Income Report October 2016 (Traffic and Strategy)

THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE READ MY DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO

Since October 2015, every month I publish a detailed report with all the accounts for my online businesses. On them I include the earnings and expenses, I tell a little bit about my personal experience and what new things I have been trying during this period of time.

I explain as well what my future targets are and if the previous ones have been achieved or not. Why doing this?

It helps me to keep track of my personal finances.In any moment of time, I can look back at my reports and see what steps and results I got from determined strategies, like a log book.
Increase trusting.I also want to show you that I am a real person starting from the first step. There are many amazing bloggers out there reporting their incomes of thousands of dollars, but I found very little bloggers reporting low amounts of money like me. I think this can help to starters and to people who are not decided yet to start their own online business.
Motivation. Writing here my results will put me on that kind of uncomfortable position in which I need to demonstrate that I can go one step further instead of getting lazy and rely on excuses. My finances are open to everybody!

I know that every month I say the same, but it’s the truth. All earnings here reported are coming from Passive Income sources. I am not including any kind of outsourcing because the intention is you show you how far I can go with only passive income sources.

This is my 13th month reporting my accounts and I simply love it! I can’t believe I started this month one year ago, it just feels great =)

You can have a look to some of my previous monthly income reports:

Income Report November 2015: $117.61
Income Report January 2016: $228.33
Income Report March 2016: $376.70
Income Report August 2016: $491.94

IMPORTANT THINGS GOING ON INOCTOBER

October has been a chill-out month. During October my wife and I have set up few things at home and spent the weekends doing stuff for ourselves.

One of the goals I made for this month was to eat healthier, that was eating less processed food and a more balanced diet.

This month I also spent some time for myself. It has been more than just work, work, and work. I’ve visited some friends and hadsome fun going out for drinks.

I’ve even carved my own Halloween Pumpkin, I hope you like it!

I also spent some time helping my wife to set up her own blog. In fact, she figured out all by herself but in some aspects, she used my help in particular for SEO purposes.

I can say her blog looks so nice and you might want to visit it. She writes about food recipes, makeup, fashion, traveling and a lot of other stuff.

If you want to have a look, check Daily Surprises, which is her blog.

Niche Site 2 is taking off.

In June I started a new project,Niche Site 2. This project relies on income from advertisem*nt.

This month is the first time I reportNiche Site 2 stats. It’s getting interesting and it’s starting to receive some organic traffic.

Focus On Pinterest

On October I spent quite a few time on Pinterest. I heard that many bloggers use it to promote their articles.

This month I wanted to give more importance to Pinterest and see if I can generate traffic out of it. I already had an account but I’ve never promoted it very well.

What I did is to join as many boards as I could on topics related to my website. Then I shared some of my content and other blogs content on these boards.

The most important here is to create Pinterest friendly pins, this is vertical pins with some colored text. You can visit my Pinterest profile here, so you know what I’m talking about.

My New Traffic Strategy: Tailwind

Tailwind is basically a Pinterest pin scheduler. It allows you to schedule your pins at specific times and in different boards. It saves me a lot of time and I can do bulk schedule in less than 30 minutes.

I already used the free trial which allows you to schedule up to 100 pins, but I wanted more. So this month I paid the membership for Tailwind and it has been a total success. My traffic has increased by x4, you will it below in the traffic section.

If you want to start using Tailwind you can get 2 free months when paying for 12 months by using my link.

Extra Effort On Twitter

This month I promoted my Twitter as well. I put extra effort on this and it paid very well.

My blog got so many new followers and visits from Twitter. You will see more details of my Twitter strategy below.

10% Earnings Donation To Children With Disabilities

Last month I made an important decision, a decision which will change the life of many people. From September onwards I’m putting a 10% of my monthly earnings aside.

This money will be donated every month to different charities. I want to help children with life-threatening, terminal illness or learning disabilities.

With this blog, I want to be successful but also I want to make a difference in other people lives.

But, why?

My wife has alittle dream since she was a child, she wanted to build schools in China (from where she is from) for children with problems and learning disabilities.

The first time she told me, I felt so touch that I made a promise to myself, a promise that I will never forget: if one day I make enough money to build a school, I will do it.

So, why to wait until that day? I can start helping from today.

That’s whyfrom today I promise myself and I make it public to you that a 10% of the money earned with any of my websites will be destinated to supportpeople who really need it.

CONTENT CREATION

For the purposes of this section I will include the posts/pages created for each of my Niche Sites and then for the PIW blog:

Niche Site 1

This month I’ve spent some time updating Niche Site 1 with two new articles. However, this site is running by itself. I also checked that all is running smoothly and answered some comments.

