Blogging Income Report & Progress: October 2020

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Purpose of Blogging Income Reports

When I was thinking about starting a blog, I scoured over many many blog income reports. Each of them were an encouragement to see how creators were doing this blogging thing.

However, as a newbie blogger, many of the income reports weren’t really helpful to me at the time. Learning how someone went from making $5,000 per month to $10,000 per month doesn’t really put things into perspective if you haven’t made anything yet.

That’s why I’m starting these blogging income reports now.

I went back and forth on whether to do blogging income reports, as my blog is only two month’s old. I decided that I wanted this to be a resource for new bloggers to see progress in its early stages. My first month blogging income report was genuinely written at the end of my first month ever blogging.

These income reports will show what it’s like to truly start a blog from scratch.

Another reason for starting income reports so early on is that I also wanted a way to track my own progress and have some accountability to meet my goals.

Goal Progress Report

I think I’ve done well overall in working toward my goals. Here are my goals from the end of September and my progress throughout the month of October.

1. Increase newsletter audience to 50 subscribers by the end of October

While I have not yet met this goal of 50 newsletter subscribers, I have made some serious strides to increase this amount.

I am currently using Mailchimp for my blog newsletter and I really like it so far! While it was a little confusing to set up right away, once I got use to the terms that Mailchimp uses, it was a cinch.

This month, I refined my first welcome email for general subscribers, created a short welcome email series, and created an email opt-in.

All of this was possible with the free version of Mailchimp! While there are certainly more features available using the paid version, I plan to stick with the free version for now until I revamp my email series again. If you’re interested in using Mailchimp, you can use my referral link and get a $30 credit! That’s like getting three months of the Essentials Plan for free, or two months of the Standard Plan for free.

2. Increase monthly Pinterest views to 20k, followers to 300, and engagement by 50% by the end of October.

Guys, I stopped using Tailwind. Gasp. I know, crazy talk.

I decided about halfway through the month that it didn’t seem to be doing much for me. Given my current state of blogging, I can manage manual pinning on a daily basis.

You hear that right. I pin fresh new pins daily.

Right now, about 30% of my pins are my own, but I manually pin the other 70% of pins from other websites and blogs within my niche daily. If in the future I decide that I can’t handle manual pinning, I will definitely return to Tailwind as it does automate the process very easily and they are in cahoots with Pinterest. Meaning Tailwind is sure to recommend verified Pinterest policies (great at preventing you from looking like spam). If you are interested in using Tailwind for your blog, you can use my link and get your first 100 pins free, along with $15 off your purchase.

Traffic Difficulties

If you remember from last month, I had a couple of pins that went viral. Overnight they had thousands of impressions. Which was great!

However, I’m realizing now that these viral pins skewed last month’s data a bit.

While I did meet my goal of increasing engagement by 50%, I didn’t meet the other two of increasing monthly views and followers.

When my data reset I went from about 16k views per month to around 5k views per month. What a drop! Now, I’m back up to around 10K views per month, but with steady traffic rather than a few viral pins. I think that it’s better this way for now, and I am impressed by the increase from 5k to 10k this month alone!

My followers have stayed constant at 240. I’m not sure how to increase those right now, but I think that’s a future goal, rather than a more pressing one.

3. Get ahead on blog posts by one week by the end of October

I did this one! Yay!

The third week of October was a really good week for me. I finally felt like I got all of my administrative blogging tasks out of the way and didn’t have any other pressing concerns to address. I got two weeks ahead on blog posts that week and I’m really proud of myself for churning them out like that!

Now that I’m a few weeks ahead on blog posts, I feel a bit more confident. It’s so hard to write when you feel like you’re under pressure to produce by a certain timeframe.

I’m still writing two times per week, and I find that posting on Wednesday and Friday has been a good schedule for me. I might shift to Tuesday and Friday in the future. I also widened my content scope by providing posts on physical wellness and ecological wellness.

Here’s a list of October’s blog posts:

• Start New Habits: The Most Effective Method
• Five Easy Steps to be More Present Using Mindful Eating
• Powerful Money Saving Tips for Your Holistic Financial Plan
• All Natural Home: Make Eight Simple Changes for Huge Improvements
• Sleep Hygiene: Secrets for the Best Sleep of Your Life
• Survive Thanksgiving: How to Maintain Your Sanity This Year

4. Create a Welcome schedule for new newsletter clients with unique content by the end of October

One of the things I wanted to focus on this month was developing a welcome email series. Prior to October, I had a single email sent out when someone joins my email list, and sent a weekly email of updates from blog posts throughout the week.

Now that I’ve spent time developing my welcome email series, I think that my email newsletter is more complete! Through Mailchimp and the Mailchimp to WordPress plug-in, I was able to create two different sign-up journeys (aka people can sign up for my general newsletter, or sign up to receive a FREE Becoming Intentional Wellness packet and will receive customized emails based on these specific requests.

Not only did I create this really awesome email freebie, but I also wrote a welcome email series that introduces new subscribers to the wellness model.

