My Second Month Blog Income Report – How I Made $46.76

Welcome to my second-month blog income report!

Things have been progressing steadily so far since my first month.

Just to give you some context, I published my first post on AbsolutelyFreebies.com on the 1st of November 2018.

I’ve also registered a brand new Pinterest account on the same day so I literally started from scratch.

I published one or two posts weekly until I had eleven blog posts by 31st November 2018 if you want to count the post published just before the New Year.

The income countdown started as soon as I published my first blog post.

If you like reading blog income reports, you’re in the right place as I am going to reveal exactly how I achieved this.

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

For more context and my blogging background, check out my first-month blogging income report here.

Related: How to Start a WordPress Blog & Make Money

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

2nd Month Blog Progress – December 2018

Unfortunately, none of my pins went viral, otherwise, I could probably have earned more. I am not complaining though.

My Pinterest viewers grew to 105,441 and my Pinterest followers to 279. Not that those numbers matter too much but they are a sign of progress nonetheless.

By 31st December, I’ve made a total of $46.76.

I know it’s not much but for me, the number is more realistic and probably more relatable to and attainable for new bloggers.

It also shows that while it’s possible to make money from blogging right away, blogging is not a get rich quick scheme!

Why Publish a Blog Income Report?

Writing my own blog income reports allows me to keep track of my own progression in income and traffic from one month to the next.

I also hope newbie bloggers find some inspiration in these reports and discover tips and strategies that they can use in their own blog.

Like many other blog income reports, I will also be recommending tools and resources that I’ve personally used which help me achieved the result.

Some of the links here may be affiliate links while others may just be normal ones.

This blog income report only covers the income made from AbsolutelyFreebies.com.

It doesn’t include any income from my other blogs and other online sources like freelancing and apps development.

I should add that I don’t plan to publish my blogging income reports forever. I will only do so if I think they offer value to my readers.

Besides, this blog is not really about blogging so I’ll only be sharing blogging related posts occasionally.

Perhaps by reading what works for me, you can learn what could work in your situation as well.

My Second Month Blog Income Breakdown

To show you that this is a real income that I am making, I won’t just put down the numbers and expect you to believe me – even though the amount is small lol.

In fact, I prefer reading income reports that show at least the screenshots from ads/affiliate dashboard reports.

Otherwise, it would make me question how a brand new blogger with little traffic and no blogging experience achieved a higher than industry average conversion rates.

If I didn’t know any better, it gave the impression that making money from blogging is easy when in reality the opposite is true.

So in December 2019, I have made a total of $46.76, up from $17.34 I earned in my first month in November.

My income comes from three sources. They are:

• Google AdSense: $34.86
• Survey Junkie: $7.50
• Panthera Interactive: $4.40

AdSense

My AdSense income has more than doubled from the first-month income when I made $12.44.

I’m not sure if this trend will continue in my third month though. As in the first week of January 2019, my Page RPM is lower than average even though Page views continue to increase.

It could be that there are fewer higher-paying advertisers in January because they had spent most of their budget in November and December during the holiday.

If you’re curious as I am, I’ll share my finding in my third-month blogging income report! So feel free to follow me on Pinterest or Facebook to be kept updated on my progress.

Survey Junkie

Survey Junkie is one of the most popular online survey sites. You can find it being promoted all over the place.

From a blogger perspective, I find it’s pretty reliable and has better conversion rates than the other survey offers.

Sign-up with Survey Junkie here and start making money from your blog promoting survey offers to your readers. They pay you $1.50 for each sign-ups.

I was making $7.50 from Survey Junkie in my second month.

Panthera Interactive

This 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 with Panthera Interactive here.

I’ve made $4.40 from Panthera Interactive in my second-month blogging.

Second-Month Blogging Traffic Report

In terms of traffic numbers, my users, sessions and pageviews have more than doubled from November too.

As a comparison, here are my numbers from my first month versus the second-month blogging.

• Users: 1,175 < 2,454 (109% more)
• Sessions: 1,253 <  2,683 (114% more)
• Page Views: 1,175 < 3,346 (185% more)

Versus the first month – November 2018 traffic.

How Did I Do It?

And now the $46.76 dollars question – how did I make this small amount in my second-month blogging?

Well, here’s what I believe helped me earn that amount in my second-month blogging.

I continued doing what worked for me in my first month. I focused on the following:

• Content
• SEO
• Pinterest

Creating Quality Blog Content

At this point in my blogging journey, I am very familiar with the blog setup, the design and other technical stuff. So I didn’t get carried away trying to make my blog worked or looked perfect.

In my second month blogging, I managed to publish another five posts.

Actually more like four because the last post was published on the 31st which didn’t get any traffic until after the New Year.

