AUGUST INCOME REPORT: How I made $328 blogging

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If you read my July blogging income report, you’ll know how excited I was to have earned $439 last month blogging.

I’d been blogging for over a year, and whilst I absolutely love blogging I was really looking to start turning it into a profitable business.

BUT, over a year in and I was only earning money with it here and there.

So to have a month of earning an actual part-time income in July was so rewarding.

However, I was absolutely terrified that it was just a fluke! And that the next month I would go back to earning nothing.

So I am so happy to say that this month, I earned $328 from my blog.

AND, even though it was less than last month, how I earned it was really exciting (more on this to come!).

WHY SHARE A BLOGGING INCOME REPORT?

Before I share how I made money blogging this month, I want to explain why I’d do this.

I actually first started blogging with the intention of making money eventually.

Because unlike lots of people who start blogging as a hobby then realise they can monetise it, I actually came across a blogging income report from another blogger when looking for ways to make extra income as a student.

And honestly, I thought making money blogging was an online scam at first. I thought “There’s no way someone could make that much doing something they love, working wherever they wanted on their laptop!”.

But as I started to read more blogging income reports from various bloggers in different niches I realised that actually, blogging was a serious way to make a legit income.

And I knew that one day, I wanted to make money from it too. If other people were, there was no reason why I couldn’t. (Plus I was doing an advertising degree, which would probably help).

So I went for it!

But whilst the first blog I made was an absolute fail (it made no money, and eventually I closed it down), starting it made me realise how difficult blogging actually is.

And so I started ANOTHER blog (the one you are reading now!) as a place to keep note of my blogging tips and tutorials.

That was in January 2019.

So no, I didn’t make money until over a year and a half of having my blog. (It’s definitely not a get rich quick scheme).

But thankfully, it’s something I love doing and have done for over a year without making money anyway. And now I am making money with it, it’s something I love doing even more! And I can see myself doing it for years to come.

So if it wasn’t for a blogging income report, there’s no way I would have started a blog. And hopefully, this will help inspire a few people to start their own blogs.

Plus, it helps me to track my own progress!

Which reminds me…

MY BLOGGING STATS

I like to list my blogging stats in each report, to give readers a rough idea of what they can expect to make with their stats in comparison (although everyone’s blogging journey is different, and some people make waaay more than I do with much lower stats).

PINTEREST STATS

Pinterest is currently the only social media platform (although I’m about to change that).

In August, I reached:

• 5,022 Pinterest followers (+535)
• 1.2 million monthly views (+130k)

(You can also check out my Pinterest account here).

I’m honestly thrilled about this!

As me and Pinterest had a bit of a falling out, after it went on a banning spree and blocked loads of Pinterest accounts owned by bloggers.

And although I was lucky enough not to be one of them, I took a massive pinning break to make sure I didn’t trigger any spam filters and get banned too.

So for my reach to actually increase and to gain over 500 followers whilst barely pinning is a massive positive.

Plus, Pinterest is responsible for the majority of my traffic. But even with pinning less, my traffic didn’t suffer that much (more on this in a moment).

If you haven’t started using Pinterest for your blog yet, you’re missing out on a lot of blog traffic.

So sign up for my free course Easy Pinterest with Emily to go from Pinterest beginner to pro pinner. You can read more about it here, or just sign up below!

MY BLOG VIEWS

In August, I had:

• 14.5k sessions (+0)
• 18.8k page views (+0)

I’m really surprised that my traffic stayed the same, even though I pinned way less. But I’m not totally pleased because:

• Even though my traffic stats were identical, my income was slightly lower.
• One of my goals was to reach 25k pageviews a month, which I didn’t.

But growing my traffic is still a long term goal I will be working on!

You can see how I gained my readers in August below:

That’s a slight growth in nearly all my acquisition methods (except for referral).

But I really want to:

• Knuckle down and work on my SEO efforts next month, so I start getting more organic search traffic.
• Diversify my social traffic.

I’ve also finally got round to adding adverts to my site, so more traffic will help to increase ad income too. So I will definitely be working on that next month!

MY EMAIL STATS

In my last blogging income report, I noted I had a high unsubscribe rate compared to sign ups, and was looking to improve that.

