Some personal pondering and updates

Personal

The kids

Our son headed back to college for his senior year at Temple last week. And our daughter started her senior year in high school. I can’t believe that I have two seniors now. Of course, this has all kept me busy. Now we are in the midst of her last soccer season and looking into colleges for her.

Unfortunately, she is starting her soccer season sad and down on herself. I won’t miss these mind games played by coaches that’s for sure. It does such damage to already low self-esteem. But I shouldn’t even talk about stuff like this on my blog or I’ll get in trouble and it will get further taken out on my daughter. It’s always the worst feeling having to take it all and not being able to speak up.

Hopefully, the rest of her senior year will be better memories than her senior soccer season.

This is also the time when I reminisce about her journey and how far she has come. Only you guys who have followed me from the beginning know about her struggles for the first 7 years of her life with severe sensory issues and gut health.

Just look at her on her first day of Kindergarten 🥺 with the best big brother:

I had her senior photos taken by a photographer and can’t wait to get them. If you are local check out Britt D’Agostino Photography. You might wonder why I didn’t take those photos myself again like I did for our son. Well, I figured we’d fight less because she is definitely nicer to a stranger than she is to me. It’s less stressful for me that’s for sure!

The furry kids

I don’t know if you saw that I built Frank a ladder to the second-floor window to my son’s bedroom. He definitely misses my son’s nightly company in the bedroom and I have resorted to sleeping half of the night with him. Yeah, I’m crazy! All three indoor cats still hate him so much.

And Maya has gained some weight again and is doing well on her chemo, steroids, and thyroid meds. It has been a lot of work to get her to feel better. According to our vet, she can live with small cell lymphoma like this for many years. Of course, this has made finding pet sitters who are affordable and willing to deal with giving meds a challenge.

I also wanted to share with you quickly that my neighbors bought a prefinished catio and it cracks me up when one of their 3 cats always peeks over the fence at us. Just look at him.

Blogging

There is a massive shift in the blogging community and I don’t know if a small blog like mine can keep existing successfully. A lot of our blogs got hammered with updates from Google and Pinterest with some seriously bad results. I’m not sure if you know that we make money from the ads that are on our sites. The more pageviews we get, the more money we make. Small blogs obviously already don’t make a ton of money but it has been a nice small income for me to be able to stay at home and do what I love which is creating and being creative. Last year was pretty great, to be honest. This year not at all…

A lot of the highest-earning blogs are food blogs because everyone needs to eat and recipes are highly searchable on Google. But there are also major websites that are big businesses with a lot of staff to be able to crank out a ton of content which are also a problem for small websites like mine because I can’t compete with them and their domain authorities or ability to publish a large amount of quality content.

So have any of you googled something lately? If so have you noticed that the first-page search results are mostly sponsored content, retail websites selling their products, and AI-generated content answering your questions instead of blogs? Or you get lots of YouTube video results.

While Google always says they want to make everything a better user experience, I call it all BS because they simply just geared it towards retail and making the most money for themselves. Hey, they are a major company. This is so layered and there is so much more to it.
If you want to help out smaller websites, try skipping the first page in Google search results and maybe head to the 2nd or 3rd page to view that content.
You might also think, why should I care about smaller websites when I can get it all on larger sites? Well if you are for supporting small businesses then this is basically the same thing.

Google’s updates have resulted in a lot of our blogs losing rankings in search which resulted in big pageview declines. But, this isn’t all…

Pinterest

My blog always heavily relied on traffic from Pinterest. I have very visual content with projects that might not be searchable on Google since people don’t even know the project exists. So this is where Pinterest has always been great for me to be discovered. People saw my project’s image and then headed over to check it out.
Have you guys still been using Pinterest? Have you noticed that barely any cool projects and ideas show up anymore? That platform now is also geared towards retail websites or making money with affiliate links on images that don’t lead to blogs. For example, people pin images from Instagram, and Pinterest then tag products on those images and make money from that. They are penalizing blogs now and their algorithm doesn’t show our pins to a lot of users anymore. My traffic from Pinterest has dropped 50% which is devastating. That means 50% less income!!!

Social media apps like Instagram and TikTok are driving me crazy. I can’t and don’t want to obsess about them but I guess I should. You can only be successful on those platforms for your own business growth if you are constantly posting engaging content. It is exhausting and not fun. It’s killing my creativity. I post when I feel like it and have something to share instead of bombarding people with posts which resulted in nobody seeing my posts anymore.
I’m also so sick of seeing older projects that content creators created who have been around for a long time like me, presented by popular influencers as if they came up with the idea.

I’m starting to feel like an old lady who can’t keep up with the latest rules for content creators anymore. It is very hard for one person to be successful in this business anymore unless you hire others. To me that then also loses the authenticity you had when it was just you.

So I’m starting to ponder the thought of getting a different job and giving up unless something changes for the better again which I doubt. If everything keeps declining, then I have no other choice. Maybe I’ll work for one of the big blogs (sigh).

So that’s it and if you made it to the end of this post then thanks so much!