This ” How I Made Over $2,950.00 On My 5th Month Of Blogging ” is my 3rd income report. I am proud of my accomplishment this past month. By a stretch, this past month was my best ever in terms of traffic and income. While I managed to pull in some nice dollars, I made several mistakes (mostly because I’m DYIng everything on my own). This post contains affiliate links/ads. See disclosure policy.
Hi, everyone!
Welcome to my June 2016 income report. This is the one post every month where I show you in great detail how I made money, how much I made, what I did and did not do, what my triumphs and mistakes in blogging, and my monthly goals.
I promised myself I would post my income report once I started making money off of my blog. I started earning money back in March 2016, which was my 3rd month of blogging. Here are what I managed to earn in the past couple of months.
- April 2016 Income Report (3rd month of blogging) – $657.17
- May 2016 Income Report (4th month of blogging) – $1,441.87
I credited my traffic and income increases to several posts I published last. I didn’t know that these posts would be seen/read by so many people. Thanks to my fellow blogger, Matt, for telling me this idea. Here are my most read/visited blog posts for the past month:
- Save More Money and Be Richer By $14,000 A Year – 20,023 visits
- How To Feed A Family For $150 A Month – 3,609 visits
- How I Made Over $1,400.00 On My 4th Month Of Blogging – 3,313 visits
- How I Paid $40K Of Debt and Saved $70K In 2.5 Years – 2,692 visits
- How To Travel Free Or Next To Nothing – 2,097 visits
Why Blog My Income Report?
Before I show you my earnings for June 2016, let me give a background on why I wanted to blog my income.
First, I like to see my income progression from month to month. When I say income, I mean income from anything related to blogging. I don’t count my day job income and my earnings from my side hustles.
I am a very visual person. I do want graphs, charts, and tables. I always need to see where I was and I am at this point. Creating this historical information will provide me exactly what I need.
Second, for many, I am still pretty much a new blogger by many people’s standards. I’ve only been blogging for 5 months now and have had triumphs and failures (actually a lot) in those 5 months. Everything I did in my blog is all of my doing. I didn’t know anything about coding or even WordPress before I started blogging. If you visit my blog, you’ll see that it keeps on changing and it has a lot of flaws. I’m still trying to figure out what works best for me and my site. So, please bear with me.
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I truly never thought that it is possible to earn money this early on in my blogging life but it has happened. I know that it will continue to be better from here (hopefully). I like to be an inspiration to those who just started or are just starting with their blogging life. I want to share to the world that earning this early is possible regardless of how long one has been blogging.
I have to say that willingness, commitment, perseverance, and luck are what helped me and continuously help me with my blogging success. As my dear mother always say, it’s not what you always do but what’s inside you that help you become better.
Third, I believe in complete transparency. While I blog just about everything under the realm of personal finance and its never ending relationship with family and life, my blog is also monetary vehicle for my family. When you see advertisements on my blog posts, those are income-generating ads.
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June 2016 Income Report
June 2016 was the best month for me money and traffic wise. My blog income more doubled from May 2016 and it’s only my 5th month of blogging.
For those who have not read my first income report, I stated there that technically, I have been blogging since December of 2015 but did not market or tell anybody about my blog until the 28th of January. I kept it to myself (my very first mistake). So, I consider February as my official blogging start date. Again, it’s just FYI to avoid confusion.
I believe the reasons that I earned this money are both because of my determination and hard work to make blogging work and because of luck. I always put luck in the mix because I am still figuring out which strategy works.
Income by Network
Here are my income and expenses:
Income
Bluehost: $349.00
Flex Offers: $1,883.31
Google Adsense: $85.62
NewsMax: $92.84
Share-A-Sale: $200.00
Smart Asset: $85.56
Sponsored Posts: $255.00
Tailwind: $45.00
Income Total: $2,972.33
Expenses
Expenses: $0.00 (Yes. No expense for this month. Yehey!)
Expense Total: $0.00
Net Income: $2,972.33
Income by Affiliates
A couple of people asked me if I could detail the affiliates that helped me make these fantastic dollars. Of course, I said yes. Here is the breakdown:
American Consumer Opinion: $1,004.00
- My wife and I earn around $175.00 a month just by taking survey. For many, it’s not a lot of money but it does pay a few of our bills.
