Second Blog Income Report

It’s that time of the month, where I share how much I have earned from my blog.  Please keep in mind, though, that my blog is only 60 days old, and I think my earnings reflect that.  Still, I am super excited to see how much my earnings have increased from last month!  In my first ever blog income report, I wrote how I earned a whopping $27.62 from blogging.  Thirty days later, my earnings increased 15x over!

Total income: $419.26

Income Source:

Affiliates: $419.26
Amazon Associates
Building A Framework e-book
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
How I Went from 17k to 350k+ Monthly Page Views e-book
Bluehost- see How to Start a Blog (Faster Than You Can Order a Latte)
Convertkit– the best email service provider out there
Restored 316 Designs
Tailwind
Flywheel
Grammarly
Stencil
Maven

Pageviews: 2,681 up from 1,591 last month

Unique Users: 2,102 up from 1,374 last month

My Income Strategy

As you can see, I had no ad revenue, no products of my own to sell, etc. My income came 100% from affiliate sales. I learned my affiliate marketing strategy from Michelle Schroeder-Gardner. Michelle blogs at Making Sense of Cents, and if you haven’t seen her income reports, you should! Michelle makes $100,000 a month blogging. No, that’s not a typo! $100,000 a month! And half of her monthly income routinely comes from affiliate sales. So Michelle created an online class teaching, called Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, to teach others how to recreate what she does. It is a fantastic class and worth its weight in gold. But what is even more priceless, in my opinion, is how much Michelle wants to see her students succeed. Once you purchase the course, you become a part of her online Facebook group. Michelle is very active there and will bend over backward to help you. She’s retweeted things for me, promoted my pins, encouraged me when I felt down, and so much more. Plus, everyone else in the Facebook group rocks too and wants to help just like Michelle.

When I purchased Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, I paid $197, and it was completely worth it.  As you can tell, I have already recouped all my money and made some more.

Lessons Learned

I’ve learned a lot of lessons in the past 30 days.  In fact, blogging is all about learning lessons… constantly, but there is one lesson that I want to talk about in particular.  My first income report was called “Income Report: How I Made Money in My First 30 Days,” and after I published it, I had someone contact me on Facebook.  She was frustrated that I didn’t disclose anything in my blog post.  She said that calling it “How I Made Money” was deceiving.  To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about that.  To me, I was answering the question. How I made money was through affiliate marketing. But after talking to her, I could totally see how she felt misled.  Even though I had answered the question, I didn’t provide any details.  It was an important lesson in really thinking about the words you write and why are you choosing those particular words.  That’s why I was extra careful in titling this blog post.  There is no use of the word “how” at all.

Even though I learned an important lesson, it certainly wasn’t a negative experience.  She and I had a really good conversation about why I didn’t disclose anything, and we ended our conversation on a very positive note.  I would say we are cyber buddies now:)  But, I want to take a moment and explain to you, just like I explained to her, why I don’t provide detailed, step-by-step instructions on how I do affiliate marketing.  The reason is that I learned what I know from Michelle.  She took the time to create a course.  All of the material in the course is hers, and it’s unlawful for me to post any of it without her consent.  I hope that makes sense.  I am trying to give people credit for their own work and ideas.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Blogging is all about learning lessons… constantly!” quote=”Blogging is all about learning lessons… constantly!”]

Something New

One of the things that I did differently this month was join Maven.  I don’t hear a lot about them from other bloggers, so I thought I would share for a minute how they work.  First off, anyone can sign up at Maven, not just professional bloggers and influencers.  Once you have an account, you can begin curating boards just like you do on Pinterest.  So, you just make boards with themes like you normally would, like, “Favorite Fall Clothing Essentials” or “Cooking Tools for the Foodie.”  People then go onto Maven and click through your boards.  You can also share your boards through social media: Facebook, Twitter, even on Pinterest.  Then, when someone clicks on one of the items on one of your boards and purchases it, you get a commission.  So say I had a board that was “Cooking Tools for the Foodie,” and I put a Vitamix blender on there.  Someone can click on the picture, get sent to Amazon, and buy it.  And I would get a commission from that.  But what makes them different from other affiliate networks (like ShareASale or Commission Junction) is that you only have to get approved through them and not through each individual retailer which can take weeks.  That means that I can have a board with items from Nordstrom, anthropologie, and Last Call Neiman Marcus all on there, and I’ll get a commission on each item, but I only had to do through the trouble of getting approved by Maven.  It’s a whole lot less work!  I am excited to see how well it works in the coming months, but so far, I have only had then three days and earned $35.  I think that’s pretty great!

Gearing Up for the Future

Last but certainly not least, I am busy working to release my own product.  It’s just for mom bloggers (huge apologies to everyone else!), and it’ll make the job of any mom blogger infinitely easier and faster.  I had hoped it would be ready in December, but now it looks like it will be ready in January instead.  Do not ask me why I thought it was possible to launch a product during the holidays.  Sometimes I get crazy ideas… like the time I decided to get married the same weekend I graduated from grad school and my soon-to-be sister-in-law was graduating from college. But that’s a different story for a different day!

Right now, the product is still top secret!  But once the new year rolls around, we’ll be releasing hints to our launch list.  Whoever correctly guesses what the product is first, will win it!  Sign up so you can participate.

There you have it!  My second blog income report.  Now I want to hear from you!  What are you trying different with your blog and how is it going?

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, click here. Also, if you do utilize a link, THANK YOU!