Tag: blogging

April 2018 Blog Income Report: How I made money online last month
Hey guys, I’ve been getting a couple of emails asking when I’d publish an income report again. I was really happy to see that you all actually want to read this. So I’ve decided to share my April 2018 blog income report.

Please note that this post contains affiliate links. Please read my full affiliate disclaimer here.

If you have read some of my previous income reports probably know that my time for working on my blog is limited to weekends. And with all the other things that generally happen over weekends, this usually means my blog gets roughly 8 – 10 hours of my attention per week.

That’s really not a lot of time for writing posts, creating pinnable images for them and scheduling those images to Pinterest. And with the recent algorithm and platform changes Pinterest recently rolled out, I’ve also started creating new pins for some of my older posts.

For those of you that don’t know what I’m talking about, Pinterest has recently changed their preferred dimensions of a pin and now prefer shorter pins. And most of my older pins are longer than the new recommended size, so part of them will be cut off when viewing it on Pinterest.

There are also lots of other changes they’ve made to their algorithm that affect keywords and the rankings of pins, but this isn’t really the place to go into all of that. If you’re already a blogger using Pinterest to drive traffic, you probably know all about this. If you don’t and want to know more, feel free to contact me or comment below and I’ll give you more info.

Also check out my previous blog income reports here:
April 2018 Blog Income Report

Okay, so I’m not going to bore you with the usual copy and paste reasons of why I share my income reports. You’ve probably read that before on my blog and other blogs that publish income reports.

I’d rather keep this short and sweet and give you the numbers you actually want to see. So here are the numbers for my April 2018 blog income report:

Blog Income:

$365.99 – Ads (Mediavine)
$76,06 – Affiliates **

Blog Expenses:

$10 – Board Booster for scheduling pins to Pinterest

Total income: $442.05
Total income after expenses: $432.05

** My affiliates include

Amazon – I haven’t really included lots of Amazon links in my posts. But I still managed to get a small amount of commission for products people purchased through some of the few links I do have. If you ever mention any products in your posts, definitely sign up for this program. You have nothing to lose by adding a couple of links to products you know and love.

Bluehost – The host I would recommend if you’re looking to start your own blog. They offer blog hosting and a free domain name at a super affordable price starting at only 3.95 per month. That is so much cheaper than any other blog hosting I’ve seen. They also have amazing 24/7 tech support and helpful personnel to assist you.

Healthful Pursuit – I’ve done a couple of posts on the Keto diet and would definitely recommend these products to anyone interest in Keto. The products are great value for money and offer a ton of information. They also have a great affiliate program which I would recommend you join if you have any posts on keto.

April Blog Traffic

Traffic has remained steadily above 30 000 sessions for the last couple of months. It hasn’t been as high as it was during February, but I expected that since most of my traffic in February came from a pin for Valentine’s Day that went viral on Pinterest.

However, I feel my traffic is more stable now as traffic is coming in from a number of different pins, so it’s not just one bring in viewers.

In April I received a total of 44 616 pageviews and 37 058 sessions.

I’m so happy that I’ve had over 30 000 sessions these last couple of months because that meant that I could finally apply to Mediavine! I applied in early in March and was accepted around the middle of the month. My Mediavine ads went live on my blog near the end of March.

I’m really happy with Mediavine thus far. They were very friendly and eager to help me get the ads live on my site. Once you get to 25 000+ sessions a month, I highly recommend you sign up with them if you want to run ads.

Pinning strategy

I’m still using Pinterest exclusively to drive traffic to my blog. I will probably start sharing my posts on other social media platforms in the coming months as well.

At the moment I’m still using BoardBooster and Tailwind together to schedule my pins to Pinterest.

I use BoardBooster mainly to schedule pins for older posts to group boards.

And I use Tailwind to schedule pins for new posts to all my group boards and Tailwind Tribes. This is just to get my new content out there as fast as possible.

After Tailwind pinned my pin to all my relevant group boards, it goes into my BoardBooster random campaign source board. BoardBooster will then share that pin at random as per my random campaign setup.

If you’re still wondering whether to go with BoardBooster or Tailwind, I’d say you should go with what is easier for you.

Both of them offer free trials, so try them out and see which one you prefer. Don’t get stuck with the idea that using one will bring you more traffic than the other. I haven’t found that to be true at all.

Thoughts on April

Overall I’m happy with the progress in April. I only published 4 blog posts – one each week. So I didn’t really expect more traffic or income for this month.

There will be a major change in my schedule from June onwards. Because of this, I expect I’ll be able to spend more time on this blog and give it the attention it deserves.

This month was the first month that I’ve really made anything decent from affiliate sales. And I can definitely see the big potential this income source offers. I’ll be focussing more on affiliate marketing going forward.

