Blog Income Report – How I Made $144.43 in My 5th Month Blogging

Hello and welcome to my fifth blog income report!

In March 2019, my 5th-month blogging, I made $144.43, that’s only $2.31 more than the amount I made in February.

Although, it wasn’t surprising considering I wasn’t able to publish any post in March due to other commitments.

If you like reading blog income reports, you’re at the right place as I am going to reveal what happened.

I’ll explain everything from my traffic and income numbers to tools I used to earn money.

Related: How to Start a WordPress Blog & Make Money

This post may contain affiliate links. See our policy page for more information.

5th Month Blog Income Report Progress (March 2019)

For some background, I started this blog on the 1st of November 2019 with 0 posts and 0 social media followers.

While the blog is a brand new blog, the domain itself is not.

I deleted the old website – which I hand-coded myself in HTML. It was no longer attracting traffic and I replaced it with WordPress.

I started counting the income as soon as I published my very first post. This blog income report is my 25th post in this blog so far.

Here are my blog income report archives for reference:

• November 2018 blog income report: $17.34
• December 2018 blog income report: $46.76
• January 2019 blog income report: $71.49
• February 2019 blog income report: $142.12

My blog income has been doubling every month up until February 2019!

In an alternate universe, I may have an easier time doubling my income every month.

This report could be laced with big traffic and income numbers to impress.

I could have said I made $$$ (without supporting screenshots) while having no previous blogging experience so that I could recommend some blogging courses.

When in fact I am not new to blogging.

I actually dislike reading blog income reports which turn out to be no more than thinly veiled sales pitch to blogging courses and ebooks.

My income reports are never about selling affiliate courses unless they are highly relevant and are absolutely crucial to my success.

I am self-taught mostly though so I hardly recommend any courses.

With or without any courses recommendation, I hope you’ll still get value from my blog income reports.

My goal is to be realistic as much as possible and telling it as it is with supporting screenshots.

The truth is, blogging is not a money making scheme that guarantees a steady income growth especially in the beginning as this post will demonstrate.

As with the previous months, the majority of my traffic came from Pinterest as it usually takes Google over six months to properly rank a post.

Here’s how my Pinterest monthly viewers look like by the end of March:

As you can see, I broke 400K Pinterest viewers for the first time!

That said, I think it’s important to mention that the Pinterest monthly viewers number isn’t the most important metric to track.

It’s because you could have 1 million views on Pinterest but only a few hundred of those viewers actually clicked on your pins and visited your website.

So it’s not very reliable when it comes to estimating the actual number of visitors you get. For that, you’ll have to use Google Analytics.

But I still pay attention to it because it’s a quick way to gauge my progress, although only roughly in comparison to other more established bloggers.

My 5th Month Blog Income Report Breakdown

The bulk of my income came from AdSense. It compensated the drop and missing income from the other affiliate programs that I was promoting.

I didn’t make any money from FlexOffers, Rakuten Marketing and Impact Radius.

While I continued to make money from the other affiliate programs, i.e. Survey Junkie and Panthera Interactive, the amount was actually lower except for ShareASale.

The incomes came from four sources. The numbers in brackets are incomes from the previous month.

• Google AdSense: $91.09 ($64.99)
• Survey Junkie: $25.5 ($42)
• Panthera Interactive: $18.8 ($20.05)
• ShareASale: $9.04 ($7.20)
• FlexOffers: $0 ($2.88)
• Rakuten Marketing: $0 ($3)
• Impact Radius: $0 ($3)

Here are the screenshots from my affiliate dashboards.

Adsense

My page RPM (Revenue Per Thousand) was slightly higher in March. The blog also received 31% more visitors as you will see in my traffic report below.

These resulted in an increase in my AdSense earnings from $64.99 to $91.09.

I am curious to know how much more I can make from an alternate ad network like Mediavine.

I’ve read that people who switched from AdSense to Mediavine saw an immediate increase in ad revenue due to the higher page RPM.

