Welcome to my January 2020 blog income report.
These posts are primarily written to document my own progress but if you spend time reading them, then I hope you find them useful too.
Want to remember my blog?
So here are my blog stats:
This post contains affiliate links for products and services I use.
Pageviews:
9282 – my goal was 10k (I was at 5k something last month. This is the first time in 3 years I got so much traffic. Details below.)
Subscribers:
1636
Blog Income:
In January I received $129.70 for affiliate and product sales IN my Paypal account.
This doesn’t include sales I made in my dreams or ones in the affiliate dashboards that have not been paid to me yet.
Blog expenses:
$132.95
- Bigscoots hosting: $10.95
- Shopify lite: $9 (Shopify paid for itself for the first time, I’m happy but also I learned that it’s all on me. I have to keep working on my offers till they start converting.)
- Convertkit: $49 (has not paid for itself yet, totally on me, I don’t sell to my list well. If you need more guidance on this, a learned a ton on this after listening to this D.I.S podcast)
- Monthly D.I.S coaching program: $25 (it can feel extra, but my performance is definitely better when I work and plan with the group instead of doing all alone.)
- Some money I spent unnecessarily in the name of market research: $7 ?
Total January 2020 Blog income profit:
$-3.25
How Much Work I Did
- In January I published 4 posts:
- And republished my affiliate review for Lena Gott’s Adventures In SEO course after SEO optimizing the bejeebers out of it. After all the hard work, it ranks #1 at the time of writing, some friends confirmed.
Optimize your blog post faster using my template.
What worked:
- I doubled my traffic: If entering the Monumetric ad network was my goal, I wouldn’t have dozed off in the middle, but my Calendar designs series brought in the bulk of traffic from Google and Pinterest. Also, my resource library was the second-highest visited page on the blog this month. I should write more series posts. Extra credit if a freebie is tied to the series.
- Seasonal topics bring in better but temporary traffic
- I tracked 2 weeks’ work in the activity log in my planner. Tracking helps keep momentum. Honestly, writing down your progress for the day only takes half a minute. For this, keep your good planner close.
- I read a money mindset book Lucky B* by Denise Duffield. Sometimes your money blocks are hindering the sales. It helped and I actually manifested sales. I will continue to work on my mindset. Never thought of this before.
- Added video to most of these new posts, which helped in faster Google ranking. Otherwise, Google takes ages to notice your post. Lumen5 free video maker rocks for generating video summaries of posts super fast.
- Did Jennifer Maker’s Pinterest Launch Plan and made new pins almost every day. That helped the traffic.
- My Pinterest impressions reached 1.2million, which I don’t see made any difference, that number was already high, but the word ‘million’… feels good for sure. If you are working on this then here’s what I did. Made new pins, repinned popular 3rd party pins. I didn’t do anything other than this.
- SEOing posts. Google traffic is awesome, unlike Pinterest. They stay on the blog longer. Lower bounce rate= better ad rpm I have heard.
What didn’t work/Lessons:
- I decided I will write my income reports as an ongoing process as things keep happening that I would want to mention in the next report. But I forgot so now I will share whatever I could write in my planner activity log or what I remember off the top of my head.
- Consistency, consistency, consistency, consistency!!! If I didn’t stop working in the middle, I could have reached 10 PVs, even if only to stroke my ego.
- My mind races at such an exhausting speed that it makes me think I’m doing a lot of work every day, but unless I note down things, and later reflect once the month ends, I really can’t see what I could actually accomplish. The month seemed super busy, but I only managed to put out 4 posts? Boo!
- Live in the moment. Don’t half @$$ work and don’t half @$$ playtime with kids.
- Speed up, ditch perfection, did you know, that is also considered a sign of dislike for self. I certainly didn’t know.
- Why are all the keywords in search console that people are finding me for being brooded on, instead of being whipped up into useful words for H2s for blog posts?
- I worked on a review post but the affiliate cookie was 1st click based. Who comes to read a Google review while taking a walk in the park? How can I ever get the first click on my Google review post? Obviously someone has told them before so they google for reviews, hence they’re already cookied! I received 2 emails for claiming the bonus, I gave it out of courtesy but learned my lesson. It’s my favorite course so I won’t stop promoting it but, change of plan- turn from Google to Pinterest. Promote the best freebie of the affiliate offer. Cookie type affects how you should promote an affiliate offer. Also, consider your ROI before working your rear off on anything and if you really wanna make something work then figure it out!
Related: 50 Awesome Blog Income Reports By Female Entrepreneurs
Goals:
I’m now only making active goals, ones I can directly work on.
Goals like I want to make x sales are not very direct goals for me. All I can do is to test and improve my product. Sales will come on their own once I do my side of the work.
- Keep publishing 3x/wk till I reach 25k sessions in 30 days to qualify for Mediavine ad network.
- Redo my one-time-offer sales page in Leadpages
- PLP everyday
- Designate work time, keep it consistent, record it daily instead of staying in work mode all the time. Keep all progress in front of me by tracking productivity in my year in pixels template