June 2017 Blogging Income Report (2024)

June 2017 Blogging Income Report –

It’s time for my June 2017 Blogging Income Report! This is where I show you how exactly I make money from my blog.

Quick Intro.

In case we haven’t met, I’m Caroline and I’ve been blogging full-time since February 2016 (about 16 months)when I took this incredible class that changed the way that I look at blogging. Elite Blog Academy took my blog from making $.17/month to now making $9,665 in just one month!

The fact still boggles my mind: I make money from the internet! I’mreally not special though. And I don’t say that to get your pity at all. I’m very serious!

I was a teen mom and got married at 20. We were living off of my husband’s one income of $17,000/year, and I just had hopes and dreams of better things. I wanted a better life for my kids than just barely scraping by each month.

But I didn’t want to leave the house for work. With my husband’s hours, we’d not only never see each other, but we’d also spend all of my income in child care for our 3 kids. That lead me to find blogging income reports on Pinterest and I just had this crazy feeling that if these people could do it, I could do it, too!

It didn’t happen overnight… for sure! I had no idea what I was doing when I started my blog in August 2015. I spent more than 40 hours each week spinning my wheels, making $.17 in my “highest earning month” until I took Elite Blog Academy.

Back to the June 2017 Blogging Income Report!

So why an income report?

Because you reallycan make money online.
Blogging is a lotof fun, but it’s also a lot of work.
You can start a blog too even if you have no idea about computers (like me!).
I want to share with you how you can make money as a stay-at-home mom without leaving the house!

What worked:

I can tell you right now that if you have never started thinking about a product to sell, you need to start right now! Selling my own product has always been just something that I never either had the time for or never felt confident in doing. I always kind of felt like it was a nice idea but it just wasn’t for me.

And then my dear friend Rosemarie, in so many words, told me that she had made $100,000 off of the sale of a $7 ebook… in one month. First of all, she’s just amazing. But the reality of those numbers is just so incredible to me.

You always think about people who make these huge profits online as having these super expensive classes that they sell or courses or even video series. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

I know for a fact that my audience could not afford a $1,000 product! So what would be the point of me ever even making a $1,000 product?!

I knew I had to do something, too!

Rosemarie’s example gave me the confidence to go forward with creating my ebooks and my printable packet bundles and actually start to give it a try. And so I did. I made my books and images Pinetrest-pretty and started figuring out how to sell them.

What else worked:

PINTEREST!

My love for Pinterest is rekindled!! It had been so low for so long that I decided to shake things up right at the end of May.

In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, Pinterest changed their algorithm again in February and traffic was almost universally cut in half (there are a few people who had reported higher numbers, but the majority has seen a sharp nosedive).

One overwhelming coincidence was that people who were using BoardBooster saw their traffic hit the hardest. I didn’t want to believe it… I LOVE my BoardBooster set-and-forget method! I was in serious denial.

But I wasn’t ready to quit on my traffic. So I paused everything on BoardBooster and gave manual pinning a try. It wasn’t easy necessarily, but it wasn’t the worst. I spent about 15 minutes at 8am, noon, 2pm and then 8pmpinning my pins to all of my boards.

And, much to my surprise, it worked!

My pageviews doubled in just 36 hours! And then they stayed that way! The manual pinning was working!

But then I had to go away for the weekend and the reality that I couldn’t be tied to my laptop all day every day set in. Despite the fact that manual pinning was working, I didn’t feel like it was worth my time and energy to be trapped staring at my screen all the time. I started blogging to find more freedom, not to be tethered to my computer.

So I jumped ship again. But this time to Tailwind.

(Are you keeping up here? There’s a LOT going on!) Tailwind is the only app that is approved by Pinterest (unlike BoardBooster, which isn’t officially recognized by them). I’ve been using Tailwind now for the entire month of June and have just LOVED it!

It’s easy to use, easy to learn, FULL of great features, and just really meeting my needs very well. I’m excited to start learning more about it and to use it to its full potential.

Hiring a VA!

I made my first full-time hire! Janelle is my new VA. She is my go-to woman when I need anything at all done. She is absolutely incredible!

I was getting overwhelmed with emails and Pinterest responses and everything else that was kind of like noise. I brought Janelle onboard and she has been helping me so much.

