How I Made $4,775 in September 2018 Blogging [Monthly Income Report] (2024)

This article contains affiliate links.

Welcome to my monthly income report. I publish these to share not just the revenue from my blog and freelance writing business, but also the mistakes, lessons and new projects.

Make sure you check out all my income reports.

I’m currently earning a few thousand dollars a month thanks to sponsorships, freelance writing and ads but I’m also working on 2 other income streams (affiliate marketing and selling online courses).

Read on to see what’s been going on over the past month. Hopefully, this will inspire you to add a new income stream to your business, start a blog, make your first money freelancing, or simply work on a new business idea.

What Happened in September 2018 on My Blog and in My Business

What I Did Differently to Earn $5K Last Month

The income from August was a total of $5,400 and that’s no coincidence. I hit the 5K milestone and I wrote a long and detailed post sharing what led to this number.

It’s a result of actions taken over the last couple of months.

Check out 10 Things I Did in The Last 6 Months to Double My Income and Make $5,000 a Month

Next Level Internal Linking

So many bloggers are focused on getting backlinks from other sites that they forget about the power of internal linking.

To you, internal linking might mean nothing more than adding a link to another page on your site when you feel like.

You might know you should include a few of these per article and that the anchor text should also be related to the content of both pages.

However, there’s more behind this.

While adding internal links is easy, that’s yet another thing people do wrong or don’t take seriously enough but which can double their traffic and improve their rankings.

I’ve been neglecting it for quite some time so decided to finally do a research and improve my internal linking techniques.

With so many articles on Let’s Reach Success, I knew I could interlink the pages better to optimize the site and help Google crawl updated content faster.

I researched this because I wanted to include a whole module section on it in my new course Financial Freedom through Blogging.

The course is now live. You can check it out here.

I’ve been updating old blog posts since the beginning of this year and I’ve seen a boost in traffic that’s natural but also stable.

One of the changes I make to old content is to update internal links and add new ones.

Also, when I publish a new post, I go to 2-4 old ones and interlink from there.

Last but not least, I link to old and not-so-popular articles so they too can get some link juice. That signals Google that they should be crawled again, which is good for the site.

All that is deep linking and it’s something you, as a blogger, should be doing all the time in order to show search engines how connected the pages on your site are.

Readers like internal links too and it reduces bounce rate.

For more on internal linking, check out Neil Patel’s guide here.

New Epic Guide

I just published 67 Best Side Hustles to Make an Extra $1000 a Month.

I realized that so many online and offline business ideas have been shared throughout my articles and the guest posts published on Let’s Reach Success. So I decided to gather the best ones and create the ultimate list.

You will find things you can start on the side, while working full-time, and even if you have no initial capital, want quick cash, are a student, a stay-at-home mum, or else.

There’s a side hustle for everyone in this list so make sure you check it out.

Business PayPal and Bank Account

Did something many online business owners usually do much sooner. However, with me things go a bit more slowly as I moved to another country (relocated to the Netherlands after becoming location independent) and only set up the business here at the beginning of 2018.

Opening a business bank account didn’t happen quickly enough as I’m not a Dutch citizen, but now it’s all fixed.

All this helps me with money management as I can finally keep my personal and business earnings and expenses separate.

September Monthly Income Report

I earned a total of $4,775 in September 2018 from my blog and freelance writing business.

Please keep in mind that’s gross income. After extracting fees I pay to other platforms, transaction fees, paying my own taxes and insurance and covering my pension as a solopreneur in the Netherlands, there’s much less left for me to spend.

It took a while till I got to over $4K/month blogging and freelancing.You can see the progress here together with all other income reports.

This Month’s Revenue Breakdown

Total Revenue (Gross Income) – $4,775

FREELANCE WRITING: $705

Upwork

ClearVoice

Clients outside of any platform

SPONSORSHIPS: $3,703

ValuedVoice

SeedingUp

AD REVENUE: $347

Check out: How to Optimize Your Site to Increase Ad Revenue

AFFILIATE MARKETING: $0

Check out: Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing

BOOKS: $20

Smashwords

Amazon

This Month’s Expenses Breakdown

Web Services

WPX Hosting – $25 (Read my honest WPX Hosting Review)

Teachable – $39

Professional Services

Accountant (paid quarterly) – €0

Office Supplies and Misc.

