Hey, guys! I’m back with another monthly reflection. I’m sort of disappointed in myself because I was doing such an awesome job at publishing 3 times a week regularly (something I have never done before), but I lost my momentum and missed the deadlines for the last two posts.
Even so, I’m very proud of what I accomplished. Despite my busy month, I was able to schedule out most of the posts early. In fact, my traffic in July was the highest it’s ever been! I quadrupled my June traffic. I give credit to the fact that I was posting significantly more and that school is about to start soon. This post also went viral, so my regular daily traffic has now increased by an extra thousand views per day ever since.
My increase in traffic has affected other aspects of my blog as well. Engagement is up, so I’ve received a lot of comments. I’ve finally caught up on replying to them, but I’m sure I’ll fall behind again once classes start. I started a series called “How To Prepare For College In High School.” That has been doing really well. I was supposed to publish the last installment on Monday but was unable to. I’ll post it next.
My blog is also much more organized. I rearranged the menu so that it makes more sense. I’m working on improving the SEO on all the posts I’ve written in the last year. It’ll take a while, but it’ll help my blog a lot.
Things have been pretty stagnant on the social media front. I’m not very good at social media, but I have noticed an increase in engagement. I also finally reached 1,000 Pinterest followers. That’s a milestone I was very excited to hit.
I finally reached 1000 followers on Pinterest yesterday! It may seem like a small number for most bloggers, but I'm excited. pic.twitter.com/Kbt81xLcur
— Making My Way (@Triasha_C) August 4, 2017
The month started with a trip to New Orleans. We road tripped down there the first week of July. We spent a day at the beach on the gulf coast and spent the rest of the week in New Orleans. A post on that will be coming soon. It was a lot of fun, but I will say that it did not meet my expectations. New Orleans is a lot more hyped than it needs to be.
Even so, I tried oysters for the first time and ate beignets every day. I even got to hold a crocodile on a swamp tour. Check out my Instagram for more pictures.
After that trip, my calendar was full. Every day I had something productive to do, whether that was for work, volunteering, or a social event. I loved it! I wasn’t busy, but life felt full again after that slump I had in June. That’s also a huge reason why I was able to write so much. When I don’t have a lot to do, I procrastinate on writing. I also don’t have the inspiration to get things done. I just stay at home reading blog posts and watching YouTube videos. Because July was so full, I carved out times to write so that a post went live every Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
That also explains why I lost my momentum near the end. We were planning on going to Orlando to visit my cousins, but something came up. Because of that, I had a lot of unallotted time to spend with myself, which I ended up wasting.(I did vacuum, though.)
Moving on from the good stuff, I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with my friends. We all have very busy schedules, so there wasn’t a lot of time to carve out to spend time together. I did make sure to plan to hang out with my friend Kat because she’s moving to Orlando for the semester. She got into the Disney College Program, so she’ll be working there for a semester. She might do a guest post when she’s done, so stay tuned.
I thought I’d insert this in because this blog is about me documenting my life and this is recap after all. I went to the Shawn Mendes concert. Charlie Puth opened for him and it was a lot of fun! I don’t remember the last time I went to a concert and was happy to accept the free ticket from my friend. I had forgotten how much I liked Shawn Mendes’s music.
This monthly series is very self-centered and I know it doesn’t help a lot of people, but I write technical how-to posts all the time, so it’s nice to get some personal posts in to mix it up a little. Your regularly scheduled programming will be back soon.
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Do you have any blog post recommendations for August because I’m going to make my editorial calendar soon and would love your suggestions?
Do you have ask.fm?
No. I don’t. Sorry.