When I need an ebook formatted, I call Janelle. She takes care of all of my emails and even finds new Pinterest Group Boards for me to join. She’s even taken on some “peak hours” manual pinning when I need it.

Guys, I am kicking myself that I didn’t hire someone before now! I’m just thinking of all of the extra time that I could have spent being very productive. Ugh!

Bottom line, lesson learned: hire someone before you get in over your head. I used UpWork to find Janelle. It’s very easy to find someone to hire using UpWork and I highly recommend it.

What didn’t work:

I’m going to have to go with the only thing that didn’t work for me this month had to have been BoardBooster and exclusively manual pinning.

It’s worth mentioning that with the fluidity of the internet, both of these things could be right back on my list of “what did work.” But not this month. For the first time in almost a year, I turned off BoardBooster (after posting close to 150 pins each day… and I saw no decrease at all in my traffic.

Income: $9,665

Affiliate Income – $5,095

Elite Blog Academy – $962
Bluehost (check out my tutorial on how to start a profitable blog) – $880
SiteGround – $400
The Best Freezer Cooking Class Ever– $319
Amazon – $318
Building a Framework (best blogging course available right now) – $278
Swagbucks– $229
Ebates– $215
Ultimate Bundles – $208
GoDaddy – $200
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course – $198
Survey companies – $162
Digit – $145
17 Strategies Used to Go From 17K to 350K+ Page Views in 9 Months – $78
Core Affiliate Strategy to Make More Money Blogging – $65
The Ultimate Pinterest Strategy Guide to Get Seen by 4 Million People/Month – $50
The Ultimate Guide to Building a Profitable Blog– $50
My favorite course for productivity – $49
How I Grew My Facebook Page From 2,000 to 100,000 in Five Months– $35
Izea/SponsoredTweets– $32
Real Life Money Plan– $22
ConvertKit – $22
Others – $178

Ad Income – $1,892

My own products – $2,674

Pinterest Group Board Master eCourse – $970
The 82-page Budget Binder – $784
My 90+ page Frugal Living & Homemaking eBook – $714
The Blogging Bundle – $210

Expenses:

Oh yes, there are expenses! I always thought it was silly for bloggers to show you what they make without showing you what they spent to make their money.

I am very cheap (but you already knew that), so I have very low expenses (for the most part). Because of that, I don’t have a staff and I don’t hire people for much more than little Fiverr gigs. I like to keep my expenses low month-to-month so that I can save up my business income for important things to me like conferences, training, and for a Mastermindgroup I’d like to join in September.

Month-to-month expenses – $690

Convertkit: $149
BoardBooster: $5 (see above for reason why)
Haute Chocolate stock photo subscription: $25
Big Scoot (I changed my site host and couldn’t be happier): $13
Facebook Ads – $300
Focus@Will (a focusing music app that has made my 20-minute time blocking even more effective) $99
MyeCoverMaker.com – (Since I’ve started making more of my own products, it’s getting expensive to keep outsourcing making ebook covers to Fiverr. So for $99 I can make all of the covers that I want!) $99

It’s also worth mentioning that despite the fact that this is a lot of money (remember, our frame of reference is like $1,400/month as income), almost 100% of the money that is earned goes right back into investing in the company.

It’s not like I’m pocketing all $9,665 of that money to go out for dinners, buy Coach purses, and fancy vacations. Nope! I pay myself a very small salary and that’s the extent of it.

I promise: we’re stillliving off of my husband’s income. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere with my frugality!

Goals for next month:

My goals for July are to create at least 2 more products and do soft launches for them.

I’m also going to set up a webinar for Pinterest Group Boards that you’re not going to want to miss!

Related resources to help you with blogging:

How to Start a Profitable Blog the Right Way
The Blogging Class that Made Me a Full Time Blogger
The First Pay Day I Got From Blogging
Here are great blogging freebies!
Surefire Ways to Promote Your Blog and Grow Your Audience
How to Rock Affiliate Marketing When You Stink at Sales (Plus an Interview with Michelle Schroeder-Gardner)
How to Start Using Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers
Best Tips for a New Blogger From a Blogging Pro
Don’t Let Fear Stop You From Starting Your Blog!