Income Report for June 2017: My 3rd month blogging

I’m so excited to share this month’s traffic and income report so you can see my progress since last month! I feel like my blog is gaining some traction and I am pleased with how everything is going. I just wish I had more time!

For the most part, I have been continuing the strategies I outlined in my post on Pinterest Strategy.

This page contains affiliate links meaning I earn a commission if you use those links. Please read my Disclosure for more information.

I won’t bore you with the usual spiel about why I am sharing my income and traffic, suffice to say that I absolutely love going through other bloggers’ income reports so it just makes sense to do my own.

If you want to see a bunch more reports from bloggers at different stages of the game,  you can find tons on my income report Pinterest board. 

What worked this month?

Growing my Traffic

I had a few pins go viral in June which of course helped my traffic and income. I credit this growth to  Pinteresting Strategies,  a fabulous ebook from a blogger who grew her traffic from 0-200K page views in a year.

 Pinteresting Strategies is all about pinning to Pinterest without a scheduling tool like Tailwind. Carly, who wrote the book, devised her own strategy around manual pinning and shares all her secrets in the book.

When I first started using the strategies, I saw almost immediate results as I showed in the graph on this post about the advantages of manual pinning v using a scheduler.

The book includes:

• How and when to pin to group boards
• Using Google Analytics to your advantage
• What do to about 3rd party pins – should you delete the ones that aren’t popular? 

So many bloggers have had amazing success with the book, it is really worth checking out if you are not getting the blog traffic you want.

The other thing that really helped me grow my traffic were the tips from the Traffic Transformation Guide – see my course review here.  While the course does touch on Pinterest and has tons of awesome tips, where I found it really useful was the non-Pinterest stuff.

The guide is a paid course but there is a free bonus section that you can download here.

The book taught me so many helpful things such as:

• How to build off of one blog post to constantly create traffic
• Why you need to use platforms such as Instagram to boost your traffic.
• How to update your existing blog posts to create new content 
• Getting readers to spend more time on your site

Growing my income

I earn the bulk of my blogging income from affiliate marketing. I love to recommend products and things that have been useful to me as I hope they help others too!

I’ve taken two courses that have helped me immensely when it comes to perfecting my affiliate marketing strategy:

Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing

• This course is by Michelle from the Making Sense of Cents. She makes over $100,000 a month, $50,000 of which is through affiliate marketing so you could say she is a bit of an expert!
•  This course is an in-depth how-to of affiliate marketing from the basics through to putting it all into practice.
• It includes a bonus Pinterest course from The Busy Budgeter. Rosemarie is one of the bloggers who originally realized the potential of Pinterest for bloggers and she has tons of great tips on growing your traffic,

Paid By Pinterest

• I think this was the first ebook that I bought when I was just starting to get my blog together.
• It’s a zippy “how to” of affiliate marketing on Pinterest with tons of pictures and actionable items
• This post will tell you everything you need to know about the book and how I make money just from pinning to Pinterest (no blog posts!).

New to Blogging and want more tips?

Check out my tutorials here:

How to start a profitable blog

The Secret to exploding your Blog Traffic: Pinterest Group Boards

The top affiliate networks for bloggers

Income for June 2017

Affiliates: $852.76 MaxBounty, Shareasale, Amazon, etc.

Adsense: $109.66

Mediavine: $18.68 – I started with Mediavine on June 28th so I don’t have much from them in June. 

Total: $981.10

So close to the big $1000! Maybe next month…

Traffic for June 2017

In my May Income Report, I shared how my blog traffic almost doubled exactly in May from just over 7000 page views in April to over 15,000 in May.  It more than doubled again to 35,000 page views in June.

In the graph below, you can see the growth I experienced once I started using the Pinteresting Strategies. 

 

 

Once I reached 25,000 sessions on around 15th June, I applied for Mediavine which is an ad network similar to Google Adsense. It pays a lot better in my opinion! I’m interested to see how my first month goes with them.

June 2017 Goals Recap

Here’s how I fared with my goals:

• Break the 1000 followers for Pinterest (currently at 920) – Yes! Currently at 1250
• Get started on Twitter, Instagram & Facebook – Yes to Twitter. I opened Instagram and Facebook accounts but have done nothing with them. 
• Increase both income and traffic – Yes!
• Join some more Pinterest Group Boards- Yes!
• Reread all the courses I took in April to get even more tips on growing my blog! – No. Ugh, no time! 

July Goals

• Keep growing traffic and income
• Work on getting traffic from other social media platforms using the techniques in Traffic Transformation (I don’t know how I feel about getting so much of my traffic from Pinterest). 
• Reread all the courses I took in April to get even more tips on growing my blog!
• Launch my freebie Pinterest guide “Pin Perfection”

My Previous Income Report

May 2017 Income Report