See that’s doable for most people I think.

I didn’t do any work for about a week during the Christmas holiday otherwise I could have published more.

If you’re wondering, I’ve been working full-time online since forever and AbsolutelyFreebies.com is just one of my online projects.

Check out these blogging tips and tricks to learn more about creating quality blog content.

As a non-native English speaker, writing is not my strongest suit.

Nevertheless, I understand that one needs good content in order to attract the right audience. So I always focused on trying to write good posts.

I’ve been using Grammarly to help me fix my grammar and spelling. Grammarly is an online spelling and grammar checking app that helps users find and correct English writing issues.

While it didn’t help me write like a native English speaker would, it has definitely improved my written English and help me create more engaging posts.

Click here to sign up with Grammarly. It’s FREE.

Optimizing Blog Post for SEO

I decided to optimize my blog posts for the search engines starting from the first post. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization if you don’t know.

If done correctly, SEO can help your posts rank on the first page of Google search results. That could mean getting massive free traffic on your way every single day.

While I don’t expect to see organic traffic from Google for at least 6 months later, I think it’s important to start right away.

SEO goes hand-in-hand with writing quality and useful content.

Longer posts tend to rank better on the search engines. Also having very helpful, in-depth posts results in more shares and engagement.

You can learn more about SEO here.

I continued to write longer articles in my second month. In fact, my first blog income report is over 4000 words long!

However, there’s no point in writing long blog posts only to fill them with fluff, so you also need to think about your readers.

Also, not all topics warrant a long post. Think celebrity gossip or news event.

I also performed keyword research to find popular topics I could 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.

Try KeySearch for FREE here.

Using Pinterest to Attract Traffic

I continued to focus on Pinterest to drive traffic in my second-month blogging.

Without Pinterest, this blog income report won’t even be possible.

Here’s what I did to increase my Pinterest views to over 100K in my second month.

I Use Tailwind to Schedule My Pins

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

While I’m not a new blogger, I’m pretty new to Pinterest. I only started getting my feet wet with it in July 2018.

I find it rather mind-boggling in that even with zero followers, I could reach thousands of viewers on Pinterest, spending only a few hours per week to schedule my posts.

This is even more impressive when you think you’ll never get this kind of reach on Facebook or Twitter if you have zero followers unless you got lucky.

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

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

I only have 11 posts so far – 12 include this one.  I’ve been scheduling 90%-95% of my own content and the rest are other people content.

The opposite is true for Tailwind Tribes as I’ve been re-sharing more of other people content on Tribes.

I explain more about Tailwind Tribes down below.

I joined Several Pinterest Group Boards

Pinterest group boards are collaborative boards where multiple users can pin their stuff for free.

I only apply to join group boards related to my niche and avoid boards that accept pins from various niches or the pin your best posts types as they are too generic.

I also made sure the board has a good description with relevant keywords in it and is being properly moderated.

Before applying to any group boards, make sure that your blog actually launched, have more than one quality posts and is working properly.

Create a thoughtful profile description, add a good headshot or website logo, have some high-quality pins and create several targeted niche personal boards for your own pins.

If you don’t have enough of your own content to pin, try repin other people’s content.

Although group boards are no longer as effective as they used to be in driving traffic, joining them is still one of the fastest ways to get your pins noticed.

Since I didn’t work for one week during the Christmas holiday and didn’t write many emails for the whole month, I didn’t manage to join to as many group boards as I’d like.

By the end of December, I’ve joined 55 group boards. That’s just 6 more boards than in my previous month.

For more info on how managed to join 49 group boards in my first month, check out my first-month blog income report.

I Created Multiple Engaging Pins for Each Post

For each post that I published, I created five different pins design.

Having multiple pin images for each blog post not only improves your reach but also your SEO for Pinterest.

For example here are my pins for one of my posts:

Pinterest is favouring new pins which can be pins for new blog posts, new design for old posts or even old design with new descriptions.

I use Photoshop to create my Pins but you can also use Canva or PicMonkey.

In the future, I might create more pin variations so that I can continue serving fresh content on Pinterest for my older posts.

I Joined Several Tailwind Tribes

Tailwind Tribes is an online community made up of other bloggers sharing content in a similar niche.

They are like Pinterest boards but only accessible to those who use Tailwind.

Tribes can work pretty well and can get your pins repinned more times, amplifying the reach of your content.

When you share your blog posts to a Tribe and if your Tribemates like your content, they can share it to their Pinterest boards for their audience to see.

Most tribes require you to pin someone else’s pin for every 1 of your pins you share. This makes the members more accountable and encourages more sharing.

Besides, you’re not spamming any Pinterest group boards because your pins were being repinned by other bloggers.