This month, I had:

This is roughly the same as my 266 subscribes and 60 unsubscribes last month.

I’m not too mad at this- a growth of roughly 200 subscribers a month should mean I get around +2,400 subscribers by this time next year, which is a definite win!

But I would like to grow my email list faster, and only have people signed up who are really interested.

MY BLOGGING INCOME

Below is 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 2019 Blogging Income report

Blogging Her Way (affiliates)	$60.16
Bluehost (affiliates)	$80
Product sales	$188.08
Total	$328.24

So, you can see that there are some slight changes to my income, which I will go over in a moment.

But even though my income has dipped, it’s not all bad!

BLOGGING HER WAY AFFILIATES: $60.16

Last month, me and my bloggy friend Dale from Blogging Her Way made more of an effort to collab and share our products with our readers.

Surprisingly even though we are in the same niche, our products seem to compliment each other. If any of my readers want to know about making money on Pinterest, I always direct them to her guide Get Paid to Pin.

And last month I made $136.80 in affiliate sales solely promoting Get Paid to Pin.

But Dale has a number of different ebooks and courses, and towards the end of July I started suggesting her second guide Amazon Affiliate Affluence by itself too.

Dale also gave me a discount code, so my readers can get 20% off any of her guides using the code EBE20.

And whilst I shared this with my readers in July, I basically made no mention of it in August. So this could be why I had a drop in affiliate sales and made only $60.16 this month.

BLUEHOST AFFILIATES: $80

I’m majorly gutted about this one!

There’s a massive segment in my email list that don’t currently have a blog yet, and it was my goal to try and get some of them to start one this month.

My actual goal was to make X5 Bluehost affiliate sales.

So I created two incentives:

1. A free course on how to start a blog and make passive income
2. A free blog startup bundle

But despite these, I still only had 1 sign up! I will have to rethink my Bluehost promotion strategy, as there’s clearly something I’m missing.

A NOTE ON MY AFFILIATE SALES FOR AUGUST

So, I’m a lil’ gutted my affiliate sales decreased.

You’ll also notice if you read my July blogging income report that I made an affiliate sale for Tailwind, but made none this month.

Which means in total:

• I made $140 in affiliate sales. Compared to the $314 in affiliate sales I made in July, that’s a pretty big loss of income.

But it’s made me realise affiliate sales are sort of often out of your control.

Sure, you can promote the heck out of your affiliate products. But all it takes is for the product owner to increase their product price slightly, or tweak their sales page, and they might stop selling as many products. Meaning your affiliate income will probably decrease too.

So it’s made me realise I still need to work on diversifying my income. So if one method (like affiliate marketing) takes a hit, the other methods are still working.

And this is why I’m sort of okay with seeing a drop in affiliate income. Because my product income increased instead…

PRODUCT INCOME: $188.08

I’m honestly so proud of myself that my product sales have increased!

Because I’m no sales person, and I’d hate to come across as one. I simply made my first product (an ebook about Pinterest) because I wanted to provide a different approach to Pinterest for bloggers.

For ages I thought that you needed hundreds of pins to get loads of attention on Pinterest and decent blog traffic.

But when one of my pins went viral overnight, my blog traffic went from under 100 pageviews to over 600 pageviews. In just 24 hours!

And that pin went viral in November… almost 9 months later, the same pin still brings me over 6k sessions a month! So I simply created The Viral Pin Guide to show other bloggers what I had learnt.

There was absolutely no guarantee that a single person would buy my guide. And even when the first person bought it, I did a little happy dance.

And this month, I had over 20 people buy it!!!

I’m over the moon not only because each month more people are buying my guide (last month 13 people bought it), but lots of the feedback I have received has made me realise I have totally done the right thing in creating it. And I look forward to creating more guides and ebooks in the future!

I should also note that 1 of those sales was for a product I created ages ago, but never really promoted (gift guide templates for Pinterest). So one of my goals for next month is to add a shop on EBE with all my digital products, so people can always find them (and eventually make some more!).

BLOGGING INCOME REPORT: EXPENSES

I hate this part because it always shocks me how high my expenses are.

