THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE READ MY DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO
Every month I publish a detailed report with all the numbers of my blog.
In this report I include the earnings and expenses, I talk about my personal experience and what new things I have been trying during this month. In addition, I share 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 specific strategies, like a log book.
It increases trusting
I also want to show you that I am a real person who started blogging from the first step. I believe this can help beginners and people who are not decided yet to start their own blogs. I’ve received many comments and emails from other bloggers who like my income reports and apparently they are learning a lot.
It boosts my motivation
Sharing 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 to show you how far I can go with only passive income sources.
This is my 23rd month reporting my accounts and I simply love it! I can’t believe I started blogging almost two years ago, it just feels great =)
You can have a look to some of my previous monthly income reports:
- Income Report October 2015 – $75.91
- Income Report June 2016 – $374.83
- Income Report October 2016 – $803.73
- Income Report May 2017 – $895.19
Important Things Going On inSeptember
I’m writing this income report with some delay (it’s nearly the middle of October!) because some of the income wasn’t verified until a few days ago. One of my affiliate managers couldn’t pull the earnings from the last month because they needed to be verified.
1. Traffic Boom! From 14k to 32k sessions
This month I duplicated my traffic! Yes, you read it right. After 2 years of blogging, I was averaging 14k sessions per month and this month I jumped into 32k (that’s more than double).
In fact, my Pinterest traffic quadrupled in less than 7 days!
How did I manage to make it happen?One day, looking for new Pinterest strategies, I stumbled upon Carly’s blog, and I found this book. I had heard of manual pinning before but it seemed like a lot of effort and I thought that Tailwind could do the same. I was wrong!
I got convinced to buythe book after reading the success stories of other people. Many of the testimonials were bloggers that doubled their traffic a few days after taking the course. After all, a price of $57 compared to other Pinterest courses that charge $150-$200, was not that bad. (Sometime after, when I finished the book, I realised that Carly’s book worth much more than $57).
Enroll for $97 (Pinteresting Strategies)
I was determined to give it a try! And it was the best thing I could have done! As you can see in the image below, my traffic quadrupled in less than a week.
But not only that, my Pinterest reach also increased consistentlysince I started following the book’s strategies. I was stuck on 350k monthly viewers for months and in lessthan two weeks I jumped to 700k. I wish I could have done it before!
It doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down the growth for a while. More traffic means more readers, more email subscriptions and more income. That’s great!
2. Applied to Mediavine ads
As a consequence of my traffic boom, I reached the 25k sessions threshold to apply to Mediavine ads. I’m so excited about it!
My blog has been approved (high five) and now they are working on setting up my blog for the placement of the ads.
Currently, I’m using a few Adsense ads but after changing I’m expecting to triple my ads income. I’ll tell you what happens next month 🙂
3. Interview with Michelle from Making Sense of Cents
This month I started a new series of interviews with other bloggers.
I’m so happy that my first interview has been with Michelle.I believe this interview has a lot of value as she shares some of the secrets that made her succeed.
She also talks about how she makes $50,000 per month from affiliate marketing and why her course, Making Sense from Affiliate Marketing, is a great learning tool, even for brand new bloggers.
You can read the interview here: Interview with a Multi-Millionaire blogger – Michelle from Making Sense of Cents
Related article:
- How I Tripled My Affiliate Income In 4 Months
4. A total of 250 students enrolled in my new course
In less than a month, 250 students enrolled in the Start a Money-Making blog course. And the feedback has been great.
I really enjoy helping people and this course is really doing it.
Are you planning to make money from home? Blogging is a great idea!
Here is a snapshot of what you’ll receive if you subscribe.
- Day 1: Why you should start blogging.You will learn why blogging is a great option to work from home.
- Day 2: Create A Money-Making Blog.Five steps to follow (in less than 10 minutes) and you will have your blog up andrunning.
- Day 3: How to make money blogging.This is the day that you will learn the five best ways to monetize your blog.
- Day 4: How to grow your traffic and followers.I will share my methods to grow your audience and followers in social media.
- Day 5: Blogging tips that will help you be successful.Myfavoritelesson! I’ll share all the tricks that made my blog being so successful.
- Bonus Day: Special gift for you.I will include a special gift for you once you complete the course. I can’t share what it is yet, otherwise, it will not be a surprise 🙂
Content Creation
InSeptember I published7 posts (including theAugust income report).This month I’ve been focused in long posts, between 1,500-2,000 words. I’ve come to realize that it’s better to publish less often but more in-depthposts than short and less useful articles.
Sincelast month, I aim to write 2 new blog posts every week and it seems working well for me (I went from 2 posts per month to 7-8/mo).
I’ve also spent some quality time inupdating the material of my online courses.
Here is the list this the posts I published during the last month:
- 11 Smart Passive Income Ideas That Actually Work
- Best Blogging Courses To Skyrocket Your Blog’s Income
- 43 Hacks To Save Money On Groceries
- Passive Income Report August 2017
- 7 Things You Must Do When A Blog Post Goes Viral
- Interview With Michelle From Making Sense Of Cents
- How I Quadrupled My Pinterest Traffic In 7 Days
The post about 11 Smart Passive Income Ideas That Actually Work has been one of the favorite posts this month (it went viral) and it seems to be helpful for other people.The reason why I wrote it, it’s becauseI’ve realized that many people are still struggling withfinding ways of earning passive income. I want to show that making money frompassive income is possible.
