3rd Month Blog Income Report & Growth

Welcome to my 3RD Month blog Income report & growth. I have made these from day one, not just for you guys to read and hopefully gain something from, but also for myself so I can look back and see the areas I need to concentrate on.

When I started out with this blog I was looking at other blog income reports and came across Michelle Schroeder-Gardner. She runs a great Personal Finance blog called Making sense of Cents. You can find her blog Income report here

However as amazing as Michelle has done with her blog and as much as it gives me motivation, I was looking for blog growth & income reports from beginners to see how it was going to be at the beginning of my blogging journey. It turned out there wasn’t that many. The ones I did find were a good mix of honesty, hard work, mistakes, and learning.

So to that end, I’m am going to try and be as transparent as possible so as you readers out there see not only my successes but also my failures.

Also if your new to this blog and would like to read any of my other blog Income reports then you can find all those reports here.

Also If you would like to subscribe and see these reports as soon as I publish them then you can do that here or on the main menu from the dropdown.

Some of my posts may contain affiliate links. This simply means if you purchase something after clicking one of the links I may receive a commission at no extra cost to yourself. Many thanks for the continued support.

Hey everyone, I’m writing this a bit late this month as we have family from Australia staying with us. Like an idiot, I didn’t plan ahead. Plus I have to wait until the end of the month to show you guys the right figures etc.

Articles:

So my aim is to produce good quality, well written and fully SEO functional article per week. I’m pleased to have yet again done that for the month. I still have to revisit some of my older articles and add some form of SEO as I ignored it for the first 10 articles or so.

Also, some of my articles are now ranking in the top 100 for certain keywords, so good news all around.

Traffic:

So my traffic has been good but as explained last month this is due to me promoting on a blogger site. Nothing wrong with that of course but it does kind of skew my traffic results somewhat. I have temporarily ceased doing that although I’m not sure if that’s a good idea or not at the moment.

As you can see above I have swapped over to google analytics as it gives me more data then Insights. When writing a blog income report it helps to be as accurate as possible and google analytics helps a lot here. So this is the total over the whole 3 months so far. You can see I’m closing in on 5000 page views which I’m happy with.

The bounce rate is great although I think this is my fellow bloggers helping out there. I feel the session duration could increase but again until I start to get more organic traffic I’m not convinced on the figures.

Social Media:

As stated in previous reports I tend to only really focus on one which is Pinterest.

Twitter:

I have 17 followers on twitter which is up 2 from last month. I have only tweeted like once and tend not to use it as don’t want to water down my time on Pinterest.

Facebook:

I now have 28 members in my group up 4 from last month. I do tend to post on here once a week and I am going to try and concentrate on this a little more for next month.

Email:

This was going to be something that I was going to concentrate on more this month and I have. I have added an opt-in Freebie which I’m yet to receive any comments on but I’m hoping it will help get more people signed up. As of last month, I had 4 subscribers and now have 10. I’m happy with that as setting it up properly has really got my head in a twist. Still it’s up and running and hopefully this opt-in will get me double the amount for next month.

Pinterest:

This is of course where most bloggers should be spending most of their efforts. Pinterest isn’t just a social media outlet it is also a Search engine. This means it is the one media you should concentrate on as a blogger.

My monthly unique viewers have dropped from 60k down to 49k. This isn’t overly important though and it does fluctuate a fair bit throughout the month.

The average daily impressions on my profile are down on last month as is the daily viewers. However, the average monthly viewers and average monthly engaged is slightly up from last month which is good. On the flip side, the activity is down from last month. I’m not sure how to rectify this at the moment. I may need to do multiple pins per article to broaden the views I get.

My Pinterest Followers have increased from 402 to 501 so an increase of 99 last month. This is about what seems to be normal for me at the moment and I know some people struggle to get followers so I won’t moan at this amount of an increase.

Changes Made:

None really, I haven’t implemented any great changes. I have tweaked my Pinterest profile heading and have started doing 2 pins for every article. Also, I have started implementing SEO into all of my articles I write as well as going back and starting to add SEO to older articles. I have actually started to rank in the top 100 for several keywords and this is good progress in a short space of time.

I still haven’t added any more affiliates as of yet. Until I start to see some progress in that department I won’t add any more I doubt.

Income:

So some people can make a lot of money blogging very quickly due to being clever with the way they organize and plan their blogs, others make not a penny for months and months. I am firmly in the lower middle of those two in that I am making money but it is slow progress.

Last month I made 0.57 Cents. So a huge increase on the previous months 2 cents. Well, that’s the way I’m looking at it anyway. Progress is progress no matter how small.

I’m trying hard not to become focused on earnings because everyone will earn at different rates dependant on the time they put in and the niche they are focusing on etc.

There have been no affiliate sales at the moment. I have around 3 or 4 affiliates at the moment and need to learn a bit more about how to aim some of my content around that.

Goals:

My goals for last month were as follows.

Reach 100,000 monthly unique views on Pinterest (Fail)

Expand email subscriptions to 20 (Fail)

Gain 600 followers on Pinterest (Fail) But close

Hit 3000 total page views on my blog (Success)

Gain 35 members in my facebook group (Fail) But close

Sort out Amazon Affiliate account (Fail) So simple to do but haven’t.

So as you can see from above I had a bit of a rubbish month with hitting goals. Perhaps my sights were set too high or I just had a rubbish month, it happens to us all. I’m not going to dwell, instead, I am going to set new goals and aim to achieve as many as possible. But also try keeping it more realistic.

Blogging growth doesn’t always head in an upward line, Sometimes there are some dips and troughs and that’s ok. Let’sing look for some upwards lines this month to make next months blog income report better.

Goals For This Month:

Acheive 7000 total Page views on my blog.

Reach 65,000 unique monthly views on Pinterest.

Gain a total of 35 members on my facebook group.

Grow Email subscribers to 15 total subscribers.

Gain 650 total followers on Pinterest

Sort out Amazon affiliate account so it works properly.

Add more affiliates and try and learn more about being succesful at that.

The main ones I want to succeed are the subscriber goal and the followers on Pinterest. So I’m going to end this brutally real Blog growth and earnings report with a cheeky link to some of my affiliates.

If any of you are looking to make an extra income or indeed set up your own blog whereby you blog about things that you are passionate about then these links may just be for you. thanks for reading these guys and I hope this report didn’t dampen your enthusiasm to either continue your blog or start one.

Affiliates:

So if these monthly blog income reports are piquing your enthusiasm and you are looking to start a blog then I would suggest using self-hosting. It gives you far better control over your blog and means you can monetize it should you wish to do so.

The guys over at Siteground can help you out with super cheap monthly hosting. Also, any time I have had a problem they have sorted it out within 30 minutes and guided me through live chat etc. Their service is top notch.

Once your site is up and running and you are looking to make it look a little bit more professional then head over to WP Engine and pick out a Studiopress Genesis Theme. The theme I’m running is called Foodie Pro and has some really cool features. The below link will get you some great looking themes for your new or indeed old site.

StudioPress – Themes

If you have been reading some of my blog articles about side hustles and Matched betting in particular and you are looking to earn a few hundred pounds extra per month for very little effort then head over and check out the guys at Profitaccumulator. Very friendly and professional with free trials to show you how it all works. Give it a go and it will be the easiest cash you have ever earned.

So that’s about it for this month, I’m a little disappointed with it, to be honest, and feel that perhaps I haven’t invested as much effort as the previous two months. Where this is perhaps the point that a lot of people give up or at least drop off in terms of output, this is where I continue full steam ahead.

I will have another blog income report for you guys next month. Good luck with your own blogging journeys.