Note (added March 17, 2025):
When I wrote this post, I mistakenly believed I had identified and resolved the primary causes of declining traffic. In reality, I had not fixed anything. From that point forward, I continued to struggle, and every time I attempted to take time off, my progress seemed to reverse. While internal issues and platform-related problems contributed to the decline, even without those factors, I still would have experienced significant traffic loss due to external forces beyond my control.
Stabilizing my site’s performance remained an ongoing challenge. On October 26th, 2024, I filed claims that revealed some of the parties involved. However, it became undeniably clear that content theft was my primary issue on November 1st, 2024, when my accounts were suspended—an observation that seems particularly problematic given the timing of Pinterest’s response to the claims I had filed on October 26th. Immediately following my suspension, Pinterest started filling the gaps previously occupied by my accounts with the very content that had been stolen from me. Until that point, I had unknowingly been battling numerous external parties, struggling to maintain my traffic and stay afloat.
For 7 months, I struggled to find out the cause of a traffic bleed. In February I figured out what it was. I have not written any thing since then, but traffic has been gradually going up every month. I am getting to a point where I have more free time. So, eventually I will be diving back into Copytrack and some other subjects. In short, I failed at supervising, and I had trusted someone too much. The long version… well.
I like to employ those who can work without supervision, which is required for working from home, which I have done since 1999. I like to think I have pretty relaxed standards. I almost never contact after hours, but I allow people to contact me beyond my hours. I like to have at least 72 hours of notice if someone needs time off, but I understand life is not always convenient. I am not big on firing people, having experienced the desperation of needing an income, and as a neural divergent person, I am empathetic to those who live paycheck to paycheck. Yes, I have employees’ work monitored, but I only check when shit hits the fan. Because being paranoid is time-consuming and unproductive. I believe people work for a living, not living to work. But that is a topic for another day. I wrote 5 paragraphs on the topic only to file it away. I feel that even what I have left up is off-topic. But I bring this up, as I found that three employees did not do what I paid them for. One of them was my personal assistant. I am not naming names. They knew for 7 months that I had been struggling to find out what was causing the traffic to bleed from my sites and a lower RPM. At the same time, I was trying to juggle my own responsibilities.
At first, I thought it was WPEngine by August 2023, and yes, it played a part; after leaving them, things improved somewhat. But the problem was growing like an infection, and I had only put off the inevitable. For some reason, I am still on WPEngin’s mailing list. Also, Capital One has offered me up to 50% reward if I purchase service through them. Half off of terrible service is never a bargain.
https://benjaminspider.com/wpengine-has-one-solution-for-everything-pay-them-more/
When September 2023 rolled around, Google decided to run an experiment. Never mind, I did not opt-in for random tests on sites I earn a living off. This caused chaos with my Pinterest ads when the slow bleed became a gush. No doubt, this caused Facebook and Pinterest to give less organic traffic. After stopping it, things seemed stable. But no, the infection was still spreading.
https://benjaminspider.com/behind-the-scenes-my-daily-battle-against-clickbait-ads-on-adsense/
In the middle of October 2023 it became time to put Christmas content out on Pinterest. I know you are rolling your eyes as you read this. But, with Pinterest, things take time to percolate. Honestly, it should have gone out earlier than October. But… I am not big on Christmas before December. But everyone was a week behind on my planned release. I was unhappy, but I felt there was still time. Unfortunately, the person responsible for Scheduling on Pinterest waited until mid-November, and even then not all of that content went out. The one person I counted on to ensure it was scheduled had put it off. There were three sites with their own Pinterest accounts, and she was the one who was supposed to get Christmas content out.
By November 2023, RPM was not going up, and that caused all kinds of anxiety and ulcers. That time of year, it goes up by 50% or more. So, I started to shop around for someone to fix the site. Which, I admit hiring is not something I am good at. So, I wasted December trying to find someone. December is a time of year when my workload should lessened.
January 2024, I decided to try and see if I could fix it myself. I found that the WP theme had not been updated for nearly 7 months, and there has been no major update in 2 years. It did not help that Copytrack.com decided to accuse me of copyright theft.
https://benjaminspider.com/caution-one-blogger-endless-ideas-site-under-construction/
February 2024… Things seemed desperate.
I was nearing a breaking point where I thought I would have to fire people and pay them for a few months before moving on to the next thing. But… I thought maybe I could try a test campaign on Pinterest. As someone with ADHD/ASD… I tend not to see the trees for the forest. ADHD should really stand for Attention Dysfunction Hyper Disorder. Not, deficient, especially in my case. A prime example of this was when I was trying to fix an issue on a site, I spent a few days researching and attempting to fix the problem. But it turned out the best fix was to uninstall and reinstall. Because sometimes the fix is obvious.