And now… let’s start with the interesting part. I know you are here to check out my numbers 🙂
Income Report
The total gross income for my blog this month is detailed below
- Paid surveys affiliates –$908.34
- Bluehost(check my tutorial on how to start a blog) –$130.00
- Google AdSense –$98.91
- Pinteresting Strategies (from 0k to 200k page views)– $51.20
- Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing–$42.00
- Hootsuite – $32.56
- Monumetric–$31.42
- SmartAsset –$11.12
- PadSquad mobile ads –$2.99
- Tailwind –$1.50
- Grammarly–$0.60
- Other blog income –$4.24
For the paid surveys, the networks I use are FlexOffers, ShareASale and iGain
Total Income: $1,316.46
Expenses
This month, expenses arenot very high. In September I only paid the fixed expenses plus some proofreading articles.
I pay a VPS (Virtual Private Server) because I have a few other websites running and if something goes viral I want to be ready for it.
- VPS:$66.50
- Convertkit: $29.99
- Proofreading: $30.83
This month, I should have sent more articles to my proofreader but I didn’t. So I guess expenses inOctober will be much higher.
Total Expenses: $127.32
The total net balance of my account for this month is below.
Net Total Balance: $1,316.46– $127.32=$1,189.14
- Previous month: $1,423.42
- Difference:– $284.28 (-16.46%)
Wohooo! August has been another great month for my blog income as it has been 4 consecutive monthsearning over $1,000. It seems that my blog is jumping to the “next level”, if I can keep income around $1,300/month and keep expenses low, it will be amazing!
Be aware that I put a 40% aside to pay taxes and the money that goes to my savings is less than the reported above.
Money saved for taxes (40% of $1,316.46) = $526.28
This is my 24th month reporting my accounts (wow! 2 years already) and my income seems to keep growing little by little, which makes mevery happy.Obviously, it’s nothing compared to other famous bloggers, but for me,it’s considered an important milestone. I am having more than $1,100 profit and this is something I’ve never expected to happen.
Imagine what would you do with an extra $1,189 extra per month?
The graph below shows my income and expenses since I started my blog in October 2015. It seems incredible that I’ve been on this for two years!
The graph below shows the balance or profit which is calculated as:
Balance = Income – Expenses
September is the 13th month I am donating a part of my income to children with health issues and learning disabilities.
Since September 2016, every month I’m sharing how much money Passive Income Wise is giving to help these families.
I calculate it as the 10%(Total Income – Tax Money – Expenses)
Income Donated This Month: 10%($662.556) = $66.25
Total Income Donated Accumulated = $786.93
Nice! One step closer to build a school in China!
Traffic and Metrics
After a few months, I am back reporting my traffic and metrics. And I do it because of you.
I received emails, comments, and even a phone call just asking to continue reporting my traffic.
Since I started using Tailwind(Pinterest pin scheduler) combined with manual pinning (using Carly’s strategy) my traffic has increased a lot. A few months I ago I barely received a few hundreds of visits, and now thousands!
Related posts:
- How I Quadrupled My Pinterest Traffic In 7 Days
- How I Went from 0 to 250 daily page views (in just 1 month) using Tailwind
I went from 14k to 32k sessions.Wohoo! That’s double traffic! I finally got the 25k sessions that I needed to apply for Mediavine ads.
The traffic sources are mainly coming from Pinterest (84%) and Direct (11%). A few months ago I didn’t receive any traffic from Pinterest and this month it’s my main source of traffic thanks to Carly’s Pinterest strategy.
If you want to try Tailwind for free you can do it following this link (and get a $15 discount).It offers auto pin scheduler for 100 free pins.
Organic traffic is building up month after month. I already have some long tail keywords ranking in positions 2-3 in Google.
The most visited posts during July were:
It seems that people from Pinterest like tips to make/save money, 7out of 10 of the most visited posts are related to these categories. The favourite posts are the 11 Smart Passive Income Ideas That Actually Workwhich a list of ideas to start making passive income from home, and the postHow to Pay Off your Debt in 7 Steps. This last one is a mini-guide on how to pay off your debt in less than a year.
Social Media
Twitter.If you don’t want to miss any of my new tweets followPassive Income Wise on Twitter
- Followers: 16,524
Pinterest. Check out my new Pins by following Passive Income Wise on Pinterest
- Followers: 3,764(+136)
Email List.
- Subscriptions: 977 (+333)
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July goals and results
Below are the goals I set up for August, let’s see if I achieved them.
- Keep writing2 new blogposts every week.PASS
- Get 25,000 sessions.PASS
- Keep the$1,500/monthincome. FAIL(but very close)
- Create newthumbnails and pinsfor my old posts (and add a new pin every day).PASS
- Keep adding new emails to myConvertkitsequences.PASS
- Send at least1 broadcast email every week.PASS
- Get300 new email subscribers.PASS
- Finish at least one new course.PASS
- Send articles to my proofreaderand update changes to my old posts.PASS
Wow! I’m so impressed with myself. Even though this month my targets were not so greedy, I was able to pass most of them.
The most difficult one is writing 2 new blog posts every week. For a long time I’ve been used to publish one article a week and now I’ve duplicated it.
Goals forOctober
As a future work for September 2017 here are my goals:
- Keep writing2 new blogposts every week.
- Get 30,000 sessions.
- Make$1,500/month income.
- Create newthumbnails and pinsfor my old posts (and add a new pin every day).
- Keep adding new emails to my Convertkitsequences.
- Send at least1 broadcast email every week.
- Get 300 new email subscribers.
- Finish at least one new course.
- Send articles to my proofreader and update changes to my old posts.
This month is going to be very challenging, my targets are very high and I will need to work hard towards them.
That’s everything for this past September.
Did you like my September Income Report?Are you interested in earning income online?
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