You can’t manage what you don’t measure, so it’s well past time that I sat down and tried to put a value to what I am doing online. I can’t sell things to people who don’t know I exist, so marketing is a big part of my hobby microbusiness!

January is pretty much over, so what I’m doing now is planning out how I want to work on the goal in February.

2018 Data Crunching

Only 18.9% of the traffic to the blog last year came from social media. On the one hand that’s cool because it means Google thinks I am worthy of search traffic… but on the other hand it’s horrible since a lot of people use social media as a way to find things.

So a rough goal of mine for 2019 was to increase my social media driven traffic so it makes up at least 25% of the total. Without going broke!

I loved a lot about my free trial at Tailwind, but at $15 a month, I’m just not ready to take that leap yet. (I’m already paying $13 for Canva.)

So how do you get traffic without paying a lot of money or spending a lot of time? …I have no idea. Yet!

Scheduling Posts

Right now I am planning on using a combination of Buffer, Hootsuite, and the Facebook Pages built-in future post options.

Buffer and Hootsuite both offer a queue of 10 posts per channel (Buffer does 30 total, split however you want), so that gives me 60 posts to play with. It just means I need to sit down at the start of each week and figure out what needs to go where.

This method means more manual work on my part, since there isn’t an easy way to set posts up to constantly repost every few months… but I don’t know which plans will work so best to keep it cheap! 😀

Pinterest

My Pinterest numbers are… odd.

Folks look at and repin my Saturday Story Prompt pins like gangbusters, but they rarely click on them. So they aren’t great for driving traffic to Etsy or the blog, but they make up almost all of my views and saves.

On the other hand, while they have fewer impressions, the Molds and Plaster Casting pins have much higher percentages of clicks and saves. The plaster posts are also the majority of the ones that get pinned from the website by visitors.

I want traffic, I don’t just want to be popular on Pinterest! So for February, I’m going to focus in on pins that either link to an item for sale (Etsy or Amazon) or on a How-To post that will bring folks back to the blog.

Twitter

I’m still learning this platform, so I don’t have a lot to go on. Right now it looks like folks like the prompt pins, but I seem to get more interaction when I play in the various small daily writing challenges.

There is also a lot of weight put on interactions vs. static posts, so it may be that I end up doing most of my tweets manually. I just need to make time to sit down once a day and chat with folks! 🙂

My Twitter account is meant to be more about writing than art, but I’d like to keep a balance in the post topics (3 writing for every 1 art, or somesuch). *ponders*

Instagram

I’ve had much better luck with my Instagram than I have with the other social media channels. I think it’s because it’s a more art/visually focused world and that plays to my strengths. (Although it’s hard to tell if it’s driving any traffic...)

I’m currently following way more folks than follow me back, which is something I need to focus on reversing. For a long time I was automatically following back anywho who followed me… and then they’d drop me after a few days/weeks/hours.

It’s a follow-eat-follower world! *solemn nod*

So my goal for February is to get into a daily posting schedule, but also to go through and clean up my following list. I need to get it down to a list of people I actually like and comment on, since my feed is crazy clogged right now.

Facebook

I have had my Facebook page for years… and you can’t really tell. I’m still under 100 followers and for the most part my posts go by without much interaction.

I’ve considered just abandoning the page in the past (since my Instagram is much more popular), but when I floated the idea to the group they asked me to keep it going.

So… I just have to figure out what to do with it.

I know Facebook favors images and folk seem to be interested in the process and not just the finished products. So I think I need to work out some sort of daily update posting– or a way to repurpose the posts I’m making to the other platforms.

Etsy

I have almost never used the shop updates feature on Etsy, but I’ve heard that it can help bring in traffic. Since I’m not planning on working on process and not new listings in February, it might be worth it to give this a try.

It looks like posting updates here might line up well with posting updates to Facebook and Instagram… *ponders*

Da Plan

The first plan… is to make plans!

I’m going to take the goals I came up with here and build up a Google spreadsheet for February. Then I’ll know how many posts of each type I need (and when). It should be easy to work out the timing on loading up the scheduling programs… since, in theory, the posts will all be pre-written.

Onwards! 🙂