JULY INCOME REPORT: How I made $439 blogging

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I am SO excited to be sharing this blogging income report with you!

I have been working on Easy Blog Emily since January 2018 (I’ve been blogging for over 2 years however, as I started a different blog in June 2017 but eventually stopped that to focus on EBE).

And I am NOT one of those bloggers that made money in their first month blogging….Or even a good amount in their first year!

Plus, you must remember I was working on EBE whilst completing my degree.

I wondered at points if I should be getting a “real” part-time job alongside my studies, rather than spending all my free time working on something that wasn’t bringing me any income.

But I persevered because I really do love blogging (I wouldn’t have been doing it for this long if I didn’t!).

I was certain that whilst it wasn’t bringing me money at the time, it would at some point in the future.

And I’m really glad to say that time as come- this month I made $439 working at home on my blog, and nearly all of it was passive!

WHY SHARE A BLOGGING INCOME REPORT?

I know blogging income reports can be a really positive and inspiring for some bloggers, but also really frustrating if you’re not making money with your own blog.

However, I have decided to share my income with you, and I want you to know why.

I’m doing this for 2 reasons:

1. For your sake. I want to help bloggers out- I have always enjoyed reading blogging income reports from other bloggers, to see how they are making money and to motivate me. So I thought it would be helpful to see what money making methods are working for me, then you can try them too. Plus to show you that you can actually make money blogging!
2. For me! I want to be able to look back and (hopefully) see my blogging income grow, as well as seeing what goals I have set and achieved for me and my blog.

So this is why I am sharing how much I have made on my blog this month.

MY BLOGGING STATS

So I’ve listed my stats in this blogging income report, so you can get a rough idea of my blog size compared to money made.

MY PINTEREST STATS

Pinterest is currently the only form of social media I focus on, so it’s the main social media platform I get traffic from.

I currently have 4.4k followers on Pinterest.

My reach is sort of wavering between 860k and 870k, but I am expecting it to drop soon as it’s summer and less people are working on their blogs.

Pinterest has been essential in growing my blog to create an income.

It is responsible for the majority of my blog traffic (which we will come to in a moment), and I really would be lost without it.

If you haven’t started using Pinterest for your blog yet, you’re making a big mistake!

I doubt I would have made any income this month without it.

So if you haven’t started working on Pinterest yet, you can 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 July, I had 14.5k sessions and just under 19,000 page views.

This does not seem like a lot when you think there are some bloggers getting over 100,000 page views every month,

But I have to keep reminding myself that more readers doesn’t necessarily mean a larger income. (I made a list of bloggers earning over $1000 a month with under 15k pageviews to show you don’t need lots of views to make money).

Plus, it is better for me in my niche to work with a highly engaged but small audience first. THEN work on scaling my reach in the future.

You can see how I acquired my blog readers for this month below:

The majority are from social media, but I’m really happy to see my organic search traffic increase. This basically means Google is starting to take my blog seriously!

I’m also starting to get direct hits, meaning people coming back to my blog. Yay!

Although it dipped this month, you can see I also get some traffic from email.

Which brings me onto my next stat: my email list.

MY EMAIL STATS

If you’ve heard the phrase “the money is in the list”, it’s because it’s right!

I first started working on growing my email list by offering my free Pinterest course.

It’s one of the smartest decisions I’ve made for my blog- I don’t think I’d have been able to make any income without my email list really!

So this month, I had 266 people subscribe… And 60 unsubscribed.

My unsubscribe rate is a LOT higher than I expected, but I have been emailing quite a lot recently. Plus I’m sure lots of people just sign up for my free course and then ditch me, ha!

But I’ve come to the conclusion I would rather have a smaller list full of people who are excited to open my emails.

As similar to my blog traffic, it is better for my business model to have a smaller but highly engaged audience.

So the unsubscribes aren’t really a bad thing.

MY BLOGGING INCOME

So here is the bit you have been waiting 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).

July 2019 Blogging Income report

Blogging Her Way (affiliates)	$136.80
Bluehost (affiliates)	$160
Tailwind (affiliates)	$18.11
The Viral Pin Guide (my ebook)	$124.40
Total	$439.31

I really feel like this is the month everything just clicked income wise.

I made lots of little changes here and there, and it really made the difference!

Here’s a breakdown of each income source:

BLOGGING HER WAY AFFILIATES: $136.80

One of the biggest mistakes I made before was not reaching out and collaborating with other bloggers.

Connections are not only good for potential opportunities, but just to have blogging friends that understand what you do!

So this month, me and my bloggy friend Dale from Blogging Her Way made more of an effort to collab.

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

And it definitely paid off- I made $136.80 in affiliate sales!

You can see the proof of each affiliate sale below:

This was pretty much exclusively promoting Dale’s guide Get Paid to Pin, as affiliate marketing on Pinterest is something my readers ask me about the most.

However the “cart with 2 items” is a bundle offer for her 2 guides together, so her sales skills has helped secured those larger affiliate sales for me!

I know lots of my readers are interested in making money on their blogs too, so towards the end of the month 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.