Sage One: $120.00
- I’ve been looking for a very user-friendly, cheap, and effective accounting software especially for my growing blogging business. I signed up for Sage One for a 30-Day FREE TRIAL with NO CREDIT CARD required. I tell that Sage One is easier than using a spreadsheet (and I am an advanced-to-expert MS Excel user).
Bing Rewards:$136.80
- My wife and I have been using Bing Rewards for almost 2 years now. By using it for just a few minutes every day, we manage to pull in $28ish every month, which is good enough for Hulu, Domino’s pizza, and some more. You can sign up for Bing Rewards for FREE and start making money.
Bluehost: $349.00
- Bluehost is the reason that I have a blog. I didn’t know anything about coding, WordPress, and other things related to blogging. With Bluehost, I was able to create my blog in 10 minutes or less.
Shoeboxed: $132.00
- I have a ton of receipts that just aren’t organized. I really love Shoeboxed because it has digitized all my receipts and are now kept online. This means no more clutters and no more missing receipts. If IRS is knocking for your receipts, this is for you. The best part is I’m using Shoeboxed for FREE for 30 days plus there’s NO CONTRACT with Shoeboxed.
Swagbucks
: $260.40
- Swagbucks is one my new affiliates though I’ve been using it as one of my search engines for some time now. Every month, my wife and I make $70, which is good for gas and some groceries. Receive a FREE $5 when you sign up via this link.
Motif Investing: $51.75
- I like investing but not the fees that comes with doing it. Then, I found Motif Investing. I can buy a Motif (a basket of up to 30 stocks, bonds, and/or ETFs) for just $9.95. That’s cheap than individually buying stocks, bonds, and/or ETFs. Get up to $150 when you start trading at Motif Investing. Click Here to Learn more.
Tailwind: $45.00
- Tailwind is basically the magic behind my budding Pinterest success. Before, I spent hours pinning and scheduling pins with no luck in getting referrers. Now, all I need is less than 30 minutes a day to pin at least 150 pins across boards in my account.
Google Adsense: $85.62
NewsMax: $92.84
Smart Asset: $85.56
Sponsored Posts: $255.00
All Others: $354.36 (Just little knick knacks that when put together made some big bucks)
Total: $2,972.33
What I Did and Didn’t Do
I decided to permanently include this section because I know a lot of my fellow bloggers and those who want to begin blogging would love to see what I did to earn money and increase my traffic as well as the things I didn’t do or failed to succeed on.
Did do
- Sign-ups. This past June, I signed-up for two ad networks. For those who want to use these subscribers, please feel free to use my links here:
- PeerFly and Sovrn– These are two new ad networks I intend to use together with FlexOffers, CJ, and Share-A-Sale. I don’t know what they have just yet but I know I’ll be able to find the products from affiliates that I have been using and love to promote.
What I learned in the past months is that no single ad network houses all your affiliate needs.
- Follow-up. The same thing I have done in the past months, that is, I followed up with people who needed help. When people asked me questions, I not only answered their questions but also offered help. I built relationship as a result. Better yet, this assistance converted into sign-ups for products that are promoted throughout my blog.
- Website re-design. If you look at my blog, you’ll see changes on layout, placement of ads, among others from time to time. Since my blog is new and I’m new at blogging, I like to try what works best and doesn’t work for me. I know there are risks associated with this but I’m willing to try.
- Sponsored Posts/Mentions: While I cannot say I pursued sponsored posts, I can definitely say I entertained sponsored posts or mentions for this past month.
Did not do but should have done
- Last month’s casualty was my Twitter account. My twitter activity and followers moved upwards but not in the pace that I hoped they did. As of May 2016, I had 1,835 followers, which is up by 405 followers.
Traffic
For the month of June, I had 60,753 views, which is a 106.65% increase from last month’s 29,399 views.
I am so thrilled to see my traffic grow month by month. Much of the increase in traffic is due to my Pinterest traffic. I cannot stress enough how Tailwind has helped me achieve this growth is such as short time.
