2019 Mamma’s List Review

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The end of 2019 is here and while I obviously knew it was coming, it feels like time is slipping right through my fingertips. We’ve had a big year – personally and professionally in our house, and it always helps me to reflect back on everything that’s happened. I started this after my first full year blogging – and creating a 2019 review really helped me look back on how much our lives have changed over the past year.  

Most of this post will focus on The Mamma’s List and blog growth, but since we’ve had so many other milestones in our personal lives I wanted to share those with you as well. If you have no interest in hearing about blogging, you can probably stop after the first section 🙂 

If you’re coming and just want the blog facts, jump there now!

Sometimes my posts contain affiliate links. That means if you buy something using one of my links I may receive a small commission – at no additional cost to you! How cool is that? It’s kind of boring, but feel free to read my full disclosure if you want more info.

2019 Review: Personal Changes at The Mamma’s List

Our daughter turned three this year.

That came with a whole lot of sassiness and even more of her personality shining through. She also decided to take after her mamma and turned into a cuddlebug/couch potato. She’s now my favorite movie companion. Cuddling on the couch is one of my happy places.

We made the decision to grow our family,

This was a decision we’d been agonizing over for literally a year. And putting off even before that. Finally deciding to just take the plunge was liberating, and it helped drive so many other decisions in our life. For instance, not planning that dream Mediterranean cruise for 2020 🙂 Baby S coming in March!

I survived the first trimester.

If any of you talked to me through this phase you know it wasn’t a small feat for me. Morning sickness was one of the key drivers in our decision to wait so long between pregnancies. I’m not one of those women who “felt a little nauseous once or twice” the first 13 weeks. I was on medication by week five and didn’t stop it until about 24 weeks. {Update: I’m 28 weeks and the nausea that came back in my third trimester last time is starting to make an appearance again – woohoo!}

Received a promotion at my day job in marketing.

This was a huge professional milestone for me since we typically only get promoted every 3-4 years. In fact, my last promotion was almost exactly the same time, when I was pregnant with our first daughter, in my first trimester. I’ve now had to go to two new bosses the first month I was working for them to tell them I was pregnant. Strange coincidence. 

Continued savings growth.

We made the decision NOT to move to a bigger house in order to continue to pursue FI. I haven’t written about our finances or long term goals this year since it didn’t seem to be a big topic of interest on a mom blog, BUT I’m super passionate about personal finance. We learned about the Financial Independence movement last year and while we’re not as hardcore as many people pursuing FI, I love following the steps and the journey. The podcast ChooseFI is awesome, here’s a link to one of the best episodes on “the Why of FI.” 

Committed to conquering my emetophobia.

This is something I’ve struggled with since elementary school, and since having kids it’s become something I’m no longer ok living with. Nope, it hasn’t happened yet, but I’m working on it. If anyone else wants to chat about this – send me an email!

And now down to the blog nitty-gritty. I share this with you guys because you know how I feel about goal setting. I don’t blog about blogging or make money trying to sell you any blogging tools. All of this is purely informational so you can see my win/loss column. 

2019 Review: The Mamma’s List Blog Hits & Misses

I started these Year in Review after I’d had my blog for a full year. As an “achiever” personality type (learn more about Clifton’s 34 Strengths here) it’s really hard for me to be satisfied with accomplishments. Particularly if they aren’t the goals or milestones I set for myself at the beginning of the year.  

I’m going to be super transparent with you all. I only hit TWO of my five goals this year. And I missed the biggest ones.  It’s really depressing to miss on things, and the worst part is that I’m honestly not sure what I could have done differently for a new outcome. If I knew I’d just thrown in the towel that would maybe have helped me rationalize the misses. 

That said – although I didn’t hit the big goals I’d set for the blog, I do have some very MEASURABLE OUTCOMES I’ll share below. 

So, let’s dive into this….

First things first, I’m going to do a quick goal review with the WINS/MISSES on the goals I set for the blog this year. I’ll then jump into some additional metrics behind them. You’ll note that both the wins and misses have caveats since life just isn’t black and white. 

2019 WINS: 

The Mamma’s List daddy joined the team.

