Dear Friends of A Country Girl’s Life-
This is gonna be a long one so bear with me….and PLEASE read everything!
I know we’re all adjusting to new realities with this world wide shut down. I see friends and family on Facebook everyday talking about furloughs and layoffs.
I know that this is affecting many people in some really, really negative ways. This week our little website got hit with some seriously bad news. Due to Coronavirus and the huge economic recession, we’re now seeing our advertising revenue being cut in HALF.
Some may be new here so I’ll just reiterate that we sustain our totally free website through advertising income (and the small amount that comes from our shop). This has allowed us to pay for the costs and my labor for running a website that sees hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. I’m going to be honest, this is a huge blow and this development is having us rethinking the future of our website.
To put things in perspective….to earn as much as we once did, we’d have to work twice as hard. I’m a one woman show here and I usually work 40-50 hours a week creating content and freebies for the website….I’m not sure I can work 80-100 hours a week (without cloning myself somehow).
I know everyone is struggling financially right now but there are ways that you can help support us that don’t cost you a cent. Here are a few ideas on how you can support our website and keep us going:
#1 Biggest Impact: Clicking on ads. You don’t have to buy anything but just clicking on an ad and spending a little time on that advertisers website clicking around helps us garner more advertising revenue. If our click through rate goes up we get a better share of ad placement during a time where few companies are paying for advertising.
#2 Biggest Impact: Clicking on website product links to make your purchases on Amazon, Target etc. We link to products we recommend and use in our tutorials. If you decide to make a purchase we receive a small advertising commission at no cost to you. That advertising commission extends to anything that you buy so even if you click on a link for a sticker paper recommendation and decide to buy your weekly supply of toilet paper…we will receive a commission on that toilet paper at no cost to you. So, if you were going to make an order on Amazon or Target for example…you could click any of our hyperlinks on our website or Facebook group to make your order so we can receive those much needed advertising commissions.
#3 Commenting on Our Website Posts. This doesn’t really drive revenue for us but commenting on our posts improves our ranking within Google which helps us get more pageviews (and helps us build a bigger audience so we can increase revenue).
#4 Sharing our Facebook posts and commenting on them. If you’re not already a member of our Facebook community please join (it’s free to do so just CLICK HERE)! Use the share button to help us get the word out about our free printables. You can share to your feed or any Facebook group you’re in. Also, you can leave us comments on our Facebook posts. Both of these things help us improve our engagement rate/audience within the Facebook algorithm.
#5 Pinning our Printables to Your Pinterest Boards AND follow us! Please, if you haven’t already, follow us on Pinterest by clicking on THIS LINK and hitting the red “follow” button. Pin any of the pin links we drop in our emails or Facebook posts to your boards. This doesn’t help us make any money but both these things help us get the word out about our printables (similar to sharing our content on Facebook…it helps build a bigger audience).
Thank you so much in advance for your support!
Lisa
