Blog Income Report: How I Made $703.57 Blogging in July 2018

October 30, 2019 50 Comments

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My First Blog Income Report

Welcome to my very first blog income report!

I generally don’t blog about blogging, but I thought writing this income report would be helpful for beginners and those who haven’t started a blog yet. This also gives me a chance to reflect back on what worked and what didn’t work. With that said, I can look back on my blog income report to see where I can improve.

Now, you’re probably wondering why I would share this private information with the public?

I was debating whether or not I should share this blog income report because I was afraid of coming off as bragging or lying — or even both! I don’t want to come off as either because my sincere hope is to help others who want to earn extra money on top of their full-time jobs.

As you can see, I’m definitely not making a lot compared to other bloggers who are pulling in over $1,000 every month. But despite how little or much I make, I believe that everyone can learn from each other!

For the past month, I started reading more into other bloggers’ income reports and it taught me how to monetize my blog properly. Again, I’m not making thousands of dollars like other bloggers, but I am learning a ton from them! From what I’ve learned, every bloggers’ income report will be different. For example, there are bloggers with fewer page views who earn more than me and there are bloggers with more page views who earn less than me.

Before I started a blog, I was pretty skeptical about the idea of making money online. But after seeing other bloggers’ income reports, I realized that it is possible to make money blogging as beginners with no experience!

My Blogging Progress:

– Febuary 2019 Blog Income Report: $7,498.94

– January 2019 Blog Income Report: $6,790.93

– December 2018 Blog Income Report: $6,840.01

– November 2018 Blog Income Report: $5,532.13

– October 2018 Blog Income Report: $4,798.01

– September 2018 Blog Income Report: $4,509.50

– Blog Income Report: How I Made $2,797.64 Blogging in August 2018 (300% Increase from July 2018)!

Start your blog for cheap today!

I’ve been blogging for less than a year and I feel grateful that I’ve been able to increase my monthly earnings from ~$0 (Nov 2017) to $500 (April to June) and now $703.57 (this month) after taking a few blogging courses which I will mention later.

You too can learn how to start a blog with this easy step-by-step tutorial. You can start a blog at a discounted price for only $2.95 a month (that’s over 60% off). Plus, get a FREE domain name ($15 value) when you sign up through my tutorial. If you’re interested, you can read more about the details in my tutorial.

Start your blog with my FREE 7-day course!

Are you a total beginner and don’t know where to start? Join my FREE 7-day e-mail course where I will teach you how to start your blog the right way! I will guide you from starting your blog to growing your traffic and earning your first income. 🙂

Anyway, let’s take a look at my blog income for July 2018.

July 2018 Blog Income

In July 2018, I earned $703.57. Please note that this is in Canadian dollars.

Affiliate income – $510.80

Money-saving resources (Checkout 51, OhmConnect, Ebates, $5 Meal Plan, survey companies, etc.) – $384.09

Amazon – $19.93

FlexOffers – $106.78

Display advertising from Google Adsense – $192.77

You can learn how to earn money online with Google from home along with my personal experience with Google Adsense.

Total blog income = $703.57

My blogging income was ~$0 when I first started

I’ve mentioned before that I wasn’t making any money with my blog when I first signed up. I started this blog under a year ago on a whim and I had NO CLUE what I was doing. To be honest, making money wasn’t my top priority because I was focused on learning how to use WordPress. Until this day, I’m still not proficient with WordPress, but I know that I will learn more as I move forward. 🙂

July 2018 has been my highest blog income so far. I don’t know what to expect in the months ahead, but what I do know is that I’m not ready to give up despite the volatile blog income and traffic. I’m in this for the long-term and I’m even ready for any sudden drop in traffic and earnings.

Let me tell you my story.

In my first four to six months of blogging, I was earning close to nothing! If I could remember correctly, I had a BIG SMILE on my face when I earned my first $1.45 from Google Adsense in my first month of blogging. I thought “Woo-hoo! I made my first dollar online!”

I was in the same spot as you are in now.

After many months of blogging, I saw almost no results. I kept wondering how other bloggers were able to earn over $1,000-$5,000 per month in their first, second, and third month of blogging! Just like you, I felt really sad and discouraged. Gosh, I thought it would even be nice to make $100 a month!

