How I Made Money My First Month Blogging

Welcome to my very first traffic and blog income report. I decided when I first started my blog, I did not want to wait until I started making money from my blog to post blog reports. The thought never crossed my mind I would actually make money my very first month blogging!! But, it happened and I am stoked about it.

I wanted to post blog reports starting my first month because I thought it would help me stay accountable to my goals and also give others a little insight into the first months of blogging. I love reading other’s income reports but most of the time I find myself asking the same question: “How long did it take before they grew a following and made money”? So, hopefully my journey will be helpful to those with the same question in the future.

You may be asking yourself why in the world would someone want to share their income report. There are two main reasons I want to share this report with all of you:

• First and foremost, I want you to know it is possible to make money blogging! One of the biggest benefits to me this past month was other’s income reports. I would devour them and learn how other bloggers are making their money, gaining traction, and what did or did not work for them. There is so much to gain from these income reports. My income may be small in the beginning but I encourage you to look at other bloggers income reports to learn from them as well.
• Second, I want to have accountability and this is the best way I know of to feel the pressure. If I put it out here for the world to see, I can’t really take it back. I am the type of person that if I set a goal, I try my hardest to accomplish it. I may not even get close to accomplishing my monthly goals, but as long they are set and written down, I do my best to reach them. It is just a little way of giving myself a push to JUST DO IT!

Did I Accomplish My Goals and Make Money in May 2017?

I made $28.98 in May 2017 from my blog (first month blogging). I know, I know…this amount is very small. However, if you know anything about blogging, you know it is a slow go. Most people do not even make money their first month blogging, so I was thrilled with this and hope it continues to grow! I will go into detail of where this money was from below. But first, I want to go through the goals I set for my first month and see how they turned out!

Goals for May 2017:

• 4 New Blog Posts
• 1000 Pageviews for the month
• 100 Pinterest followers
• 50 Facebook followers
• 25 Twitter followers
• 25 Instagram followers
• 10 Email Subscribers
• $0 in affiliate sales

Although my goals were not set very high, I really had nothing to go off of so I tried to set them at what I thought was reasonable for my first month. So, how did I do?

Actual Numbers for May 2017:

• 7 New Blog Posts
• 1489 Pageviews
• 177 Pinterest followers
• 147 Facebook followers
• 68 Twitter followers
• 62 Instagram followers
• 52 Email Subscribers
• $28.98 in affiliate sales

I feel like I crushed this month’s goals, however I realized my goals were not set high enough and I focused on too many things. Next month, I want to narrow my focus and hope to increase traffic to my blog.

May Blog Posts

My goal for May was to write one blog post per week so I could spend the rest of my week on driving traffic to those post and learning more about blogging in general. I did not want to overwhelm myself with an unrealistic goal since I am only able to work two hours a day on blogging. To my surprise, I was able to publish three extra posts for May. I plan to continue with this schedule until I see I will be able to spend more than two hours a day on my blog :-).

If you missed any post from May, check them out here:

How to Start a Blog and Quit Your 9 to 5

Make Extra Money with Paid Surveys

Everything You Need to Build and Grow Your Blog

How We Paid Over $100K of Debt With This Simple System

5 WordPress Themes for Female Bloggers

Earn FREE Money With the Ibotta App: Plus Earn $10 Just For Signing Up

The Ultimate List of Must Have Plugins for Bloggers

 

Acquisition Overview

Where did traffic come from?

1. As you can tell, social networks are bringing in 60% of my traffic (we will go into detail on this in just a bit). I would like to increase this number simply because I want to increase my traffic, however I would like to keep the percent at or below this in the future.
2. Direct traffic is nearly 30% but has a higher bounce rate and much lower duration average per session. I am not sure why this is but I would like to see both the number of session and the duration increase in the future.
3. Organic Search is a whopping 7.88%. I am especially glad that I do have organic search listed here and it is not 0. I am very pleased with the bounce rate and the duration per session. This month I would like to work on SEO to hopefully optimize my sight and gain more traffic organically.
4. Referral is the lowest, however bounce rate and duration per session is great!

Which Social Network drove the most traffic?

I was pretty disappointed when looking at this because I expected Pinterest to be my number one source of traffic. Having worked very hard with Pinterest, I feel I spend much more time working with it than I do Facebook. I will continue to work with it because I know for most bloggers it is what drives their traffic.

