February Income Report: How I Earned $5,365 Working From Home

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In January I shared my first blog income report in my anniversary post, earning $1,500 in all of 2018, and while it seemed menial, I was encouraged to keep going! Exciting stuff! I had earned a mere $1,500 in all of 2018, and while it seemed menial, I was encouraged that this blogging gig could actually be paying off, little by little.

Then, I reported in my January blogging income report that I had grossed nearly $500 – $63 of which was ad revenue from Adsense. Pretty lame, right?

I’ve since switched to a new ad network called Monumetric and have earned nearly 800% more! 

I was very close to being able to get into Mediavine (on track to reach 25k sessions), but I didn’t want to wait another day. So I signed up for the ad network that most people haven’t heard of. And my income has grown significantly as a result!

They say to do one thing that scares you every day, right? Well, Monumetric was my one thing for February.

And it paid off…big time!

See more blog income reports here.

 

 

February Income Report Breakdown

Google Adsense: $265.75 – This was for about 6 months worth of ads….ridiculous!

Amazon Associates: $76.22 (My best payout to date from Amazon)

Medium Partnership: $1.72 (That one post I syndicated to Medium…actually paid enough to buy me a candy bar!)

Bluehost Affiliate: $75.00

ebates: $27.49

Mix.com Referrals: $26.00

Monumetric Ads: $453.48 (nearly 8x January’s ad income!)

YouTube Income: $239.45

Sponsored Posts: $290.00 (This more than doubled!)
_____________________
Total Online Income: $1455.11

So this month’s income tripled! What?! Is this real life? Someone pinch me!

February Traffic Stats

In February, I had 36.5k pageviews, nearly 10k more than the previous month!

The majority of my traffic came from Pinterest and Google.

I run a real estate business, manage a household with three kids, and manage my blog and YouTube channel.

I don’t have a lot of time to devote to social media promotion (particularly Pinterest).

My Pinterest strategy consists of manual pinning using strategies I learned in Pinteresting Strategies. I also use Tailwind to schedule out pins every single time I publish a new post. I create 3-5 unique pins for posts that are doing well, and I rinse and repeat.

I have increased my traffic from Pinterest using techniques from this course, and it’s the only Pinterest course I recommend. 

Several pins for my Extreme Frugal Living post have had thousands of visits and repins and are trending upwards (all without paying a dime for promoted pins).

But I couldn’t have done it without Tailwind.

Sign up for the basic plan to start and then you can always power-up later when you’re ready to take it to the next level.

As far as increasing traffic from Google, I just use the Squirrly SEO plugin for keyword research, optimizing posts, and tracking my position on Google. Some people invest in Ahrefs or SEMRush.

These are great programs but expensive…especially if you’re just starting out and aren’t making much money yet.

There are no contracts, so give it a try and let me know what you think! There are discounts available through my link.

Check out Squirrly plans here.

Blogging Expenses

BlueHost – $0

Since I paid for my hosting on a three-year plan, I don’t have to worry about this for another couple of years. Bluehost has been more than sufficient up until this point for hosting. That being said, I will probably upgrade to BigScoots as soon as I run out of hosting with BlueHost.

They have a dedicated team to manage everything, but the goal is for the blog to be able to easily pay for that. At this point, I’m not willing to cut into my profits just yet.

ConvertKit – $29

I started out with Mailerlite because it’s free up to 1,000 email subscriptions. I switched to ConvertKit because Mailerlite was clunky and I wanted an easier, cleaner look to my opt-in forms.

The problem is, when I migrated all of my email subscribers from Mailerlite to ConvertKit, my sequences were difficult to switch over, and I had to go back into every old post that had a form embedded and change them to the new ones. It was such a pain.

I also found out later that my sequences were all messed up in Mailerlite and subscribers weren’t even receiving the freebies I had promised them. Oops!

I think the $29 fee per month is well worth it from the start if you’re looking to make money from your email list. Don’t worry about what you’ll sell them. Just worry about growing your list for now by offering killer freebies and opt-ins.

Trust me! I agonized over monetizing my list, and I STILL have yet to sell them anything. It’s okay to just get started and worry about all of the details later.

