From 0-70K page views in 4 months – July 2017 Income Report

I’m excited to share my blog income report with you!

This month I was lucky enough to grow both my traffic and income quite a lot and I want to share with you how I accomplished that in a typically slow summer month.

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.

What worked this month?

Traffic growth

Manual Pinning plus Tailwind

This month I made a small change to my pinning schedule and adding in one pin a day of my own to Tailwind in addition to my regular manual (live) pinning routine.

I have been using Tailwind to repin from the tribes but I typically only manually pin my own content. Tailwind tribes are completely free to use, you don’t need a Tailwind subscription.

Pinning without a scheduler has worked wonders for me but it is very time-consuming. I’m always looking for hacks and ways to save time as I have a full-time job and 2 kids at home in addition to my blog. My current method takes around 1 hour of my time every day which is time I could definitely use elsewhere!

This change was an experiment and it seems to have worked and saved me a bit of time. I will probably continue to add some pins to Tailwind to see what happens.

I will definitely keep manual pinning though as I think that is really important for traffic plus spending time on Pinterest helps you get to know your boards and what works.

If you are familiar with my income reports, you know that I credit my traffic growth to  Pinteresting Strategies,  a fabulous ebook from a blogger who grew her traffic from 0-200K page views in a year. The ebook is where I got the idea of manually pinning.

Carly, who wrote Pinteresting Strategies 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.

Making use of free tools to promote my posts

I really tried to knuckle down this month and spend time growing my Twitter, StumbleUpon and Facebook traffic. It worked, kind of. I still need more time to work on this.

I did take advantage of Facebook share groups and Tailwind communities a lot more than in previous months and it definitely made a difference. You can check out my 4 favourite free tools to promote my pins here.

Growing my income

Affiliate Marketing

As will see from my income breakdown below, 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!

If you are a new blogger and want to make income quickly, affiliate marketing is the best way to get started. I made my first affiliate sale within weeks of launching my blog and my affiliate income grows every month.

In order to help new bloggers really get to grips with affiliate marketing, I’ve created an ebook course that will take you from clicks to conversions in no time.

I’ve priced it low at $12 because I know how hard it is to spend money when you are not making any!

You can expect to learn:

• • How to brainstorm products that work for your niche
  • How to join affiliate programs and determine which ones are the most profitable
  • How to maximize your profits on and off your blog
  • How Amazon Associates can end up being your biggest earner
  • Four must-do strategies for increasing your sales
  • How to capture your audience without cheap sales tactics
  • What types of posts you should focus on to engage and grow
  • Which affiliate networks are best for your niche
  • Affiliate marketing Checklist

 

Joining a new ad network

In the ideal world, I wouldn’t have ads because.. ugh well. Who really wants them? BUT, if you want to monetize your blog, it’s a fact that ads can make up a large chunk of your income.

I was using Google Adsense for the first few months of blogging but at the end of June, I switched to Mediavine Network and it has been amazing. The earnings are so much higher than Adsense.

You do need at least 25K sessions (not page views ) to join Mediavine but it is worth tracking your stats and applying the second you can.

Their customer service is so awesome and they rectify any problems very quickly. They also have an awesome Facebook group for publishers that is quickly becoming one of my favorites.

What didn’t work this month?

Due to a plugin issue, my site was down for a good part of 2 days this month which sucked. It was so stressful although I will say that my host was pretty awesome at fixing it quickly.

I didn’t do anything on Instagram and I think I will have to if I want to get sponsored posts. I need to get my head around Instagram as I’ve never really caught onto it.

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 July 2017

Affiliates: $1848.25 MaxBounty, Shareasale , Amazon, etc). 

Mediavine: $547.94 

Total: $2396.19

Traffic for July 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 July I managed to double it again to 71,904  page views! 

 

July 2017 Goals Recap

Here’s how I fared with my goals:

• Keep growing traffic and income – Yay!
• Work on getting traffic from other social media platforms using the techniques in Traffic Transformation   .Um, I did try but need to do more.
• Reread all the courses I took in April to get even more tips on growing my blog! Again, nope. 
• Launch my freebie Pinterest guide.  Yes – grab it here!

August 2017 Goals

• Concentrate on twitter and other platforms
• Maintain or grow traffic knowing August is a slow month for traffic normally
• Land a sponsored post for the fall

My Previous Income Reports

June 2017 Income Report

May 2017 Income Report

Update: What My Blog Made in 2018 (Income report)