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In this post, I’m sharing my February 2020 blog income report. It was a tough decision to put this sensitive information out here in the public but a lot of people were interested in finding out how blogs make money so I decided to share this anyway in order to help those thinking about starting a new blog to earn an income from home.
Also, with these income reports, my goal is to break some myths about things like pageviews, and the number of followers. I’ll talk more about this later.
When you read this report, I want you take note of my pageviews and the income. The fact that I was able to make $2516 with JUST 19.3k pageviews is a proof that you DON’T need to have a HUGE number of views to make money from your blog.
In this income report, I’ve combined the revenue from both my new blog (Cut N Make Crafts) and my old blog (Sew Some Stuff). This is because believe it or not, my old blog STILL makes money. Yep, I haven’t published a SINGLE post on that blog since December 2018, that’s like a WHOLE year yet, I’m making approximately $392 per month from that dormant blog. This is the power of Pinterest and I’ll talk more about it in a minute.
February was my 11th month of blogging on my NEW blog Cut N Make Crafts. Prior to this I was blogging at Sew Some Stuff for the past 7 years.
I started blogging in June 2013, in order to earn an income to support myself during college. To be honest, it wasn’t easy AT ALL. I made GAZILLION mistakes and didn’t know what I was doing until I joined this AH-MAZING course, Elite Blog Academy.
I’ll talk more about it in the post.
First, let’s have a look at the January’s stats.
Table of Contents
FEBRUARY STATS
Pageviews: new blog 19,300 (up from 14k); old blog: 40,152 (down from 45k)
Mailing list subcribers: 7278 (I’m not collecting any emails on my old blog because it was pretty useless as no body was interested in buying my products. Last I checked my old list had 25k subscribers)
Instagram followers: 90.6k
YouTube subscribers: 1160
A NOTE ABOUT STATS
As you can see above, I’ve shared very limited stats. That’s because based on my previous blogging experince, I’ve found all the other stats pretty useless so I’ve stopped tracking them altogether.
I had 10k Facebook followers but this did NOT help with my income or pageviews. On Pinterest, I had 100k followers, yet it didn’t DIRECTLY effect the number of pageviews. What DID help with Pinterest was the STRATEGY that I used for sharing pins. Those pins that I saved continue to bring in traffic to my OLD blog thanks to which I’m making $400 – $500 per month by doing absolutely nothing. This shows the POWER of having great posts and a good Pinterest strategy. When done right, these can bring in revenue even when you’re on a break. NO OTHER job does that!
FEBRUARY REVENUE
Product sales (new blog only)= $1807
Ads: new blog = $68.82 (up from $33); old blog = $392
Etsy SVG shop: $13
Affiliate income (old+new blog) = $259
- Amazon: $81
- Shareasale: $153
(I’ve combined the affiliate revenue together because I’m using the same platforms for affiliates for both my old and new blog and everything is pretty much intermingled).
Total revenue for February 2020 from both old and new blogs: $2516
WHY WAS THE REVENUE LESSER THAN JAN?
If you remember, last month my income was $3154. But this month I made almost $600 less. There are two major reasons for this
- There were 2 whole days missing in February as opposed to 31 days in Jan
- Secondly, Instagram banned me from sending messages due to which I wasn’t able to promote my products using the strategy that I always use. This was a real bummer and due to this I was not able to beat my previous month’s goal.
CHANGES TO THE BLOG
If you compare my January income report with Feb’s you’ll notice, my new blog’s pageviews were higher than last month. Also, my ad revenue doubled from $33 to $68.
This is because, starting from 20th February, I challenged myself to share a brand new post EVERY SINGLE DAY. And as you can see from the graph above, this made a significant change to my traffic.
I also started working on driving traffic to the blog through Pinterest, by using the strategies that I learned in Elite Blog Academy.
Like I mentioned earlier, Pinterest played a HUGE role in old my blog’s success thanks to which I still receive 40k-50k pageviews every month which brings in $400-$500 on autopilot.
ETSY SHOP LAUNCH
Last month, I spent the first few days preparing my Etsy SVG shop launch to add an additional stream of income. My goal is to make at-least $2k in 6 months from this new shop. Right now, I’ve set a goal to publish a new SVG for sale everyday and it’s going quite smooth. I’ll share more details about the shop in my shop income report. If you’re looking to start an SVG shop to bring in an extra income, stay tuned for the report!
HOW DID I MAKE $2516 FROM BLOGGING?
The answer is straightforward and I’m not going to lie. All this is thanks to the one and only Elite Blog Academy.
I can’t describe in words HOW MUCH this course has helped me for the past couple of years in making my dream to earn an income from home come true.
Prior to enrolling in this course I had NO IDEA about HOW to make a sustainable income from blogging.
Honestly speaking, I’m good with techy stuff BUT I suck at developing strategies. I needed a step-by-step plan to guide me in the right direction. Before I enrolled in Elite Blog Academy, I was relying on tips from other bloggers who SEEMED to be doing good in the online world and guess what, NONE OF THESE TIPS worked for me.
Once I enrolled in Elite Blog Academy where Ruth Soukup (the founder of EBA) shares HER VERY OWN blogging success masterplan highlighting step by step the things new bloggers NEED to do to earn a sustainble income from their blog, I was able to FULLY understand how this blogging thing works.
The course taught me the importance of having a STRONG email list and as you can see from my income breakdown above, the sole source of my income was (a) my list of 7k subscribers (b) my Instagram account.
I SOLELY used my Instgram account to grow my list to 7k subscribers in just 11 months.
But where did I learn about growing my list? Elite Blog Academy. Thanks to this course, I grew my old blog’s list to 25k and now 7k in just a couple of months.
Elite Blog Academy ALSO taught me everything about Pinterest. Thanks to the strategies covered in the course, my OLD blog still makes me around $450 per month with LITERALLY zero efforts.
Elite Blog Academy also helped me change my focus from growing my pageviews to building my OWN products and as you can see from the revenue above, thanks to this mindset, I put all my efforts in creating a product that my audience wanted and it actually paid off. This is a proof that you CAN make a full time income from blogging even if your pageviews are less provided you have a strong social media following.
GOALS FOR MARCH 2020
- Start growing my pageviews so that I can unleash the power of high views to boost my income.
- Grow my list to 15k in preparation for the course launch in the mid of this year.
- Hit 30k pageviews so I can apply to a better ad company. Right now I’m using Adsense on my new blog but they keep on blocking my ads whenever my traffic goes beyond a certain limit. On my old blog, I have AdThrive ads, they manage EVERYTHING for me. I don’t have to worry about making any code changes manually like I have to on Adsense.
If you’d like to learn MORE about making an income from craft blogging, feel free to sign up for my blogging tips email list below.
