Blog Income Report – How I Made $199.09 in My 8th Month Blogging

Hello and welcome to my 8th blog income report!

If you have been following my blog income progress, you’re probably curious to know how this blog was doing in June 2019.

Well, it made $199.09, the highest so far in my first eight months of blogging.

I am glad to see the income continues to rise despite the fact that this blog received 6.48% fewer visitors in June as compared to May.

And there’s also 31 days in May instead of 30!

If you like reading income reports by blogs in their early stages and always wanted to take a peek behind the scenes, this is it.

I am going to explain everything from my traffic and income numbers to what I did and what I have learned. Get ready for lots of charts and graphs!

OK, let’s jump right in!

Related: How to Start a WordPress Blog & Make Money

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

A Little Bit About My Blogging Background

To give you some context, I launched this blog with 1 post, 0 social media followers and with no email list in November 2018.

In my first month of blogging, I’ve made $17.34 with the few posts that I had published.

That’s possible because I am not new to blogging. I knew what I had to do in order to attract traffic, what topics to write and how to monetize this blog from the get-go.

Although I must add that most new bloggers do not make money in their first few months blogging let alone in their first month.

If that’s the case for you,  don’t feel bad about it. It’s more important to get started and learn as you go.

When compared to other blog income reports you find on Pinterest, my numbers are far from being impressive.

None of my pins went crazy viral on Pinterest. Due to other commitments, I was not able to churn out posts faster which could have helped in accelerating the blog growth.

When it comes to blogging though, I am mostly self-taught so I hardly purchase any courses or ebooks.

That said, I can see how purchasing a blogging course can help new bloggers shorten their learning phase and avoid mistakes.

My last purchased was in 2018 for a course by Elna Cain titled Ready Set Blog for Traffic. I was new to Pinterest back then and wanted to learn Pinterest fast which was covered by the course.

My main goal for sharing my blog income reports is to share my experience and inspire new bloggers to work hard towards achieving their own goals.

I’ve also realized that my blog income reports give this blog a personality and a chance for me to connect with my readers closer.

Blogging is hard and it takes time to see a meaningful result. Those are some of the challenges that anyone who wants to make money blogging has to overcome!

It is not a get rich quick scheme to make money online like some bloggers may let you believe.

8th Month Blog Income Report Progress (June 2019)

Every month I published a blog income report to share my progress.

I often wrote about the different things that I’ve learned for the month so I think it’s worth checking them out if you want to get the full picture and learn from my previous experiences.

Here are my past blog income reports 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
• March 2019 blog income report: $144.43
• April 2019 blog income report: $154.23
• May 2019 blog income report: $174.52

8th-Month Blog Traffic Report

Like in the months before, Pinterest is still my main traffic source.

Without Pinterest, I would probably still be making like $20 per month. That’s how important Pinterest is to me (and for any blog who knows how to use it to their advantage).

Pinterest Analytics

Despite the decent amount of traffic I am getting month after month from Pinterest, my monthly Pinterest views seem to be heading in the opposite direction.

My Pinterest monthly views have dropped from 400,000 to around 227,100 at the time of this writing.

Not that I care too much. I would probably stop quoting the number in my future blog traffic reports.

Pinterest is phasing out this old vanity metric in favor of the new version of analytics which I prefer. It’s more granular and allows me to track my progress and engagement better.

For example, while my pins daily impressions fluctuate widely, the minimum impressions are trending up as indicated by the red line.

This is not surprising as I am publishing more posts every month.

Google Analytics

This blog received 8,171 users (-6.48%) and 11,184 page views (-6.69%) in June.

Below is the comparison between May and June 2019 traffic.

While none of my pins went crazy viral, the traffic had been rather stable throughout the whole month.

Here’s how my monthly traffic looks like from November 2018 until the end of June 2019.

As you can see, I am still not able to breach the 10,000 users mark. Maybe soon!

My 7th Month Blog Income Report Breakdown

As usual, I am going to share the screenshots of my affiliate income for transparency.

With the amount of traffic I have, you can see how much and which affiliate programs are making me the most money.

