AUGUST INCOME REPORT: How I made $2,503 blogging

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I can’t believe summer is over now!

If you read my last income report you’ll know that I lined up a new client for a monthly service in July, ready to start in August.

Well this is the first month working with all my clients, and I can’t believe how much it’s increased my blogging income.

Another month of earning over $2k!

I know you’re probably sick of seeing me write that in bold italics.

But in all honesty, I still can’t believe I am making this much from my blog.

Because just over a year ago I was making a few hundred dollars a month.

Take a look…

MY PREVIOUS INCOME REPORTS

FIRST INCOME REPORT: July 2019: How I made $439 blogging
August 2019: How I made $328 blogging
September 2019: How I made $512 blogging
October 2019: How I made $559 blogging part-time
FIRST $1k MONTH: November 2019: How I made $1,225 whilst working full-time
December 2019: How I made $816 blogging (whilst working full-time)
January 2020: How I made $828 blogging whilst working 40 hours a week
February 2020: How I made $1,047 blogging (whilst working full-time)
March 2020: How I made $1125 blogging (whilst in isolation)
April 2020: How I made $1826 blogging
FIRST $2k MONTH: July 2020: How I made $2,159 blogging

So you can see in July 2019 I made around $400 from my blog… But in July 2020 I made over $2,000.

And if you’d had told me last July I would make this much the following year, I don’t think I’d have believed you!

So this is why I still write how much I’m earning in bold italics like it’s a big deal.

Because for me, it is!

I never thought I’d make a full-time income online doing what I love, and I’m so grateful that I am now able to.

So here it is; my blogging income report for August.

MY BLOGGING STATS

I always start my income report with my current blogging stats, so I can look back and see how my blog is doing (and to prove you don’t necessarily need a big platform!).

Below are my current stats:

PINTEREST STATS

Pinterest is responsible for the majority of my blog traffic.

My Pinterest account is here, and in August I reached:

11,397 followers
2.8 million monthly viewers

As I always note, my Pinterest account is just naturally growing by itself now without me putting much effort into it and my reach seems to stay high.

And whilst I’m happy with the consistent growth, I know there is room to grow more here (as I haven’t been active for my own account on Pinterest for quite some time!).

MY BLOG VIEWS

My traffic dropped slightly this month to around 14k sessions/ 18k page views:

I know a lot of bloggers experience a decrease in traffic over summer (known as “the summer slump”) as more people are out enjoy their time off rather than being active online.

So whilst it is frustrating for me to see a decrease in traffic, considering I don’t do much to get it I am pretty happy to have 18k page views a month!

But of course, I really need to work on a strategy to make sure I am growing my blog each month.

MY EMAIL STATS

This was a good month for subscriber growth for me:

It’s not as much as a growth as last month (where I gained around 170 subscribers!), but I am quite happy with around +120 subscribers each month without having to actively gain them.

But as with all my other blog stats, I am sure there is a way for me to gain a faster rate of growth!

MY BLOGGING INCOME

So here’s the bit you’ve been waiting (scrolling?) for!

A breakdown of my blogging income.

(Side note: this is income before expenses. Some affiliate products have a 30-day refund policy, and this is income earned for the month, not necessarily paid out).

August 2020 Blogging Income report

Blogging Her Way (affiliates)	$3.60
Bluehost (affiliates)	$170
Tailwind (affiliates)	$2.26
Advertising income	$30.37
Product sales	$93.22
Services	$2204.41

Total	$2,503.86

Here’s a breakdown of this income:

AFFILIATE MARKETING

Below are all the screenshots of my affiliate earnings:

Again, this has been another poor month for me in terms of affiliate marketing.

Now I don’t mean poor as in “I worked really hard and something’s not working” kinda poor.

I mean poor as in I didn’t really earn much.

And considering I had months earlier in the year where I was making $500 a month from affiliate marketing, this is not good growth.

However, I literally don’t do anything for my affiliate income.

It’s all passive.

So earning $175 without doing anything is actually pretty great!

I just know I could be earning more.

ADVERTISING INCOME

So another bad months for ads…

My session RPM is mega low (even lower than last month).

And when you consider at the beginning of the year it was almost $10 and I was earning around $130 a month from ads, you can see why I’m unhappy with this form of income.

(And not only that, but this month I accidentally switched off the plugin which allows me to make money with ads on my blog. So for a while, my income from ads was literally $0 a day. Big woops!).

I’ve actually made plans with the ad company I’m with to switch ads off permanently in the next 30 days, as I don’t feel they’re worth having on my blog at the moment.

But I know there are bloggers making thousands of dollars every month just from having ads on their blog!

So I need to work on getting more traffic to my blog, so I can make more passive income with ads eventually.

PRODUCT SALES

So in April I made over $230 from product sales, and in July I made $113.

And this month, I made even less:

So yes, I’m a little sad to see my income from selling products go down.

BUT, I have to remind myself this is another form of passive income (as these sales are from a tripwire I have set up so I don’t need to actively work to make them).

So not great when you consider there are bloggers making thousands from digital product sales each month, but pretty cool when I think I didn’t have to work for this money.

SERVICES INCOME

I think looking at my forms of passive income it’s pretty plain to see I have been impacted by “the summer slump”, as less people are reading my blog and so I make less money passively.

However, my services income is where I make up for my other failings!

I’m aware the total of this is over the $2,200 but there is a service fee for each transaction so I do not get all the money myself!

I am now officially a full-time Pinterest manager helping bloggers and business owners with their Pinterest presence.

This is the form of income I have managed to grow the most, and is my “safest” form of income as it’s the most consistent.