But I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t share it, so:

August 2019 Blogging expenses

Blog Hosting	$7.90 p/m
Tailwind	$19.92 p/m
Mailerlite	$15 p/m
SendOwl	$15 p/m
Adobe Photoshop	$12.12 p/m
Total	$69.94

It’s worth keeping in mind:

1. Some payments are annually, not monthly. I paid for Tailwind and blog hosting upfront for the year, so I do not have the total amount listed going out of my account each month.
2. Not all of these payments are necessary. Most people can start a blog for under $4 a month, but I pay slightly more so I can have multiple sites. Plus I pay more for Tailwind for extra features (Tailwind in general is awesome, but not completely necessary for blogging).
3. Not all are purely blogging related. For example I used Photoshop for my degree, but I decided to include it as I do sometimes use it to help with blogging stuff.

So my blogging expenses are higher than average.

Here’s a closer look at my expenses:

• BLOG HOSTING: I couldn’t run my blog without this, so it’s 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, which has helped to increase my reach. But you don’t need to spend almost $20 a month on it- you can schedule 100 pins for free here.
• 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, plus it’s free for up to 1000 subscribers. You can get a $20 referral fee when you sign up here.
• SENDOWL: This is the platform I use to sell my guide on. I pay $15 a month to have the option to add more products and sign up affiliates, as I think it will benefit me in the long run. But you can get the basic plan and sell 10 digital products for just $9 a month here.
• PHOTOSHOP: I feel like this is an unnecessary expense as I barely use it now I’ve finished my degree, but when I do use it I’m glad I have a subscription. It’s in the back of my mind to cancel it, but I’m not sure yet.

But even when you look at my expensive compared to my income, I have still made profit!

Now I want to discuss what worked for me making money blogging this month.

BLOGGING REVIEW: WHAT WORKED

After realising some epic fails last month I made changes accordingly, and it definitely paid off:

• I held more sales. My Pinterest guide is still in the shiny-new stage, and because it’s not established people are hesitant to spend lots on it . So offering it for half price for various sales (including a flash sale for my birthday!) really helped people go “Oh well let’s go for it, even if it’s rubbish it’s only $9!”
• I added more reviews and “proof”. Again, because my guide is still in the new stages, there’s very little info on it online. So I added a positive review from someone who had been through it, and more solid proof that my strategies work (my Pinterest reach surpassed 1 million this month so I added evidence of that, plus examples of my pin stats with high click through rates). I think the reviews and proof help to show people I really knew my stuff and encouraged sales.
• I collaborated more with other bloggers. If you read my last blogging income report, you’ll know one of my big fails was reaching out to bloggers asking if they wanted a free copy of the guide (most of them ignored me, which I’m not surprised at looking back!). So this month, I made more of an effort to collab with other bloggers. And it really paid off- I have made some awesome bloggy friends, and learnt so much from them that I hadn’t anticipated! Plus I have some collabs lined up for September now too.

I’m glad I wrote down what worked and didn’t work last month, because I can actually see I learnt from my fails for last month.

So again, here are some of the fails I made this month (hopefully I can learn from them and make them wins for September!)

BLOGGING REVIEW: WHAT DIDN’T WORK

• Affiliate marketing. I saw a serious drop in income from affiliate marketing this month. I really need to focus on positively promoting more of the products I use as a blogger (because there are quite a few), and perhaps even branch out into different affiliate programmes if I want to make serious consistent income from affiliate marketing.
• Emailing. This isn’t a massive fail because actually, my email list was responsible for a lot of my sales this month! I’m just getting slightly fed up of writing and sending them, as it feels very one sided on my behalf. I’m hoping to create a Facebook group ASAP, so me and bloggers can have more of a chat (and I get to write less emails!).
• Gaining traffic. On the plus side, I’m glad my traffic isn’t dropping. But I really want to grow my blog traffic- I just added adverts so more views would increase ad income, and to show I know my stuff enough to be talking about digital marketing strategies!
• Increasing income. I naively thought after reading blogs which publish income reports that my income for each month would increase steadily until I’m eventually earning a full time income. My lower income for August shows this is not the case. But if anything, I’m kind of glad that I made any money at all to show to myself July was not a fluke, and the dip in income as made me more determined for September!
• Diversifying income. Massive fail on my behalf- if I had gained one client for Pinterest management or just added advertss at the beginning of the month, I could have made up some of the income loss from affiliate marketing. Lesson learned- a diverse income with multiple streams is a steady income!