July 2016 Goals
I always believe in setting goals. Going through life, in general, without a goal is like walking on unending road without a foreseeable end in sight. The blogging goals I set for this July are both easy and challenging to achieve.
- Page views. I want to see 3,000 views a day, at least. Maybe it’s impossible to achieve it but I will try my best to make it possible. (June Goal: 1,200/day ; Result: 2,025/day) – Succeed.
- Alexa rank. I like to be ranked under 140,000 (World) and 30,000 (US) by the end of July. This maybe a stretch but hey I like a challenge. (June Goal: 186,420 (World) and 42,055 (US) ; Result: under 150,000 (World) and under 40,000 (US)) – Close enough though, I think.
- Social Media. I aspire to increase my social media connection across all my social media platforms by end of July. If you like to follow me, the links are located below:
- Twitter: 2,000 followers. (June Goal: 2,000 ; Result: 1,835) – Failed. Close though.
- Pinterest: 6,000 followers. (June Goal: 2,500 ; Result: 3,767) – Way too happy.
- Facebook: 1,200 fan page likes. (June Goal: 800 ; Result: 905) – Way too happy.
- Instagram: 500 followers. (June Goal: 500 ; Result: 186) Didn’t even touch it this past month.
- I want to double my income for July. Yes, double the amount it is. (June Goal: Double my May’s income of over $1,400 ; Result: $2,972.33) The income more than doubled.
- Email subscribers. I like to have 500 subscribers by the end of July. (June Goal: 400 ; Result: 212) – Failed but close to the target.
- Posting on bigger platforms. I like to contribute to bigger platforms like the CNN Money. I published one on Huffington Post in April and that’s about it. My post was The Success Of Failure: How Failures Help Me Succeed. (June Goal: more platforms ; Result: Nada) – Failed.
great post and very informative! thank you for sharing and hope to reach every goal next month <3
You are welcome. I’m trying to reach my goal. cross fingers 🙂
Wow, great post and look into what you’re doing! I’ve been tossing up about Tailwind. I’m doing a course about how to get traffic from Pinterest and they recommend Tailwind. I’ve been trying Board Booster, but need to give it more attention. Then I’ll try Tailwind and see what happens. I’ve been blogging for around 6 months, but only just starting to see some results now. You’re doing such an amazing job. Congrats!!
Thanks. I’ve been faithfully using Tailwind and it sure has done wonder to my page views. Please let me know if you have any questions about Tailwind and I will give you my two cents on it.
Awesome job, Allan! I may just have to pick your brain about pageviews. I had a few high traffic days last month due to Pinterest. I hoping to replicate my success! Thanks for sharing your progress and good luck on next month’s goal!
Thanks, Latoya. Sure, please drop me an email and I can give you some personal tips on blogging. It’s probably not much… 🙂
This is great! I love reading other bloggers income reports with the breakdown of how they’ve done everything.
Thanks, Kylie. I try to put everything in my income report to make sure transparency is there.
Incredible progress Allan. Keep up the great work and THANK YOU for maintaining the high level of transparency.
As always, it is inspiring to see how consistent work is paying off for you.
Thanks, Matt. I believe consistency is key so is luck. 🙂
Congratulations, Allan. Very impressive stats all around.
Thanks.
Inspiring post Allan it is amazing how quickly your blog grew through social media and how many views on of your post got! Keep up the great work you will be a blogging star!
Yes, I credited everything (or almost everything) to my Pinterest.
Great post Allan and way to grow your blog and bank account. Love your honesty and transparency on how you’ve increased your income month over month in such a short period of time. I’m looking into a few of the affiliate links you posted because it would be great if I could make up for my husband’s “lost” income (he retired a few months ago and is busy working on projects around our home that need his attention.)
Thanks. Please do take a look into some of the affiliates. They sure have made a big difference in my bank account. 🙂
It is fascinating to read these updates from you. Thanks for being so detailed and letting us see under your processes. Good luck!
Thanks, ZJ.
Great job once again. In June, which is my fourth month blogging, I made over $1,500. Though most of that is from freelancing.
Thanks, Aliyyah.