And whilst I do have to actually work for this (it’s not passive income like my other income streams), I am able to work my own hours doing something I enjoy (as I love working with my clients!).

So this is the form of income I am the most proud of and happy with currently.

BLOGGING EXPENSES

So that covers all the money that I had coming in for the month (which is the most I have ever had come in online!).

But in the interest of transparency, here are the expenses that have gone out:

Blog Hosting	$34.95 p/m
Tailwind	$19.92 p/m
Mailerlite	$36 p/m (could be $21 if paid annually)
SendOwl	$18 p/m
Canva Pro	$12.95 p/m ($9.95 if paid annually)
Gsuite	$6.19 p/m
Stock photos	$11.50

Total	$139.51 p/m ($121.51 if paid annually)

Here’s a breakdown of what each expense is:

BLOG HOSTING: I couldn’t run my blog without this, but I pay for more expensive hosting to make my blog load faster. Blog hosting is definitely an essential expense, but you can start a blog for under $4 a month by following my start a blog guide here.
TAILWIND: I love Tailwind so much that I bought a plan with more features, but you can schedule 100 pins for free.
MAILERLITE: Email marketing has become essential for me, and I wouldn’t be able to make money blogging without it. I recommend Mailerlite because you can add images to your email. I pay for mine and recently started paying more as I have more subscribers. But MailerLite is free for up to 1000 subscribers. Plus you can get a $20 referral fee when you sign up here.
SENDOWL: This is the platform I use to sell my Pinterest guide on. I pay $15 a month to have the option to add more products and sign up affiliates, but the basic plan allows you to sell 10 digital products for just $9 a month.
CANVA PRO: As a Pinterest manager the pro version really helps me as a Pinterest manager, as I can access more of the stock photos and fonts Canva pro offers (so I can create awesome pins for my clients). “Normal” bloggers wouldn’t need this however.
GSUITE: I’m certain there’s a way of doing this for free so you don’t need to pay for it, but I pay for Gsuite to have an email address that’s my website (aka emily@easyblogemily.com rather than easyblogemily@gmail.com as it’s more professional).
STOCK PHOTOS: This is expensive, but for me it’s worth the price as it saves me a lot of time looking for them (which means I spend less time working for my clients, therefore upping my hourly rate!).

So you can see I do spend quite a bit.

HOWEVER, the expenses are relatively low in comparison to the profit I make.

Plus this isn’t a “normal” amount for a blogger to spend each month!

New bloggers would spend less than $20 a month;

Tailwind isn’t a necessity for Pinterest
You’d only need SendOwl if you wanted to sell a digital product
Mailerlite is free for up to 1000 subscribers
You don’t need Canva Pro or a stock photo subscription at all

So really you’d only need blog hosting and perhaps Gsuite, which would be around $10 a month altogether!

That’s my income for the month covered; here are my goals for following months.

BLOGGING GOALS

My blogging goals never really change that much month to month.

But every now and then I get to cross one off as I’ve achieved it!

So I keep noting down my long term blogging goals at the end of each income report (as hopefully I’ll be able to look back in the future and see how far I’ve come!)

My blogging goals are:

Earn $500 a month from each passive income stream. This is a loong way off! But earning $500 from each form of passive income stream on my blog will mean at least $1,500 a month from my blog passively (which will be awesome).
Gain 10k sessions from SEO. I invested in a course for SEO, but haven’t actually been through it yet! So hopefully one I start implementing it I will gain more organic search traffic.
Reach 50k sessions a month. This will up my passive income from ads considerably, but I’m a mile off from this right now.
Build more of a community and help beginner bloggers. This is the main reason I started this blog and what I want to continue to do – it’s my mission to help other bloggers achieve their blogging goals!

MY LAST BLOGGING INCOME REPORT…

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my August blogging income report because I’m saying goodbye to them (for now)!

Now I know a lot of my readers enjoy my income reports, and I haven’t change my thoughts on them at all; I think blogging income reports are great for transparency and to show how much people can really make online (I wouldn’t have known you could actually make money blogging if I hadn’t read a blogging income report myself).

However, I have a full year’s worth of blogging income reports up now.

And I think they’ve served their purpose at this moment in time.

You’ve been able to see my journey from a beginner blogger making a few hundred dollars a month to scaling my income and making over $2k a month (which I hope has been as inspiring for you as it has been exciting for me!).

But now I’ve reached a point where I feel I need to take a step back and start putting more work in behind the scenes to really scale my income beyond $2k a month.

I’m sure as a reader you’re getting sick of me saying “Oh, I need to get more traffic!” and “I need to work on my affiliate marketing strategy!” every month.

Because I’m really not doing enough right now to make these positive changes.

And I think the best way for me start to actually make these changes will be to take myself away from any potential scrutiny and pressure from people to keep making more money each month (I’m aware this is pressure I am probably putting on myself! But pressure I am feeling nonetheless).

So whilst I do still love blogging income reports and will probably publish more in the future (when I hopefully have exciting progress to share), for now I am saying goodbye to them.

But I really hope you have enjoyed them, and if you’re not already subscribed you can sign up to learn how to start making passive income below (as my email list will be the first to know about any blogging income updates I have!):

Otherwise, this is the end of my last blogging income report.

Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts you would like me to see!

EXTRA BLOGGING HELP

Remember if you need more help making money with your blog:

Check out Easy Pinterest with Emily to start getting serious blog traffic using Pinterest
And join the Easy Blogging Facebook group to get even more support

AUGUST BLOGGING INCOME REPORT 2020

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