The Building of a Blogshop: The beginning Traffic stats for my blog, printables shop, and pinterest account {Episode 2}

I wanted to take a quick moment and give you a snapshot of the beginning stats for this blog and the printables shop. Just to give you a general idea of what to expect if you were to decide to take on the same venture one day.

As you might know from Episode 1 { The Building Of A Blogshop: Building A Blog & Printables Shop From The Ground Up}, I am building a brand new blog using my first and last name as my domain, and a printables shop, where I am selling printables for every-day life and productivity.

While I have had this domain for a few years, I wasn’t using it to blog or sell printables. For many years, this domain hosted a site that sold my piano music and voice over demos. You can see it here on the wayback machine.

On November 3, 2023, I decided to revamp this blog to be a place where I could write about topics I am passionate about, and use my creativity to design and sell printables. And somewhere along the way, I decided to document the journey, because blogging and creating are topics I am passionate about, and I know I will enjoy writing about them.

One quick side note about blogging before we get to the traffic stats. If you do decide to start a blog, make sure you blog about topics you are actually interested in. It is very hard to write article after article on topics you are just ‘meh’ about. Or topics that you may have once had an interest in, but no longer do, and feel like you have to keep blogging on the same topic because that is what you initially chose as the niche of your blog.

I did this with my other blog Indie Author Central, because I was once really passionate about self-publishing and creating low-content books on Amazon. I created my whole blog (including the domain name….which is really important, and I will be talking about that later in the series) around one theme……the author/publisher theme.

I tried to make a go at building up Indie Author Central a few times around, each time changing my main topic a little, but still focusing on the author/publisher theme (hence its name), and even though this last time around (beginning in 2021) I have managed to grow it to appx 10,500 to 12,000 views per month, with a Pinterest account where I have 2.03K followers and 272,000 monthly views, I am having a hard time finding new topics to write on that I am passionate about.

Most, if not all, of my readers and followers of that blog are people who are interested in creating and selling low-content books on Amazon. I have tried branching out to talk about other topics, like blogging and affiliate marketing, and even writing in general, but those posts have not really seen the light of day, and all my traffic and keywords that people are finding my blog with are related to the low-content publishing niche.

Don’t get me wrong, I am very thankful that I have been able to build up that blog, and I still do enjoy the topic of low-content publishing, however, as I mentioned in Episode 1, I have hit a ceiling with traffic, and don’t feel like the topic is broad enough to get the blog to where I would like it to go.

Building Indie Author Central has been a learning experience and a true labor of love. It has shown me many things about what it takes to get traffic to a blog and make money promoting affiliate offers and ads, but now I feel I am ready to branch out, have a broader topic base, write from a place of passion, represent my own brand with my name, and sell my own products.

Using my own name as my domain not only allows me to be my own brand, but it allows for an easier transition to broader topics moving forward. When you first start blogging you hear so many advise you to niche down your focus so you can carve your own spot in the market. Pick a niche and stick to it. Become an authority on your topic. While I agree this definitely is helpful to attract your target audience, what I have learned is, I am not a one dimensional human being. Turns out, I have ALOT of interests, and sticking to just one for the rest of my life is not satisfying.

I have lots of plans swirling in my head for the direction I want to take with this blog, and seems like every day, God inspires me with a new idea. I have a feeling this is going to be fun over the years, and I am coming into it expecting. I have prayed so much about this, and asked the Lord to lead and guide me and direct me in all my steps to make this blog and shop successful. I am going to follow His lead on wherever He takes this.

Phew….that was alot more than just a quick side note! See what happens when you are passionate about a topic, you can literally write about it all day long and not run out of things to say.

Back to my traffic stats.

My Beginning Traffic Stats

When I revamped this blog, and wiped off all the old content and installed the free Kadence starter theme, I also wiped out a bunch of old plugins and installed some new ones. One of them was Jetpack.

Jetpack is a paid plugin, but you don’t have to pay for it to use their traffic stats feature. Even though I have Google Analytics installed, I find seeing my stats within my WordPress Dashboard through Jetpack to be faster and easier.

So…..between the dates of November 3, 2023 to November 29, 2023, the following are my traffic stats:

The Blog

The blog at aprilmartella.com has gotten a whopping 22 views. Woohoo! And all 22 views have happened within the last 7 days. I suspect these views are coming from my Pinterest account that I started posting to within the last week.

The main two ways I get traffic to my other blog, Indie Author Central, is through Google and Pinterest, so I decided to change my personal Pinterest account associated with my real name into a business account (which I will get into why and how to do that in a future episode) and about a week ago, I started pinning the posts I have written so far on this blog and also the products in my shop.

The Printables Shop

The Shop has gotten 543 views since November 4, 2023, however, I suspect many of those views were actually me checking how my shop looks from my phone. I am not quite sure yet, because PayHip does say that your views don’t count when you are logged in, and it is showing that 47 of those views came from Russia.

Unfortunately, their traffic analytics aren’t too comprehensive. Hopefully that will change in the future. I have also put a link to my shop on the Indie Author Central navigation bar, so some of those views may be coming from there. And I have also been pinning to my shop from my Indie Author Central Pinterest account, so some of those views may be coming from there also.

Moving forward, I am going to try to find a better way to hone in on my shop’s stats so they are more accurate.

The Pinterest Account

My aprilmartella.com Pinterest account is showing that since I switched to my business account and began posting pins to my blog and shop, my monthly views went from 0 to 1.2K. I gained no new followers since starting this endeavor on November 3rd.

I already had 89 followers because I started my Pinterest account years ago and added all my friends who followed back, so I am not counting those followers as anyone who would be interested in my content or printables. (Though hopefully they will see my stuff and be interested at some point)

That pretty much wraps it up. Not too much to report. However, I hope that as the progression of this blogshop gets moving, you (and I) will get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. Even though I already have a somewhat successful blog, I still consider myself very new to blogging, and have a ton to learn.

So far, I have only used organic Google search traffic and Pinterest to get visitors to my sites. Moving forward, I would like to at least some of the other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram (and maybe TikTok), but for now, I am going to stick with what I know best, and learn as I go.

Thanks for joining this exciting new journey with me!

All the best and God Bless,

April

P.S. Follow me on Pinterest so you don’t miss any episodes from my Building of A Blogshop Series where I will share the progression and journey of this blog and shop!

Don’t have time to read this whole article now? Pin it for later.