During my 1st Year Blogiversary post, I asked you all if you would be interested in my doing both a Pinterest post (since 60% or more of my traffic comes from Pinterest) as well as an income report now that I am actually making some money! Your response was overwhelmingly “Yes!” so I’ve started doing these Traffic & Income Reports on a monthly basis!
I believe that more bloggers should reveal their income, but I personally do so for several reasons:
- To Inspire: No, I’m not narcissistic, and I don’t believe that what I’m doing is even inspirational at all, but just when I think about stopping these posts about how to make money blogging I remember how inspired I was by reading others’ blog income reports when I was just starting out.
- To Be Transparent: I’ve committed to complete transparency, both in my Budget and Net Worth reports, and completing a monthly report like this completes the transparency packaage. I believe that transparency breeds trust, and as such it’s something that I am committed to.
- Accountability: I can’t even begin to tell yo how much it hurts to complete a post at the end of the month and not meet all of the goals that I set for myself. These reports help me push myself and stay accountable for always moving forward and improving.
This is my actual blogging income, folks.
Let’s get started!
How I Make Money Blogging
Time Spent Blogging-
I believe in a couple of things related to hours worked: efficiency and hourly rate. Obviously, these are tied to each other, and while the reality of owning a business like mine is that the hours I work, and the amount I make for each hour will fluctate – sometimes a lot – but what I want to see are slow and steady gains over time.
Here are the hours I worked in September:
- 3rd-5th: 16
- 6th-12th: 20 hours
- 13th-19th: 25 hours
- 20th-26th: 35 hours
- 27th-30th: 12 hours
- Total Hours: 108
I promised myself when I went into business for myself that I would NOT work more than 40 hours per week (averaged, not exactly) and I’ve noticed that I’ve been working less and less and making more and more money! Efficiency is where it’s at, ya’ll! Based on those hours, and the income I will spell out below, in August I made:
$24.76/hour
I’ve definitely had ups and downs in both income and page views on the blog, but diversifying my income has definitely done wonders for both my hourly rate an my sanity. This puts my daily income at $85.95, a $10 per day increase over August. Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to developing passive blog income, that’s for sure.
If you want to start your own money-making blog, you can do so very cheaply. I created a tutorial that will help you start a blog of your own in about 10 minutes, and very cheaply, with prices starting at only $3.95 a month. This low price is only available through my Bluehost link, and when you purchase at least 12 months of blog hosting, Bluehost will even throw in a FREE domain name (a $15 value). Again, this pricing + free domain name is only available through my link, and if you want to make money with your blog, then self-hosting through a company such as Bluehost is essential.
Some Highlights –
This month I focused on diversification. I didn’t just want to diversify my income, I wanted to diversify where my traffic was coming from, and as such I’ve been working on growing my traffic from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I’ve also been pushing hard to up my SEO game. I’m finally starting to gain traction (just a little) with a few keywords that I actually didn’t expect to, so I’m working on diversifying the keywords that I rank for too!
So, during the month of September I worked on running Facebook ads and Promoted Pins. The Facebook ads actually netted me 545 new likes at a cost of $0.27 per like. Now, I just need to make sure that I’m engaging my newfound audience :-) My strategy for Promoted Pins was a little bit different, in that I ran a campaign of my most popular post in an effort to induce another round of virality. (The first round happened all on it’s own and shocked me, LOL). It actually worked out really well, and the Promoted pins campaign ended up costing me $0.04 per “click.” (Want to know how to set up a Promoted Pin campaign? I can help you as The Pinterest Assistant)
To work on SEO, I decided to start using Market Samurai. I am still learning how to use about 2/3 of the features, but two that I’ve fallen in love with is the Rank Tracker and Keyword research. I’ve been tracking my rank for 10 keywords that I want to rank in, and have been doing keywords research for all of my posts. You guys, it’s been eye-opening! It was $97 after a free trial, and it’s already paying for itself.
I was also very excited to be interviewed by iBlog Magazine as a part of their “Expert Video Interview” Library. They reached out to ask if they could republish an article I wrote on The Pinterest Assistant called ” 6 Places to Find Reliable Pinterest Marketing Information.” Of course, I was excited! Stay tuned for more info!
Income –
This is important: Previously, I was reporting the income I earned (not necessarily was paid) and actual expenses paid. When this blog was smaller, it worked well, mainly because I was so excited to be making money – haha!
