January 2019 Blogging Income Report Plus First Month YouTube Earnings

Last month I shared my very first blogging income report in a post about my one-year blogging anniversary. I was super excited to share that, despite taking five months off for a blogging break, I still earned a decent amount of money last year on this blog. But just a month after publishing that blogging income report, I’m seeing even better results!

Something magical happens when you start speaking your goals and progress and putting yourself out there. If Thoughts Become Things, we need to be speaking more gratitude for things we have yet to receive. Cause it’s coming, y’all! And I am ready to receive!

December 31, 2018, I was also approved in the YouTube partner program meaning I was able to start making money on YouTube from ads. I figured I’d earn maybe $40-50 starting out, but I was blown away by January’s income. Let’s get right into it. I’ll share exactly what my sources of income were in this blogging income report, traffic stats, and some exciting changes I’ve made to my ads that are already increasing my ad revenue exponentially!

Here’s my blogging income report breakdown:

Google Adsense: $62.27 Amazon Associates: $49.88 Squirrly SEO Plugin: $12.59 Bluehost Affiliate: $75.00 YouTube Income: $155.11 Sponsored Posts: $140.00 _____________________ Total Income: $498.70

Ok…I know $500 isn’t life-changing income, but what I’ve found is by vibing at a high frequency and changing my mindset, my numbers are growing exponentially! Be sure to read to the end because I’ll share with you my new ad network partner that’s going to increase my ad income by 500-600%!  Take a look at these numbers.

Google Adsense Income & Traffic Stats

Last month, when I shared my blogging income report for 2018, I shared how I nearly doubled my pageviews in December from every other month previous. I was up to 18.4k pageviews. Keep in mind, my previous 5 months I stayed right around 10,000 page views (solely due to my awesome SEO strategy). In January, I had 26.4k pageviews! Woot woot! This was an increase of 44%! 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). So I 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. Several pins for my Extreme Frugal Living post have gone mini-viral and are trending upwards (all without paying a dime for promoted pins). But I couldn’t have done it without Tailwind. I suggest signing up for the lowest-level plan to start and then you can always power-up later if needed. 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. I think those are great programs but expensive…especially if you’re just starting out or aren’t making much income yet. There are no contracts, so give it a try and let me know what you think! There are discounts available through my special link.

Check out Squirrly plans here.

Blogging Expenses

Hosting – $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 able to easily keep up with my traffic needs, and eventually, I’ll probably graduate to Big Scoots, but I figured why pay extra for more expensive hosting when Bluehost easily meets my needs, and their customer service is stellar. 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 jacked up in Mailerlite and subscribers weren’t even receiving what I promised. YIKES! I believe 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. Squirrly SEO Plugin – $0 I also paid for this a year in advance 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 was $469.70. 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. All of my traffic has grown through old school hustle and grit. $470 may not seem like a lot, but when it’s going towards our debt snowball, I am happy! And I didn’t even have to wait tables or deliver pizzas!

Monumetric: The Best Ad Network No One is Talking About

For five months last year, I hovered right around 10,000 page views every month. My total income from Adsense last year (for all 12 months combined) was just over $300. Pretty Lame, right?! Everyone always talks about Mediavine as the #1 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. Then another blogger recommended I check out Monumetric, formerly The Blogger Network. I had never heard of this ad company, so I was skeptical. In December, I was right around 18.4k pageviews so I applied to Monumetric, but I knew they take a few weeks to approve bloggers. In the meantime, my traffic started growing so I went ahead and applied to Mediavine (a little early) at 18.4k sessions. I’d heard from other bloggers that sometimes they approve you early if you’re pretty close. One blogger mentioned being accepted at 19k sessions. Denied. They said while my site is beautiful, I needed to keep pushing for 25k sessions. Meanwhile, Monumetric was still on my mind. I found myself chasing vanity metrics just to get accepted into Mediavine, and that’s not good. I want my traffic to be quality, resulting in more revenue. Not just quick hits to register a session. So I moved forward with Monumetric. Two and a half days in, all I can say is WOW. Why didn’t I sign up with them months ago?! I would have made so much more money! Here are my stats from Adsense. Here is a screenshot of my Monumetric dashboard. Ads went LIVE on my site at 4:24 pm on January 31, 2019, and that’s why the RPM was lower that day. You can see that my income in 2.5 days is already half of what Adsense paid me for the entire month of January! My average RPM for the lifetime of my relationship with Adsense was $2.81, y’all… My average RPM the first three days is $6.79…more than double! You can see that everyday so far, my RPM has gone up, and my ad representatives at Monumetric and another blogger have said that it should continue to increase as the publishers are figuring out my audience. I can’t wait to share the results after a full month with Monumetric. If you’re shooting for 25k sessions to apply to Mediavine, consider Monumetric as an option to increase income. The difference between the two is that Monumetric charges a $99 setup fee if you have less than 80,000 sessions. And you must have 10k sessions before you can apply. Most bloggers make that investment back in the first month…compared to the piddly income from Adsense, I’d say this is a very small investment with a huge return. An example of potential income (remember RPM’s vary from blogger to bloggger), if you had an average RPM of $10 and 12,000 page views per month, you’d make about $120 per month and each month as your pageviews grow, your income grows!

Blogging Activities That Were a Waste of Time

I’ve stopped participating in blog shares on Facebook. You know those blogging groups where bloggers share each others’ content in multiple threads throughout the day? That’s a massive time waster. Stop doing that. The problem with these blog share groups is that they’re not niched down to your audience. So you’re sharing content that’s totally irrelevant to your readers, which confuses Pinterest and causes your reach to be lower. They penalize you for it. Think of Pinterest as the ‘Google’ of Social Media. It’s a search engine, and you want to be very specific about your intention on that platform. I’ve grown my Pinterest followers to over 2500, with Pinterest viewers being right around 400k and impressions at 50k per month. I’m convinced that my Pinterest strategy works. Sign up for a Tailwind account and start sharing. I’m putting together a Pinterest video tutorial of the exact steps I take from publishing a blog post to promoting it on social media, including where and how I create my beautiful pins! These steps have increased my pageviews resulting in more income! And you can do it too! Enter your email if you’d like to be notified when it’s ready!