I’ve been 9 months withoutupdating Niche Site 1 and I’ve decided to add 2 new articles every month to keep it fresh.

Niche Site 1 has been ranking on the first page for 3,100 organic words.

Referring pages are now more than 200 but it seems they stopped growing since August, another reason to do some more work on it.

Niche Site 2

I’ve added 5 new posts with a total of 53 posts so far since I created it in July. The site is growing little by little but it needs more articles.

Niche Site 2 has been ranking on the top 100 organic search results for 18 keywords. This is very little compared to Niche Site 1, but still is a good progress.

Referring pages are now nearly 30 with some ups and downs.

This is the first time reporting referring pages for Niche Site 2. The graph above suggests me to work on SEO in order to increase the number of backlinks.

Passive Income Wise

This monthI created a lot of new images for my Pinterest boards and also for Twitter and Facebook.

Also, I’ve been working on a couple of posts which you will enjoy.

7 Free Online Survey Sites To Join For Extra Cash
12 Things I’ve Done To Make Extra Money(most visited post in October)

The first one is a review of some online surveys I’ve been using to make extra money. I tried so many survey sites before but these are the best ones in terms of payouts and legitimacy.

In the second post, I show some of the things I’ve done in the past to make more money. Some of them are passive income ideas, but others talk about my past life before blogging. So if you want to know more about me, you will find this post interesting. You can also apply some of these ideas in your life.

I also started a new series of posts, the income roundups. Every month I will publish a summary of all the most influential bloggers and their income reports. So if you don’t want to miss them, I suggest to youto subscribe.

I also updated some of my old posts. I included extra information to provide more value and improved readability:

25+ Ways To Save Money $800 Per Month
Extra Income: +35 Passive Income Ideas
Why Passive Income Can Change Your Life

It is always good to spend some time reviewing old material.

And now… let’s start with the interesting part. I know you are here to check out my numbers 🙂

INCOME REPORT

Google Adsense (from niche site 1): $55.80

Previous Month: $64.13
Difference: –$8.33

Monumetric Ads(from niche site 1): $225.50 Start with Monumetric for free if you have more than 80k pageviews

Previous Month: $241.15
Difference: –$15.65

PadSquadmobile ads(from niche sites 1 & 2): $166.01

Previous Month:$245.72
Difference: –$79.71

Paid surveys: $36.14

Previous Month: $14.32
Difference: +$21.82

The websites I use to generate this income areAmerican Consumer Opinion, Swagbucks, TopCashBack,Vindale ResearchandQmee.

Consulting Work:$208.00

Previous Month: $72.50
Difference: +$135.50

Other Income:

Bluehost: $65.00 How to start a blog with WordPress and Bluehost
Content Samurai:$22.09 Read my Content Samurai review
YouTube (from niche site 1): $0.37
Amazon Affiliate Program:$0.00
Sage One: $8.00
ShareASale Affiliate Program: $1.00 Click here to read my post aboutShareASale
Grammarly: $0.00 Click here tostart using Grammarly for free
Qmee: $0.57 Click here toread my post about Qmee
Redbubble: $9.97 Design and sell T-Shirts
Disqus (Ads in comments): $5.12

EXPENSES

In February I needed to upgrade the hosting for my Niche Site 1. Before I was using a shared hosting with a limitation of 150 GB of transfer data, now I have my own VPS in where I have up to 5,000 GB and I can host an unlimited number of domains.A total of$64.00.

Consulting Work Expenses and Charges:$41.60
Tailwind (1-year subscription):$114.18

The initial investment for the hosting and domain name (for PIW) was done in Octoberand this one is already running for free. Next month I will need to renew it.

Net Total Balance: $803.73– $219.78=$583.95

Previous month: $580.72
Difference: +$3.23 (+0.5%)

October has been the best month so far in terms of income and net total balance. The expenses have been a little bit high compared to other months. The main reason has been the purchase of Tailwind but the results have been amazing.

I try to spend around $100 every month in plugins and other useful stuff to improve my blog performance. Next month I would like to purchase ThriveLeads.

The consulting work is coming from people who contact me to hire my services. It seems some readers like the way I do things. Great! More than $200 this month will help to cover all of the expenses.

This is my 13th month reporting my accounts and it seems to keep growing little by little which makes me so happy.Obviously, it’s nothing to compare with other famous bloggers, but for a starter like me,it’s considered an important milestone. I am having nearly $600 profit and this is starting to be very exciting.