Your income is amazing considering how long you’ve been blogging! Great job!
I’m just starting to think about monetizing my site more, and I think I will turn to you for inspiration!
Thanks. Please feel free to browse through all my income reports to see if there’s anything you can use.
Thanks for sharing and for the detailed report, Allan! Your success so far is an inspiration to other new bloggers! Where do you find the time for it all?!
Thanks for reading. I tried to do as much as I can with the little time I have. Sometimes, it’s hard and sometimes it’s ok. I do most of my writing when the little one is sleeping.
Seriously Allan – Your growth is insane! Glad to see you continuing to push yourself and get better!
Thank you, Thias. I tried to challenge myself from time to time and see if I can rise above the challenge.
I really enjoy articles like this. I find post that show success to be inspiring and help keep the drive flowing to work hard on your own website. Thanks for this!
Thank you for reading.
Congrats! You’ve had great success thus far! Very inspiring to other new bloggers like myself. I’ve been considering the paid plan for tailwind and it seems like it’s been gold for you! Keep up the good work.
It is really gold for me. I get to do a lot of things in Pinterest without spending too much time. Thanks to Tailwind.
Great work, Allan!
You continue to rock. I love seeing your progress every month. Thanks for sharing.
You are welcome. Thanks for stopping by again.
So we started using Flex Offers and Share a Sale on our blog. We made $20…..what am I doing wrong?
It all depends on the type of the products you are marketing. I market more on products that help people save or make money. Along that line, I use the products I promote and all of my writing are based on my personal experiences. What products do you promote?
I am very impressed by the amount of income that you have made in 5 months of blogging. It is not an easy task to do and by affiliating with products that you already use is putting yourself in a good luck. I wish you much success if the future months to come.
You are welcome. And thanks.
This is great and it shows you were focused from the start. Nice of you to share.
You are welcome. I try my best to provide details as much as possible.
Thanks! I am new to the blogging scene and hope to make some money with my blog someday. This is very helpful and informative to me!!
You are welcome. I was once a new blogger, still am by other people’s standards. I like to share what worked and didn’t work so bloggers especially new ones can learn from my experiences.
Congrats dude, you blown my mind
Thanks.
Thank you for sharing how you are making progress. Do you count your profit from swag bucks because you work with them as well as use their service?
No. The money that I have on my income report are the money for referring people to Swagbucks not the money I get from using it. This report just details the money I earn from referrals.
Congrats on these numbers. You really are helping others. And I will be checking out the new affiliate networks listed. Thanks!
Thanks.
FRIGGIN AWESOME Allan!!! You’re kicking the blogging world’s butt 😉
Thanks Gigi.
OMG its my 4th month with my blog and im ready to take the step to get a income but im sooooo scared IDK where i can even start! do yo have any advise?
Maybe you can take a look at my blog and give me some guidance
Loves from Sun & http://likesocharming.com/
Sure. I will take a look and give you feedback.
Great job! Huge congrats on all the work you’ve done, cheers to your success!
Thank you
You are literally #goals !!! This is my first month of blogging and I’m focusing on creating content so I can start promoting on Pinterest and other platforms. I am gonna subscribe to all those income sources!!! One question tho, how do I subscribe to be their affiliate? Thanks so much for sharing this! You give me so much hope!!!!
Thanks and thank you for subscribing.
Alan – those are very solid numbers for a new blog, congrats! In many ways, you’re on track to generate a day job’s monthly income, which is fantastic. Are you planning to make this a full-time gig? 🙂
Hopefully. I plan to make it a full-time gig if it does work out for me. I like to work on my own time (plus or minus the kid running around our house :-)) and still get paid decent amount of money.
Congrats Allan! This is extremely impressive man. It’s great to know that it’s possible. I’m starting to look more into FB groups and plan on looking into Pinterest now. Looks like you’re having a lot of success with them! Thanks for sharing the report!
Graham, nice to see you again. Thanks and yes, Pinterest has been good to me even though I’ve only been Pinteresting for two months now. I see potential there and that’s why I’m putting a lot of focus there, for now.
