Hurry! MomsCove is 2 years old today. Thank you all for your support because without you all of it wouldn’t have been possible. Today in this post I have decided to document my journey of these 2 years in which I will also share my traffic and blog income report.
For many mothers, it is a struggle to restart their careers after the motherhood break. Regular full-time jobs are too long to go to with a baby back home and just staying home is too tough to cope with. Blogging seems to be an obvious choice that gives you the liberty to work from home at your own pace.
Though most who start blogging fail to sustain it, many mothers have actually done it and made it large. Here is a list of top mom bloggers in India.
Why Share My Blog Traffic and Income Report
If you are thinking to start a mom blog and doing some research on it, you would come across many posts on how to start a blog. But there aren’t too many on what to expect. I tried to get a benchmark about the parenting and motherhood niche but couldn’t find many published posts. And those I found were too optimistic…..well at least for me.
How to reach 0 to 60000 views in 1 year.
Tripled my page views in just 3 months!
How I grew from 0 to 50000 dollars in a year.
That will give you a too optimistic outlook…..well, at least I felt so. That is because most successful bloggers flaunt their number and the average one goes down whimpering behind the scene not confident enough to share what they achieved. Therefore, I am sharing my journey to add some ‘commoner’ element to your expectation.
I am not sharing it because we achieved something great. I am sharing because our journey was pretty ordinary and if you are getting scared of the big numbers you can relate with us, sustain and Improve!
Before we go to the point, let me give you some background so that you can get the context.
Momscove Background
Most people blog either due to their passion for blogging or for making money. I had had some writing experience under my belt and I have some knack for it too… but passion is not a word I would choose to describe it. Who minds some extra bucks! But making money was also never a primary priority.
Then why I started to blog?
Well, I was tired of just being a wife to my husband and mother to my daughter. I wanted to try if I could carve an identity of my own via blogging. My daughter was just two years old and I didn’t have much social support. So, this is what I could do without having to leave home. Know more about that in our about us section.
However, I knew that most who start blogging give it up somewhere down the line. I was also as unsure, as many of you might be.
But I gave it a shot anyway.
We booked hosting for 3 years with the intention that if I cannot do something good with my blog in these 3 years, I would give it up. That leaves me with one more year of time to get my blog established….. let’s see how we go from here.
Starting off the Blog
Once I decided that I will commit to opening a blog, there were lots of decisions to be taken.
What niche to chose?
What name should I have for the blog?
Which hosting service plan to buy.
Self-hosted blog or not?
For a person with no previous background in blogging, it was tough. Thanks to Biplab, my brother, who came to my rescue. I swear, I could not have done it myself.
He is an engineer by training. Though he had zero knowledge of web designing and web hosting, he is tech-savvy. He became a self-taught webmaster in a matter of days. (Though it literally took him hundreds of blog posts and youtube videos, and he had my blog to experiment upon.)
But, I too learned lots of geeky stuff
- Word press
- Hosting
- SSL certificate
- Keyword research
- Long-tail keywords
- Caching
- CDN
- SEO etc
If you would have asked me about any of these words a month before I started my blog I would have put up a long blank face to you. I am sure, it will fumble even today for some of these kinds of stuff.
I swear to you, blogging needs much more than just blogging skills. You need to commit to learning all new stuff. Most of the mom bloggers I know either can do it themselves or have someone in the family (husband/someone else) who can do it for them. Or else you may need to hire someone professional for all these.
Once our blog went live, we were all excited and busy writing posts and executing everything that we learned over the last few weeks.
Blog Status at 2 Month
By 2 months we (I and my team) created 38 posts; many of them in long format averaging a word count of about 1400 words. Apart from that, I read Tons and Tons on blogging and tried almost everything that’s written out there.
- Joined Pinterest and pinned like crazy!
- Created Facebook page and group (and Promoted)
- Opened an Instagram Account and Posted regularly
- Joined Blog Directories
- Joined Quora, wrote answers to queries like there was no tomorrow!
And to make things worse, traffic dropped from around 3800 pageviews in the first month to around 2000 the next.
Let me tell you that this all was exhausting. Was this the Lazy work-from-home option I was looking at? I realized that this was a marathon and not a sprint.
Even though I was looking for an easy work-from-home option, yet I found myself stuck to the desktop all day long. It was turning out to be worse than a full-time job 🙁
I told to myself that I needed to take it slow and needed to recalibrate my expectations.
