May 2018 Blog Income Report: -$2.61

Excuse me while I finish my happy dance!

***happy dancing***

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Well hello there! How was your May?

Me? Well thank you for asking…it was GREAT!

As I said in my income report from last month, I am simply amazed as to how quickly things can turn around with a blog. I more than DOUBLED my pageviews from last month!

I am have been busting my butt this past month (although admittedly I probably could have put even more time in, but, you know, life…) and I feel like I have made a lot of progress!

Oh, and you may have also noticed I completely re-branded the site ?.

I had technically launched it on June 1st, but did all the work for it in May and April.

Review of Blogging Goals:

Rebrand the blog

DONE & DONE!

Not to brag, but I am SO in love with the new branding, it makes me smile every time I log on and see that beautiful home page!

I had set the goal to get the site re-launched on June 1st and I did it!

I have to give the guys at BigScoots a big shout out to helping me switch everything over. It was a process that was a little more technically advanced than I was comfortable with and they were a HUGE help!

*Side note: I have actually switched my hosting from HostGator to BigScoots. Not that there is anything wrong with HostGator, I think they are great! The main reason is that I wanted an SSL certificate for the blog (change it from http to https) because I knew that I would be adding paid products and the https is more secure from a customer standpoint. BigScoots offered the SSL certificate for free, and for $19.99/month I can get unlimited sites, unlimited SSL certificates, and turbocharged speed for increased load times.

Continue to work on the Billionaire Blog Club course

I still have some work to do within the course. Scrivs (the course creator) just rolled out an updated Pinterest portion of the course after all the big changes went through. Which I think is super awesome! Pay once and get lifetime access and updates!

One of the things that I have found most useful is the community. I had set a goal to get accepted to 50 group boards by the end of May, and the community of this course helped me to reach and surpass that goal.

There are so many opportunities to connect with other bloggers that I could literally spend all day in the communities! But alas, there are other things on my to-do list.

Income:

Ads – $41.99

• Media.net – $16.71
• Adsense – $25.28

Nothing super exciting here. This was an increase from last month of $25.50, which honestly, I was hoping would have been a little higher considering the big increase in pageviews.

Affiliates – $17.80

• Smart Asset – $12.36
• ShopStyle – $5.44

I haven’t focused much on affiliate marketing lately, I was a lot more concerned with getting the new branding set. One of the things I would LOVE to do is start getting some sponsored content (don’t worry, I’m not going to sell out!). But it would be nice to have a consistent and reliable income.

Gross Income = $59.79

This makes me so sad from the previous month ?. But as we all know with blogging, everything can drastically fluctuate from month to month.

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Pageviews:

I was totally stoked this month when I was tracking my pageviews!

I more than doubled what I did last month, passed 10,000 midway through the month and ended with a total of 17,315!

That is a total increase of 97.46%. That’s pretty darn good!

The big spike in traffic is attributed still to the 10 Frugal Dinners post. Not that I am complaining about that, but I need to figure out how to duplicate that success with other posts.

Expenses:

My expenses remain the same pretty much every month. Although I made a few changes to try and save some money as I haven’t been bringing in as much as I would like.

I had an increase in hosting costs but cut Canva and Tailwind. Although I LOVE both of them, I can do without them. I have been using BoardBooster lately, which seems to be working pretty good as of right now. And at only $5 a month is totally affordable!

**UPDATE** Boardbooster has since closed its doors, click here to read about the Death of Boardbooster. 

Even though I stopped using Tailwind right now, I still use the Tribes feature (freemium) and plan on using Tailwind again in the future. I think it is a great service, especially for brand new bloggers to help them save time in scheduling their Pinterest accounts. Using Tailwind from my second month of blogging into my third month I saw an increase in growth of 982%!

Total expenses = $61.97

Most of my expenses are pretty minimal, $5 here and there. My biggest expense thus far is ConvertKit at $29 a month, but TOTALLY worth it! Although I’m all about using the free stuff when I can, ConvertKit allows me to do what I want to do as far as collecting email addresses, segmenting, etc.

