3rd Quarter 2016 Check In

I’ve just spent the last who knows how long scrolling Facebook and accomplishing nothing. Despite having this post on my to-do list for the past two weeks and having a dozen other post drafts in my head, I’ve been unable to find the motivation to actually write any of it.

It’s been quite a quarter for Beyond Mommying. Lots of ups on the blog and some great stats to report. Yet all the downs in life have overshadowed those accomplishments and left me feeling frustrated, overwhelmed and honestly a little lost.

I’ve always had a very clear vision for Beyond Mommying, I’ve always had the specific goal of using it above all else to connect with people but the longer I go, the more disenchanted I become with the process, the less I enjoy it and the less I want to do with it.

For the first time, I find myself wondering: What am I doing here? Is this really taking me where I want to go? and What’s the point?

It’s a strange time to be having all these feelings because it was a great quarter. July was my best month, ever, for pageviews as I had a few posts take off on Pinterest as well as published my first post for Collective Bias/Social
Fabric. Overall, 3rd quarter on Beyond Mommying saw an 84% increase in total pageviews.

And while making money has never been my main goal, I did earn ten times more during the 3rd quarter than I did during the 2nd, not even including the payments I’m owed for different things and earned enough to completely off-set the costs associated with running the blog (which was a lot this year as in January I renewed my web hosting for another 3 years–ouch!) And, once all payments owed come through, I’ll actually have earned more than I’ve spent throughout the life of Beyond Mommying which is pretty great for something I didn’t start with the intention of monetizing.

Quarter 3 also brought a 41% increase in my subscriber’s list (which I really need to be better about actually using!) and an almost 10% increase overall in my social media following with the biggest increases on Pinterest and google+, both platforms which I’ve been trying to better utilize (which I now do through Buffer since signing up for the Awesome plan after trying many different social sharing tools.)

But what has changed the most is where my traffic is coming from. Over half of my traffic last quarter was from Pinterest and almost another quarter from organic searches (google and the like), up from a combined 65% of my traffic during 2nd quarter and only 55% of my total traffic during the 1st quarter of 2016. It means that people are looking for and finding my content which is bringing tons of new eyes to the blog!

But this also shows that I’m not getting traffic like I used to from other sources like Facebook (which accounted for just 13.5% of my total traffic this past quarter whereas it brought 77% of my traffic in 2015!) I can share on Facebook and the lovely algorithms only show my posts to 30-50 people (less than 5% of my followers) and way less people than that actually click through to my links. I can tweet 8+ times a day and still only get 1.3% of my traffic from Twitter. I can spend hours posting my content in different groups and participating in blogger share groups and still see very minimal benefit.

So why bother? Why spend my energy doing all the tasks I don’t like? Why take the time away from my kids and other responsibilities when search traffic is basically carrying the blog at this point?

I haven’t been able to answer these questions but I’m pushing on. I have some great projects coming up which I hope can rekindle my blogging fire in the future and will continue to do what I can to keep bringing you great content. Because while life may have me down, Beyond Mommying and my readers, followers and supporters are still really important to me.