I almost forgot to put this one in here, but it’s such a milestone I can’t believe it hadn’t been a year yet. The daddy behind The Mamma’s List started running our Pinterest program, and for that I’ll be forever grateful. Having someone who not only supports you verbally, but also shows you support with their actions, is invaluable. It meant the world to me when he volunteered to help out so I could focus on other things. If I hadn’t already known (which I did), I got a winner.

Implemented Pinning Perfect in Q1 2019.

This is a blogging course I took at the beginning of the year. I took the course and followed the steps, and yet, no massive boom of Pinterest traffic. I did learn a lot and thought it was one of the most comprehensive Pinterest courses I’ve taken, but unfortunately even though I implemented the strategy I didn’t see the growth. I’m still calling this a “win” because I did the work. 

Completed Elite Blog Academy and launched a product.

I actually launched my product in June and completed EBA in October. I started EBA in March 2018 so it took me just over a year and a half to complete while working in the margins of life. I’m so proud of myself for sticking with it and going through all the lessons.

However, per the above, I haven’t yet flipped my business to profitability. Some of that is due to spending on Facebook ads – which is one of the suggestions in the course, but I was definitely hoping to be much farther along with my blog at official year 2.5. Also – my product actually flopped. I mentioned this in my last newsletter since it’s something I’ll be working on for 2020. Every failure teaches us something, so hopefully next year I can optimize and improve. I’m calling this one a “win” because I did it, but also not because it worked. 

Other cool stuff that happened, but I didn’t have on my official goals list:

• I set up my own shopify store to sell my digital products. Guys, I am a 100% normal person and I have my own online storefront. How cool is that?!
• I took more Pinterest classes in order to try and get myself into this mythical traffic place. Spoiler, I still didn’t crack the code, but if you’re interested in learning about Pinterest, here are some other options:
  • The  Pinterest Project – These ladies saw massive success within the first six months of launching their blog. It’s amazing how quickly they’ve grown. 
  • Pinterest Launch Plan – Jennifer Maker is one of the biggest names in the blogging world, making over $100k/month. And she started from zero. I tend to listen to her advice. 
• First big guest post submission acceptances on RedTri. Published two articles with them in 1H 2019. 
• I was accepted as a guest poster on Motherly. Here’s the open letter to my daughter in case you haven’t read it yet. 
• Was approached unsolicited (and accepted) another product review. Check out the Baby Charm Stroller Organizer. 
• Put myself on video for the first time during my course launch. Yes, it was scary. 
• I sold products during my beta launch, and responses of people who purchased were positive. 
• Fought (and won) a lot of tech upgrades: WordPress Update, Hosting Migration, Leadpages and Shopify Integration, etc. Most people who aren’t bloggers won’t understand this one AT ALL, but since I’m not technical you can just take my word for it. It was a lot of work and I’m happy every time I don’t totally break something on my site.

2019 MISSES:

Flip to Profit!

I have been operating this blog at a loss, and wanted to flip to profit in 2019. At the beginning of the year, that looked like making $2k/month by Q4 ‘19. Yes, I know I’ve spent a lot of money. Don’t remind me. It’s still not looking good 🙂 

I DID do headline and copy testing on my product and tripwires multiple times in the second half. No results yet, but I’m still plugging away. For me, this was a big miss since I really wanted to be able to see tangible results for my work. 

Grow Traffic to 30,000+ pageviews/month (25,000 sessions).

This is a huge milestone in traffic generation because it allows your blog to get accepted into MediaVine. This is one of the bigger ad networks that pay significantly higher rates than Google AdSense.

Traffic growth was the main reason I spent so much time (and $$) on Pinterest courses. I have yet to crack the code, but I’m in another course right now, so stay tuned for an update early next year to see if it moves the needle. 

Grow email subscriber list to 5,000.

I grew my list from around 100 to almost 3,000 this year. It was one of my biggest accomplishments, and is something I feel like I’ve almost “figured out.” 

What I mean by this is that most of you are probably here because you found a Facebook ad with my email opt-in. People see what I’m about, and I get subscribers. It took a few tries, but it’s now humming along. This is something that clicked in January, and if I’d wanted to invest even more money and had left my opt-in running continually all year, I have no doubt I’d be at the 5,000 subscriber mark.