Recommended resources if you want to start a blog

Bluehost

If you want to start your own blog, you can check out my post with step by step instructions on how to setup your blog with Bluehost. Going with paid hosting has so many benefits over starting a free WordPress blog, including being able to run ads on your site.

They also offer new bloggers a really affordable entry-level price of $3.95 per month on the 36-month plan. And as you can see, you can make back that money fairly quickly if you’re willing to put in the work.

Billionaire Blog Club

Now, guys, there’s another amazing resource that I want to share with you all. And I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t feel so strongly about the value it provides. And that is the Billionaire Blog Club.

Paul Scrivens (or Scrivs as people call him) runs over 10 different blogs that made him over $76 000 in February 2018. You can read all about it in his income report here.

And if you join the Billionaire Blog Club, you get access to a wealth of information. There’s a variety of different courses, a Pinterest manual and a great community where you can interact with all the other members, including Paul himself. And honestly, this is the only blogging course/membership you will ever need. I won’t go into detail of everything you can get, because if you’re interested you can check it out yourself.

The Billionaire Blog Club is currently closed but it opens up a few times a year. So if you’re interested I’d suggest you sign up for Scrivs’ mailing list to get notified of when it opens. If you’d like to get a feel for what he is like, definitely sign up for his free 12-day blogging boot camp or check out some of his blog posts.

Looking for more inspiration and blog income reports?

If you want to see more blog income reports, check out Amy’s list of 43 blog income reports for 2018 and Charne’s list of 20 blogging income reports. They include income reports from beginner bloggers making as little as $13 per month to bigger bloggers making $50 000+ per month!

And that’s all I have for you today. Hope you gained something from this April 2018 blog income report. If there’s anything specific you would like to know, please leave a comment below. You’re also always welcome to contact me via my contact page.

If you enjoyed reading this income report, I’d appreciate it immensely if you’d be willing to share it on some of your favorite social media platforms.

You can also pin one of the images below to Pinterest if you want to get back to it later.
May 13, 2018
Blog Income Report 2018: What I Earned From My Blog in February 2018

Hey guys, welcome to my second blog income report for the year, my blog income report 2018 for February. I know its a bit overdue (this seems to have become somewhat of a habit), but better late than never right?

Please note, this post contains affiliate links. This means I may receive a small commission – at no extra cost to you – if you purchase something through one of my links. You can read my full affiliate disclaimer here.

Why do I post an income report?

If you’re new to my blog, you might be wondering why I’d want to post a blog income report, and I have two reasons for it.

1) It helps me get an idea of how my blog is doing and forces me to look at what is working and what is not. By compiling an income report, I pull everything together to get a general idea of how well my blog is performing. It also means I can go back and compare my blog’s performance and income with that of previous months.

2) I hope that it can help motivate you and show you that it really IS possible to make money blogging. Before I started blogging, I used to read the income reports of other bloggers, and that is what eventually motivated me to start my own blog.

If you’re looking to start your own blog, you can do so from as little as $3.95 per month with Bluehost. I have a more detailed post about it here. With it costing as little as $3.95 p/m, I think its a really small investment to make towards something that can potentially earn you much, much more down the line.

Blog Income Report 2018 – February

Okay, so let’s get to the part that you’re really here for – how much did I make from my blog in February 2018? Drum roll, please…

I made a whopping $257.34 in the month of February!

This is pretty much in line with what I made the previous month. And I made all this from Google AdSense alone. Yep, I didn’t earn anything from affiliate marketing in February. Truth be told, I kind of expected this, as I didn’t really promote any affiliate products last month.

Now I know $257.34 is not much, but it’s still something if you consider the amount of work I put in last month. I only published 4 posts in February. That means I put in roughly a little over 8 hours of time into my blog last month. And I still made $257.34!

For those of you wondering, I received 50,293 page views in February. This was my best month yet in terms of page views, and February only had 28 days, so I’ll take that as a win.

How do I get traffic?

Most of my traffic comes from Pinterest. I received some traffic from Google and StumbleUpon, but the percentage is really small when compared to what I got from Pinterest.

So how do I get all of this traffic from Pinterest? Group boards! Group boards are awesome as you can get your pins in front of thousands (or millions) of other people even if you only have a few followers yourself.

At the time of writing this, I only have 415 followers on Pinterest (btw, I’d LOVE it if you’d follow me on Pinterest). But I’ve joined 50+ group boards, some of which have over 100 000k followers. So when I pin my pins to those boards, it can potentially be seen by all the people following those boards.

Pinterest tools

Now I have a lot of pins and a lot of group boards, so manually pinning to all of those boards will be time-consuming as you can imagine. So I use the following tools to automate my pinning:

Tailwind:

Until the end of February, I was using Tailwind exclusively to schedule my pins. What I love about Tailwind is that it generates specific time slots for you based on when your pins perform the best. You can tell it how many times you want to pin per day and it will generate a schedule with the best times for you to pin. You can then schedule your pins ahead of time.

