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I can’t believe I’m actually writing the first income report for my blog. I thought about starting a blog for so long, and I finally started it about a month 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. But 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 June 2020 (First Month Blogging)
Goals
I had no idea what goals to set for my first month, since I am so new to this blogging world and had no idea what could happen. I had also seen other people have extremely different stats for their first several months, so this really was a blind goal-setting month. But moving forward I can try to set more realistic goals based on this information.
- 50 monthly page views on the blog
- 25 sessions on the blog
- 100 Pinterest followers
- 50 Link Clicks on Pinterest
How Did I Do?
I met 2 out of 4 goals!
Honestly, I know my blog is very new and my numbers are really low. Throughout this first month I started learning about new strategies for gaining traffic to the blog, and started implementing some of those strategies as the month went on.
Traffic
Here’s a screenshot from my Google Analytics for the blog:
I think it’s good that the sessions & page views increased at a higher rate as the month went on. This lets me know that the strategies I started implementing have started working. As I’m beginning to get the hang of blogging and learning my process, I’ll be able to implement even more and be more consistent with my strategies moving forward. I’m super excited to see my growth over the next few months!
Most of my traffic for this month came from social media, though all of my social media accounts for the blog are brand 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. Here’s another screenshot from Google Analytics:
From Google Analytics, I can see that 67.35% of my Social traffic came from Pinterest, 20.41% came from Facebook, 6.12% came from Instagram, and 6.12% came from Twitter.
I joined a few Facebook groups and participated in a few threads to promote my blog or my Pinterest account. So that’s how I got traffic from Facebook.
About halfway through the month I started a Twitter profile for the blog and began following bloggers/influencers in my niche. I have tweeted a couple of my blog posts, which has generated a little bit of traffic, but I really haven’t explored Twitter much this month.
Towards the end of the month I added my blog URL to my blog’s Instagram bio and mentioned my blog in one Instagram post. I’ve had this Instagram account for almost a year (because I’ve been intending to start a blog for a long time), but I have rarely posted on it so it doesn’t have many followers. This is something I do want to work on moving forward so that I can use Instagram to get more traffic to my blog.
As Pinterest is my biggest driver of traffic, I wanted to go a bit more in depth about how my Pinterest account is going. At the beginning of this month, my Pinterest account was brand new with no content pinned on it at all. I really started from nothing this month.
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 this month my Monthly Viewers metric has grown to 9.9k. This just tells me how many people see my pins.
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 this month were 33.
At the beginning of this month I was creating pins and saving them initially to a secret board that was just for the pins that link to my blog. I was then re-pinning those pins to other relevant boards. I have since learned that Pinterest values fresh pins of your own content, not re-pins. So all of my fresh pins were going onto a secret board so nobody else could see them. When I realized this, I started saving the fresh pins to the most relevant board instead of to my secret board. This change in strategy has helped my pins to get a lot more impressions, so I will continue to use this strategy for the next month so I can get more data on it.
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 learning about WordPress and figuring out my process of uploading blog posts to my website. I also spent a lot of time setting up and designing my website, and tweaking it to make it look the way that I want.
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’ve only spent $157.48 total on my blog so far. I may take a course or two at some point, but for now I’m trying to learn as much as I can for free and focus on driving traffic to my blog through Pinterest predominantly, while also slowly building up my other social media profiles related to the blog.
Blog Posts from June 2020
I try to be consistent with writing new blog posts, so here are the posts I uploaded this month:
Goals for Next Month (July 2020)
- 200 monthly page views on the blog
- 100 sessions on the blog
- 100 followers on Pinterest
- 100 followers on Instagram
- 100 followers on Twitter
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!
Hey Sidney! I relate to SO much of what you wrote in this income report! I’ve been looking for new bloggers to connect with since I only see established blogger income reports. This is so reassuring to see new bloggers out there as I’ve just started mine. Loving your content and I hope you keep going at it! <3
Hi Jandy! Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment! I also was only able to find blogger income reports from really established bloggers, and that’s one of the reasons I decided to start making income reports from the very beginning with my blog (even before making any income). I’m so glad I could help inspire and reassure you! <3
Love this! Also, I empathise so much with not sharing your blog with friends/family, only a very small number of people in my life know mine exists. This much be such a nice thing to look back on month after month though!
Katie | katieemmabeauty.com
Thank you for your kind words! It’s nice to know I’m not the only one keeping my blog a bit of a secret!