AdSense still generates the most money for this blog followed by Survey Junkie.

My June income came from seven sources. The numbers in brackets are incomes from the previous month.

• AdSense: $133.73 ($111.42)
• Survey Junkie: $30.00 ($28.50)
• Panthera Interactive: $18.90 ($23.30)
• ShareASale: $8.26 ($7.50)
• FlexOffers: $3.20 ($0.00)
• Rakuten: $3.00 ($1.80)
• Impact Radius: $2.00 ($2.00)

Here are the screenshots from my affiliate dashboards.

AdSense

I know some bloggers think AdSense ads can be a little spammy and prefer to do without it.

If I were to remove AdSense though, I would lose my biggest money earner. Getting paid $100 per month passively is kind of nice if you ask me 🙂

There’s a setting in AdSense (Ads > Ads Balance) to reduce the number of ads to show.

But for now, I choose to show 100% of the potential ads as I think the negative effect on visitors experience is minimal.

It helps that most of my content are very long so the ads do not bury my whole content underneath them.

My goal is to join Mediavine when the blog reaches 25K sessions per month. I still have some work to do before I can apply.

I noticed Mediavine ads can be quite obtrusive too as they can suddenly appear randomly while you’re reading the content.

They aren’t drastically better than AdSense except for the higher RPM.

Despite the lower traffic, my AdSense income continued to rise from $111.42 in May to $133.73 in June. That’s a 20% increase.

Why is that?

Upon closer inspection, I found my AdSense ads received about 20% more clicks in June which means higher Page RPM (Revenue Per Thousand Page Impression).

I am not exactly sure why that was the case. Perhaps it was caused by improved matching between my content and advertisers.

Survey Junkie

I earned $1.5 more in June compared to May for a total of $30 from Survey Junkie.

In my Conversion Report, there’s no particular article that contributed significantly more than the others. I didn’t have any viral pin so that explains the balanced earnings.

In my experience, Survey Junkie is one of the most reliable survey affiliates with good conversion rates. They also pay like clockwork.

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

Panthera Interactive

My earnings from Panthera Interactive went down from $23.30 (May) to $18.90 (June).

One way to increase earnings is by driving more traffic so I am trying as hard as I can lol.

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.

ShareASale

In June, I only made $8.26 from ShareASale for promoting the Tailwind app. Nothing too interesting to report.

Whatever your blog niche, there are tons of relevant offers you can promote from ShareASale. I recommend you sign up here.

Rakuten Marketing, FlexOffers & Impact Radius

The last three of my income sources in June came from Rakuten, FlexOffers and Impact Radius.

I am just going to talk briefly about them as I think the amounts are just too small and not significant enough to show the screenshots.

I made $3.20 from FlexOffers last month from the promotion of Paribus, the free shopping app that tracks if stores owe you a refund.

Paribus sends you money when you buy items and there’s a price drop or your guaranteed shipment shows up late. Check it out, you might find it useful yourself!

If you are looking for an affiliate network to join, FlexOffers is a good one.

Next, I’ve sold two Udemy courses and made $3.00 from Rakuten.

And finally, I made $2.00 from the Ibotta promotion via Impact Radius.

What I Did in June 2019

Posts Published in June

I published six posts in June. They are:

• Top 10 Money Earning Apps for 2019
• Scrap Yard Near Me: Read This BEFORE You Visit
• Top 10 Business Ideas for Women in 2019
• Blog Income Report – How I Made $174.52 in My 7th Month Blogging
• How to Start a WordPress Blog & Make Money
• How to Make Money as a Kid Fast and Easy

Sometimes it was a struggle for me to write in English as it’s not my first language.

Thankfully, I got a little help from Grammarly.  It’s an online spelling and grammar checking tool that helps me find and correct English writing issues.

Download and try Grammarly for FREE here.

To get traffic, I focused on the usual sources, i.e. Pinterest and Google.

Using Pinterest to Attract Traffic

While Pinterest is still one of the fastest and easiest sources to get free traffic from, it’s now harder to have your pins go viral.

