This month I made a little less money than last month, mostly due to doing less sponsored work. I also invested more money back into blogging, which grew my expenses. However, I invested mostly into Lightroom and Lightroom presets to up my Instagram game, so the expense is a one-off. Currently, I’m very happy with how my feed looks and also, editing images on a laptop is so much more enjoyable than on a phone.
Number of Posts Published: 22 Traffic Sources: 73% Google; 17% Pinterest; 10% Other.
Something great happened with my analytics this month. If you look at my last income report you will see that my average session duration was merely 1 minute 16 seconds, and that my bounce rate was over 80% – now, my average session duration is over 2 minutes and my bounce rate hovers around 60%!
I’ve adjusted several things on my blog since last month, but personally I noticed this change when I did something technical on the back end: I updated my WordPress PHP to 7.2 and deleted any plugins that were incompatible with the new PHP 7.2.
Now, I have no idea what that even means, but I got great results from it so if you’re a fellow blogger, you might want to give it a go! As for my traffic growth, I’m still on track of growing about 20-30% each month: This month my traffic is roughly 25% better than last month, which makes me happy!
Sadly, this jump in traffic didn’t result in an income increase of 20-30%, but I’m hopeful that my income will continue to grow in the next couple of months.
Another thing that made me quite happy this month is that I’ve finally managed to make a dent into Alexa’s global website indexing platform (the lower the number the better).
Realistically, this doesn’t mean anything, but it’s one of those vanity metrics that you can use to compare your site to how popular other people’s sites are.
So, last month I told you that I had almost 2000 monthly sessions from Pinterest on my blog, and this month that figure has tripled – I now have 6028 monthly sessions from Pinterest, which means that Pinterest now makes up 17% of my traffic.
Last month that figure was only 6%! In my June income report I told you that I had purchased ‘Tribes Elite’, which allowed me to pin 400 pins to different Tribes. However, I upgraded to ‘Tribes Unlimited’ almost as soon as I had ran out of pinning slots, and I don’t regret it!
My Pinterest strategy is quite aggressive at the moment, but it’s working well for me. I know that I’m paying almost $500 annually for Tailwind and all the Tribe features which seems a bit obscene, but if my traffic keeps growing like it has up until now, I think it will be worth it.
I’ve been a part of Mediavine for only 7 days, but so far I’m loving it. My ad income went from $2 per day with Adsense to $12 per day with Mediavine, which is amazing!
As I’ve only been a part of this ad network for a week, I can’t tell if the ads are going to impact my revenue from affiliates, how it’s going to affect user experience and other things like that, but if everything goes smoothly, I think I will continue with MediaVine for a long time.
This month I published a whopping 22 posts that are all at least 1000 words long – that’s quite a lot! I think that one of the key factors that drives my traffic is writing lengthly SEO optimised content, and I will continue with this strategy in the next few months.
My traffic goal is to hit 100,000 page views by the end of the year, and I’m really hoping I can make it happen!
Don’t get me wrong – affiliate sales are my top source of income on the blog and they work generally pretty well for me. However, I was expecting my sales to go up by at least 20% compared to last month, because of how much extra traffic I’ve been getting.
This wasn’t the case though – my affiliate earnings actually went down, so I need to evaluate what has gone wrong. It might be that some of the links that I’m using have expired, so hopefully if I go through my old posts and update links it would fix the issue.
I want to start growing my Youtube presence and in order to get as much content out there as possible, I hired an editor to help me along the way. Last month, I posted an application on one of the online portals and got a whopping 260 applicants on the job that I advertised, which seems crazy to believe.
I always thought that it would be extremely hard to find people to work with you in blogging, but this doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Now, I haven’t actually started working with my editor yet so I have no idea if this is going to work out or not, but I have high hopes for the guy: he’s worked with some big names in the YouTube space and seems like an overall nice person.
So, my goals for the next few weeks is to get approx. 1 video per week out there, and then gradually increase that to two videos once I start reaching my blogging goals and can ease it up a little over here (i.e. 100,000 monthly page views).
P.S. If you want to step up your YouTube game, consider hiring an editor too – on average, they ask for $20/h (about $60 per video) so if you can afford it, definitely go for it!
So far, my growth on Pinterest has been great over the last month, but I want to keep growing it until it it’s equal to the amount of users that end up on my site from Google.
According to my latest stats, I get around 1k visitors per day from Google, and 300 from Pinterest, so there’s still a long way to go!
Alright, I know I know – I’m a long way off from reaching 100,000 page views, but that’s my ultimate blogging goal for this year. I don’t know why I’ve set that number as a personal goal, but it seems like a good round number to aim for.
Also, when you have 100,000 monthly page views you can apply for AdThrive, who apparently pay the most out of all ad networks. With them, you can apparently earn $1000 per 100,000 page views solely from ads, which sounds pretty good to me!