Rockstar VIB – $100 – UPDATE: The Rockstar VIB Program has been discontinued.

This program is for personal finance bloggers only, and I am lucky enough to have been able to join mid-enrollment! I held out for about six months joining VIB because of fear of investing in myself, and then I realized this type of scarcity mentality was holding me back.

After joining VIB, I was featured on Rockstar Finance, The Financial Diet, and even wrote a guest post for ESI Money! I am grateful for all of the opportunities ahead as a member of the VIB.

Tailwind – $0

I paid a year in advance for Tailwind, and it has provided me with over 32,000 pageviews my first twelve months just from Pinterest alone! (Note, that was from January 1, 2018 to January 1, 2019).

In February 2019, I had 15,333 pageviews from Pinterest (nearly half of the entire last year).

It’s safe to say I got my Pinterest game figured out in the past few months! Here’s a link to my killer Pinterest strategy.

 

Don’t have a blog yet? Check out my guide on how to start your own money-making blog.

 

Net Blogging Income: January 2019

 

After expenses, my total net blogging income for February was $1,326.11. I don’t invest a lot of money on unnecessary products or services, and I’m not spending anything on Facebook ads or promoted pins at this time. All of my traffic has grown through old school hustle and grit. My income tripled, and that’s extra money to put towards our debt snowball, I am happy! And I didn’t even have to wait tables or deliver pizzas!

Monumetric Income Report

Everyone always talks about Mediavine as if it should be your first blogging goal.

If I could just get into Mediavine, I could start making more money from ads.

I’m convinced we all want to get into Mediavine because it’s exclusive and only allows those with over 25,000 sessions into the program. I remember it being my first really big stretch goal.

When I signed up for Monumetric, remember I had only made $63 from Adsense the previous month. February was my very first full month with Monumetric, and I earned more than I did the entire first year of blogging with Adsense….$453.48.

My only regret was that I didn’t sign up with Monumetric the second I reached 10,000 pageviews in a 30 day period (about 7 months ago). I would have earned so much more, but you live and learn and tell the world about it, right? 

Here is a screenshot of my Monumetric Dashboard for February 2019, showing ad revenue.

 

My average RPM for the lifetime of my relationship with Adsense was $2.81. Check out the RPM with Monumetric for the first full month!

 

Average RPM of $12.42 sure beats $2.81 with Adsense!

Monumetric does charge a $99 setup fee if you have less than 80,000 sessions. And you need 10k sessions before you can apply.

Since writing this post, I applied and was accepted into Mediavine. As excited as I was about my RPM with Monumetric, Mediavine numbers were so much higher!

My current Mediavine RPM is $42-45 per 1,000 sessions, and I’m only two months into my relationship with the ad network.

Read my full Mediavine review here. Spoiler alert: I’m one happy blogger!

Real Estate Income

As a Realtor, I have complete control over my schedule. This means I can list homes for sale, and I can prospect for buyers and sellers (or just accept referrals from friends and family).

At this point, I’ve been able to use real estate as my side hustle while I work on blogging and YouTube full-time.

A previous client of mine referred a friend to me, and I earned $3,910 from that sale.

I’m netting more income with Real Broker, the virtual brokerage because I don’t have any monthly desk fees weighing me down.

Related: How I Made $50,000 My First Year as a Realtor

 

 

Blogging Activities That Were a Waste of Time

In case you didn’t read my last blogging income report, I’ll give you a refresher.

Facebook blog sharing groups are a massive waste of time (except for the FinCon Bloggers groups or those very specific to your niche). Don’t spend your time sharing other people’s content. Let me rephrase that. It’s always good to share something valuable to your readers. But blog sharing groups are typically all sorts of niches and exchange blog shares in order to game the system. Don’t do that.

I’m convinced that my Pinterest strategy works, but my main focus of 2019 is SEO for more traffic and nailing down an affiliate marketing strategy to earn more income.

Don’t forget to sign up for a Tailwind account and check out Pinteresting Strategies so you can start gaining hella traffic from Pinterest!

Cheers to an awesome month and many more to come!