Not to mention, I wasn’t able to generate much traffic either. It’s something I’m still trying to improve on!

At the beginning of my blogging journey, I was trying SO hard to increase my traffic because I knew I wanted to eventually make money from my blog. I heard about Pinterest and how it’s a crazy traffic driver for most bloggers, so I decided to give it a shot! WHY NOT? It’s FREE traffic after all!

SO…

I signed up for Pinterest in November 2017 in hopes to make an income from my blog one day. I followed exactly EVERYTHING I learned from all these paid Pinterest courses and resources I found online:

– create relevant boards that are keyword focused and related closely to your niche.

– join high-quality group boards that will put your content in front of their followers (leverage is power!).

– make eye-catching pins that scream “CLICK ME! CLICK ME!” (or did they mean CLICKBAIT??).

– input a sweet description in your pins by sprinkling in relevant keywords.

– do not stuff your pin descriptions with keywords (this tends to look spammy).

– make at least 3 different pin images on Canva for each of your blog posts.

– do A/B testing with your pins.

– pin like a madwoman on Pinterest!

Okay, I did all of that PLUS everything else they taught in the courses!!!

SO WHY AM I NOT GETTING TRAFFIC?? Why isn’t anyone pinning my pins?? Is my content garbage? Does nobody like me? 🙁

I didn’t understand how people were even getting 5,000 monthly page views at that time!

*crickets*

and some more crickets…

This is how my traffic looked back in November 2017. 1,059 sessions and 3,773 page views.

This is how my traffic looked last month in July 2018. 34,426 sessions and 43,226 page views.

I truly believe that taking small steps and learning at your own pace is key. But, of course, you need to learn from the right course instructors! In the next section, I will list out all of the resources (both free and paid) that helped me get:

– from 3,773 to over 40,000 monthly page views in less than a year. (No, I’m not here to sell you “how I went from 0 to over 100,000 page views in three months!” I am telling you a more realistic story and something that’s more achievable!)

– from 1,500 (back in November 2017) to over 500,000 monthly viewers on Pinterest (as I’m typing this, I’m at over 600,000 monthly viewers, but I don’t know how this will look in the future).

– from earning ~$0 to over $500 per month blogging in less than a year ($703.57 in my last month)

The Right Blogging Resources That Helped Me!

Here are the resources that helped me during my blogging journey and I am confident that it will help you too!

But I want to mention this before I list those resources.

One thing that held me back at the beginning was my fear of wasting money on blogging courses. Initially, I was skeptical of paying for these e-books and online courses because I was afraid of being scammed by what people call them “online salespeople” (which isn’t true BTW). I was also afraid that the strategies in the courses might not work.

I’m sure that’s exactly how you feel, right?

Despite that possibility, I took the plunge because I knew that there’s no such thing as free lunches. I will be honest and tell you that some of the material in paid courses can be found for free online. But, do you really have that much time to dig and search through millions of articles out there? Plus, for some of the stuff, you wouldn’t even know what to Google search for in the first place!

With that said, I’d rather take the shortcut and optimize my time by investing in the right blogging courses and learn from the experts. All that time you spend weeding out free (and potentially useless) information could have been better spent optimizing your earnings strategy.

As the saying goes:

“You gotta spend some money in order to make money!”

Believe me, don’t be afraid to invest in the right blogging material! I’m really glad that I did!

1. Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing

I noticed a difference in my blog income in April when I implemented Michelle’s affiliate marketing strategies on my blog. Michelle’s course, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, was a serious game changer for me!

When I read her blog income reports and learned that she was making over $100,000 every month from her blog, I knew that I’d be learning from the best when I purchased her e-course here. Within my first month of taking her course, I earned over $400 (~$520 in CAD) alone in affiliate marketing! Before that, I was earning $0 from affiliates.

Also, I’m SO glad that I was able to make the minimum sale of 3 items on Amazon before getting kicked out. Thanks to Michelle’s course, I met Amazon’s requirement within a few days of implementing her affiliate marketing strategies! With that said, I didn’t have to worry about re-applying for Amazon’s Affiliate program!