To qualify for Mediavine, I need at least 25K sessions per month. Last month I had 9,672 sessions so I need to more than double that number before I can apply.

Survey Junkie

Last month’s Survey Junkie income was a record high for me where I earned $42. This month, I only earned $25.50.

Why did the income drop when my blog traffic had increased?

One of the good things that came out from publishing my blog income reports is that I got to learn about issues like this.

Thanks to sub ID tracking, I was able to determine which posts are converting for me.

Upon closer inspection, I discovered a few of my higher converting posts for Survey Junkie didn’t get as many visitors as in February and as a result, I got fewer conversions.

If you have a freebie site, or write about personal finance or making money online, you can sign up and promote Survey Junkie and get $1.50 for each sign-up.

Panthera Interactive

Panthera Interactive is an affiliate network offering mostly CPA offers.

CPA stands for cost per action, that is, you get paid when users take a specific action such as signing up for a trial, taking a survey, getting a quote and so on. The users don’t even have to buy anything.

Because of that, CPA offers usually convert better than pay-per-sale offers. You can sign-up for Panthera Interactive here.

In March 2019, I’ve made $18.80 from Panthera Interactive.

I’ve also started promoting offers from MaxBounty, another popular CPA network. I applied to join them twice and only got accepted the second time.

MaxBounty requires a phone interview in order to consider your application. But due to the time zone difference, I wasn’t able to take or give them a call immediately.

However, my application was approved anyway after they reviewed this blog in my second application without even interviewing me via phone.

ShareASale

In March, I made $9.04 from ShareASale by promoting the Tailwind app – the ever useful Pinterest schedule that is crucial to my blog progress and PinchMe, the free sample program that sends you free product samples via mail.

If I want to make more money from ShareASale, I’ll have to attract more traffic via Pinterest and create more posts promoting relevant offers.

I am looking forward to having my posts ranked in the top 10 in a couple of months and see how this will affect my income, fingers crossed!

If you’re curious too, don’t forget to return for my future blog income reports as I will reveal how organic traffic affect my income.

No matter what niche you are in,  there are tons of relevant offers you can promote via ShareASale. I recommend you sign up here.

My Fifth Month Blogging Traffic Report

I received a record number of visitor in one day reaching 1,217 on the 3rd March.

I was generating up to $10 a day during the days when my traffic was high in the first week of March.

Overall, I only had 31% more users in March as compared to February. I guess that’s acceptable considering that I was not able to publish any post in that month.

What I Did in March 2019

Nothing new unfortunately lol.

But I continued to create new Pinterest pins for my old posts. This is the reason why I managed to maintain, even increased my traffic number.

During that month, I noticed Pinterest started to treat fresh pins differently.

As I mentioned in my previous blog income report, their freshness seems to be getting shorter.

New pins seem to last for about one or two weeks before their reach starts to decrease drastically.

This algorithm change coincides with Pinterest preparing to go public in April 2019.

I believe Pinterest wants its users to pay for promoted pins more as this will help with their bottom line.

Using Pinterest to Attract Traffic

While writing this post, I noticed getting traffic from Pinterest even after I created several new pins wasn’t as easy as before.

It’s possible that Pinterest has updated its algorithm again. So I’d probably need to try new strategies. In any case, I will share any findings in the next blog income report.

In March, I didn’t do anything differently from my previous month strategies.

If you haven’t read my previous blog income report, here’s what I did in March. For your convenience, I copied and pasted most of what I wrote previously.

I Use Tailwind to Schedule My Pins

I’ve been using Tailwind to share my posts on Pinterest.

If you don’t know, Tailwind is a Pinterest (and Instagram) scheduling tool that helps you share your posts automatically at the best times for engagement.

To do well on Pinterest you need to pin frequently and consistently and the best way to do that is by using Tailwind.

With the recent Pinterest algorithm changes, I think it’s more important than ever to create new content and pin consistently.

The best thing about Tailwind is that you can sign up for free. No risk, no commitment. Click here to register for free.

