May 2022 Writing Report

April flew right on by, and the end especially was an amazing month that last week or so. Normally, I’m super focused on hitting the publishing metrics, but in April, I got the opportunity to attend an in-person mastermind in Las Vegas.

Just for the record, I’ve decided I’m not a huge fan of the public policy in Vegas that allows people to smoke pretty much anywhere. It triggered a few breathing issues with my asthma. Luckily, I always travel with my inhalers.

Even so, the mastermind conference? **Muah! Chef’s kiss of perfection. I found a group of my people, and they are amazing.

Notes from the Mastermind

I can’t share all of my notes with you from the mastermind, as I did take 25+ pages of notes in a Word document. And a lot of those are personal notes, helping me see how and where I can improve my portfolio and/or my business.

Other notes are insights I got from the brave souls who shared some insights into their portfolio or business, and so those aren’t my stories to share.

And there are a whole lot of notes in there about how I’ve drunk too much water (I drink 80 oz a day or more on average) combined with diet Coke (they didn’t have diet Mountain Dew, sadly), and so I have to visit the little girls’ room quite urgently.

Thankfully, the organizers planned hourly breaks. It’s like they knew we’d all be trying to stay hydrated in a desert, while also needing regular brain breaks.

Even so, here are the biggest takeaways I got from the mastermind:

I’ve been thinking TOO SMALL. A few mindset shifts and an organizational adjustment mean that my portfolio should be able to grow faster, be more sustainable, and become a larger force for good in the world – while minimizing a lot of the overhead and growing pains I’d been dreading.

Me in Vegas, while trying not to giggle too much

And seriously. After some of the other takeaways from the meeting? Being able to be a larger force for good is exciting. Not that there were any supervillains at the meeting, mind. They’re all good people. Some of them just have different thoughts on paywalls than I do. And that’s totally fine.

So, let’s get into the reports.

Site Reports

The sites continue to grow. The average growth for visits is 139% compared to last year, and 7% up from March. Income is up 88% from March and 213% from last year.

Those are some pretty awesome statistics, and so are these.

• Total new posts: 23
• Total Sessions: 102,264
• Revenue: $2,667
• EPMV: $20.36
• Montization: Ads + affiliates

Getting from $0 to $1,000 per month took me 24 months after joining Project 24.

Getting from $1,000 to $2,000 per month took me 4 months.

I did have a backslide from the first $2k month, but I’m officially back to it now.

Okay, so the report looks a bit different from last month’s report, and that’s on purpose. These reports could get very detailed if I wanted them to, and then I’d be spending my whole month writing this report.

Not only do I not want that, but I also want to be able to scale back some of the reporting to the portfolio level, rather than at the site level. This is done primarily to help me manage my time, but it also helps some with privacy.

As portfolios grow, it’s only natural (from all of the other reports I’ve read) for this to happen. So I’m going to go ahead and implement it now rather than waiting for some higher dollar monthly earnings amount.

I’m still sharing the portfolio-wide numbers for the time being, although that will begin to drop off in the future, too. There are still only a few of you reading these reports just yet, and that’s okay. You all have access to my spreadsheet (thank you again, spreadsheet guru, who made it for me!).

But for the future writers who read this? I hope to leave you inspired. Or maybe nobody sees this in the future and it’s a moot point. Either way, it’s all good. I’ll keep reporting what I’m comfortable reporting.

Mindset Shifts & Reorganization

Previously, I’ve done teamwork reports. Those are now done. My team continues to grow and shrink because there is a turnover in the writing world. That’s totally normal.

I’ve got my core set of writers, a virtual assistant, and an editor on the team at the moment. That will change over time.

The biggest change that will happen has to do with the mindset shift I mentioned earlier. It’s this: quit thinking small.

In order to think bigger, I did rearrange my ClickUp space. I simplified everything. I streamlined things. It could probably use more simplifying and streamlining. I’ll keep doing that.

In the meantime, it’s fun to implement things I learned from others at the mastermind and to see how much my team loves having things simpler and easier.

Just for reference, the biggest change is that I centralized each role’s tasks into a single dashboard. That way, all of the prioritized tasks and projects are there – and they’re prioritized for the team. They don’t have to wonder which thing to do next.

Each team has its own dashboard. They can track every metric they need right there. They don’t have to look at other folders or lists or views. And they love that it’s dead simple.

I’m trying to figure out a way for them to track their invoicing from the dashboard, but that’s proving trickier. I can track it from mine quite easily. I’ll keep working on it because I believe in transparency. But even if I can’t figure that out, I’ve given my team the tools they need to get the job done – and keep it simple.

Goals for May

In any case, it’s May and I’ve got a lot more planned awesomeness to do and accomplish. The team continues to work and make progress on the publishing goals. I’ll keep working on prepping the organization (still a lot to do there), getting ready to expand the team again, and testing a theme change (it’s on this site – so what do you think of it? Trick question – I don’t have comments enabled!!).

We also need to finish up homeschooling for the school year, get a few house projects done, and have fun as a family. So, nothing crazy, right?

And I’d really like to hit May’s publishing goal since I didn’t hit April’s (by a couple of posts – Vegas really got me distracted!). Thankfully, the distraction should prove worth it – it already has.

I’ll see you all next month.