But I didn’t really share my discount code that much!

So I will be working on doing that more next month, to hopefully increase my affiliate sales.

BLUEHOST AFFILIATES: $160

I blog about blogging, so it’s logical maybe a couple of people who find my blog haven’t started their own blog yet, then follow my start a blog guide.

But this is where email marketing becomes so important.

I started offering the chance for my readers to tell me about themselves and their blogs when they first sign up.

And I’m really surprised to find that waaay more of my readers than I expected didn’t have a blog!

I sort of don’t understand this- currently the only sign up forms I have are for my Pinterest course. So I kind of presumed everyone signing up for that already had a blog, and was looking to get traffic to their blog using Pinterest.

But I was really wrong!

So this month, really getting to know what stage each of my readers are at in their blogging journey has definitely helped me to generate more income. (Including helping the ones that haven’t started their blogs yet). Hence the Bluehost sales.

And next month, I will be working creating a free course to actually help those who haven’t started their blogs yet finally do it!

Which hopefully will result in a few more Bluehost affiliate sales.

UPDATE: I have finished making the course! As the majority of this income was passive (meaning I did not have to actively be working to earn it), I wanted to share what I had learnt with other people wanting to make passive income too.

So you can sign up for Easy Passive Income to learn how you can start making money online below!

TAILWIND AFFILIATES: $18.11

As you know, Pinterest is my main traffic source.

And it is better to pin consistently throughout the day than log in and share 20 pins all at once.

And this is why I use Tailwind.

Tailwind is a scheduler for Pinterest, so you can schedule all your pins at once and then it will pin for you automatically.

Scheduling pins is especially important for me, as I’m a UK blogger and most of my audience is American! And when they are most likely to be visiting my blog after 5pm, I am sleeping.

So Tailwind lets me make sure I am pinning even when I am asleep, to best engage my audience. Go Tailwind!

Below are my affiliate earnings for Tailwind in July:

If I’m honest, I’m kind of surprised I didn’t make more sales for Tailwind.

I make my love for it known pretty often, and I don’t think I’d have the Pinterest reach I currently do (or the blog page views) without it.

However, I know it is a pretty big investment for bloggers. I too was so hesitant about purchasing it initially, as it is a lot of money upfront.

But the investment has definitely been worth it for me.

Plus, you can schedule 100 pins for free before you actually purchase anything! So hopefully next month I can convince more bloggers it is worth their investment.

I’ve listed this as Tailwind affiliates because that’s the specific affiliate program I made a sale for.

But the platform that the affiliate program is on is Shareasale.

I actually ended up making this much on Shareasale this month in total:

It’s slightly more than just the affiliate sale for Tailwind, because I get $0.01 for every person that signs up to Shareasale.

You can see this below:

So this is why it’s slightly higher.

If you’re a blogger and you haven’t used Shareasale, it has a tonne of different affiliate programmes for various niches.

And it’s free to sign up! You can find loads of affiliate programs for your niche here.

THE VIRAL PIN GUIDE: $124.40

This is the part I am most excited to share.

This month, I made $124.40 from sales my ebook!

I decided to make my guide 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 to decent blog traffic.

But it turns out you only need a few viral pins.

Maybe even just 1.

This is what happened for me- one of my pins went viral overnight, and 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!

Crazy, right?

It made me realise I just needed to get a handful of viral pins to get really good blog traffic from Pinterest.

And so I created The Viral Pin Guide to help other bloggers get their viral pins and get good blog traffic.

You can read more about the guide here, or if you want to get it for half price, you will have the opportunity to do this when you sign up for my free Pinterest course below.

This month I made over 10 sales, which compared to only 3 last month is a massive growth and I’m really happy about!

You’ll notice nearly all my sales took part in the second half of the month:

That’s because initially, as a UK blogger I was listing the guide in GBP.

But halfway through the month after having a convo with Dale, she made me realise the majority of my audience were American and the currency on the sales page might have been puttng them off purchasing.

So I changed the currency on the sales page, and I started to get waaay more orders. (I seriously don’t know what I’d do without Dale. Not make any money blogging that’s for sure!).

You can see that I only made 2 sales in GBP this month before changing into USD:

So I have converted the profit from GBP into dollars ( $22.80) and added it to my income for the month.

But I am excited to see what a full month of selling the guide in USD looks like!

I also made a few tweaks to the sales page and checkout format at the end of the month, so that might have contributed to the increase in sales too.

From now on, I will only make a single change to my sales page at a time, and see if it has any effects. That way I can know for sure what increased or decreased my sales.

I would also gradually like to start getting more sales every month. Then hopefully as I get more people who have taken the guide, I will be able to gain more affiliates to promote it and testimonies of their results.

But for now, I am pleased.

BLOGGING INCOME REPORT: EXPENSES

I know some people get annoyed with blogging income reports for not showing the expenses too.

So I wanted to add that in to be totally transparent.

July 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

Writing it down, I can’t believe how high my expenses are!

