From 100 to 7,270 a DAY: Looking Back at April

From 100 to 7,270 a DAY: Looking Back on April

April was a crazy month for Cow Country Housewife! And I mean crazy!

My goal was that by my one-year blog-iversary in August, I would have 1,000 readers a day. Well, I didn’t expect to already have surpassed that… and not just by a little. In the month of April, my daily page views have gone from 200ish a day, to more than 4,500! I couldn’t make this stuff up! The incredible part about this is… it’s still going up!

I mean seriously… What just happened?!

I figured that eventually I’d get more views and grow my blog, but never in a million years did I think my numbers would explode the way that they did. Of course, there is still plenty of growing that I want to do moving forward, but this is a great start and a much-needed confidence boost to see the tiny blog that I started to keep myself busy and connected after having my third baby, growing and starting to look less like a hobby and more like an entrepreneurial venture.

But I couldn’t do any of it on my own. If I hadn’t used the knowledge that other people had learned to help me, I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am now. And I really wouldn’t know what to do moving forward!

So what worked growing a blog?

BoardBooster for the win!

BoardBooster is the way that I scheduled all of my pins. It allows me to put 100 pins or more each day to highly visible group boards. Without BoardBooster, I would still be trying to pin individual pins 100 times each day at peak hours. BoardBooster has a fantastic kind of set and forget thing going on. It really makes scheduling pins super easy. 

You can read more about my Pinterest strategy for the month and how I’ve made a ton of money from Pinterest HERE.

Blogging courses and books

I don’t know where I would be without taking blogging courses! That’s not true. I totally know where I’d be: still trying to figure out what I was doing and wasting a lot of time and energy that could have been put to making good posts!

Here are my favorite courses so far: 

Elite Blog Academy: The best investment I’ve ever made was taking the Elite Blog Academy course. It was the biggest investment that I have made for my blog and was also a huge leap of faith for me. I really don’t have $500 to just throw around! But I promised my husband that I could make it back and pay for it myself. And that is, in fact, what I have been doing! It has absolutely felt incredible to see the results!

Your Dream Blog is in Reach: If you are hoping to blog for profit, you should absolutely look into taking this course! Tanya from Blogelina.com, who designed my site, has an incredible 4-week blogging class that’s only $27 until May 3rd. I wish I had known about this course before I started blogging! She’ll set up your whole site and pay for the domain for a year along with teaching you how to make your dream blog a reality. She’s super hands-on and personal. If you’re looking to get serious about blogging and want to start now, this is absolutely worth the $27!

Brilliant Pin Promotion: This is another of the amazing course that I started taking that helped me to get to where I am in Pinterest! Brilliant Business Moms has come up with a great course that has helped people like mega-blogger Crystal Paine in her Pinterest strategy for Money Saving Mom.

You can read more about how much I love this course for Pinterest HERE.

Strategies Worth Sharing: How I Grew My Facebook Page from 2,000 Likes to 100,000 Likes In Five Months: I just bought this amazing eBook that Brittany Ann from Equipping Godly Women released. I have learned a lot about Facebook strategy from this ebook! Facebook has not been a strong suit of mine and I have suffered for it. It’s another really fantastic $20 investment for your blog! From all of the traffic that you will see driven to your site from your increased Facebook presence, it will absolutely pay for itself right away!

Goals for this month

Start making product!

This has been a big one for me. And I have really been dragging my feet on it. I absolutely love figuring out what kinds of things my readers would like to hear, but actually doing something that I felt I could charge for, that never seemed like something that I could do! Like, why would anyone ever want to hear what I’m thinking?! Let alone pay for it! I felt like I needed permission to be an expert on something. 

Well, not anymore!

I’m getting over that thinking and taking the next steps toward building a business from the tiny blog that I started 8 months ago to pass the time.

Here’s to an even more amazing May!