My ideal reader is someone who may or may not know what wellness is, but wants to learn more about how it can benefit them specifically AND wants to do something about it. Both my welcome email series and the email freebie help my audience accomplish these goals.

If you’d like to see my new and improved email newsletter in action, take a look here by signing up with your email and name. After marveling at my three-day welcome series, you can always unsubscribe!

Canva for Graphics

I used Canva to create my email opt-in freebie and I couldn’t have been happier with the process!

Just like when creating Pinterest pins, creating this packet was SO easy and there are a wide variety of features to use. I like Canva because it’s intuitive and functional. If you are interested in using Canva for your blog, or other purpose – they have SO many templates: social media, marketing, lesson planning, resumes… – use my referral link and get a free credit for purchasing premium images, templates, or even music! No purchase necessary – just sign up.

5. Start Facebook marketing strategy by the end of October

I have not successfully done this.

Currently, my Facebook page is set up to automatically post blog posts as they are published – which is more than my Instagram account does – but I have yet to do anything more with it. I know some general goals of what I want to do with Facebook to increase engagement, but I have mostly been focusing on Pinterest this month and have not given my Facebook management strategy enough thought.

Some things that I have done to improve my Facebook page are update images to maintain consistent branding, and add a Mailchimp sign up page for my newsletter in the tabs on the page.

DreamHost

One thing that I did this month that was not on my goal’s list from September is purchase a domain name and shared hosting plan. I went with DreamHost because they are one of the recommended shared hosting providers from WordPress. Given that I had a WordPress blog, it was pretty important to me that WordPress and my new hosting site would be compatible.

So far, I’ve been really happy with all of the integrations DreamHost provides. I was able to transfer my WordPress.com blog easily to WordPress.org, and I haven’t had any speed issues thus far!

DreamHost has been a dream during the first month 😉

Plus, I really liked that they had a three-year plan available for purchase. I got a great deal – hosting for $2.95 per month and because they have three-year plans, I was able to lock in this price for three years! If they change their prices in the next two years, I won’t have to worry about it when I go to renew because renewal is so far in the future. In three years, I will likely have different blog goals and more experience, so I can consider a different host at that time and be more informed, if necessary.

Right now though, I’m really happy with DreamHost. If you’re interested in starting a blog and want to self-host via a shared hosting site, check out DreamHost for sure. If you’re an experience blogger and you want to go big or go home, you can get $50 off the Unlimited Shared Hosting plan with my referral link. THAT’S TEN MONTHS FREE. I know, I was shocked too when I found out. Their unlimited shared plan is only $5 per month, which is a great deal anyway, but when you get $50 off, why even question it.

Traffic Report

While my traffic on my blog has not really been that great this month, I did notice that many of my blog posts are ranking on the second and third pages of google for their respective keywords. This is SO promising to me because I’m only in the second month of blogging and I’m close to the first page of Google! With further SEO practice and optimizing future posts, I definitely believe my traffic will increase in the next few months as my posts rank higher in Google’s algorithm.

Ad you can see, on average per day, I only receive two to three visitors. That’s okay though! I know that what I’m doing right now – spending time optimizing SEO and consistently publishing blog posts – will help in the long run. My domain authority is not going to increase over night!

If you’re a new blogger and you’re not getting pageviews overnight – don’t stress! Keep going! By now, you’ve read how to set up your blog and the best practice for social media. You know what you’re doing! It’s just going to take time to see those results.

Don’t give up, guys!

Pinterest Traffic

On the social media side of things, my Pinterest account is really improving quite a lot! As a mentioned earlier, I had some viral pins last month that skewed my data. This month I have yet to have any pins go viral. While I would LOVE to have some increased traffic from those viral pins, I believe that my Pinterest stats are much more accurate to the progress that I’ve been making.

As I mentioned earlier, once those viral pins were no longer being calculated in my metrics, my pin impressions, audience, and engagement went WAY down. So even though it says my impressions and audience have gone down this month, they have actually had to recover quite a bit! I am almost back to my September numbers with consistent traffic instead of one or two viral pins and no traffic otherwise!

This month, I’ve been manually pinning 10-15 fresh pins, in addition to the new pins I’ve been creating since the first weekend in October. Almost every week my impressions and engagements have been increasing! While I know Pinterest metrics are somewhat vanity metrics, I also know that with increased impressions comes increased engagements and clicks through to my site. I believe that this next month will be the turning point for traffic!

Income Report & Expense Report

This month, I’ve yet to earn any money. I really truly believe that I am following Pinterest best practices, and will likely see short-term traffic growth from this source within the next month or so.

I spent $93.24 on shared hosting through DreamHost for the three year plan this month, and $19.99 on domain hosted email. My domain was free for the first year.

So right now, I’m in the red by $-113.23.

I think if I stick at this blog thing for three years, I can certainly make that money back, and more. My goal is to have some actual income to discuss in next month’s income report!

Next Month’s Goals

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