[ Journey ] Blog Income Report – How I Made $713.85 In May 2020

Join me on my journey with my monthly blog income reports collection.

I publish a monthly blog income reports which breaks down key blog statistics, how much the blog has earned and spent throughout the month. One thing I would like you to be aware of is that these reports were started 20 months after launching this blog.

Why?…

Because at the time of starting these case studies this blog was already launched back in August of 2018 – back then I never really published monthly income reports or progress as it was not a major focus at the time.

I will attempt to continue rank and build this blogs’ income and traffic without fancy link building tools while just focusing on – on page SEO, keyword research and publishing high quality unique content and tutorials.

After having steady growth I decided to do monthly case studies to see if I can continue to grow my monthly blog income and traffic without begging for guest posting opportunities, blog roundups or link building that every so called “blog guru” is telling every newbie to focus on in order for their blog to be successful.

I truly believe that I can grow my traffic and income by NOT doing what every other blogger out there is doing. I also tell you exactly what I did in each month and the precise steps I took to generate the traffic and income.

These blog traffic and income reports provide full transparency on all aspects of the blog including a range of statistics from unique social and organic visitors.

I decided to publish these to help myself track my own progress while helping others with what works and more importantly what didn’t work.

My hope is that somewhere in my monthly income, growth and traffic reports there will be information that will help other bloggers grow their blog from my trial, errors or successes.

Will my blog income, growth and traffic experiment be successful, or will I fail? You be the judge!


Welcome to my very first blog income report; these reports will be a part of my monthly blog growth case study.

At the end of every month I will publish a post like this one that shows you how this blog is progressing and everything I have done across the month to get it there.

Why I’m Doing Monthly Reports

At the time I’m starting these reports the world is smack in the middle of a global “corona virus” – COVID19 pandemic. These monthly reports will help me track my own progress and keep me accountable while helping any newbie blogger with what has worked for me and what has not worked during the month.

This will also prove if I can grow this blog to a full time income without chasing or building links to this blog and inspire those who may be struggling or thinking about starting a blog that with hard work and dedication you can grow your blogs’ traffic and make a full time income for yourself and family.

What I Have Done In May

In the beginning of the month I made some changes to the blog and focused on speed optimization. I removed Google Adsense from the blog and I’m currently testing for blog speed and affiliate income growth.

Although I’ve accomplish both desk top and mobile loading times of under 2 seconds I did see a drop in income from both the removal of the ads as well as the Google May update.

Most blogs have taken a hit but it looks like I’m gaining back in serps. Many bloggers old and new where either positively or negatively impacted so unique content still rules along with page speed.

I will continue my blog load speed optimization case study into June and provide an update if I decide to add the Google Adsense revenue stream back to the blog.

Content Creation

With all the COVID19 pandemic lockdown restrictions like I mentioned earlier I spent the month doing some back end tweaks to the blog, bloated plugin removals and data base clean up so I only published nine post this month.

Eight of those post where company review post while one was a WordPress Speed Optimization Tutorial – based on my results from the May case study, you can check out the tutorial if you like.

The focus was on long tail keywords for the review post so I’m eager to see how the eight post perform in the month ahead. I’m happy to say all nine post have already been indexed by Google so it’s only a matter of ranking in the serps.

Time Invested

Overall I’ve invested 60 hours this month on the blog with 30 of those hours geared toward keyword research and content creation. The other 30 hours was spent doing back end tweaks to the blog and speed optimization research.

What I Did for Traffic Generation
To generate traffic to the blog this month all I have done is –

• Twitter blog post tweets and re-tweet
• Post pins to Pinterest using my Tailwind tool
• Started using Blackhatworld and DigitalPoint forums
• Shamelessly beg people to re-share my blog post and tutorials

Remember my goal is to build a full time income without chasing or building links to this blog.

Crunching The Numbers

Throughout the month my traffic fluctuated due to the May Google update but my social traffic held strong with engagement from Pinterest. You can take a look at my visitor stats, most popular content, top traffic sources and search traffic for the month below.

Visitor Statistics

During May the blog had 3,706 visitors that resulted in overall page views of 4,895 for the month. Not too bad with no link building strategy in place.

