27. Let’s Celebrate Your Traffic!

Stephanie 0:00

On the journey to getting more traffic to your TPT store, it can be easy to focus on how far you have left to go. So when it's time to celebrate your marketing wins, you feel like there's nothing to be excited about. Let's flip the script, as I show you where you can go to find something worth celebrating.

Stephanie 0:22

Hey there, teacher business owner. It's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:33

Welcome back to the podcast. For the past two weeks, we've been talking about our traffic plans for next year, an important part of maintaining your blogging momentum is to identify what's working and do more of that. Whether you're just starting out, or you've been blogging for a while, you might be in a season where it just feels like nothing is really working. So in this episode, I'm going to share a few places where you can find something to celebrate, even when you feel like things aren't going very well.

Stephanie 1:07

The first place where you can look for something to celebrate, it sounds simple, but it is your list of blog posts that are on your website. I like to maintain a list in Airtable of all of my blog content, and it's partially for this purpose, because when I'm feeling burned out or uninspired, I like to scroll through the list of things that I've already written just to remind myself that I can do this. Now you don't have to maintain a separate blog content spreadsheet in order to do this, you can just log into your website dashboard, navigate to the list of all posts, and then just take a minute to recognize all of the effort you put into creating that content. Now, why would this be an important thing to do? Well in the professional blogging space, there are a lot of people that, instead of building a website from scratch, they like to buy existing websites to build their portfolios and increase their online presence. It really is just like a real estate market, and when they're looking for websites to purchase, the existing content on the website can add significantly to the value. You'll often hear like, if you listen to a podcast or something, you'll hear bloggers talk about their recent website acquisitions, and they'll say things like, and it has 200 optimized blog posts, and there's going to be a chorus of oohs and ahs like, Wow, what a great deal. And so celebrate the fact that you have put time and effort into creating these assets for your business. Because your blog posts are assets. They are potential scripts for YouTube videos or podcast episodes. They are future social media captions and emails, and they are a source for getting TPT traffic on autopilot. So going back to that list of your blog posts, whether you have one post on that list or 100, take the time to celebrate what you've created, and think about how you can do more of that.

Stephanie 3:29

Now let's talk about finding something to celebrate on Pinterest. So if you have been using this platform for any length of time, you know what an emotional roller coaster it can be because you spend all this time creating and scheduling pins, and then you're just rewarded with crickets in your stats when you check on them after a week or two. And I know how disheartening this can be, but there are definitely some Pinterest wins that are just lurking below the surface, if you want to take the time to check. And so the next time you open up your Pinterest business account, I want you to click up in the left hand corner on the business hub. There's a menu there and then navigate to the analytics overview at the top, there's like a little graph, and I suggest making the date range for the past year, and then you can switch the content type. And I suggest switching it to organic, just in case you've paid for promoted pins at some point, because I want you to be able to see just organically, what some of your wins are for your business. And so then once you've set those parameters, you're going to scroll down, and there's a graph there that says performance over time. And I want you to switch the metric to outbound clicks, so people who are actually leaving Pinterest to go to your blog, and once you've done that, underneath the graph, you're going to see a number, and I want you to just sit and take in that number for a second and look at the number of people who have seen your pins and not only seen them, but they have clicked and chosen to go to your website to take a closer look at this solution to this problem that they're having. There's a reason why I wanted you to look at it from a full year perspective. Because I want you to see the quantity of people that have turned to you for help with their problem, that you have supported, that many overwhelmed teachers who are quickly trying to find something for their classroom. And then look at that number one more time and think about how long would it take you to have a conversation with each of those teachers and to talk to them about the different features of your product and different ideas for using that product in their classroom. And these are all things that you're able to do on your blog and then directing them to your blog post through Pinterest, and just what a cool opportunity that that is, and so it's definitely something to celebrate. But we're not done yet. Now, in the analytics menu, scroll down just a little bit further, and you'll see the top pins menu. Now this one's a little bit different. At the moment that I'm recording this, they only let you look six months back, and so you'll want to adjust your parameters up at the top of the page and make it six months instead of 12. But anyway, once you've done that, I want you to go and and also look at it in terms of outbound clicks. Once you've done that, you can hover your mouse over those top pins. And when you do that, it gives you some details about that pin, especially when it was created. Now I love looking at this sometimes, because it's just it's so exciting to me to see that something that I created, you know, two or three years ago, is still actively bringing me clicks to my website. And it just never gets old to me. And so I would suggest, if you've never done it before, go to your top pins menu and do that? Hover over the pins and just see, like, wow, this pin that was created so long ago still brought me 1000 clicks to my website in the past six months. You know, just take a minute and celebrate the awesomeness that is long term traffic on autopilot. It's just it's so cool.

Stephanie 8:04

Now I'm going to share with you a place that I love to go to feel just a little bit better about my blogging efforts, and that is Google Search Console. You might already have this connected in your Google Analytics account, but if you don't, you can find it at search.google.com. Now, once you're logged in with your Google credentials, you will choose the performance menu on the left and click on search results. And when you click on it, it should be filtered for the past 12 months, but if it's not, go ahead and adjust it for 12 months. Now, once you're on that page, there's going to be a graph, and you'll see a menu there with six different tabs, and one of those tabs is the Queries tab. When you click on that, you can even sort it based on clicks or impressions. I like to look at it based on clicks. And so once it's all there and organized, just take a look at that list for a minute and just let it soak in. That list of queries represents actual problems and actual questions that real teachers are having, and when they plug that into Google, people are being shown your content. And so just take a minute and look at those topics that Google trusts you enough to send your content to people when they have a question. And I just think that is such a neat thing to celebrate. And then also, you can look at the number of clicks. Look at the number of people who after they've asked the question, and they have seen a list of potential answers, they chose your content. And I just think that is the coolest thing to celebrate. And on top of that, the best thing is that all of these things are happening while you're working on other aspects of your business. Your website is working around the clock to help people find your content and your products on autopilot. And that is something to celebrate. Let's definitely do more of that in 2025.

So if you're newer to blogging and pinning, and you kind of took notes today and thought I'm going to go look at my results. Don't get underwhelmed if you log into Google Search Console and you don't really see any queries. I want you to celebrate the fact that you have successfully set up your website and connected your analytics, because that is an accomplishment in and of itself. So definitely celebrate that in this season where, you know, we're kind of to the point where we're writing off the current year and we're just going to prepare to start fresh in the new year. I wanted to encourage you to just take a step back and truly celebrate some of your traffic wins this year, and those wins that you're celebrating, they don't have to come from the different analytics that I shared in today's episode. I was just hoping to give you a few ideas of places where you can find some little, little pieces of treasure to celebrate when you feel like you're not super excited about blogging or pinning at the moment.

So I would love to hear about some of your traffic wins from this year. You can send me a DM on Instagram or tag me if you're sharing to your stories, and then I can celebrate with you. You can find me on Instagram at stephanieroyersolutions - all one word - or you can find the link in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now, let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.