BLOGGING GOALS

Very quickly as this income report is getting long, I want to go over some of my goals.

I’ve realised how important goal setting is for both motivation and tracking progress.

So just like if you were trying to lose weight you’d take photographs, I write down my goals (and do a happy dance when I realise I’ve met them!).

BLOGGING GOALS FOR LAST MONTH

Last month, I set myself around 6 goals to achieve in August:

• Share X4 traffic/ income /sign up generating posts- FAIL. I only managed 3 posts! And they didn’t all serve their purpose of generating traffic, subscribes or generating income.
• Gain 300 subscribers- FAIL. I only managed around 200. Hopefully that’s to do with it being summer, and in September more people will be indoors reading blogs!
• Reach 5000 Pinterest followers- SUCCESS. Slightly surprised as it would mean gaining over 500 followers in a month, but I did it!
• Make X5 Bluehost sales- MASSIVE FAIL. I only managed one… And that’s despite creating freebies and a course based around it. I will have to rethink my approach.
• Make X20 ebook sales- SUCCESS. I’m so happy about this! Granted, I just about scraped 21 sales, and that’s with a lot of promotion. But the fact that I can now call myself an entrepreneur is amazing!
• Reach 20k sessions- FAIL. I’m stuck at just under 15k sessions. But hopefully that’s because it’s summer, and in winter my traffic will naturally increase.

So mostly fails, but a few successes that I am pleased with.

BLOGGING GOALS FOR THIS MONTH

So I’ve written my blogging goals for September and put them by my bed, in the hope that I will see them regularly and do more to achieve them!

They are:

• Share X4 beneficial posts. I say beneficial as I want them to either generate traffic, income or subscribes.
• Make X20 ebook sales. I think it was a bit of a stretch aiming for 20 sales in August. If I can keep that up in September, I’d be so happy.
• Diversify my income by adding at least 1 income stream. I’ve learnt my lesson! And I definitely need to add more income streams. I’ve just added adverts, so it will be interesting to see how that affects my income in September.
• Open a shop and add 1 product. I’ve got my guide listed on my site, but not my other product. I think adding a shop will be beneficial to my product income.
• Get 2k sessions through SEO. I want to increase my traffic, but I’m leaning towards Google now as a way to diversify my traffic sources and not solely rely on Pinterest.
• Start a Facebook group. I really want to have more of a chat with bloggers in need! Rather than just send emails all the time.
• Gain 1 client. I’m aiming for 1 Pinterest client as this would be reoccurring income, but even just a one-off freelance client would be helpful.

BLOGGING GOALS LONG TERM

Eventually, my blogging goals are:

• Earn $1k – $2k a month from my blog. Me and my boyfriend want to go travelling in a years time. It will be amazing if I can be earning this amount to help support us.
• Gain some Pinterest clients. I haven’t got any yet, but I would like to gain some clients to have a secure form of income.
• Gain 10k sessions from SEO. I’ve already made working on SEO a short term goal, but eventually I want to be getting lots of organic search traffic! As right now, I’m relying too much on just social media for my traffic.
• Reach 50k sessions a month. I’ve just signed to a premium ad network, so this amount would allow me to earn considerable passive income from advertising.

It’s also worth noting one of my long term blogging goals last time was to start a Facebook group, but I’m hoping to do that this month!

BLOGGING INCOME REPORT: FINAL THOUGHTS

I really hoped you have enjoyed reading my blogging income report for August!

As despite how long it is, I was really excited to write it. Income reports are a chance to be honest about blogging, and reflect on progress for myself.

If this post has helped you with making money blogging, please share it.

Otherwise check out these other money making posts you might enjoy:

• How to make $500+ a month with Amazon affiliates
• Easy ways to make money blogging as a beginner
• How these bloggers make $1000+ a month