When I started at the beginning of May, I had no idea what I was doing with Pinterest. I ran across an eBook called Pinteresting Strategies several times and read multiple reviews on it that highly suggested it. I decided to take the plunge and invested in it ($32) and I am so happy I did. It help me understand what I was doing wrong and what I needed to change regarding my Pinterest Strategy. Take a look at the below graph:

I bought the eBook on May 5th and starting implementing a few of the strategies on May 8th. Needless to say it helped drive more traffic. Each spike is a new blog post that I pinned on Pinterest with my new Pinterest Strategy. Obviously I don’t have it down pat quite yet, but it will come.

I’ve been hearing about Tailwind Tribes in most of my Facebook groups but had no idea what they were or how to go about participating in them. Plus, I did not want to pay for Tailwind. However, through a lot of research I figured out in order to participate in Tailwind Tribes, you do not have to pay for the monthly subscription of Tailwind. You can sign up for their free trial and gain access to the tribes. If you decide not to opt for paying the monthly subscription once the trial is over, you can continue to participate in the tribes since they’re in the beta testing phase at this point. I signed up at the end of May and started participating with tribes. I am also taking advantage of the free trial and letting Tailwind pin 100 pins for me for free. I’m excited to see how this turns out and if it will be better, worse, or the same as my manual pinning strategy. We will find out in June :-)!

If you have not already signed up for the free trial in Tailwind, I highly suggest you do. Mainly for the Tailwind Tribes that you will have access to. Sign up for Tailwind here!

Income by Affiliate Network:

BookScouter: $1.65

Coupons.com: $2.26

Google AdSense: $5.47

SendOwl: $12.80

*Pinteresting Strategies eBook

Grammarly: $0.20

Awin.com: $5.00

MaxBounty: $1.60

Income Total: $28.98

These are not all of the affiliate networks I participate with. They are only the networks I have earned money from in May. Since most bloggers earn a portion of their income through affiliate links, I developed a list of 315 Affiliate Programs for Bloggers and Online Business Owners to help you boost your monthly income. This list is for bloggers of all niches, not just the financial niche. If you do not see your niche listed, you can still utilize a good portion of the affiliate links, so make sure to look at all of them! Enter your name and email below to download the FREE list of affiliate programs!

 

Goals for June 2017:

• 4 New Blog Posts – Continue with the current schedule of 1 post per week.
• 2500 monthly Pageviews – I would love more but at this time I think it will be pushing it to get 2500 page views in the month of June.
• 300 Pinterest followers – I want to devote more time and effort on Pinterest and grow my following. This is something I have not completely figured out, but I will!
• 200 Facebook followers – Since I am focusing more on Pinterest, I am not going to drive this one as much.
• 80 Twitter followers – Again, Since I am focusing more on Pinterest, I will not have the time to put much effort in Twitter this month.
• 75 Instagram followers – Same as Twitter.
• 150 Email Subscribers – I have several post and a challenge I am working on that will hopefully boost my subscribers.
• $50 in affiliate sales – I would love this, we will see!

 

Blog News

At the first of June I made the decision to change the blog name from The Work From Home Evolution to Breaking Financial Chains. I decided to rebrand since the blog is not solely about working from home. I wanted a name that would better encompass what the blog is about. Since it is about making more, saving more, spending less, and living financially free, I feel that Breaking Financial Chains helps to describe that.

I am working on a free email challenge and hope to finish it up in the next week or two. It is a Money Challenge to make and save $100 in 30 days. This email challenge will give subscribers the exact steps they should take in order have an extra $100 at the end of the 30 days. If you would like to participate in the Money Challenge when it begins, please complete the form below and I will send it to you!

I also created a new Facebook Group: Breaking Financial Chains Community. I hope this can be a close community  so my readers and followers can get to know one another and support each other in their endeavors to become financially free. The purpose of this new group is for members to post questions, struggles, and wins! Members can also get advice and support from other members as well as give support and encouragement through their own experiences. If you would like to join our new Facebook Community, please ask to join here. We would love to have you!

 

Wrap Up

Whew! I am so happy with how May turned out overall with the blog. I am super excited to see what June has in store! Thank you for all your support and encouragement and also reading this report. I feel so much more accountable for what I am doing and I hope to have answered at least one question you had when deciding to read this report.

 

If you haven’t already taken the leap and are interested in starting a blog I highly suggest using Bluehost as your hosting provider. I have created a step by step guide that will walk you through signing up and setting up your blog. It is very simple and you can get started for as low as $3.95 per month.

Once you setup your blog, you will need to choose a theme. I have written a post on my 5 favorite WordPress themes and also give other resources to find great themes. I have also written a post about everything you need to build your blog and also all the plugins I use for my blog.

 

What are your goals for your blog and how are you crushing them?