So now, I am reporting the actual income I received, as well as actual expenses. This will make for a more accurate income report and hourly rate, but it will look a little bit deceiving, because some of the income I reported in previous months I will show as received this month – so just realize that as you read this!
This does not account for the 30% that I hold back for taxes. Also, this does not take expenses into account – those will be covered in the next section.
- Ad Networks: $516.74
- The Blogger Network: $516.74
- Media.net: $0
- BlogHer: $0 ( I ended my contract with BlogHer)
- Affiliate Sales: $58.44
- Sponsored Posting: $505
- Moms Affiliate: $0
- TapInfluence: $300
- Clever Girls: $125
- Kasai Media: $200
- iSway: $0
- LinkVehicle: $150
- Other Sponsored Posts: $0
- The Pinterest Assistant: $1,334.15
- Freelance Projects: $250
- Total Income: $2,664.31
Expenses
Just like with my own budget, I strive to keep my expenses affordable here on the blog. However, I am not against spending money on something that will give me far more value that it costs. Case in point, you’ll see each month I have expenses for things like Tailwind, Mailchimp, Productive Inbox, and Postplanner, because they literally save me HOURS every single month.
- Tailwind for my Pin scheduling. You can learn more about how to schedule pins for only $10 a month here.
- MailChimp: $50.00 – I absolutely loooove MailChimp . For those of us who are technically, and artistically challenged, this is the absolute best way to go for emails. Check out these 11 Reasons why Every Blogger Needs Mailchimp for more info!
- BoardBooster: $20 -I have almost completely stopped using BoardBooster. You can read a case study of why here
- Productive Inbox: $5
- Books/Courses: $5.95
Total Expenses: $80.95
September 2015 Goals
- Hire an additional VA for The Pinterest Assistant – SUCCESS!
- Bring Back Inspiration Tuesday – SUCCESS! These will start Mid-September
- Get 1 month ahead on blog posts – FAIL!
- Keep scheduling 3 FB posts per day – SUCESS!
- Make $4,000 before expenses – FAIL! I honestly didn’t work that hard on the blog in September. Just got busy, ya know :-)
- Write and publish 6 posts per week on my other niche sites – SUCESS!!
October 2015 Goals
- Apply and accepted to PubExchange
- Apply and accepted to Influence Central
- Run Promoted Pins, determine budget
- Run FB Ads, determine budget
- Diversify Ad Income. I have already started to do this, but I need to step it up!
- Revamp the blog’s sidebar with featured posts, holiday posts, and popular posts
If you want to start your own money-making blog, you can do so very cheaply. I created a tutorial that will help you start a blog of your own in about 10 minutes, and very cheaply, with prices starting at only $3.95 a month. This low price is only available through my Bluehost link, and when you purchase at least 12 months of blog hosting, Bluehost will even throw in a FREE domain name (a $15 value). Again, this pricing + free domain name is only available through my link, and if you want to make money with your blog, then self-hosting through a company such as Bluehost is essential.
How was your month? I would love to hear about it!
*This post may contain affiliate links
Linked up
Jim Wang says
Congratulations on your success!
Cat@BudgetBlonde says
Congratulations on the awesome income! I REALLY need to learn more about keyword research for sure!
Michelle says
Great job! Looks like an awesome month.
Shirria @ GDTH says
That’s great income and they do continue to inspire me to keep blogging!
Ramona says
I was the first month I really worked SERIOUSLY on my blog. With goals and a good plan. It shows. I am very happy to see how many opportunities this brings me and look forward to October.
Congratulations for a really cool month, looking forward to the next update :)
Sarah says
Congratulations on such a high income month!!! You are rockin’ it!! I’ll have to send you an email regarding promoting pins! :)
Christina says
You are doing great. I like your goals, too. Gives me something to aspire to in the future!
Lisa | The Money Pinch says
Great job! I really need to go back and refocus on my blog. My goal was just to start a post weekly, and that bombed this summer. I’ve been where you’re at before with a coupon blog, but my passions changed in a way. I didn’t want to share coupon and online deals as much as ways I was saving.
Market Samurai is def the bomb! I used it a couple years ago, and worth every penny. I currently don’t use it, but just to generally check a keyword in a post to see how’s it is ranked I’ve used: https://serps.com/tools/rank_checker
Jenny M. says
Very inspiring post, Gretchen! I’m linking it to my most recent blog income report at http://www.mommawren.com! Thank you for posting this information. :)
jerrieal lumar says
Love this post and so inspirational to keep pushing and put in the hours to do what you love!