January Blog Income and Traffic Report
Hello! Here it is – an inside look at my business. My struggles, my triumphs and all the doubt and experimenting that I do in between. This month, I changed my promotional strategy and I changed how I’m building my email list. As a result, I doubled page views and the size of my contact list!
Let’s talk change. It is probably one of the hardest things for everyone. People like their comfort zone. Change is hard. Change is uncomfortable. When I’m asked to change something that I’m doing, I am afraid.
I just came back from the Build Your Blog Conference in Salt Lake City. My weekend was amazing, to say the least. However, this conference was more than a weekend. Six weeks prior to the conference, pre-conference webinars started. These webinars taught me how to promote more effectively, how to entice more people to my email list and how to sell.
That’s right, I said how to sell.
As bloggers, many of us don’t think of ourselves as business people. My thinking was that I write, I get page views and life will be happy.
But page views alone do not make me money. The only income directly tied to page views is ad income.
Let me help you make more money as a blogger! Click here.
Here’s the breakdown of what I earned this month:
Recommended Posts
Super interesting about the board booster campaigns… so, you don’t pin any old posts?
I do. 4 old posts a week. Right now, 4 of them are giving me a lot of referrals so I’m staying with those until they run out of juice. What I didn’t mention was that I also have a separate Board Booster board devoted exclusively to the KBN board because that one performs so well for me. The rest of my active group boards only get 4 posts at a time.
JoAnn, your growth is incredible in such a short amount of time. Thank you for being open about the behind the scenes with your blog.
My question, does a subscriber have to sign up multiple times to get your varying offers?
Sometimes when I create a new printable, I will email it to my list. But if people join afterwards, yes, they have to sign up multiple times because each offer is connected to a separate segmented list. My email program consolidates everyone though so they only show as one contact.
Hi,
First, thank you for sharing this information! It’s definitely helpful and not to mention a gentle kick in the butt to stop procrastinating and work harder on my blog lol I was just wondering if you need to be a little tech savvy with all the sequencing and pinning uploaded posts. Any basic coding knowledge required? Thanks so much in advance.
Regards
Natasha
Not for pinning or anything. I just upload the image and then pin it using the jquery pinit plugin. However, Pinterest also has a plug-in thats a little easier to use. For my automated pinning, I use Boardbooster. It’s very user friendly 🙂 Make sure to join my blogger email newsletter too Natasha! You can join via any of the green buttons in my post.
Hi, was wondering if your expenditure listed here is for maintaining your blog or is it daily necessities and such? Thanks in advance 🙂
Its just the blog. Those expenses include buying supplies for posts, email service, PO Box rental and conference fees and travel. However, I bought Leadpages in January which was $300. I decided I didn’t like it enough so I asked for a refund. My profit is actually a bit higher than I listed because in February I received my refund for leadpages.
So nice to meet you at the conference and I’m excited to get started. Can I ask you how you did the little welcome box at the top? That’s one of the tips I’m struggling with. I don’t want the text at the top of every post because I don’t want people to see the same thing over and over again, but I could see having a little graphic (designed to match my blog, of course) to welcome them. I was thinking to put it under the header, but it looks like yours is just under the post title. How did you get it to go there? Do you have to copy it in every time?
HI Adrian!!! Great to meet you too! Nope, I don’t copy it each time. That’s a plug-in 🙂 It’s free and called What Would Seth Godin Do? Extremely easy to use! Let me know if you have any questions once you install it.
I appreciate your transparency! I also like looking back at old months and seeing that it’s been a process. As an aspiring blogger I don’t know how soon to invest… Is it worth it to buy a webcourse when I’m not making any money currently? Will I actually gain followers? Is my content needed? You’re an inspiration!
Thank you so much Cebre! I think it is worth it to buy a web course because it will set you up for success. I personally did Elite Blogging Academy last year and it was the BEST investment I made for my blog. It helped me clean up my writing and set me up for success on Pinterest. Its actually open for enrollment right now and closes tomorrow so if that’s an option I would jump in and do it! It is pricey but I believe there is a money back guarantee.
Blogging is like any profession. Its not luck, its skill and that skill has to be learned. Once you have stellar content, followers will come. 🙂
Thank you for being so transparent on how you are growing your blog. It is so helpful and inspiring to me to think that I could grow my blog too. I just joined EBA and am excited to get my blog to the next level (actually make some income).
Yay Carolyn!! That is so exciting! You can grow your blog! I loved EBA!! Let me know how it goes!
I’m probably going to have to read your post a couple of times to let the strategy soak in. But a couple of Pinterest questions off the top of my head:
1. When you rewrite a popular post and then use it as a freebie download for new subscribers, do you remove the old post from your blog? (i.e. now they can only get that info from the download.)
2. If you pin the same post to the same board multiple times, don’t your boards look stuffed with all the same pins? Seems like someone exploring your boards would not get a lot out of it. Am I missing something?
I appreciate your openness and willingness to answer questions! I have neglected my blog for a couple of years and am just now considering breathing new life into it and really trying to make a go of it financially. (Came to your site through your testimonial on Ruth Soukop EBA.)
Hi Kristi! Thanks for coming by! Really awesome questions 🙂 I’ll do my best to answer.
1) I rewrite an old post in the same spot. I don’t change the URL I just update a post. My content upgrade for my small wardrobe post was actually bonus material. But if “I give away” too much in a post, I might re-write it in such a way that I lock up part of it in a content upgrade that readers can only access by becoming a subscriber.
2) The boards I repost to are huge group boards with tons of other contributors. There is so much pinned that no one notices if the same pin gets pinned multiple times. One of the smallest group boards that I pin to has 2.7k pins on it. The largest has 155k. I can’t pin multiple pins to my own boards because they don’t have that many pins, but the larger group boards work well.