We initially decided to stick to a content schedule of 3 blogs a week… didn’t realize that it would be that tough. This big-mouthed monster I created was hungry for more every second day!
I could not help but defaulted a couple of times – just could not keep pace. And, that is when I decided to start accepting guest posts. We announced via Facebook and wrote our write for us page.
Expenditure & Blog Income Report:
- Expenditure: USD 259.7
- Income: 0
6 Months:
By 6 months we achieved few milestones –
- Affiliate recognition from Amazon.in
- We got our Adsense approval.
The number of posts published decreased substantially though. We published just 20 posts in 4 months as opposed to 38 in the first 2 months. The initial enthusiasm was wearing off.
Nevertheless, we had 58 posts on my blog by the end of 6 months.
Pageviews Trend
The only positive thing in these months was that we saw an uptick of page views at about 3 months and some of my keywords started ranking on the first page of google. We started to see some activity in the google search console and we were beginning to get our first organic traffic.
Thank god at least someone somewhere knows we exist; at least someone is reading our post.
Expenditure & Blog Income Report:
No sign of a single penny tickling in till now. 
. Towards the end, we decided to publish a post inviting sponsored post and collaboration. No fresh Expenditure Either.
Next one 1 Year (6 to 18 months)
Next, one year was the leanest and most difficult stretch. Boomer (our Golden retriever) fell sick and we subsequently lost him to renal failure. I was devasted. At one point in time, I just thought of giving up blogging. But thankfully we bought the hosting plan for 3 years – The blog would run even if I stopped writing.
We published only 56 posts in the whole 12 month period ( that is just about 1 post a week). And that too, most of them were guest posts seeking backlinks. I practically stopped writing.
Towards the end of May 2020, we published a post on top mom bloggers in India which received a lot of attention and social media sharing. This helped us to double the traffic in one month. This page ranked high as well and we managed to get a featured snippet for a couple of keywords. Therefore, the page helped us sustain the increase in traffic even after the social media pageviews dried.
The good thing was that we attracted a lot of links back from the bloggers who got featured which helped our domain authority. This helped other keywords also rank better and consequently resulting in a steady increase in traffic. Though we invested less and less time on social media, our organic blog traffic steadily rose.
Here is a round up list of the Popular blog posts that brought us all the good attention from google.
Expenditure & Blog Income Report:
- Expenditure (at 1 Year): USD 55.80 (Domain name registration renewal, Domain privacy protection plus site lock security )
- Income: USD 359
2 Years Blog Traffic: the May 2020 google core update
The moment we were ecstatic about having climbed Mount 12K of Pageviews, google struck us with a bolt – the May 2020 core update. We lost two-thirds of the traffic almost overnight. And didn’t know what to do. But, ‘When you cannot see the future, you do the next right thing‘ – This is what I learned watching Frozen 2 over and over again with my daughter. And the next right thing seemed to continue writing and publishing great posts.
Expenditure & Blog Income Report:
- Expenditure: USD 99 (Upgraded to Genesis Framework and Pro theme )
- Income: USD 46.5
Our Top Traffic Channels
We concentrated on social media as a traffic source early on in the course. From the very beginning, we paid attention to SEO (as much as we could) and that started paying dividends as time passed. Towards the later part, 75-85% of our traffic came from organic search. And because the traffic came predominantly from one channel, we were susceptible to the google algorithm change. And that is what happened with May 2020 core update. This underscores the need to diversify traffic sources so that one can create an ‘ all wether traffic’ blog.
Traffic and Audience Overview
Expenditure and Blog Income Report Summay
- Total expenditure till 2 years: USD 259.70 + 55.80 + 99 = USD 414.5
- Income till 2 years: USD 359 + 46.5 = 405.5
Reflection:
What We did Correctly
- Created good content: most blog post focussed on answering a question or solving a problem
- We learned and did SEO with even though fairly limited resources ( free keyword research tools and free Yoast plugin)
- Created an online presence across different social media platform
- Survived 2 years 🙂
Beginner Blogger Mistakes We Committed
- We Could not give enough focus on social media
- Did not promote our post adequately
- Didn’t reach out to fellow bloggers
- We were slower on the networking
- Could afford a premium keyword research tool
- Didn’t pay focus to earn and didn’t reach out to brands
- Didn’t focus on building a subscriber list.
- Didn’t have clear goals: actually, didn’t know what to expect and what would be a realistic goal.
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