Blog Income Report: I made $26,527 in September 2023 (2024)

Hello 👋 , and welcome to the blog income report: September 2023 edition.

That’s right, we broke the 25k threshold.

🎉woohoooo…

I recall a few months back when I was revamping this website, planning the content strategy of this blog, and struggling to figure out how to overcome the AI-pocalypse of loosely written content that was supposed to take a lot of writing jobs.

And randomly, I had a thought, “…you know what would be nice? $10k by the end of the year, that’s it, that’s the goal…”

While I write this, constantly gazing my eyes in the title that says “$26,527“, I don’t know what to feel but am “shocked and grateful” simultaneously.

As you might already know, the second half of September was a bit of a rough patch for many niche site owners.

Because Google released an excuse of an algorithm update, HCU (Helpful Content Update) is what they’re calling it, a major drop in overall traffic (and income) of almost all niche websites was expected.

(Except the all AI content sites that are fairly new and it’s still not clear how they are getting such a boom in traffic)

On the contrary, since I don’t get the most traffic from SEO, I didn’t witness any massive drops, instead, there was a staggering 38.5% increase in overall sessions (more on traffic discussed later).

Courtesy of Pinterest,

If anything, this incident only affirms one point once again: Diversification.

While SEO might be the holy grail of blog traffic, don’t shy away from diversifying your traffic sources.

Promote/build an audience on social media (Pinterest, Facebook, etc.) and make an email list. These are the safety nets you’ll need as a website owner who is solely reliant on search traffic.

If you want to get started with Pinterest and learn how to drive traffic from Pinterest, consider checking this article:

Moving on to the part you’re waiting for,

The Income Breakdown: $26,527.06

First off, let’s talk about Mediavine…

The single best thing that has ever happened to this blog. I can’t describe in words how Mediavine has changed the trajectory of this blog’s income in a few years.

A massive $23k in a month, just from ads.

Highest-ever ad revenue in September, beating last month’s numbers by an extra $8,214.1

Having a premium ad network under your belt will not only give you a few extra bucks but can earn you more than anything.

Read the Mediavine Review if you’re considering using ads on your blog.

Throughout the month, I had a very good income through it and saw a massive jump in overall RPM as well; it was averaging around $80, compared to $72.29 last month.

In August, we hit $600 and $700 ad income a day for the very first time.

In September, there were multiple $800 days, $900 days, and even $1100, $1200 days.

Now, that’s something I didn’t expect to happen anytime soon. Nah-uhh!

The moment I saw the ad revenue for the 16th day, a word just came out of my mouth that I can’t really say here; that’s how unexpected it was.

And the RPM for 16 Sep, too, was the highest I ever got, $98.03. Hopefully, I’ll be seeing similar numbers in December.

On the 17th, I saw an RPM of around $107 and posted about it on X (Twitter).

Later, I realized the number was not updated, and it came down to around $90 the next day haha…

I guess Mediavine takes time to get exact data from GA4, hence the delay.

And by the time the numbers updated, the post got nearly 9K impressions *sigh*, apologies for that…

But $90 is still a good number for RPM, considering it never reaches even $80 for the majority of the year.

Anyway, I’ll be posting an article about how I boosted my Blog RPM and how you can too, especially for Q4 (and in general) soon,

The article is live: How to Increase Blog RPM

I’ll link it here post-completion. Keep an eye out, or sign up for the “The Blogging Blueprint” newsletter to get updates directly to your inbox.

In terms of affiliate income, a slight drop was noticed despite having higher traffic than the previous month.

It could be because most of the Pinterest traffic was directed to that same blog post. Or do I need to up my affiliate game?

Anyways, ads made more than enough to compensate for the loss in affiliate earnings.

Blog Expenses for September 2023

Expenses for running this blog remain the same which are around $35 for blog hosting and $17 for CDN (content delivery network), $12.95 for Canva, and $79 for Convertkit (Email service provider).

The above digits were basic; the rest of the services I use aren’t necessarily a requirement but rather used for content research purposes.

So the Net Profit for this blog turns out to be ($26,527.06- $432.85), which is:

$26,064.21

(up by 41.76% since last month)

On the fence about starting your own blog?

Building a personal brand online not only helps you build a steady source of income but also helps you in all sorts of not-so-direct ways, such as:

• High-income potential (a lot of established bloggers make over $100,000 a month)
• You leverage your blog to help your existing business
• Building a like-minded community
• You don’t need any technical or coding knowledge prior to starting a blog.
• Starting a blog is cheap (about $2.95 a month)
• You can create your blog on any topic you like or are passionate about, ANYTHING!
• Create a passion project under your own name ( Example: yourname.com, I have another blog other than this, which is in my name, sayanneogie.com)
• What do you have to lose? (Other than those $2.95/month, a cup of coffee is more expensive than this.)

Here’s how to start your own blog in 10 minutes:

Head over to the article: Step-by-step guide on starting a blog, and you’ll be good to go.

Income Proof:

1. Mediavine

2. Impact

2. Proofread Anywhere

Traffic Stats:

September received record traffic from Pinterest, a massive 283k sessions, and over 700k pageviews.

700k??? WHAT???

There were two pins in particular that went viral and contributed the the surge in traffic, and those led to the same blog post.

There was a significant increase in Traffic (38.5% in sessions) from Pinterest, and the pin reach has been the highest it has ever been.

Over 14 million impressions across the platform converted to over 255k outbound links.

Again, if you want to know more about getting started with Pinterest to drive traffic to your website, check out this article:

Email Subscribers:

The list is growing quite well, and I think the goal to reach 5k subscribers before 2024 is actually possible.

It is possible that I might boot some people off of my Creator Network recommendation list as I would like to include my other sites in that list as well.

I won’t be doing that until I have some actual content and structure to those sites, but yeah this is what I am looking at.

Previous Blog Income reports:

• Blog Income Report: I made $18,819 in August 2023
• Blog Income Report: I made $15,545 in July 2023
• Blog Income Report: I made $12,373 in June 2023
• Blog Income Report: I made $6747 in May 2023
• Blog Income Report: I made $4,767 in April 2023
• Blog Income Report: I made $4,801 in March 2023
• Blog Income Report: I made $4,753 in February 2023

Blog Updates:

The 5th Site (a similar niche as this one) is coming along really well in terms of first impressions and the overall aesthetics of it all, and I might post a few articles on this website this month as I have planned.

And for my 2nd site, SayanNeogie.com, I have disabled Adsense ads.

The major reasons are, that Adsense ads are too bulky, take a lot of screenspace, and pay nothing.

The amount getting paid wasn’t worth the loss of the clean feel of the website. Soooo, see ya never.

Update for Site 6: Too complicated as of now; I still have to learn about the topic to be able to write anything about it.

The topic here is still something I wanna learn eventually, but it does not take precedence in my overall business idea as of now.

That’s it for the September 2023 income report!

See ya next month!

Cheers!