Holy cow.. Inspiring stuff right here! Those income levels are extremely impressive. The best part is how quickly success has come for you. We’ve been at it two years and haven’t had a month that is anywhere close to this one! This serve as a great starting point for the two of us during our next meeting haha
Congrats again. Keep up the good work here!
Bert, One of the Dividend Diplomats
Thanks, Bert. This is the reason that I created this income reports. I like to be an inspiration, even in my small little way, to a lot of bloggers especially to those who are just starting out.
This is a really thorough review. Sometimes you read reviews about income made blogging and it is hard to see through what is true and not. I appreciate your transparency. I am sure it is a lot of hard work and the fact that you are changing things as you go is great. It is a work in progress!
Thanks. Yes, it’s a work in progress and yes, I like to be transparent because I believe that readers deserve to see the pluses and minuses of blogging especially income reports.
That’s quite impressive. Thanks for sharing with us!
You are welcome.
Well done on the quick success Allan. I have been blogging about the same time as you but so far have just been creating some good content. It is interesting to know that these possibilities exist though.
Anything is possible. I tend to credit my early blogging success to luck and patience.
Hi Allan,
As a new blogger – blogging since April ’16 – I’m encouraged by your progress and is grateful for your transparency. I joined Sovrn over the weekend and will be assessing its results.
I had Adsense for about a month then removed them because I don’t have the traffic to sustain it.
Tailwind is a fabulous tool. As it relates to Instagram you can use Tailwind for that too shortly. Try to post to IG at least once a week.
And to help your Twitter account try Social Quant. They’re very good.
Best of luck with this months goal. Congrats and keep up the great work.
Thanks for all the tips. I’m going to focus on IG but really don’t know how to get traffic from it yet. I’ll definitely have to do some more digging on how to get traffic from IG.
You’re most welcome Allan :-). You can start your digging with http://bit.ly/28ZyIDw and go from there.
Cheers!
Your post has given me courage to take a chance on a dream to become a blogger and I can’t begin to thank you. I would love to share it with you and get your honest feedback. I am so very grateful that I read your blog post today!
Sure Treshea. Please PM me with you information so I can take a look at your work. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing, I have gained a lot from your monthly earning.I will but more effort on my blog.
Hay, I’m happy with your earning,with just 5 month old blog,this is amazing.Thanks for sharing.
Thanks.
WOW! That’s incredible going in month 5! I really need to look into this Motif, it’s something I’m hearing more and more from you guys over the pond!
Thanks. I thought it’s impossible but it worked and I’m happy that I took the time and risk to blog.
Great post. I’m in the third month blogging and I’m hoping to start making some money soon. Thanks for the motivation and showing it’s possible 🙂
You are welcome. Just keep on blogging and make sure that you focus on bringing great contents because readers will come when you post great articles.
HI Allan
Great Progress. Congratulations! I’m on my 5th month blogging. My 3rd actually taking it seriously. I haven’t been able to get much traffic however. I was wondering if it may be the content?
I forayed into Pinterest during my 3rd month and from there my traffic has increased month after month. What I am saying is that maybe it isn’t your content but more of your marketing avenue. I used to focus on Twitter and not pay attention to Pinterest. Because of that, my traffic was slow. When I switched to Pinterest and aggressively promote my posts in there, my traffic began to increase by my 4th month.
Maybe try a different social media platform to get more traffic? That’s just based on my experience.
Such a great post! I’ve been primarily focused on affiliate marketing, ecourses, and building up a few of my social media accounts where I see the majority of my traffic. This does give me hope and motivation to keep going and to try out some other things to really boost my traffic. Thanks for sharing! 🙂
Thanks, Becky. I focused primarily on affiliate marketing but I’m thinking of going into ecourses and blog coaching. I just want the ecourse and blog coaching to take up a lot of my time. I know a lot of bloggers are doing those and are making great money. Maybe later, I will but for now, I’ll stick with what I have and don’t have. 🙂
Great job! I’ve been blogging for a few months now and quite honestly, its been discouraging. But its nice knowing others are having some success out there!
It does take a toll especially when you don’t see any progression (in terms of traffic and income). But hang on there. You’ll soon find your voice and people will flock to your site.