My overall traffic wasn’t skyrocket-high in April (24,573 page views) but my blog post, How We Went From $93,000 Debt To Over $750,000 Savings, generated most of my affiliate income as that was ~75% of my traffic during that month! So, Michelle was spot on when she said:

“You don’t need a million page views to start earning with affiliate marketing. You’re ready to earn money even if you have only ONE blog post!”

And one reason why you’d want to implement the right affiliate strategies into your one epic blog post ASAP is that you’ll never know when it will go viral. Once it starts getting a lot of page views, you’d wish you implemented these strategies sooner!

UPDATE:

I went from making $0 in affiliate marketing to $400-$500 USD consistently from April to July after implementing Michelle’s strategies.

And in August 2018, I made over $1,500 USD in affiliate marketing. September 2018 was my highest affiliate earnings to date at over $2,000 USD!

Below is a screenshot of my blog income where affiliate marketing and display advertising are my only sources.

– An Interview With Michelle: How To Win With Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

– September Blog Income Report: $4,509.50

– August Blog Income Report: $2,797.64

2 FREE bonuses for you!

Before we dive into my blog income results, I also want to mention that I am offering 2 FREE bonuses to help you organize and plan your blogging journey when you purchase Michelle’s Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course through my link. I will talk more about her course later and explain how it helped me increase my blog income from $0 to over $500 in affiliate income per month.

Update: Now, I am earning over $2,000 in affiliate income per month as I am writing this update in October 2018 thanks to Michelle’s course!

I want to let you know that I will be giving away my printable Blogging Binder ($42 value) + Affiliate Marketing Planner ($18 value) as my gift to you when you enroll in Michelle’s course using my link!

If you are interested, you can visit my page here (or click on the image below) for more details about the binders and how to grab them for FREE!

2. Making Pinterest Possible

If you’re new to Pinterest, or if you’re like me, who’s tried so many different strategies yet nothing’s working, I highly recommend this e-book by Ana from The She Approach.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve tried almost everything that was taught by other Pinterest course instructors but I wasn’t seeing results!

One day, I woke up and saw Ana’s email about her new course, Making Pinterest Possible. I thought: “Oh, great… another e-mail trying to sell me some blogging/Pinterest course. Really?? Do I need this?? Will this really help me increase my traffic and my blog income??” *Sigh*

I clicked into her email (for fun)…

Okay, her e-mail sounds pretty convincing. Plus, I trust Ana because she’s sweet. She PERSONALLY responds to all of my e-mails in a VERY friendly manner even though I’ve never purchased a course from her before buying this one. I’ve also read many of her articles from her blog, The She Approach, and she gives a lot of quality content about blogging to her audience.

So, I really like her! And I decided to buy her course and give it a shot. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting anything at all.

To my surprise, Making Pinterest Possible is PACKED, and I mean JAM PACKED, with a lot of valuable information. Even for someone like me who has been using Pinterest for a while got valuable lessons out of it! I could tell that Ana put in a lot of sweat, blood, and tears into her e-book.

If you’re new to Pinterest, or you don’t fully understand Pinterest (or not seeing the results you like) after using it for a while, then this course is PERFECT for you! BUT you NEED to be patient and FOLLOW EXACTLY EVERYTHING in her e-book to actually see results! The best part is her book covers the most recent Pinterest changes after April 2018.

I bought this 172-page e-book totally by fluke, but I’m really glad that I did (see my results below)!

❤ Ana was nice to provide me a coupon code for my readers. For a limited time, you can use the code, TSA5OFF, towards her e-book and get $5 off when you purchase her e-book here! The price is honestly very affordable and you get a TON of value from Ana’s resource!

I invested in this course because my traffic wasn’t moving much after a while. If anything, it was starting to trend down from March to May. I even saw dead traffic (<300 per day) on certain days. But after taking Ana’s course and implementing her strategies from mid-May onwards, my traffic picked up!

You’ll see that my page views from June to July increased by almost 150% whereas my sessions increased by 158%!

	Sessions	Page views	% Change
March 2018	20,370	26,685
April 2018	18,956	24,573	-7.91%
May 2018	11,133	14,811	-39.73%
June 2018	13,325	17,307	16.85%
July 2018	34,426	43,226	149.76%

Update: I’m so surprised that this is how my traffic looked one month after in August 2018 where my blog reached over 88,000 page views!