I like to take one day of the month to schedule my pins for the whole month in advance. When I create new posts throughout the month, I just add them to the schedule.

If you’d like to try Tailwind for yourself, you can sign up for the free version here – no credit card required. You can always upgrade later if you feel that it’s worth it (for me it definitely is).

BoardBooster:

I’ve recently also started using BoardBooster for pinning to group boards. The reason I decided to try out BoardBooster is that it offers some useful features that Tailwind does not.

One of these is duplication controls. With BoardBooster, you can tell it not to pin something to a board if it was already pinned in the last X amount of days. Or if the pin was already pinned and is in the last X amount of pins in the board. So, for example, I can tell BoardBooster not to pin anything to a board if it was pinned to that same board in the last 7 days OR if the pin appears in the last 20 pins of the board. Which I think is pretty useful (you don’t want your pins to look spammy).

If you’d like to try out BoardBooster for free, you can sign up with my special link that will give you your first 500 pins for free.

I can’t comment yet on which platform I prefer as I haven’t used BoardBooster as much as Tailwind, so I might make a separate post comparing the two in the future. But since both of them offer free trials, I’d definitely recommend you try them both and see what works for you.

Future plans

Can I make more money with my blog? Yes, definitely! I can’t honestly say that I’ve been blogging seriously, as I’ve had limited time to spend on my blog. But this blog has sort of served as a proof of concept for me – it shows that you CAN make money blogging and that it doesn’t have to take years.

This blog is by no means unique or special, and anyone can create a blog like this. If I had 10 of these blogs, each earning me $257 p/m, it would put my monthly income at $2570. Of course, you don’t NEED as many blogs. You can easily make that amount with a single blog too – if you have enough content.

The only problem I have at the moment is time. At this point, I feel that I can either continue to grow my blog slowly by working on it over weekends (which is what I’ve done so far). Or I can take a leap of faith and quit my job to try my hand at blogging full time. I’m giving serious consideration to the latter option for a number of reasons, but I’ll save that for another post as I suspect it might get quite lengthy. I’ll let you know what I decide though!

If you do have any questions, comments, or just want to say hi, please reach out to me, I love hearing from you all. You can either comment on the post below in the comment section or contact me via this page if you’d like to get in touch.

If you found this blog income report 2018 post helpful or useful in any way, I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to pin the image below to one of your Pinterest boards!

Spread the love – Pin it for later!

March 21, 2018
10 Super Easy Steps to Start a Money Making Blog Today

So, you’ve decided to take the first step and start a money making blog. It’s definitely a decision you won’t regret! Blogging can change your life in so many ways. You can earn a full time income, connect with people all over the world, and have a platform to voice your opinions. Whatever your reason – you won’t regret it, trust me!

In order to start a blog and get your blog online, you’ll need a domain name as well as hosting. The domain name is the name of your blog and the address people will see when they visit your blog – my domain name is blastaloud.com. Hosting is the service that will allow your blog to be visible on the internet.

Now if this all sounds complicated to you, please don’t worry! Below I’ll show you step by step where and how you can get all these things to get your blog up and running in no time. And it will be much easier than you might think! In fact, you can do all this in 10 minutes or less! And don’t worry, you don’t have to be tech savvy to do any of these things, you can just follow the steps below! Ready? Okay, let’s get your blog set up!

Note: This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my affiliate disclaimer here.

Click here to sign up for hosting with Bluehost from as little as $3.95 per month with a free domain name!

Step 1: Sign up for hosting

There are many different hosting providers out there, but the number one I recommend is Bluehost, mainly because they make starting a blog super affordable. You can start your blog from as little as $3.95 per month on the basic plan, which is the one I recommend because it has everything you need. And as an added bonus, you’ll also get a free domain name if you sign up for a year of web hosting, how awesome is that!? I don’t know of any other web hosting that does this, so it’s definitely a bargain to get right away!

With Bluehost, its really simple and easy to get your blog up and running with WordPress. They have an easy to understand panel and they offer one click WordPress installation, which is what you’ll use to start your blog. And if you ever get stuck, they have 24/7 technical support so you’ll never have to worry about not having someone around to ask for help!

Click here to sign up for hosting with Bluehost from as little as $3.95 per month with a free domain name!

Step 2: Choose your domain name

Now that you’ve chosen your hosting package, it’s time to choose your domain name. Bluehost will tell you whether the domain name is available or not.

Choosing a domain name can be a bit difficult at first, especially since there are already so many websites out there. But be patient and try to come up with a list of possible names for your blog, so that you have some backups if your first choice isn’t available. When I tried to come up with names for my blog, I probably went through about 15 names that were unfortunately already taken before I decided on this one which was available at the time.

