Building a Blogging Business: Goal Review - Third Quarter 2021

So much about building my business feels like pushing a snowball up a hill. 

You start off with a small snowball. And as you learn more about creating and running a business, you start pushing the snowball and it grows. As you push that snowball up the hill of time and you learn more and more about how to run your business, it continues to grow bigger and bigger. 

At some point you’re going to hit the top of the hill. Enough time will have passed and enough work will have been done to create the momentum for the snowball to roll on its own. But there’s no magic formula for this. No X (work) + Y (time) = Z (business success). You have NO idea when the success from all that work will start to happen. 

Based on how the third quarter of 2021 has gone, I just might be getting to the point where the snowball is starting to roll on its own. Which means I now have to keep up with it. And while some days I’m walking next to the snowball, other days I’m running as fast as I can. 

Website Growth

Website traffic this quarter went through the roof! I had literally 10 times the visitors to this site in Q3 vs Q2, which is a wild uptick. Traffic got a helping hand through the Google Web Stories I’ve been posting for the past few months, which Google’s algorithm was quick to pick up and share in July and August. This trend was slowing a bit at the end of Q3, but my Web Stories keep sending me traffic, so I’m going to keep making them. 

Kickstarter & A Cocktail Book

In July I launched my first Kickstarter campaign to support printing my dream cocktail book, Homemade Happy Hour. The campaign ran for 30 days through mid-August and ended at 131% funded! That increased funding has allowed me to increase the physical size of the book, which is super exciting. 

Homemade Happy Hour is on track to be available for purchase by the end of October. Next up comes setting up ecommerce on my site as well as the work of getting the book into brick-and-mortar stores in the West Michigan area. If you know of a business that should carry my book, help a girl out and connect me with them! 🙂 

SIP Coffee and Cocktails

I’m thrilled to be doing the drink menu for SIP Coffee and Cocktails, a new local cafe opening in early 2022. The menu for SIP is nearly complete and I’m having so much fun creating mocktails, cocktails, and coffee drinks. (Cleaning up the kitchen after a round of recipe development is much less fun.) 

I love collaborating with the team at SIP. In September I was invited to work at an event to help represent SIP alongside the owners and serve my delicious, nonalcoholic apple sangria to 200+ people. The drink was a huge success and I can’t describe how happy it makes me to see someone enjoying something I made. My face hurt from smiling that night. My alcohol-free Apple Sangria will be on the mocktail menu at SIP when the cafe opens. I can’t wait for you to try it!

Newsletter Growth 

Subscribers to my weekly newsletter have doubled this quarter. I know website pop ups are a little annoying, and you probably closed one to read this post. But here’s the reality - I did an experiment and pulled that pop up for 3 months this spring, leaving 2 places - on my header and sidebar - for people to subscribe. And my newsletter sign ups flatlined. I added the pop up back to the site in early July and saw an immediate uptick in sign ups. So it’s staying. #sorrynotsorry 

Looking Ahead

If you’ve been following my blogging journey this year, you might remember that I themed each quarter to help give myself some direction. Q1 was about building the foundation of my business, for Q2 I focused on the technology of blogging, and Q3 was all about my cocktail book. 

As we head into Q4, I’ve purposefully left these last three months simply themed “holidays.” The fourth quarter is traditionally good for website traffic on food and drink sites as people are searching for holiday recipes. I want to be able to focus on delivering the best content possible to my site visitors during this notoriously busy time. 

I also want to focus on wrapping up projects and working with a few new ones. Putting the final polish on the SIP Coffee and Cocktails drink menu, getting my cocktail book into local stores, hosting cocktail classes, and working with a new recipe development client are all exciting business ventures on the list for finishing out 2021. 

Strange as it seems, 2022 is very close, so setting my quarterly goal for next year will also happen in Q4. I’m thinking about regularly hosting virtual cocktail classes via Zoom next year. What do you think? Would you be into that? 

Until the next review, sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you some recipes! 

xo - Katy