But it’s worth noting that:

1. Some payments are annually, not monthly. I have 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 powered up for Tailwind (finally!), so again that is not a necessary payment to make money 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 I would definitely say my expenses are pretty high for a blogger.

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. I pay for my blog hosting yearly, so this does not come out every month.
• TAILWIND: I love Tailwind so much, that I powered up and got unlimited tribes! Which has helped to increase my reach. But you can schedule 100 pins for free here. Again this is paid yearly, not monthly.
• 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. I’m currently paying this monthly, but there was the option to pay yearly and save 30%, so I will be looking to do that to lower my monthly expenses.
• 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 a considerable profit!

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

BLOGGING REVIEW: WHAT WORKED

For me, the steps that definitely helped me make money this month were:

• Finding out more about my audience. I think this is the main thing that helped me this month. Once I found out where my audience was based and what each individual actually needed, I was able to make product suggestions and adjustments accordingly (which made me money).
• Having more contact with my readers. Although I scared some subscribers away, I think having more email contact helped me discover who in my audience actually wants to hear what I have to say. Plus it made my readers more familiar with me- nobody is going to buy something from a stranger!
• Focusing on passive income. I’m really excited that nearly all of my income was passive e.g sometimes I would wake up to see I had made an affiliate sale whilst I was sleeping! I think that focusing on passive income is partly the reason I didn’t make money sooner. But I’m glad I focused on building passive income so much now, as it should help me continue to earn in the future.

BLOGGING REVIEW: WHAT DIDN’T WORK

I have to be honest with myself and you- I tried some things, and they were epic fails!

These were:

• Reaching out solely about my ebook. I messaged a couple of bloggers asking if they wanted a free copy, and very few got back to me. It’s no surprise really, because who would want some random person’s book?
• Trying to engage my affiliates. I already had some affiliates signed up before I launched the guide, as they’d had a free version. However I’m not having many sales through affiliate referrals!
• Offering services. I’ve started offering Pinterest management because I feel really confident on Pinterest now, and I want to help some beginners master Pinterest. But I’m yet to sign any clients.

BLOGGING GOALS FOR NEXT MONTH

I’ve decided to start writing some blogging goals down.

I did this because I saw in Facebook group that not long ago, I posted I was getting around 2000 pageviews a month.

And now I am close to x10 that.

It made me realise how far I have come, and I decided it will be good to set myself goals and have that ‘yay’ feeling when I look back and see I’ve reached them.

I’ve purposely set some that I know I will achieve, so I definitely won’t fail them all!

But I’ve also set some that are a real reach, to try and push myself.

My goals are:

• Share X4 traffic/ income /sign up generating posts. I’m pretty good at sharing posts weekly, but next month I want to specifically share posts that will benefit my blog in one of the ways I’ve listed above. I would eventually like to share posts more often, but I am working on creating other content first.
• Gain 300 subscribers next month. I think this might be difficult given it’s summer and my high unsubscribe rate, but I’m going to be adding more free courses to hopefully gain more subscribers.
• Reach 5000 Pinterest followers. I’m at 4.4k currently, but recently I’ve been getting between 120-150 followers a week. So I’m hoping to gain 600 followers in the next 31 days!
• Make X5 Bluehost sales. Given that over 100 of my subscribers don’t have their own blogs yet, this is not a ridiculous goal. Plus I will be creating a free course to help drive signups. But 5 sales would drastically increase my income.
• Make X20 ebook sales. Given I made an extra 10 sales compared to the month before, making around 20 this month should be on track. But of course there is no guarantee I will make any sales in August! So I am listing that as one of my goals.
• Reach 20k sessions. I think this will be hard because traffic tends to drop in Summer. But I really want my blog to grow, so I can report back on it for you. However this is one of the least important goals for me, as more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more income.

These are my immediate short term goals for my blog that I want to achieve next month.

I’ve only written down 6 and I’ve made sure they’re not ridiculously large goals given the time scale.

But I’m hoping that writing them down will hold me more accountable.

I’ve also written them down and put them next to my bed, so I can see them every day and hopefully be reminded to take action to achieve them!

BLOGGING GOALS LONG TERM

I’ll keep this brief because this blogging income report has become seriously long.

But eventually, I would like to:

• 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’m not too upset about this as it’s allowed me to work on passive income instead. However I would like to gain some clients to have a secure form of income.
• Start a Facebook group. I think it will be nice for me and my readers to be able to actually regularly. I just don’t feel that email is personal enough, and it’s a bit of a one way thing on my behalf!
• Work on SEO. I don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket, and right now I’m relying too much on social media for my traffic. If for some reason social media was banned, I’d be in trouble! So SEO is something I want to master.
• Reach 50k sessions a month. This is a very long term goal. I am already in the process of signing to a premium ad network, but this amount would allow me to earn considerable passive income from advertising.

BLOGGING INCOME REPORT: FINAL THOUGHTS

This brings me to the end of my blogging income report!

I really hope it has helped you with monetising your blog.

I was very hesitant about sharing my income, but I knew people would benefit from it and I need to continue to be transparent on my blogging journey.

If you have enjoyed this post, please share it on Pinterest:

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