Native Mommy Lawyer hit its seven-month birthday on June 29, 2021. This article is a recap of the past month. I also share how I’ve been weathering some storms at seven months of blogging.
Overall, this has been a very up and down, rollercoaster month. Basically, I decided that I needed to place ads on my site. Choosing an ad network and integrating ads has been a very bumpy road.
Despite the bump in the road, there were some positives this month. I saw slight increases in traffic, and I continued to stick with my content publishing schedule.
If you’re interested in reading prior month blogging updates, click below.
- Trying new tools after six months of blogging
- Blogging for five months, update on the journey
- How to avoid writing burnout early on in blogging
- How to stay motivated after blogging for three months
- Newbie blogger mistakes I made after two months of blogging
- Ups and downs in the first month of blogging
Traffic
I shared in a prior update that my month-to-month traffic is increasing slowly. Although I’m sure anyone would like to see some exponential growth overnight, I’m perfectly content with the slow and steady growth.
Last month, I was averaging 15 pageviews per day. This month, I averaged 20 pageviews per day.
Early on in the month, my traffic was increasing steadily and fast. I felt that I was on a path to hit even more than 20 pageviews a day. Then, I hit some ugly bumps in the road.
First bump. I made some DNS changes to my website to integrate Ezoic ads and my site completely went offline. Since Ezoic nor my host could figure it out, I stayed offline for more than 24 hours.
Second bump. With the implementation of ads on my site this month, my page speed scores plummeted. This affected my traffic toward the end of the month, which slowed down significantly.
Let’s just say, I was feeling excellent about my traffic at the beginning of the month. At the end of the month, I felt that I was in full recovery mode. Unfortunately, it’s probably going to take a few weeks to get back to that upward trajectory.
Placing ads on the site
You might wonder why I wanted to place ads on my site when my traffic is less than 1,000 pageviews a month. In reality, I’m not going to make tons of dough with this traffic.
I’m on a few Reddit communities related to blogging, including /r/juststart and /r/ blogging. These communities offer so much insight into all aspects related to blogging. If you’re new to the blogging world, I highly recommend looking up these communities.
There’s been a lot of chatter about ad networks and ad revenue. Some bloggers start to apply for Adsense within their first month of blogging. I was very curious how an ad network might work for Native Mommy Lawyer.
So, I took the plunge after seven months of blogging.
Ezoic
I’ve heard very good things and very bad things about Ezoic. First of all, their recommended entry requirement is 10,000 sessions per month. Obviously, I am not even close to that amount of traffic.
I stumbled upon a Reddit post about the Ezoic Access Now program, which offers Ezoic access to all sites despite traffic level. To be part of this program and to gain access to Ezoic ads, you just have to sign up and complete their badge prep courses.
Signing up and working on the courses was the easy part. I never made it past fully integrating Ezoic onto my site. The steps seemed easy. I chose Cloudflare integration, signed into Cloudflare, and got the green light that Ezoic was integrated.
If only that was the end of it. I realized that my entire site was down! Instead of trying to troubleshoot and fix things myself, I contacted Ezoic, who directed me to some articles and recommended that I contact my host. So, I contacted my host, who then referred me back to Ezoic.
I discovered that I was getting a 520 origin error and none of Ezoic’s solutions were working for me. They requested that I contact my host and have my host whitelist their IP addresses so that they weren’t miscategorized as bot traffic.
When I contacted my host to do this, they told me that my shared hosting plan did not offer whitelisting services. I would have to upgrade to VPS or a dedicated server. For my level of traffic, shared hosting has been working perfectly fine, so I did not want to upgrade hosting services.
It was so frustrating to the point that it was easier for me to remove Ezoic and just get my site back online.
Google Adsense
After the debacle with Ezoic integration, I decided to apply for Google Adsense. This is an ad network powered by Google.
Although Adsense is the gold standard for smaller sites, the potential revenue per mille (RPM) is significantly lower than other premium ad networks.
Nevertheless, I applied and, to my surprise, was approved two days later! I opted to do their Auto Ad placement so I didn’t have to bother with ad placement. This literally involved toggling “Auto Ads” on and I had ads on my site within an hour!
Ease of integration between Adsense and Ezoic is like night and day. Ezoic was my storm this month and it was so frustrating to deal with the issues I had. In the seven days that I’ve used Adsense, I’ve had zero problems.
So, there you have it! After seven months of blogging, I have ads on my site now, yay!
Patience, my friend
Seven months of blogging has been bittersweet. I’m glad that I’m doing updates every month because each month is so different. There’s a lot of learning, growing, and taking two steps forward, one step back.
It was pretty brutal to see my site averaging 30 pageviews per day at the beginning of the month, then to plummet after the DNS changes with Ezoic and then ad placement. I’m sure there was a Google core update in there as well.
After seeing all the changes this past month and the effects they had on my traffic, it is hard to keep doing what I do to maintain the blog and publish content. I’ve experienced so much impatience this month, more than any previous month of blogging.
Ultimately, I need to look at this as a bump in the road.
Final thoughts on seven months of blogging
I’m definitely aware that the general tone of this article is negative and disheartening. That’s how I felt about blogging this month. I tried to include some positives in here, but it just wasn’t happening.
The reality of blogging is that there are going to be highs and lows. There will be challenging days or months. When you have months like this, it’s always good to think about your short and long-term goals for your blog.
I’m still looking forward to publishing my 100th post. That’s going to be an amazing moment and it’s something I don’t want to miss out on. So, I keep moving forward. Thanks for reading my recap of seven months of blogging!