KC blogs at The Real Thing with the Coake Family blog where she shares organizing tips, recipes, DIY, crafts, organizing, kids activities, family, holiday & seasonal ideas. She started with Monumetric in September of 2015 and is thrilled with how much her site and income have grown since then. I caught up with her recently to see how things were going and asked her about what she’s learned about growing a site.
At first, KC’s pageviews were in the 45,000–50,000 per month range. Then she “went through an explosion in traffic” after she started to focus on Pinterest as a way to drive traffic to her blog. It started with taking a course called Pinning Perfect which she credits with teaching her the strategy she uses now. First, she pins more. How much does she pin per day? It’s probably more than you expect — it’s over 20 pins every day and it’s a mix of her posts and other people’s pins. She consistently pins 13–20 of other people’s work and 12 pins a day from her site.
In addition, KC started to pay more attention to Pinterest SEO. She uses keywords in her pin titles and board names. In addition, she saw an increase in traffic when Pinterest’s algorithm started to show older content. She had so many older pins that she was in the perfect position to benefit. Notice how her boards are branded with her part of her blog and then what each board is about. The first board, for example, is titled, “Real Coake blog” and then there’s “Real organization” and so on.
Using these strategies, she’s more than tripled her traffic. Today her blog gets over 200,000 pageviews a month! In addition to her traffic increasing, she’s also gotten higher revenue from her blog. In the beginning, she made about $200 a month from Google AdSense. When she joined Monumetric she decided to go all in and give all her ad spots to us which she credits with more than doubling her income.
“I had a hodgepodge of ad networks on my blog,” she explained. Now all of her ads are with Monumetric, and she even removed ads in old posts, calling them “a stupid waste of space” to have.
Recently she signed up for FLIGHT to start monetizing her mobile traffic. She didn’t see an increase right away and was concerned, but her account representative Ali worked with her to increase her ads. Ali explained that it can take time for mobile advertisers to get to know a blog’s traffic before you start seeing higher eCPMs.
One feature KC loves about FLIGHT is the design. Her theme was mobile friendly before FLIGHT, but it didn’t show her blog’s sidebar. That means none of the ads in her sidebar showed up. With FLIGHT, ads are now integrated into her content and more ads are showing up so she will start to see the benefits from that.
