How I Made Money in My Sixth Month of Blogging

It just keeps getting better and better! Spoiler alert: I made a lot of money in February! But it didn’t come from where I thought it would. And what I expected to work didn’t! Crazy, right?

{ Post contains affiliate links }

Why I blog

Before we get into the numbers, I just want to give you a brief overview of the blog. I started Toot’s Mom is Tired to share parenting tips and life hacks for new moms. Toot was born at the beginning of a baby boom among my friends. It seemed like everyone I knew announced that they were pregnant right after I did.

Since Toot is the oldest of this new generation, I had to go through every milestone first. And I figured I might as well pass on any useful information to my friends that I had learned so they could be prepared for what was coming up.

So that’s how the idea of a blog was born. I randomly came across a post about blogging on Pinterest and found out you can make money from blogging! I thought, “Ok, why not give it a shot?” Instead of just relaying parenting tips to my circle of friends on Facebook, I can put it out there for everyone who is interested and maybe make a few bucks, too.

Turns out, you can actually make a living off of blogging! So that’s my overall goal. I’ve always loved writing, and now I get paid to do it!

Why I do blog income reports

Comparison is a tricky thing. You shouldn’t compare your blog stats to mine exactly. Every blog is different and every blogger puts in a different amount of work, has different skills, has different content, and tries different techniques. Not to mention sheer luck. So I don’t really post these for you to compare them to yours.

I post blog income reports to inspire other bloggers and to give helpful tips to what worked for me. Maybe what worked for me will help you, but maybe it won’t. So don’t feel discouraged if you aren’t making any money. Try new techniques!

You should also know that I’m not a top blogger. There are other bloggers making more than me, and they’ve been blogging for a shorter amount of time. It’s not an exact science.

So this post is for informational purposes only, and I hope it will help you! I also have all of my blogging tips in my How to Blog free email course!

Income

Ads: $0. But just got approved for Adsense today! Don’t worry, I won’t bombard you with ads.

Sponsored Content: $1. Just a sponsored retweet.

Affiliates: $415.

• Zazzle: $14* (Please note that I’ve been on Zazzle for years so this isn’t specific to my blog. I’m including it because I have had a lot of traffic from my Ultimate Guide to Earning Extra Money with Zazzle post.)
• Amazon: $8*
• Ebates: $43
• ShareASale: $30*
• ShopStyle Collective: $1*
• Elite Blog Academy: $319

*I haven’t hit the payout threshold for these so they are still pending

(side note: I also made $9 on InboxDollars, but that’s not really blog related. That’s just me watching videos and doing surveys. Yay!)

I expected to make more from Zazzle because my average is about $50 a month, My best guess is that January was slow for sales on Zazzle after the holidays. The pending earnings don’t show up until the month after they’re sold. It’s confusing. But my February earnings are really from January. I can see what I have pending from February but they haven’t been cleared yet so I don’t count them.

What I didn’t expect was any affiliate sales from EBA! I had only joined the affiliate program a few weeks before launch so I wasn’t really expecting any sales. Next year, I hope to get a lot!

 How do bloggers make money?

Expenses

No expenses this month! I pay yearly for a lot of things like Tailwind and hosting. I’m also in a free trial for ConvertKit and SendOwl.

Totals for February

Income: $416

Expenses: $0

Net Income: $416

Ok so $400 isn’t Beyoncé money, but YEAHHHHHHH!

How much traffic did I get in February?

Sessions: 8,970

Users: 8,520

Pageviews: 10,466 (WHOA! That’s a 50% increase!)

Where did it come from?

Social: 85%

• Pinterest: 92%
• Facebook: 4%
• Twitter: 3%
• StumbleUpon: 1%
• Instagram: >1%
• Reddit: >1%
• Google+: >1%

Direct: 10%

Organic Search: 5%

Referral: 1%

Top Posts for February

1. 9 Prizes for Baby Shower Games
2. Realistic Toddler Meal Ideas for Busy Moms
3. 10 Things I Miss About Being Pregnant
4. Realistic Toddler Breakfast Ideas for Busy Moms
5. 21 Easter Basket Ideas for Toddlers

What Worked

Surprisingly, what worked is that I didn’t. Toot and I got sick for about a week. First B got it, then Toot, then me, and then my mom. So for about 4 days, I didn’t touch anything on my blog or Pinterest.

I was scheduling my pins every night for the next day to a bunch of group boards. So when we were sick, obviously my pins were not on my mind. I let it go for a few days thinking it’ll be ok. I’ll just have reduced pageviews for a while. Nope. That’s not what happened! My pageviews DOUBLED.

WHAT??

Instead of getting 250 per day, it was 500+ every day! Here’s my theory of what happened: I was pinning too much and Pinterest wasn’t showing my pins to as many people. I was scheduling 130-150 pins per day! So when I stopped, I started showing up in search rankings and on smartfeeds. I know this because more traffic was coming from regular Pinterest.com and not a specific pin.

I also found out that if your pin is on a board with matching keywords, it will rank higher in search results and get more traffic. My baby shower prizes post is getting a lot of traffic from one pin on a board that has like 100 followers. The lady that pinned it isn’t even a blogger. She’s just a regular user that pinned it to her baby shower board. But since my pin and the board have baby shower in the name, it shows up when you search “baby shower!”

So I’ve toned down my Tailwind schedule for pinning. I’m going to try to do only 30 pins per day.

Join my Tailwind Tribe and we can share each other’s pins!

Another awesome thing that worked was Elite Blog Academy! Not only am I really enjoying the course, I made affiliate money from it! Unfortunately, the enrollment period is over for this year. It’s only open for 5 days a year! Crazy, right? But so far it’s shaping up to be the best course I’ve taken.

You can’t enroll until next February, but you can grab some freebies that Ruth offers year round that are amazing. The Blog Structure Blueprint has been really helpful to me. And the 7 Surefire Ways to Boost your Blog Income Overnight ebook is super helpful too. And they’re free! Go grab them.

What Didn’t Work

Well, also because I was sick, I didn’t work. I missed post deadlines. I also decided that I needed a little time off so I went down to one post per week for a while. It hasn’t decreased my traffic, but I’m not super satisfied with myself. Yes, I need the time to enjoy my shows and to feel like a regular person again. Yes, I am a regular person, but I work all day, take care of Toot until she goes to bed, then work on my blog until I go to bed.

I thought I was going to use the extra time to work on my ConvertKit sequences and write my Zazzle book. I did not. This may be because I’m feeling the blogging burnout everyone told me about. It has been 6 months. But I’m going to power through and allow myself some grace.

Writing posts at the last minute needs to stop, self. I need to start batching and get ahead on my posts again. Writing at the last minute is tedious and not always feasible. So I’m going to try and set aside time to write multiple posts at once. And hopefully, I’ll get back to two posts per week again.

Goals for February

• No, for real, finish my book. FAIL. Ok, I did work on it, though. That’s at least something.
• Set up resource library for moms opt-in. FAIL. I worked on this, too. But it’s still not finished.

It was a short month and I was sick, people. Ugh. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m so mad at myself.

Goals for March

• Get ahead on posts by at least a week.
• Write more in my How to Blog course.
• Continue with EBA, one unit per week.

I swear I will actually finish my book. I don’t do well with deadlines, as you can tell. I’m not making pageview or income goals even though they are goals. They’re just results, not actionable. Actionable goals get results. Now I just need to do them!

What about you? What are your goals?

Let me know in the comments below!