This seems to coincide with the time when Pinterest went public in April 2019. So I suspect Pinterest wants its users to spend more money on promoted pins to improve their bottom line.

I continued to improve my pins design by experimenting with different font and making my message clearer.

You can see the before and after below. On the left is my old design and the new design is on the right. The changes are subtle but I like the new font better.

Once in every couple of days, I create four new pins for four of my old posts.

I continue to do so until I’ve cycled through all my published posts and then start again from the oldest post.

I must be doing something right because both my average engagement rate and link click rate have been trending up month after month as you can see below.

While there’s always room for improvement, I am happy with this trend and will work hard to improve them further.

There’s one tool that has helped me improve my clicks and engagement which I’ll discuss more below.

I Use Tailwind to Schedule My Pins

To do well on Pinterest you need to pin frequently and consistently.

I have over 50 group boards to pin to. As I mentioned earlier, I create four new pins every couple of days for my old posts.

Pinning them manually would take too much time, not to mention one would need a system to space out the pinning enough to avoid spamming which can result in banning.

This is where Tailwind comes in.

Tailwind is a Pinterest (and Instagram) scheduling tool that helps you share your posts automatically at the best times for engagement.

Tailwind saves you time by avoiding the drudgery of manual pinning while you concentrate on content creation.

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.

To put it in perspective, with the help of Tailwind, I am now making over $100 from AdSense alone every single month, enough to cover the annual cost.

The traffic you get from Pinterest is also a signal for Google to check out your posts more closely.

In fact, most bloggers who had viral pins also discovered the same posts to do quite well on Google search result pages.

Tailwind 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.

Open a free account with Tailwind here.

I Purchased Tailwind Tribes PowerUp

Within Tailwind, there are options where users can purchase power-ups that allow them to unlock more features like pin more, or join more Tribes and so on.

In June, I purchased the Tribes Max PowerUp that allows me to join unlimited Tribes and have 200 Tribe submission per month.

You may be wondering, what is a Tribe?

Watch the video below for an overview of how it works.

Tailwind Tribes is a tool that enables you to share your content and promote other bloggers content.

They are like Pinterest Group Boards but are only accessible via the Tailwind app.

With Tribes, you can have your pins shared by other bloggers without worrying about spamming Pinterest Group boards because it’s the other people who do the sharing for you.

Just yesterday, several of my pins received tons of repins and with that, I also got a decent amount of traffic.

Here are the stats from my Tailwind dashboard.

It’s still too early if this trend continues or if more of my pins go viral. Whatever happens, I will let you know in my future blog income reports.

The free plan of Tailwind Tribes allows access to 5 Tribes and the submission of 30 pieces of content a month so why not give it a try?

Open a free account with Tailwind here.

Optimizing Blog Posts for SEO

I am happy to report that my organic traffic from Google continues to increase too. Still, nothing to shout about but it’s a positive development nonetheless.

The June algorithm update that started rolling out on June 3rd saw many sites affected. Some lose traffic and others gain more.

Personally, I am not sure how much AbsolutelyFreebies.com was affected.

Either way, I can see the impressions increasing, then dipped after June 8th but they are still higher than those in May.

The image below is a screenshot taken from my Google Search Console.

I am using the Yoast SEO plugin to help me optimize my article for the search engines. The free version should be enough for most bloggers.

I Use KeySearch for Keyword Research

To help me find popular topics which are easier to rank for and have high search volume, I use the KeySearch keyword research tool.

One of my favorite features is the Competitive Analysis which lets you analyze 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.

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

If you don’t know anything about SEO and keyword research, they have you covered! It comes with a free SEO course to get you started on the right foot right away.

Try KeySearch here (no credit card required). The free trial allows 3 daily searches and analysis as well as YouTube research.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading this far!

I hope you’ve learned something from this blog income report that you can apply in your own blogging endeavor.

Do you want me to write about something that I haven’t covered enough in my blog income reports?

Perhaps blogging SEO tips and tricks? How to properly monetize a blog with affiliate offers? The ultimate guide to using Pinterest to attract free traffic?

Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

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 and make money – 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).