It’s hard to believe that I’m writing the second ever income report for my blog. I thought about starting a blog for so long, and I finally started it about 2 months ago!
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 July 2020 (2nd 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.
- 200 monthly page views on the blog
- 100 sessions on the blog
- 100 Pinterest followers
- 100 Instagram followers
- 100 Twitter followers
How Did I Do?
Goal
Actual
Met (Y/N)?
200 monthly page views on the blog
208
Y
100 sessions on the blog
142
Y
100 Pinterest followers
96
N
100 Instagram followers
121
Y
100 Twitter followers
64
N
I met 3 out of 5 goals!
Honestly, I know my blog is very new and my numbers are really low. Throughout this month I have tried to learn as much as possible about different strategies to drive traffic to my blog so I hope to increase my traffic in the future.
Traffic
Here’s a screenshot from my Google Analytics for the blog:
I am so happy that I was able to reach my monthly goals for both sessions and page views!
I can see that my traffic was lower towards the end of the month. I do think this had to do with me not being as consistent on social media. I want to really focus on being consistent, though my full-time job got really busy towards the end of this month and it has been hard to find the time and energy to promote my blog. Hopefully I will be able to improve!
Most of my traffic for this month came from social media, though all of my social media accounts for the blog are really new so they don’t have a lot of reach yet. I also made the decision to not share my blog with friends/family, so I don’t have any traffic from them or shout-outs from them on social media to help me get more traffic.
From Google Analytics, I can see that 45.19% of my Social Media traffic came from Pinterest, 27.88% came from Twitter, 25.96% came from Facebook, and 0.96% came from Instagram.
I am in a few Facebook groups and participated in a few threads to promote my blog. So that’s how I got traffic from Facebook.
I started a Twitter account for my blog last month, 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, or less). 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 literally got only one session on my blog from Instagram this month. However, I have decided to re-do my Instagram feed so it looks more cohesive and a lot better. So I spent a lot of time this month planning my future feed and figuring out an aesthetic that I like. Because I’ve just been planning, I actually haven’t posted on Instagram since July 8th. Since I haven’t been very active at all, I understand why I haven’t gotten much traffic from Instagram. I plan to roll out my new Instagram feed this next month, so hopefully I’ll see more Instagram growth and more traffic to my blog because of that.
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 really 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 9.9k, and at the end of this month it was 14k. This just tells me how many people see my pins, but I am happy to see that increasing.
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 33. This month I got 51. I am happy that it is increasing.
This month I decided to start a free trial of Tailwind so I could schedule Pinterest pins and keep my pinning more consistent. Throughout the beginning half of this month I was pinning about 5 pins per day, and approximately 2 of those daily pins were fresh pins directing to my own blog posts. However, I did run out of the 100 pins I was allowed to schedule for the free trial pretty quickly, so I had to go back to manually pinning for the last week or so of the month. That made me a lot less consistent, probably pinning every other day at most. And I noticed my blog traffic was lower when I wasn’t using Tailwind at the end of the month. I think I do plan on purchasing Tailwind so I can continue to schedule pins and be more consistent.
Blog Income
I did not make any money with my blog this month. I haven’t actually started monetizing it at all, so I knew I wouldn’t make any money.
I spent this month writing blog posts and trying to grow my blog social media profiles. I want to increase my blog’s traffic more before I really start focusing on monetization. However, I did make a separate bank account for blog income/expenses so I can keep those transactions separate from my personal transactions. So I am slowly preparing to monetize.
I have not joined any affiliate programs yet and I do not currently run ads on my blog. I plan to join affiliate programs within the next couple of months if I can get a bit more traffic to my blog, but for now I’m going to focus on gaining traffic and making sure my blog posts are amazing every time. I am a total beginner at this, though I’m having fun learning how to blog!
Blog Expenses
I actually didn’t spend any money on my blog this month, since all the start-up costs were paid last month and I haven’t yet purchased Tailwind.
Blog Posts from July 2020
I try to be consistent with writing new blog posts, so here are the posts I uploaded this month:
Goals for Next Month (August 2020)
- 300 monthly page views on the blog
- 200 sessions on the blog
- 150 followers on Pinterest
- 200 followers on Instagram
- 100 followers on Twitter
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.
Overall, I am happy to see everything that has happened this month and I look forward to seeing what I can accomplish in the next month!
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!
Love these, I might need to post another one myself.
You should! I love reading income reports!