The free trial lets you schedule and publishes up to 100 pins. However, to get most of Tailwind, I would highly recommend upgrading to the Plus plan.

Tailwind Plus account costs $15 per month, or if you pay annually as I did, it costs $120 and you get 4 months free. Your monthly payment comes down to $9.99 per month.

Personally, I thought $120 is still a little pricey for a scheduling tool. But I don’t want to wait for months or a year to start getting meaningful traffic to my blog so I bit the bullet and paid for it.

As it turns out, it’s one of the best investments I have made online. I am always looking forward to seeing my traffic increasing.

The plus account is perfect for bloggers and small businesses. My advice, don’t hesitate to upgrade to the Plus plan if you’re serious about driving traffic to your blog.

I Created Highly Targeted Personal Boards

Previously, I put a lot of focus on joining group boards. Pinterest group boards are collaborative boards where multiple users can pin their stuff for free.

Today I no longer look for group boards to join. I am also selective to which group boards I pin to.

My focus today is more on my own personal boards.

I created several niche personal boards and optimized their descriptions with targeted keywords. I pin relevant third party pins as well as my own pins.

From my Tailwind dashboard, I can confirm that my personal boards are among my best performing boards.

If you want to access this statistic, you’ll have to subscribe to Tailwind.

Optimizing Blog Post for SEO

I continued to optimize my blog posts for the search engines. While I don’t get much organic traffic yet, this is for the long-term.

I also performed keyword research to find popular topics I can write about. For that, I’m using KeySearch.

KeySearch offers a no credit card required free trial that allows 3 daily searches and analysis as well as YouTube research.

One of my favourite features is the Competitive Analysis which lets you analyse your competitors and discover all the keywords they are already ranking for.

Then you could easily target similar keywords and select those which you’ll have a better chance of ranking for.

Why write blindly when you can find out what already working for other bloggers with KeySearch?

KeySearch is one of the cheapest professional level keyword research tools you can get your hands on. It’s easy to use and beginners friendly.

It also comes with a free SEO course to get you started on the right foot right away.

From my Google Search Console, I can confirm that this has been working. More and more of my posts are climbing up the rank and starting to get more impressions.

They are not ranked in the top 10 or top 20 yet. I think that will take a few more months.

Conclusion

This is the shortest blog income report I’ve written so far but it’s still over 2,000 words!

Thank you for reading this far. I hope you’ve learned something new today that you can apply in your own situation.

If you find this post useful and want to be kept updated, you can follow me on Pinterest or Facebook.

Recommended Tools & Resources

• How to Start a Blog – here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how you can start your own blog without technical knowledge.
• Thrive Themes – I am using a theme and plugins from Thrive Themes for this blog.
• KeySearch – most affordable professional-level keyword research tools. Use KSDISC coupon code to get a 20% discount. Instead of paying $17 monthly, you’ll only pay $13.60 monthly until you cancel or upgrade your plan.
• Panthera Interactive – an affiliate network offering mostly CPA offers. CPA stands for cost per action. That is, you get paid when a user takes a specific action such as signing up for a trial, taking a survey, getting a quote etc – no purchase is necessary.
• MaxBounty – another popular and reliable CPA network you can join.
• Survey Junkie – get paid for promoting high converting survey offers in your blog.
• FlexOffers – one of the most popular affiliate networks for bloggers
• ShareASale – another affiliate network popular among bloggers.
• Grammarly (freemium) – an online freemium spelling and grammar checking tool that helps you find and correct English writing issues.
• Tailwind (freemium) – MUST HAVE if you’re serious about getting traffic fast to your blog. Save time by scheduling your posts automatically. Get more traffic, followers and accelerate your blog growth fast
• Photoshop, Canva or PicMonkey – design beautiful and engaging pins with any of these tools.
• Ready Set Blog for Traffic – if you are new to blogging and want to learn how to create the best blog, get traffic fast, even learn some Pinterest tactics, get this. (I purchased this for the Pinterest content but it offers more).