Traffic Alchemy is back with another email about trying to turn traffic into gold. But first, quick reminder of what we’re about: I share my real experiments in building and monetizing websites and social pages.
The links in this email are usually affiliate links. I make a small commissions at no cost to you. I only recommend things I have used and liked.
It’s been a long time since I’ve sent an email. I apologize. To be honest I’m still recovering from hand surgery and I just wasn’t “feeling it.” I’m back now baby!
Facebook Page Growing
I’ve still been diving into social media, with Facebook and Pinterest being my primary interests at the moment. Have about 6 Facebook pages that I currently manage. Most pages have been slow to get reach, but one page started taking off.
Reach is looking good 🚀
4.5M reach is pretty good. You can see 3 peaks. The first, I had my biggest viral hit. The second two are when I reposted that same post. You can see that while not as large as the first spike, that same post still drove a lot of engagement the second and third times I posted it.
I did get two pages accepted into the Facebook bonus program. If you’re not familiar, this is a program where Meta basically pays you to post and keep people on their platforms. The two pages that did get invited have low engagement though, so the payouts have been nothing worth talking about.
Links on my Facebook posts are starting to drive some traffic
This page is a bit more risqué, so I don’t think it will get invited to the bonus program. My way to monetize this one is going to be to drive traffic off-site to my own website and try to monetize there. I will try to get approved for a display ad network soon, but with the content being iffy, I’m not sure if that will happen either. I have some other monetization ideas still.
I’m also building an email list for this site. I don’t have major plans for how I will use it, but conversions rates have been around 8% on popovers on the site.
What I do know is that if you can get traffic, there is almost always some way to monetize it.
Pinterest Traffic Down, Earnings Steady
If you’ve been following along, I have a Pinterest page that I’m testing. It’s mostly inspirational style content, which tends to do well on Pinterest. I realized recently that my impressions have been cut in half, which is impacting the number of outbound clicks that I see to my website.
The surprising thing is that earnings for the month are stable. This is is because my RPMs on Journey by Mediavine continue to increase. 🚀
Pinterest peaked at 180k impressions per day and dropped to 90k impression.
But these metrics are all increasing:
Engagement rate is up 54% 📈
Pin click rate is up 64% 📈
Outbound click rate is up 117% 📈
This tells me that users are engaging with the content, which makes me think they like. However, Pinterest is not distributing the content to as many people. This is probably partially due to the Pinterest algorithm update that happened a few months ago.
I’m going to try to create some fresh content and optimize the keywords I target in the pin titles and descriptions with PinClicks. PinClicks is a tool that allows you to explore the interests on Pinterest, find top performing pins, and see the official annotations for the pins. Those annotations are likely added by humans and machines and are words that Pinterest recognizes. You can use them in your pins to optimize for Pinterest’s search engine.
Speaking of PinClicks, they recently released a Pinterest rank tracker. This is the first of it’s kind. I’m not aware of any software that tracks how your pins are performing. If you’ve ever done search engine optimization (SEO) work, then you know how valuable knowing this information can be.
If you want to give Pinclicks a try you can sign up here.
Tool Updates
If you don’t know, I sometimes release free tools on my website. Recently a popular YouTube channel by Jesse Cunningham mention the Journey By Mediavine Explorer tool that I created.
As a member of Traffic Alchemy, you get access to this tool. Though it may ask you to enter your email again.
The point of the tool is that you can see the types of sites that are being approved for Journey by Mediavine. You can examine the sites, find niches, and apply similar content strategies.
My thought is that if they were able to meet the requirements to join Journey, then they are good examples for those of you just starting out.
What’s Happening Next?
I plan to release a video about how you can put Pinterest pages on autopilot. You can create and schedule your posts with one click and be done for the month. You’re not going to want to miss this one.