Blog and Life Update: What I've Been Up to Lately

Last Updated on April 2, 2022 by Tina

It’s been a while since I’ve published two posts in a week. Ever since that very busy first 10 days of March, I’ve been having a hard time thinking of what to write. I’m not sure if it’s just writer’s block, or I have just become too lazy to write, or I already ran out of things to write about. It’s so weird because I haven’t been busy at work in the past two weeks. All our presentations, meetings, etc. were moved to after the national elections in May. I should have been able to write a lot already, instead, I’ve been wasting my time watching Instagram stories. Let me just give you my blog and life update, and what I have been up to lately. Maybe this will help me come up with ideas to write about in the coming days.

Life Update

So aside from watching IG stories, what have I been up to lately? I was busy preparing for an upcoming trip with my mom. Traveling right now isn’t as simple as how it used to be before the pandemic. Now, you have to check all the travel requirements to make sure your travel will be problem-free. And rules change a lot these days, sometimes every week. I’m also preparing an itinerary for the trip, something I’m not used to doing. (I used to do minimal planning prior to my trip in the past and just decide what to do when I’m already there.) But this is a sponsored trip, so I have to make sure my mom gets the most out of it.

I’m super excited about the trip. It will be my first time going out of the country after two years. I will have something new to write about. And would you believe I actually manifested it? During the lockdown in 2020, I posted in my IG story that the first country I’m going to when countries open up again will be Singapore. I thought it was not going to happen anymore after the break-up, but I guess manifestation really works. I mean I don’t really know what got into my mom’s mind. She just said she hasn’t been to Singapore yet and she wants to see it. I’m not complaining though.

Blog Update

Things are looking good with my blog. The other day, I checked the blog data/stats files I saved on my Google drive last year. I’m very happy to see improvements and I thought I’d share them with you. To give a background, although I have been blogging for a few years already, it was only last year that I started doing things so I would make money on my blog. When I started blogging, I joined several affiliate networks because I’ve read that it’s one of the ways you could monetize your blog. The problem with affiliate marketing is that you only make money when someone buys something using the affiliate link that you have in your blog.

Another way to make money is by having ads displayed on your blog. When I started blogging, I didn’t want to have ads on my blog because I want my blog readers to have the best user experience. However, in late 2020, I started having a huge amount of traffic on my blog because of two blog posts that I wrote that landed on the first page of Google Search. My web hosting was expiring in a few months, and my business was badly hit by the pandemic so I thought why not put ads on the blog so I could raise the amount needed for the renewal.

I started with AdSense but I wasn’t making much. In February last year, I discovered Ezoic, another ad network. I joined and it was a perfect time because another post I published ranked really well on Google. There were days when I would get more than 2000 pageviews in a single day. More views mean more income. That and another event that I’m not gonna share anymore made me start planning for the growth and success of my blog.

I made a spreadsheet of my blog goals. I also enrolled in online blogging courses to improve the searchability of my site. But just when things were looking good already, the world was hit by the Delta variant. People couldn’t travel again. And because they couldn’t, the pageviews on my blog significantly dropped. But I was focused on my goal so I made it a point to publish at least two blog posts a week. And that paid off because from a Domain Authority (DA) of 8 last year, my DA now is 17. (I just found out today! Last week it was 16.) Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a website is to rank in the result pages of search engines. The higher the DA, the better it will rank on the first page of search engines.

This was my goal last year that I wasn’t able to meet because of the Delta variant

Compared to last year, the blog sessions for the period 16 February to 18 March is 23, 492, close to the 25,100 last year. My Ezoic earning is US$68.97. And I now have 92 blog subscribers. Hopefully, in the coming months, these numbers will increase. With the blog traffic that I am getting now, I should have been earning more, if the majority of my traffic comes from the US and other rich countries. So that’s something I need to work on, how to get more traffic from the US.