In my attempts to fix this site, I forgot to check Pinterest. January is generally a great time to advertise with Pinterest, and ads have not done well. I thought I would try some new templates and test them against the old template to see if they would do better than the old style. That was when I realized how bad of an idea it was to use .webp images for pins; they were converted to .jpegs and did not have a 1000 X 1500 ratio. Pinterest only does .png or jpegs. It was not my idea, but I went along with it because it seemed like a good idea back in August to cut down on the space an image uses. Someday, I will need to deal with the growing monster of orphaned files.
I went to Tailwinds and paused all queues. At the same time, I sent out a message to my graphics people to redo images and my assistant to stop queuing until the pins were redone.
So that was it? Everything was solved, right?
No… but the problem would be very clear once I was in Tailwinds.
Yes, the site had to be moved from WP Engine.
Yes, we needed to fix ad units.
Yes, we needed to fix our web performance.
Yes, we needed a new template.
Yes, it was a good idea to leave Cloudflare. (Yeah, I did not address that)
Yes, we needed to stop using .webp images on Pinterest.
But there had one big glaring issue I should have saw, had I bothered to QA employee work.
If a certain employee is reading this… this is for you.
All of that I listed was not largely responsible for the downward spiral I was going through. Yes, they played a part in the degradation of traffic. I might have missed what the problem was if I had not taken the initiative to go to Tailwinds to stop .webp images from going to Pinterest. Admittedly, I was pretty happy thinking I had found the cause of the problem. However, the big problem was pretty clear as I started to delete the queued pins one by one. Luckily, I did not know how to bulk delete at the time. But as I scrolled through queues, I found crap that I had not approved to be written up, things that were old content that had no right to be pinned, and things scheduled for the wrong boards. … and it got worse when I looked to see how many of the pins there were posted. One was pinned at least 27 times to the same board; content that should have been pinned once at worst, never at best. and they were getting garbage as far as impressions, and it was not just this one garbage link; there were more.
I have been trying for 7 months to find out where the problems with sites are, and she knew about how this stressed me out. I had trusted her. At least 60% of this was caused by the person responsible for keeping our queues full. But the fault, well, that is mine and mine alone. Given how I am, I often miss what I am supposed to look at. But I should have checked her work. I might not have known it for a long time if we had not gone with .WEBp on pins: Honestly, I am going to have a reminder printed and framed Because I could have seen this going to straight to Pinterest and looking at what was going into the feed. .
The thing that got her fired, was after showing her the problem, she did not seem to understand the gravity of the situation. She shot me this message after getting a not-so-friendly message after she had not bothered to check her work.
I don’t need help, I need clear instructions and respectful, timely communication in order to do my job.
This was the only thing I read out of all the tripe she sent after being called out on not checking her work for what was now absurdly too common. She was contacted during her off hours after not checking to ensure content went out correctly on the weekends. While I avoid contacting outside business hours, I can not blame my business partner for blowing up. I don’t think he would have blown up on her if she had not sent a silly emoji that said ‘oops’ when she said she was sorry. Remember that we feared that we may have to close up shop, so we could ill afford mistakes. As stupid as it sounds, she might have been able to keep her job if she had taken responsibility. But no, clearly, I had given her one too many chances. Had I been vigilant, I would have fired her much earlier.
She claimed not to need help. As of the last few months, I have taken over her responsibilities, and I think we could have had more people on. She did not like the idea, perhaps because she thought she would be replaced. Those were my thoughts about why she resisted having others there to take on parts of her responsibilities. Thinking back on it now, I should have just hired people instead of worrying about her feeling unvalued.
She was brought on to help me and take responsibilities off my shoulders, and as things grew, moderators were brought on to help with comments. I plan to move people up to bigger responsibilities as we grow while placing people under them to take over their previous responsibilities. She was already in a supervisory position over the graphics team. As for clear instructions, how about: ‘Check your work’. Pretty clear, right? There were multiple failures. I could go into vast detail about what I found after doing what was once her job. But I am not going to give the golden goose away. As for respect, I have been pretty relaxed about letting her time off, even upending my own schedule for several weeks to conduct business in hours I try to reserve for myself, which was about the time work quality became noticeably less reliable. Now for Timely… like, say, getting seasonal content out in the middle of October. Which was arranged in August and later reminded at the start of October. Only to be reminded again in November and again a week later. Then, a week later, I told her to push content. I should have fire her then. Later, in February, I discovered she had not published over 200 pieces of seasonal content. Money went down the drain simultaneously with my traffic because of a failure to do a job. I should have fired her right then, not a week later. But, again, I had been too forgiving. Eventually, I will hire someone else to take her place. She will not find a more understanding employer, and I welcome my competitors, specifically the ones who like to steal my ideas to hire her.
If she is reading this, this song is for her:
The last thing I have to say to her is: You could have been paid more if you had done your job. You could have been a manager. But now, we are done. I may be too forgiving, but I don’t forget when my trust is broken. I will rebuild better than before; today, traffic is up 15% from last month. The month before, it was up 20%. Amazing what happens when you stop feeding garbage to a system that pays the bills.
I have held off on working on more content for this site because I had to take over her responsibilities. As of this post, I plan to get back into posting. Copytrack, for one, is a topic that I will be diving back into.