May 2017 Blogging Income Report

Well folks, I have officially survived my second calendar month! The month of May brought about a lot of growth in my blog, but also brought my first family vacation of the year! While I would have liked to see a bit more out of my blog for the month, I will totally be blaming my slacking on my Disney vacation at the end of the month.

This post contains affiliate links. 

Anyways, on to the real reason you are here. How did my blog perform for the month of May? Let’s check it out!

Income

For the sake of not overwhelming myself, I stuck with the four same affiliates that I reported on in my April 2017 Blogging Income Report. Here is how they performed this month:

• Google Adsense- $8.09
• Share-a-Sale- $2.31
• Bluehost-$0.00
• Amazon-$1.93

Total Income for May: $12.33

Ok, so I am dancing in my seat over here. Not because I am trying to brag over making $12 this month, but more so because I am figuring out this blogging thing! I learn more every single day about how the blogger’s market (I totally made that term up) works. Therefore, when I have a win, it really excites me. Here are a couple of my big wins for income this month.

My post Apparel, Accessories, and Home Shopping on a Budget scored me my first income through Share-a-Sale. This post, which is all about my love for Jane.com, was how I made my first income which was more than a couple pennies at a time. Totally awesome for my second month in!

Second big win, I  figured out Amazon Affiliates. This was a big thing for me as well. Figuring out their program, and incorporating a different kind of ad into my posts produced my second bit of income that was more than pennies at a time. Now that I kind of know what I am doing with them, I hope to use this to up my income in the future! Want to check out the ad’s that helped me achieve this goal? Check out my post here that demonstrates the ad’s I used!

Traffic

I am excited to be able to report, that my traffic is going up! I am still using WordPress to record my traffic analytics, however I did start to explore Google Analytics this month and I hope to be using it to start reporting traffic soon. I have to finish figuring that beast out first though.

Visitors: 1694 (Guys, this is seriously huge for me. When I started this blog, I was tickled to have 10+ visitors a day. Never did I think I would be seeing over 1500 visitors a month. Thank you for continuing to read and share my blog with those you know!)

Views: 2427 (So here I am baffled again. Several of my readers for the last month were checking out multiple pages while on my blog. This makes me so excited that people are truly interested in my content!)

Comments: 29 (I love reading the comments and feedback that I am receiving! Please, if you have a suggestion, thought or anything you want to say about a post, do not hesitate to comment!)

Posts

Remember the start of this post when I was talking about slacking due to my Disney vacation? Yeah, here is the evidence.

This month I managed the same number of posts as I did last month, 7. The thing I figured out however, is that my posts themselves are improving in multiple ways! My SEO (search engine optimization) has gotten much better this month, and visitors are now finding me through Google searches. Also, I am learning how to better place links in my post in order for them to be better utilized by my readers.

I am telling you guys, I really do learn something new every day, and the more you apply, the better your blog becomes. As my husband would say, “The more you know.”

As far as my posts went for the month, my most popular posts were Must have Items for your Stroller, and my April Blogging Income Report. The latter of the two really surprised me!

Goals

First, let’s look at my goals that I set for May:

Increase Income– While I wanted to double my income for the month, coming within $2 of that goal was not terrible for second month.

Increase Traffic– Goal Met: I managed to learn some about Pinterest this month, and it really showed in my numbers. Also, I managed to enable Rich Pins, which really helped, and I more than doubled my Pinterest following. (Do not get to excited by that, I started at 70 followers at the beginning of the month.)

This month, I hope to focus more on my Twitter following, and learning how to utilize Twitter to drive more traffic. I currently have just under 900 followers on Twitter, so it will be interesting to see how I can grow on that platform.

Increase Subscribers-Goal Met (Though I still have not figured out how to see how many subscribers total I increased by. Working on that.) I have not however, gotten a newsletter out to my subscribers. That will continue to be a work in progress.

For this month

Continue to Increase Income: As I have figured out how to utilize some of my affiliates better in the last month I was blogging, I plan to continue to increase the amount I am bringing in. For the month of June, I hope to see an income of $100 overall. A steep goal, but I believe I can accomplish it if I continue to increase my knowledge a little each day and push myself out of my comfort zone.

Create my Newsletter: I am determined this month to get this newsletter going. I am not sure yet what it will look like overall, but it is coming.

Create my First Printable: One of the tricks I have read about to gain subscribers, is to use printable’s. I plan to have my own created by the end of the month, and hopefully in use!

Again, if you have read this far, I appreciate your interest in my journey! Please do not take any of my income posts as me bragging, as that is really not my intent. My hope is, that by maintaining transparency throughout my early months, I can inspire others who may need a bit of encouragement! If you are interested in beginning your own blogging journey, please consider checking out Bluehost as your hosting provider. They have made it super simple for me to get my own blog up and running, and are super user-friendly. Plus, by clicking the banner below, you can get your own website hosting for only $3.95 a month!

As always, please feel free to drop me a comment with any thoughts, questions, or feedback that you have. Also, if you enjoyed this post, please give it a share!