You can read all about it in my second blog income report: How I Made $2,797.64 Blogging in August 2018.

Overall, Ana does make Pinterest VERY possible! I am extremely happy with her material and her customer service. I highly recommend her book if you are new to Pinterest and/or not seeing any results in your Pinterest traffic.

Click here to learn more about Ana’s e-book, Making Pinterest Possible. Again, it was a very small investment which I was able to make back in less than a week! Don’t forget to use the code, TSA5OFF, to get $5 off!

Blog Income Results from 99% Pinterest

I would like to point out that I’ve only been focusing on Pinterest to grow my traffic and that’s where all my blog income comes from. I learned from established bloggers that it’s okay to focus on one thing at a time.

Jeff from Breaking The One Percent (and Dollar Sprout) personally told me:

“By focusing on Pinterest and SEO (in that order), you are definitely on the right track!! Slow and steady wins the race! :)”

After about nine months of blogging, I have NOT focused on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Gosh, I just opened a Facebook account last month and I’m still not using it! Those were never my priority because I didn’t want to stretch myself thin. Who has time for all of that when you’re working a full-time job?

With that said, I will continue to implement these Pinterest strategies while learning how to increase my traffic through other means such as Google SEO. Yes, learning and implementing SEO will be my next step and I admit that I’ve put this on the backburner for a while now. Not to mention, it’s very important to diversify your traffic. But again, I’m taking this slowly and won’t be comparing myself to other bloggers who are making it big on every platform.

Free Blogging Resources To Boost Your Blog Income

1. As you already know, I love Ana’s tips and she gives AMAZING quality content all the time. She never fails to impress. If you’re tight on cash, she is offering some FREE resources here.

2. Lena is offering her FREE Blog Bonus Traffic Guide e-book here. There are many different ways to increase your page views beyond Pinterest and that’s why I am going through Lena’s course to learn how she increased her page views from 17,000 to over 400,000 in 10 months.

3. You can enroll in Mike’s FREE 5-day SEO Bootcamp. You will see that his webpage mentions his paid course, which is currently closed, but you can still gain FREE access to his 5-day SEO Bootcamp at no charge!

I mentioned that learning SEO is my next step and so far, Mike is my favorite go-to person for tips. It’s literally stupid simple for beginners who don’t know anything about SEO! No fluff and no BS! If you’ve been relying 100% on Pinterest or any other social media for your traffic, then this freebie to boosting your long-term traffic with Google is perfect for you! Again, I want to say thanks to Alexis from Fitnancials for guiding me to Mike!

4. Join the Amazon Affiliate program – You can promote any product you like from Amazon for FREE. But, of course, promote only the products that will help your audience in your targeted niche.

5. Join these free affiliate networks to increase your blog income – Once you get accepted, you can apply for different companies that you want to work with and promote them on your blog.

– Awin

– ShareASale

– MaxBounty

– FlexOffers

To learn how to optimize your affiliate marketing strategies, learn from Michelle who earns over $50,000 every month alone from affiliate marketing. Her flagship course, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is a sure-fire way to boost your blog income! Though her course isn’t free, it’s one of the best investments you’ll ever make on your blog!

6. Tailwind – This Pinterest scheduler app has changed my life! I don’t pin manually as much anymore and it has saved me SO MUCH time! However, when I do manually pin, I make sure that I’m following Carly’s secret manual pinning strategy. I’ve only been using Tailwind for 3 months and I see a huge improvement with my traffic! The app has some limitations and it’s not perfect, but it sure saves a ton of time because you can schedule your pins to pin throughout the day! Plus, it’s the only pinning scheduler available that most bloggers use. You can get a FREE one month trial plus a $15 credit with Tailwind by using my link here.

I don’t want to overwhelm you with too many blogging resources because I believe in quality over quantity. I’ve been blocking a lot of noise and just focusing on a few resources for help. As a result, all of this has helped me generate some blog income outside of my full-time job. It hasn’t been easy and it won’t be easy, but I believe you can do it when you stay focused on YOUR own goals. Again, don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle. Instead, be inspired and learn from them.

Over to you — How has your blogging journey been? Do you share your blog income report? If you’re not a blogger, do you plan on starting a blog today? 😉

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