Total Net income= -$2.18

Blogging Goals:

I am expanding the blog a little bit under the new brand and adding in more “lifestyle” type posts rather than strictly personal finance. You know, like cheap iced coffee recipes and frugal kids activities for the summer.

I’m also setting some lofty goals for the month of June (yes, I get called crazy on a regular basis).

Publish 6 posts

So I’m a little behind on this one already seeing this is only my first post for the month and it’s already the 13th. But I can catch up! I have, reluctantly, been getting up early before the kids to try and get more done and staying up later and working rather than vegging out. I have to give my hubby a shout out for this one, I am NOT a morning person and would rather lay on the couch watching Empire rather than work on content.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE blogging, I love mostly everything about it ?. The writing, the connecting with other bloggers, the social media, it’s all fun and even when it is challenging I enjoy it.

HOWEVER, when the kids are home all day, I am exhausted come 8:00 pm! By the time we finally get them in bed (around 9 for the older ones) I just wanna sit and have a beer and turn my brain off! I’m sure you other mamas can relate!

But, in order for growth to happen, we need to move outside of our comfort zones, right?! So in order to actually get everything done that I would like too, that means sacrificing a little sleep.

Update all posts with rebranding

This is a long, and mostly kind of boring process. If you scroll through the posts long enough you will see that the older ones still have the “old” featured images, pins, and text colors. I had been wanting to do a blog audit anyways, making sure links were still good and linking to other internal posts, so I guess this is just an extension of that.

Unfortunately, there isn’t really a way to go through and mass change the feature images and include the new pins, which makes the process a little bit longer then I would like it to, but it is necessary to make everything cohesive. Plus, it makes everything so much prettier!

Those are the two big things I would like to get done. Other things I would like to accomplish before the end of the month include redoing an optin for each of my main categories: save money, make money, manage money. Then also creating a smaller paid product for each. Which is a TON of work!

But just continuing to write posts and do nothing else will not get me to my income goals. Look at all the other “big” bloggers out there, most of them have their own products on top of promoting other people’s products.

But this is where I run into the “perfectionist complex.” If it has my name on it, I want it to be PERFECT! But someone told me a long time ago when I was working on my dissertation, “finished is better than perfect,” and I try to remind myself of this every day. Otherwise, I’m sure I would not have even launched my blog yet because it would have never been perfect enough.

So try and remember that when you are working on your projects, finished is better than perfect. Don’t keep the world from your amazing creations because you think they are not good enough!

Small and Big wins for May:

Remember, a win is a win whether big or small. Getting up early this morning was both a big and a small win, but it also allowed me to get about an hour of work in before the kids got up (uninterrupted), which is a big win in my book!

➡ My Canadian blogger friend pushed me to put the new site live on June 1st, and although, technically it is not a May win, it is a BIG, HUGE win in my book! Had she not pushed me, I probably would have put it off until the site was “ready,” whatever that means.

➡ I got all my Boardbooster campaigns set up for all of my group boards, which took a bit for me to figure out how to do it correctly.

➡ I surpassed my 50 group board goal!

➡ I cracked 10,000 pageviews for the first time ever!

Sharing is caring! Make sure you pin this for later!

Top 10 Posts from May: 

• 10 Frugal Dinners for When You’re Broke
• 27 Frugal Pantry Staples to Keep on Hand for Quick and Cheap Meals
• Pay Off Your Debt Fast With the Debt Snowball Method!
• 25 Mother’s Day Gifts for $25 or Less That She’ll LOVE!
• Crazy Cheap and Delicious Iced Coffee Recipes
• How to STOP Living Paycheck to Paycheck Without Losing Your Sanity!
• 10 Fun and Frugal Activities to Keep Kids Busy All Summer Long!
• April 2018 Blog Income Report: $38.29
• How to Start Investing With Your Spare Change
• March 2018 Blog Income Report: -$10.53

How was your May? What are you big plans for June?