The trial version of Tailwind allows you to join up to 5 tribes.

Click here to grab your free trial of Tailwind and Tailwind Tribes.

To join more Tribes, you’ll need to purchase a Tribe PowerUp.

For AbsolutelyFreebies.com, I am currently on the Tailwind Plus plan paid annually. However, I haven’t purchased any Tribe PowerUps yet.

I plan to do this soon because I think you can definitely accelerate your growth if you can submit more content to more Tribes.

There are many power pinners and big bloggers who are members of Tribes. If you can get your pins repinned by them, imagine the instant reach your pins will get.

For example, one of my pins was shared by a popular blogger which resulted in hundreds and thousands reach instantly. For the six posts that I shared in just one Tribe, I got 1.3M reach.

My Blogging Goals

When it comes to blogging, goal setting is important. By sharing my goals I make it formal, be accountable and make me work harder to achieve them.

A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline – Harvey MacKay

In general, I just want to see a consistent progression in terms of traffic numbers, social media followers, email subscribers(soon) and earnings.

Content Goal

My main goal is to just publish quality long-form posts at least once or twice per week. Making sure each post is properly optimized for SEO.

Traffic Goal

In terms of traffic, I want to see an increase month after month and reach 25K sessions by May 2019 so that I can apply for Mediavine.

Since other bloggers have been saying that they started making much more from advertising after switching from AdSense to Mediavine, I’m curious to see how much difference the ad income would be.

If accepted, I am also curious to see how Mediavine ads affect my page load time and the content structure.

So why May 2019?

Because that’s six months after I started this blog in November 2018. I hope organic traffic from Google will start to trickle in by then.

I’m curious to see how my posts rank on Google after they are out of the sandbox.

If I can publish regularly, I believe I could achieve the 25K session goal faster by getting the initial traffic boost from Pinterest or if some of my pins go viral.

Social Media Goals

I don’t have Pinterest followers goals because the number of followers you have on Pinterest doesn’t really matter when it comes to getting actual visitors to your blog.

I heard of other bloggers who got thousands of visitors daily with less than 200 followers because their pins went viral!

At the time of this writing, I have 322 followers:

Remember, Pinterest works more like a search engine than like a social media platform.

Like Google, you can optimize your pins design and use relevant keywords other people are searching for.

Regardless of the number of followers you have, your pins can still appear in other people search results.

Also, your pins can also appear on someone’s home feed if the pins are pinned by someone they follow or if the group boards they follow have your pins in them.

While I do have a Facebook page for AbsolutelyFreebies, I plan to use Facebook groups to promote my posts only occasionally. I also do not plan to use Twitter yet.

However, creating an email list is something that I plan to do very soon.

Income Goal

In terms of income, it would be interesting to see if I can achieve $1000 monthly income by May 2019.

Even if I don’t achieve this goal, I believe that getting $1000/month (even more) within a year from AbsolutelyFreebies.com is possible.

Regardless, you’ll get to read about it here and see how my little experiment will pan out. If things don’t work out, then you will learn what not to do.

Start Your Own Blog

Do you know you can start a blog with a very little upfront cost, unlike other ventures?

For example, this blog costs as little as $3.95 per month to host.

Starting a blog is one of those side hustles that could actually generate a life-changing income for you.

There are many ways you can make money from blogging. Some of the most popular ways include displaying ads as I do here, accepting sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, or selling your own products or services.

There are blogs out there that make $60K per month, just one year after starting! No that’s not a typo!

Truth be told, creating a successful blog requires serious effort, dedication and won’t happen overnight.

However once the income kicks in, you won’t be trading your time for money but instead, you’ve built a way of generating passive income and it’s highly scalable.

If you think you’re not a good writer, I myself is not a native English speaker.

Sure, there’s a learning curve involved but everyone gotta start somewhere.

There will be a lot of trials and errors along the way but one thing for sure you can definitely make money from blogging if you work hard.

If you are new to blogging and want to learn how to create the best blog, get traffic fast, even learn some Pinterest tactics, check out this blogging course: Ready Set Blog for Traffic.

The course is also suitable for those who are already blogging but are struggling to gain traffic. I’ve purchased it to learn about Pinterest fast but it offers more than that.

If you don’t give blogging a shot, you will never know how it could truly change your life.

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 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.
• Survey Junkie – get paid for promoting survey offers in your blog.
• 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).

Conclusion

I hope you find value from my second-month blog income report.

My goal is to make $1000 per month from this blog by May 2019. If several of my pins go viral it’s definitely possible to achieve that goal sooner.

More importantly, I want to see consistent grow from month to month.

I’ll set up an email list for people to subscriber soon. For now, you can follow me on Pinterest and Facebook.

Thanks for reading!