Mobile Plan – €27

Health Insurance – €102

Upwork fees – $28

PayPal fees – $213

Last month’s best content on Let’s Reach Success

62 blog posts were published in September.

Here’s some of the content worth checking out if you haven’t already:

This is What The World’s Most Influential People Studied at CollegeWhat is Biohacking and Why Give it a TryHow This Kid Managed to Quit His Job and Start a Small Business After Reading These 5 Books11 Tips to Take Your Blogging to The Next LevelTop 5 Habits of Successful People You Need to AdoptThe Highest-Paid CEOs and Their College DegreesHow to Start an Amazon Business7 Best Career Options for People Who Want to Make a Difference

Next Goals: What I’ll Be Working on in October

Reaching Yearly Goals in Q4

October marks the beginning of Q4, meaning the last quarter of the year. For bloggers, that’s when traffic spikes again after the summer slump.

It’s also a chance to rethink your strategy, get back on track, add a new income stream, start freelancing or selling your own product, or else. All that with the goal to reach your target annual revenue.

In my case, for instance, that could be $50K. It might not happen, but knowing I’m now earning around $5K/month, it’s possible.

Offering The Ultimate List of Side Hustles as a PDF via optin forms.

The list of side hustle ideas I published last month is 10,000+ words long and can be a pretty practical guide for those who can’t come up with a business idea, aren’t sure in what ways they can make money on the side, or don’t believe they can start while working full-time.

A list like that will be pretty useful as a downloadable file and is a great incentive to ask for an email in return.

So I’ll be turning it into a PDF file, sharing it with the current subscribers of the Let’s Reach Success newsletter, and offering it to new ones in exchange for their email address.

Writing More Content for Financial Freedom through Blogging

I’m doing a ton of research, exchanging emails with readers of Let’s Reach Success, writing new content, and adding new sections to different modules of my new epic course.

I want Financial Freedom through Blogging to cover all an aspiring blogger wants to know to start making money blogging but also do that full-time eventually.

Resources to Help You Start Making Money Blogging

Make Your First Money Online Freelancing[Free Course]– I created a free course sharing my journey to making more than $4,000/month blogging. It all began with freelancing and you can use this course to follow the steps I took to become a freelancer with no experience and earn my first income online.

How to Start a Blog– This step-by-step guide to starting a blog is a must for everyone who wants to start earning online and become self-employed. Having your own blog is the first step to selling products, making money from affiliate marketing, building a name for yourself, getting traffic and monetizing that attention.

The Passive Income Boss [Free Course] – That’s another free course I released on the topic of earning passive income through blogging. You’ll learn what passive is exactly and how it works, how to get started with blogging and make your site powerful, and the 4 main passive income streams you can create using your blog.

Blogging Resources–To build a powerful site that turns visitors into buyers and monetize it well, you will need the right tools. In my Blogging Resources page, I’ve gathered the best of the best and the exact tools I’ve used to grow Let’s Reach Success and be able to make a full-time living as a location independent freelance writer.

Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing– If you’re not earning money through affiliate marketing, then you are leaving money on the table. This step-by-step affiliate marketing strategy course shows you how to increase your affiliate income and make more money blogging. It’s by Michelle from Making Sense of Cents whowent from $0 in affiliate income to over $50,000 per month(and also the first online course I’ve ever taken).

How Bloggers Can Make $10,000 a Month from Home– Curious how bloggers get to 10K/month working from home and what you need to do differently? In this article, I discuss why it’s possible for everyone to make that much on a monthly basis and how to get there.

Final words for this month’s blog income report

Sharing my income reports has been a great journey, and it’s only just starting.

In the beginning, I had no idea what to include exactly. But with every next one, things seemed to fall into place naturally.

Now, I’m excited about the end of the month when I can calculate what my business earned and can share it with those who use it as an inspiration to make money online through their blog.

Hope you enjoyed my September’s blog income report.