100th post: What I’ve learned in a year of blogging

I guess it makes sense to make my 100th post about blogging, especially since it falls on my 1 year of blogging, almost to the day!

Here’s what I’ve learned in my past year of blogging. I’ll include all successes and failures so that you can see exactly what my journey has been like!

Giftings:

This has been the biggest “monetary” aspect of my blog, and it actually mainly comes through my Instagram.

As an influencer, companies will contact you asking for an Instagram post(s)/stories/blog post in exchange for a product sample.

In the past year, I’ve received about $4000 in merchandise through collaborations.

Earnings:

The actually earnings have been slim to (almost) none. I’ve earned about $600 all year from my blog:

• $65 from BlueHost referrals
• $600 from a collaboration

I’ve opted to not include ads up until now because my traffic isn’t anywhere near the volume at which that would be successful.

At this point, ads would probably deter anyone from coming to my site!

Some might consider that a failure, but what has mattered more to me is that I’ve gotten great comments and emails about how helpful my blog has been for people.

That’s a success in my book because it’s the reason why I blog!

Traffic:

Up until this past month, I’ve seen regular traffic that was very low. About 1,500 page views a month.

This past month, almost up to 30 full days, I’ve seen a huge spike (in relative terms) as I’ve had over 11,100 page views within the past 30 days.

With that has come subscribers and emails thanking me for specific posts that people have found helpful.

What you can learn from that, if you are blogging, is that growth can be very slow. I don’t know where it will go from here, but it just goes to show you that blogging TAKES TIME. And lots of it.

100 posts in 365 days is roughly one every three or four days. While also working a full time job, I’ve spent a lot of my spare time working on my blog.

Spending:

The only things I’ve spent on my blog in this past year are:

• BlueHost for monthly webhosting
• Annually for my URL
• Three $5/day Pinterest ads that ran for three days each

Learning:

Here are five things I’ve learned (I’ve learned so much over this year, but these five general things pretty much sums it up):

1. I feel like my post quality has improved a ton (or at least I hope it has!). I’ve learned that people love lists that will help them when adventuring, so I try to include a lot of things like that.
2. When I first started off, I had a very broad idea of what my blog would be. You can see I have some recipes under my lifestyle section- but I probably won’t do any more of these because that’s not why my audience reads my blog. My direction and focus has narrowed to fit my niche. I hope people get travel and blogging inspiration from my blog- not food ideas!
3. My photos have also improved– I’m now so much more comfortable and natural behind a camera! I also learned how to frame better photos.
4. I’ve learned that Pinterest can be your best friend as a blogger! It is the number one source of traffic to my blog!
5. Blogging is a slow process, but it requires consistency. When you don’t see results, just keep going. The first comment you get from a reader telling you thank you for helping them out will make it all worth it in that instant! And it just gets better from there!

I hope this was educational for you if you’re starting out with creating a blog! And if you do want to start your own blog, the first thing to do is set it up- I’ve got all of the technical details on my post here.

Best of luck blogging! And comment if you have any questions or if there’s anything else you’d like to know about my blogging journey! I’m an open book!

Xo,

Jasmine