While it would be nice to make money the way the big bloggers do, I write because it makes me happy to share my knowledge. Blogging does have a few expenses, and I would feel so successful if I were able to make enough money to offset those expenses. It may seem silly to do an income report on a month where I made no income, but I’ll tell you why I want to write these blog income reports.
Why I Post Income Reports
Looking at other bloggers’ income reports was really inspiring to me and contributed to me feeling like I could start my own blog. I personally love to read income reports of my favorite bloggers and watch their growth over time. Now that I have a blog, I want to contribute my income reports so that I can provide content that may inspire others to start a blog.
I also want to write out these reports so that I can see my own growth over time. Currently I am at the very beginning of my blogging journey and I cannot even imagine where this blog will take me. These monthly reports will be one way of looking back at my journey through data.
Posting these reports will hopefully help me to hold myself accountable for my goals. By including goals for the next month in each of my reports, I will be able to see where I should be focusing my energy in order to try to achieve those goals. I can also re-evaluate my goals and decide which of those goals are still worth pursuing for me as time goes on.
Income Report for August 2020 (3rd Month Blogging)
Goals
It’s hard to know how much a blog is going to grow and at what rate. I want to set goals so that I am always striving to improve my blog and reach more readers. This month my goals were focused on increasing traffic to my blog, specifically using social media.
- 300 monthly page views on the blog
- 200 sessions on the blog
- 150 Pinterest followers
- 200 Instagram followers
- 100 Twitter followers
How Did I Do?
Goal
Actual
Met (Y/N)?
300 monthly page views on the blog
169
N
200 sessions on the blog
128
N
150 Pinterest followers
97
N
200 Instagram followers
121
N
100 Twitter followers
82
N
I met 0 out of 5 goals!
I am a bit disappointed in myself because I didn’t reach any of my goals. However, I know that there are reasons that led to that outcome.
I tend to get spikes in traffic when I post a new blog post, and I usually post 6-8 blog posts each month. This month I only posted 4.
One of my relatives came to stay with me for over a week in the middle of August, which corresponded to lower traffic. To be quite honest, I was completely focused on spending time with my relative and I really didn’t work on my blog much at all during that time. So it is understandable that my traffic wasn’t as much as it could’ve been.
Moving into this next month, I will be prioritizing my blog more so hopefully that will lead to more traffic this next month.
Traffic
Here’s a screenshot from my Google Analytics for the blog:
I can see that my traffic was lower throughout the middle of the month (with that spike around August 17th directly correlating with me publishing a new blog post).
Most of my traffic for this month came from social media, though all of my social media accounts for the blog are still fairly new so they don’t have a lot of reach yet.
From Google Analytics, I can see that 50.00% of my Social Media traffic came from Pinterest, 28.72% came from Twitter, 19.15% came from Facebook, and 2.13% came from Instagram.
I am in a few Facebook groups and I answered other people’s questions from those groups and linked a couple of my blog posts to give them more information. That’s how I got traffic from Facebook.
I started a Twitter account for my blog a couple of months ago, and I have been trying to figure out how to use it to drive traffic. I know I should post on a Twitter a LOT more often (I currently post once every few days). I plan to post more often this next month to hopefully increase traffic and my following.
My blog URL is in my blog’s Instagram bio, so that’s how I got a tiny amount of traffic from Instagram. I only got two sessions on my blog from Instagram this month. This month I archived all of my Instagram photos and started posting new ones based on my new feed aesthetic and to be more specific to my blog. This caused me to lose some followers as they didn’t like the change and weren’t interested in my new Instagram content, but I also gained some followers because of those changes as well. Overall, my Instagram followers are the same at the end of this month as they were at the end of last month.
As Pinterest is my biggest driver of traffic, I wanted to go a bit more in depth about how my Pinterest account is going. My Pinterest account is still fairly new, but I’m hoping that I can continue to grow and gain more traffic from Pinterest.
While the Monthly Viewers metric doesn’t tell much about how well Pinterest is working for blog traffic, it is interesting to see the reach I am getting on Pinterest. At the end of last month my Monthly Viewers metric was 14k, and at the end of this month it was 44.5k. This just tells me how many people see my pins, but I am happy to see that increasing so much!
Link Clicks is a more useful metric for Pinterest as it tells me how many times people have clicked on my pins and went to my blog. The total amount of Link Clicks I got last month was 51. This month I got 50. That is around the same, so I am okay with that though I hope to increase that in the future.
I did not end up purchasing Tailwind this month, despite my free trial ending. With Pinterest’s focus on fresh pins, I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it to use Tailwind to only schedule fresh pins, since Tribes may not be as effective anymore.
However, now that I have seen my traffic dip due to not being consistent at promoting my blog, I am thinking that maybe Tailwind would still be worth it to me so I can stay consistent.
The only thing I am worried about is that some people say that manually pinning fresh pins to Pinterest has been working better for them than using Tailwind to publish their fresh pins. I wouldn’t want to spend money on Tailwind for my pinning to not be as effective. I’ll have to think about it.
Blog Income
I did not make any money with my blog this month.
I actually did join a couple of affiliate programs within the last few days of August, so there’s actually a possibility for my blog to make money now, which is very exciting!
Blog Expenses
I actually didn’t spend any money on my blog this month as I haven’t yet purchased Tailwind.
Blog Posts from August 2020
Here are the posts I uploaded this month:
Ideally I would like to publish 6-8 blog posts each month, but this month I only published 4. Not publishing as many posts probably affected my blog traffic negatively because I tend to get spikes of traffic when I publish a new post. I also want to make sure I have lots of quality blog posts that I can promote, so my promotion strategy is more well-rounded and not overly repetitive.
Goals for Next Month (September 2020)
- 200 monthly page views on the blog
- 175 sessions on the blog
- 100 followers on Pinterest
- 150 followers on Instagram
- 100 followers on Twitter
- Have 0 days where there were 0 sessions on my blog
- Make 1 affiliate sale
My goals are focused on increasing my blog traffic. I believe that increasing my following on various social media platforms will help me to use those social media profiles to drive traffic to my blog, which is why several of my goals are about increasing my social media followings.
One thing that worries me about reaching my goals is that many of my blog posts are about the Disney College Program. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Disney College Program has recently been cancelled for the foreseeable future and we don’t know when it will return. This may mean that people won’t be looking for information about it as much for awhile, which may hurt my traffic. My plan is to make sure I am also posting non-DCP content.
Now that I do have a few affiliate links in a couple of my blog posts, I have added a goal about making an affiliate sale and getting a commission. This won’t be a priority for me as my main goal is still to increase my traffic, but it would be nice if a qualifying sale would happen.
As you can see, my goals for the next month include growing my social media followings on various platforms. So if you like me or my content, I would encourage you to please check out my social media profiles below and perhaps follow me! Thank you in advance!
I love this. I always thought about doing blog income reports without having much, but always felt weird. This is inspiring!
Omg I’m so glad you thought this was inspiring! If you want to make blog income reports, you should definitely go for it!