 HOWEVER – since I don’t have a successful product or small scale item to sell (called a tripwire), I haven’t figured out how to PROFITABLY grow my list. For me this is neutral. It’s not a “win” because I didn’t complete the goal, and I lose money doing it, but I have grown substantially this year. 

I always want to accomplish more than I do, so there are tons of little tasks that I wanted to get to this year that I just didn’t hit. That said, in 2020 I’m going to try and focus more on the big picture and not sweat the small stuff as much.

If I don’t get a post up every week — oh well. The blog won’t die. 

Do you want to stay updated on all things The Mamma’s List? We mainly send out parenting advice but have some pretty awesome life planning stuff in the resource library. Subscribe to stay in the know!

2019 Review: Blog growth metrics… what really happened?

Because who doesn’t love a good graph or some statistics? 

Email growth

My email list grew from 96 subscribers in January 2019 to 2831 in mid-December — that’s including the 8 subscribers I lost today because I sent out an email. That’s 2,848% growth. 

I know it’s not 5,000 subscribers, but at least the needle is moving!

You can see from the graph essentially when I ran Facebook ads with my opt-in. 

GRAPH HERE

Social Stats

Across Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, I was able to grow my number of followers just over 60%. Yes, the base was small, but now I have 2,500 followers starting from scratch. 

I haven’t spent any time trying to figure out Facebook or really even posting on Instagram (more on that in the new year) so any growth is a bonus for me. If you aren’t already following me on these platforms, come on over, I’d love to hang out with you!

Instagram

Pinterest 

Facebook

Pageviews

I had about 205,000 page views this year, up from about 43,000 last year. Some of this was from Facebook ads, some were from my improved Pinterest strategy, and I’d like to think that some of it were from more people actually just coming back to read what I’m writing!

Either way, pageviews were up 371% versus 2018, so I have to feel like we’re going somewhere. I know big bloggers can get over 100,000 page views per month, I’m just celebrating my small wins over here.

Product Launch

These are the saddest metrics here. I did generate some sales in my beta course launch, but only sold TWO of my official product. To my friends who wanted to support me. It was a humbling experience, and of course, I was so grateful for those two sales. However, since I know product creation can be a great way to drive an online business it will be an area of focus in 2020. 

I always need to remind myself to take a step back and track my growth for the entire year. I typically look month over month, and when I see things trending downward I get upset. When I take a step back and look at the year, you can almost always find measurable growth.  

Think about how you can apply that to your own life. Everything looks different from 3,000 feet. 

What’s on Deck for 2020

It’s product review time.

With a new little lady on the way, I think it’s time I get back to my super stalking google roots and dig up some of the best products I can find for newborns and infants. And of course, I’m going to share the info with you. Anything specific you want information on? Shoot me a note!

The transition from one to two kiddos.

I didn’t feel qualified to write about this before although I’ve shared other articles on social, but next year I’ll definitely be doing some writing on this topic. Specifically, I already have some thoughts on what to share about the terrifying moment I found out I was pregnant. {Yes, it was planned, but still.} I also want to really dive into what life is like going from one to two, so I can help anyone else preparing to make the leap.

Updating / altering my new mom survival guide and breastfeeding & working series.

Based on what I’ve heard from you all in the past, help with breastfeeding and making the transition back to work is important. However, I’m not too proud to admit when I flop. And what I created wasn’t resonating — or I didn’t communicate it well enough, see above. Either way, while many of you were interested in the beta course, the actual launch was a big fat flop. I’m going to try to fix this next year. {Alternatively, please tell me if I shouldn’t bother – if you want to see something else, I’m all ears!}

If you made it all the way to the bottom of this post, I applaud you, and I wanted to say I’m so epically grateful for each and every person who reads what I put out into the world. 

I hope you have an amazing holiday with your friends and family – snuggle those littles tight.

Sharing is caring! Feel free to pin this for later if you want to refer back to it, or want to share it with others. Thanks in advance!

Sharing is caring!