by Mia M.
Hello, gorgeous humans, I hope you’re all keeping well! I just wanted to duck in with a little life/blog update . . . and, seeing as you’d probably be bored if I just yammered about my life for ten minutes, I decided to share a cute outfit too!
(Actually, this is no mere cute outfit. This is my favourite outfit. It’s comfy, it’s casual and it still manages to look good? How could I not adore it?)
So I’ve been a little bit absent from the blog this month. In my last post, I mentioned that I’ve been putting in the groundwork for a business I’m starting in the new year. Well, my Etsy business kind of bloomed over the past few weeks and, as people keep ordering 3 candles at a time, I’ve been quite busy fulfilling orders!
(Which is awesome. Thank you, almighty Etsy gods, I massively appreciate your blessing.)
However, as is often the way, the scale may have tipped in Etsy’s favour . . . but only because it lifted off my website’s. Now, I’m pretty transparent about how I monetise this site. My last income report was when I was first starting to figure out Ads and they were already one of my lead breadwinners.
Key word here – were. I tried to integrate a different ad platform (Infolinks) to my site and it completely fucked everything up. The Infolinks code messed with the Adsense code, so no ads were displaying.
In the end, I had to roll back my site (losing a bunch of content/upgrades/comments/hours of site speed improvement work) to before I ever installed the Infolinks plugin because just uninstalling it isn’t enough.
Not to mention the fact that, because I had been doing all these changes, I had to manually reinstall/uninstall each plugin to see where the error was. Only to realise it was Infolinks, have the plugin uninstall not remove all the code/data like it’s meant to and have to roll back my site again.
It took me literally 2 weeks to get my ads back up and running. But we got there! Fine, phew, I’m just happy they’re up and running. At this point, my blog was pulling in great views, my ad earnings were higher than they’ve ever been . . .
And then I got hit with an adserve limit (that limit being 0) because of invalid traffic concerns. From what I can gather, where I had no ads running at all for a few weeks then a sudden influx of ad views, it triggered something in Google’s algorithm.
Do I understand this? Yes.
Does it make the fact I’m missing out on $400-500 right after paying for my visa less upsetting? No.
Plus, considering you can’t contact Adsense directly, I have to just . . . wait. Apparently it’s usually resolved in less than 30 days but it can (and, according to the internet, often does) take longer. So that’s fun.
All of this is to say that your girl is feeling a bit demotivated. I’m trying to not be entitled or bratty about it; Google don’t owe me ads.
To be honest, it’s just been hard to motivate myself to spend hours working on my site on top of my job and two side hustles when I know the work quite literally isn’t going to pay off at the moment. So yeah. That’s pretty much it for this update and what’s been going on in the background over here!
I’m taking the approach of this is my planning time not posting time. Hopefully by the new year, my ads will be up and running – and I’ve already got most of January’s content written up! I’m still going to be kicking around in the blogosphere until then, but rather than focusing my efforts on pushing out content now, I’m just going to focus on planning and preparation.
As of writing this post, my ads seem to be slowly getting back up! (In fact, I earned a whole $6 yesterday! I know that sounds sarcastic, but I’m genuinely so happy because I’ve been earning $0 for the past few weeks. Thank you, Google!)
I hope this post didn’t sound too whiny or anything – I just wanted to get a little explanation up for why I haven’t been posting as much this month. Silver linings, though: I’ve got so much fun stuff coming up for you all in January! Have you guys ever struggled with feeling super demotivated with blogging? How do you get out the funk? Let me know your thoughts down below!
Peace,
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About Mia M.
I'm going through a bit of an existential crisis right now, I'll tell you about myself when I figure out if I'm real or not.
tattoo lover, plant hoarder, DIY addict and overall stoner grandma
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