Most Popular Content

My most popular content was a post on how to raise your credit score – I guest people are still looking for ways to boost or raise their credit scores during the month of May despite the pandemic and world wide lock downs.

That post alone contributed to the blog getting 1,216 page views this month. If traffic continues to that post I’ll be dropping links to leverage more traffic throughout the blog.

Top Traffic Sources

Despite having a focus on traffic from Pinterest my on page and off page SEO strategy is paying off due to receiving 1,590 unique visitors from organic traffic. That may not seem like a lot of organic traffic but it’s a win in my book when Google ranks your post and show your blog love.

Pinterest trailed close behind and brought in 1,320 in unique visitors to the blog this month. You can see the remainder of the traffic sources that showed some love this month.

Search Engine Traffic

This month overall 31 keywords brought in 1,649 visitors to the blog of which 1,590 were unique visitors and 59 were repeat visitors.

Forum Posts

I just started focusing on forums as a traffic generation experiment the last three days in May so to get 5 visits to my blog from Blackhatworld by just being active on the forum is a small win.

So continuing this strategy is a no-brainer – I’ll be ramping up my forum posting in June to see what my results will look like, so stay tuned.

Across May I only made 39 posts in forums which are broken down as follows-

• DigitalPoint – 11 posts ( no views )
• Blackhatworld – 28 posts ( 5 views )

Note that I’m not allowed to post links or set up a home age on DigitalPoint forum as yet so I’m assuming that’s why I did not get as least one page view from that forum to my blog.

I have no way of pointing people to my blog as yet but I’m excited to see what kind of results DigitalPoint forum will bring.

Income Report

I’m guessing most of you have scrolled to the bottom to see how much the blog has earned this month so without further ado-

Total Affiliate Earnings – $171.51

Where this income came from:

• ShareASale – $23.70
• Flexoffers – $55.60
• Clickbank – $46.21
• MyAutoPilot Traffic – $46.00

Total Ad Networks Earnings – $204.34

Where this income came from:

• Google Adsense – $204.34

Total Services Earnings – $385.00

Where this income came from:

• (2) Blog and plugin installation service – $94.00
• (3) Blog speed optimization services – $291.00
• Sponsorships – $0

Gross Income: $760.85

Total Expenses – $47.00

Where this money was spent:

• Blog hosting – $0 ( yearly subscription paid )
• Tailwind – $0 ( yearly subscription paid )
• WP Rocket cache plugin – $47.00 ( purchased one year license )

Total Net Income Less Expenses – $713.85

That means overall the blog has generated $713.85 in revenue during the month.

Now $713.85 that may not seem like a lot of income generated to some people; but all of this income was made from my blog as opposed to a 40 hour work week at a desk.

My income took a hit along with my decision to remove Google Adsense earlier in the month but I’ll continue my blog speed experiment to see if my affiliate income will be affected in a positive way in the months ahead due to my blog speed.

Remember one of the things I’m trying to achieve with this blog is to rank it in Google without doing any link building at all.

My Shameless Plea for Help

Will You Help Me? One of the traffic strategies I have been using is shamelessly asking people to share my blog post and tutorials.

If you want to help me out with my blog income, growth and traffic experiment and say thanks for my reviews or tutorials then please take 60 seconds to share them.

You can do that by-

• Posting on SEO & webmaster forums
• Sharing them with friends on social media
• Writing about them on your blog
• Sharing them with your e-mail list
• Leaving comments & ratings

Be sure to drop me a mail if you share them and I’ll shout you out in the monthly reports!

Before You Go

Now over to you – what do you think? Is SEO without link building even possible?

Do you have any tips or advice on what I should be doing to make this a success?

Is my zero link building case study setup for success or failure?

 

Hey man, Good stuff! Congrats on your success and i'm sure you'll continue to see bigger profits.. I just started a blog myself and will be focusing on my long term traffic by using pinterest and youtube..My site is built just for social media with old reused articles i bought from elsewhere.. I'm starting from zero and will be focusing on my marketing real soon..It's always nice to hear successful stories like yours and thanks for sharing, best of luck to ya and keep us updated..