My March Blogging Month has been a pretty quiet one – both in terms of blog achievements and goals – and just generally with trying to get things done.

But most of that is because it has been really busy at work. In fact, with my colleague away for half the month, I’ve had to pick up their workload too.

This has meant my blog has suffered as a result, so in April I’ll be trying hard to catch up on what needs doing – and hopefully putting together a few more vlogs, which have been on the back burner for some time now.

Who I met

My lovely friend Kerry from Kerry, Life and Loves popped over for lunch one Friday. We had a really nice afternoon chatting about all sorts – I think we could have carried on chatting until the cows came home!

I love it when I hook up with Kerry; we have a very similar sense of humour and I always end up learning a few things from her too.

I was supposed to be hooking up with Laura from Musings Of A Tired Mummy, who had invited me to watch a film with her in London at a blog event. Unfortunately, the snow got the better of us and it would have been a really pain getting into town and back with all the cancellations and delays on the day in question. I’m sure Laura and I will catch up again soon though.

Meanwhile, I’ve been chatting with a lovely girl called Sima from The Curious Pixie for a while now. We both have jobs in media and both love blogging – and we share very similar goals.

So it was nice to finally arrange to meet her for some time out to chat, rather than briefly chat exchange a few words with each other at some blogging or travel event.

We ate at a nice Lebanese restaurant called Yalla Yalla near Oxford Circus and had a great time, sharing stories, hopes and dreams. All being well we’ll be able to hook up again soon.

Blog learning

I’ve only recently learned how to hide my pin images on my blog posts, yet when you click the social media icons to pin an image, up pops the image I created!

What are the advantages of this? Well, it should mean that your web page loads quicker as it’s not displaying the pin.

Plus your blog post will look easier on the eye as visitors won’t have to scroll over the vertical pin image.

How? Here’s the code…

<div style=”display:none;”>PASTE IMG CODE HERE</div>

Once you’ve uploaded your pin image in the blog post, click on the text view at the top, find the pin code and cut and paste the whole code where it reads PASTE IMG CODE HERE.

And that’s all there is to it. You pin won’t show on your blog post, but when someone goes to Pin It, they’ll then see the pin you created.

Now all that’s left to do is work my way through 300-plus blog posts….wish me luck!

In the charts (HIBS)

I think I give up with the HIBS chart – it seems more hassle than it’s worth! It worked fine for months and months on my site and then all of a sudden, something changed and it stopped showing a rank.

I emailed the company, they emailed back, I reapplied to the HIBS website and ……..nothing. Not even a ranking, so I’m not impressed. I’ll leave it on the site for a couple more weeks, but then I’ll take it off if it’s not working properly.

Guest Posts & Opportunities

I’ve been offering my thoughts and links to a couple of my blog posts to bloggers looking for round-up content recently.

Mother Distracted featured me in her post on ‘Reasons Why You Don’t Get That Second Date’

And Travelling With Our Kids featured my tips on ‘How To Survive A Road Trip With Kids’.

Epic fails

I guess my epic fail this month was overestimating how much I could achieve. I set my sights high, got behind on my goals for one reason or another and then felt annoyed that I hadn’t got everything done that I wanted.

I think the learning lesson here is to only set goals that are realistic and achievable – even if things crop up beyond my control. And anything else that I manage to do over and above my goals is a plus.

Epic wins

So while I mention my epic fails, I’ve also got to talk about my epic semi-wins. Last month (in my February blogging month), I touched on the subject of affiliate links and how I was just getting to grips with using them.

I couldn’t believe it when I made one sale in January (from 500 clicks via either my blog, my newsletter or on social media) and I made the grand total of 10p in commission.

I remember telling my friend Nicky and we were having a good old laugh about the fact that I earned 10 pence. “Hey, it’s a start!” I told her. But then Nicky told me that she’d had far fewer clicks on her affiliates but had earned £1.10.

“Perhaps the products I’m promoting are just crap?” I suggested. We had a laugh about that too, but as long as I loved the products I was promoting I couldn’t care less.

In February. I must have only added about 5 more affiliate links, but my click rate increased by 351 to a total of 851 clicks!

I received a total 23 transactions and made the grand total of… £1.86.

Then Kerry from Kerry, Life and Loves reminded me about Skimlinks – and I remembered that I had installed it on my blog sometime last year.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had indeed earned some money since March last year – a grand total of £5.40. Better than a kick in the teeth as they say!

But that got me thinking – what else had I signed up for? I remember before YouTube stopped my monetisation (because I didn’t have enough subscribers?) I had ads on my videos – and lo and behold – I had made some money through Adsense – a total of £36.81.

It’s not an awful lot, but it’s a start! Shame YouTube stopped monetization for accounts with less than 1,000 subscribers. Best start making some new videos!

Blogging Month: March At A Glance

What was great?  The IG Stories Takeover with DotComGiftShop! (soon to be Rex London)
What wasn’t? The snow preventing me from meeting Musings of A Tired Mummy’s Laura
Goals for April: Set achievable goals that won’t leave me feeling like I’ve failed!