Tip: I’d definitely recommend that you go with a .com domain name, as search engines tend to trust domains ending in .com better. This becomes important later when you start driving traffic to your blog.

Step 3: Complete your personal information

After you’ve chosen your domain name for your blog, fill out your personal information.

Step 4: Choose the right package & optional add-ons

On this step, it’s important to make sure that you have the right hosting package selected. I’d highly recommend that you take the 36 month plan, that way you get the lowest price for your domain and you don’t have to worry about renewing it every year. Now guys, its only $142.20 for a whole THREE years, which is an amazing price. I monetized my site in my second month of blogging and made MORE than $142.20 in my third month of blogging (and my income has been climbing each month). So it’s definitely an investment that pays itself off really quickly – within the first few months of starting your blog!

On this page you can also select additional add-ons and services for a small fee that’s then added to your purchase. The only thing I’d recommend you take here is the Domain Privacy Protection option. This will keep your personal contact information private in WHOIS databases. If you’d like more information on this, you can read about it here.

Step 5: Add billing information and password setup

Next, you’ll need to add your billing information. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to choose the password for your account.

Step 6: Create your account password

Great job for making it this far! You’ve now created your Bluehost account, so it’s time to choose a password. Make sure it’s a secure password as this is the password to gain access to all of your site’s content! And of course, don’t forget this password.

After you’ve successfully chosen a password, you should see the success show below screen below. Don’t stress if it doesn’t appear immediately, it can take a minute or so to process.

Step 7: Choose a theme

Bluehost will allow you to choose one of these free themes for your blog. You can choose anyone you like here for now. You can easily change your theme again later.

After you’ve chosen your theme, you should see the success message below. Go ahead and click “Start Building” to start building your WordPress blog.

Step 8: Choose your blog type

You’ll now be prompted to choose what type of site you want to create. In most cases, this will be a personal site such as a blog, but if it’s for your business you can also select that.

Step 9: Fill in site details

After you’ve chosen your site type, you should see a screen with an option to launch your site. After you click it, you’ll have to fill in your site title and description. The site title will typically be your blog name (e.g. BlastAloud), and the description is just a few words to say what your site is about.

Step 10: Launch your site

After filling in your site title and description, click on “Next Step”.

Congratulations! You have just set up your very first blog!

You can visit your site domain name (e.g. mine is www.blastaloud.com) to see what it looks like. Typically WordPress will create a sample page and post for you titled “Hello World”. You will be able to delete these and create your own posts and pages.

So, what now?

Now that that your blog is successfully up and running, there are a few things you’ll likely want to work on.

Create pages

Before anything else there are two pages I’d recommend you create: An “About” page and a “Contact” page. The “About” page is just a page with a little bit of background about you and the reason you started your blog. This is just for readers to get to know you a bit better. The contact page is where you tell readers how they can get in touch with you. This page can have a contact form on the page and/or include your email address or social media links.

Create posts

Now I’ve seen a lot of bloggers recommend that you first have to write 15-25 blog posts before you launch your blog and make those posts public. I personally didn’t do it this way. Rather, I made my blog public with 0 posts, and published each post as I created it. There was no waiting until I had a certain number of posts before I published them all. I can however understand why some bloggers recommend you do it this way, because if you have plenty of posts, you’ll have more content for readers to go through. I didn’t really find that it made much difference, so I think it’s up to your personal preference.

Find a theme you like

You don’t have to keep the free theme you chose when you set up your site. You can if you want to though. There are some premium themes that give you a lot more functionality and ways of customizing how your site looks. I found my theme on ThemeForest for $49. Of course, you can always use a free theme at the beginning and upgrade to a paid theme later if you want.

Get traffic

Once you’ve got your basic pages and a couple of posts available on your website, it’s time to start focussing on traffic. When your blog is still new, you can’t really rely on getting traffic from Google. But one platform that can bring in a lot of traffic is Pinterest. It’s what I use to drive traffic to my blog and it works like a bomb, trust me!

Monetize

When you have enough content on your site to keep users interested and you’re starting to get a bit of traffic, then it’s time to start thinking about monetizing your site.

Now there are lots of ways to do this. The easiest, and quickest option is running ads on your website. As a newbie blogger I’d recommend you sign up for Google AdSense as they don’t have strict requirements in regards to the number of page views you need a month.

Another way to monetize your site is through affiliate marketing, such as with Amazon. This way you can promote products/services on your site and you’ll receive a small commission whenever someone makes a purchase using your link.

Don’t give up

Now guys, this is really important. Do not give up! There will be days where you feel overwhelmed, frustrated or even just too lazy to work on your blog. But don’t give up. That’s the only way your blog will be successful. And the sooner you start, the sooner you will get there. So start a money making blog today!

November 28, 2017