’ve been link swapping with other bloggers where we have relevant, complimentary content, contributing to posts that other bloggers have posted about in crowdsourcing groups, to get them to link to my site and I’ve been posting 3 times a week and doing everything I can to drive traffic to my blog. My friends and family have been so supportive with this and lots of them have shared my blog on social media for me – some of them have done so more than once, bless them. I’ve also been working on making my posts as SEO friendly as possible (thank god for Yoast, because I didn’t even know what SEO was a month ago).

At the start of the month, I really didn’t have a clue what I should be aiming for with my DA. I had no idea how long it would take for this to build, but I figured I could hopefully start to make a little bit of money once it got to 10 and I had a vague goal of getting there within 2 months, so that I could start making money in month 3.

After the first couple of weeks, when it was clear that my link swapping efforts were paying off, I decided to aim to get my DA up to 10 before the end of July. I achieved that on Sunday 29th!

So, what are my goals for August? I feel like I’ve been really lucky with traffic and since I’m not really sure how I managed that, I’m a bit nervous about replicating it for my second month. Obviously, I’d like to build on what I’ve already achieved and if I could manage 1500 sessions and 6000 page views in August, I’d be over the moon.

I want to keep improving my DA, too. The higher it gets, the harder it is to improve it and I doubt the next 10 will be as quick as the first. At the beginning of my first month, I read that it can take about 6 months to get it into the teens. I don’t know how true that is, given how quickly it got up to 10 and I know some of my new blogging friends have reached similar numbers in their first month.  So I’m going to aim to get there in 2 months, and set my goal for 13 by the end of August.

I’d also like to be making a little bit of money by the end of month 2. I’m going to aim small with this, because my blog is so new, so I’ll be happy if I make £100.

My last goal is social media. I still have a very small social media following, but I’m working on this. Most of my traffic comes from Facebook, but I only have 41 likes on my Facebook page. I’m super new to Twitter – I literally never used it before starting my blog – but the blogging community on Twitter is amazing and I already have 415 followers. Instagram is growing more slowly, with 159 followers, and Pinterest isn’t really working at all for me so far. To be honest, I don’t really understand how Pinterest works and I have no idea how I managed to get my 14 lovely followers! I’d like to be doing better on all of the social media platforms in August. If you’d like to help me out with that, please follow me, if you don’t already. I’d be so grateful!

So here’s a summary of my goals for August

Sessions – 1500

Page Views – 6000

DA – 13

Facebook – 80 likes

Twitter – 700 followers

Instagram – 300 followers

Pinterest – 25 followers

Earnings – £100

I think social media is the key to achieving all of these goals. So I’m going to work on really using social media to drive traffic to my blog and keep working on link swaps and hope for the best! Keep your fingers crossed for me!

I’m taking part in the  Monthly Goals (and updates!) Linky hosted by Charlotte over at CharlotteMusha.co.uk, so go check out her Monthly Goals post!