Blog Income Report – May 2016

Hi, everyone. As promised, this month I am publishing my first blog income report. If you were to compare it to a blog income report of say, a really technical blogger or someone who offers an e-course or an e-book, it may seem like peanuts. Let’s address this for a moment: First, as most of you know, I have a full-time career and blogging is a part-time gig for me. This blog income report will reflect that. Second, one of the rules of blogging: DO NOT COMPARE YOURSELF TO OTHER BLOGGERS, so just don’t! Of course, like many of you I do hope to succeed like others have. We all have our goals and I will share mine here, too.

So what’s the point of little ol’ me sharing a blog income report with all of you? So often I see other bloggers in group threads feeling frustrated and discouraged because they think they need huge followings to make any sort of income. That’s just not true. I am not a million page-views a month kind of blog. I’m not even at 50,000 page-views (yet).  I also don’t have a niche. You don’t have to either. Here’s where I stood for the month of May. Guys, it took me three years and a blog rebrand to get here:

As you can see, while I was on vacation traffic dropped off.

My social media stats:

Twitter: 9,306
Instagram:2,490
Facebook: 2,394
Pinterest: 1,454
Klout Score: 67

Getting started

When I started blogging I had no idea the word monetization even existed. Things like reach, SEO and sponsored posts were foreign to me. While I’ve come a long way, I am still constantly learning thanks to a great network and other bloggers who’ve shared their knowledge throughout their own blogging journeys. I hope I can do the same and perhaps make the process a little faster for those of you who do want to dip your toes into the monetization waters. If you haven’t read them, I’ve shared some options in previous posts to get you started here and here. I’ll have another post with additional resources up early next week. So now let’s get to it…

May Blog Income Report

Gross Income: $2,140

Sponsored posts

• Collective Bias: $885
• The Women Bloggers: $700
• IZEA: $325 (affiliate link)

Passive Affiliate Income

• Share-A-Sale: $160 this is from one affiliate (affiliate link)

Social Media Sharing

• She Knows: $50
• IZEA: $20 (affiliate link)

Expenses

• Taxes: 15.3% self-employment tax $327.42
• Taxes: 7% state income tax: $149.80 (Arkansas- this will vary state to state)
• Virtual Assistant: $100
• Font change to blog: $20
• IZEA membership fee: $1

Net Income: $1,541.78

Blogging Goals

Moving forward I have lofty goals along with those that are a bit more obtainable in the short term:

• Grow social media following 10% month over month
• Diversify affiliates – I work with one affiliate through Share-A-Sale and I’d like to work with just a few others
• Research effective live pitching
• Finally figure out whether Snapchat is for the blog and me or not
• Grow to 100,000 followers and apply for Ad Thrift

Have you started monetizing yet? Anything that is working -or that isn’t? As always, if you have any questions, feel free to ask. I may not have the answers, but we can find them together.