As you can tell from my blog name, I’m a mom! I created this blog to help to share my super organized mom tips and to hopefully create a website that would bring in some extra income to give me more time with my girl. I was ECSTATIC that I made money in my first month blogging! $11.28 isn’t a whole lot, but the fact that I made any income in the first month is incredible to me. I’ve detailed my blog income report below as well as listed my ideas for the coming months to see how I can grow more!
Disclosure: some of the links below are affiliate links meaning, at no cost to you, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. All items are products that I have personally used and believe in
Statistics
Before the launch, I had 4 blog posts that would be the foundation of my site. In addition to these, I also made 2 infographics to go along with the blog posts.
For the infographics, I put them on the site in an “opt in locker” which means that in order to download the free content, users would enter their email addresses which added them to my mailing list. This worked to get me 8 subscribers. Not a huge number, anything above a zero is a success in this first month! I use WordPress for my website, so I used the free Opt In Panda plugin for this. It also shows statistics on how many people visited the page that didn’t sign up so I can get a good idea of how well it’s working.
I only wrote one blog post the whole month (BAD first time blogger but GOOD mommy!) which included an infographic as well. This is one of my big goals for next month: to try to carve out time for writing more posts.
Overall, the website saw 607 new visitors. Amazing start! The acquisitions (as reported by google analytics) were the following:
- 5 from organic search
- 16 from Facebook
- 534 from Pinterest
- 7 from Instagram
The Pinterest number is what I anticipated would be the highest because I’ve put in the most work on it (see below). I was really surprised that Facebook was so high, Instagram was so low and that organic search was there at all! My thoughts on each:
Organic Search
In thinking about how in the world people found my website from searching in just one month and the thing that I came back to was the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. It’s completely free and SUPER powerful. It makes SEO simple, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do with WordPress, in my opinion.
I’m truly in awe that anything came from my Facebook posts because I have no Facebook followers right now! I posted each of my blog posts with a short blurb and just one hashtag each. I didn’t think Facebook was much of a hashtag engine, but I guess I was wrong! Now that I’ve seen how this can work, I’m going to focus more on this next month.
My Pinterest board saw 30,400 viewers in just ONE MONTH!!! This is 100% in thanks to the amazing website Tailwind and their Tailwind tribes. Tailwind is auto publishing for Pinterest. It sets the times when your Pins are most likely to be seen and pins at that time for you. It also has great groups of like minded people (called “tribes”) who share each other’s pins for greater reach. There’s a free trial for it, and it’s my number one recommendation (and honestly it’s what I attribute to my first month’s income!) I could not be more pleased with it!
I did gain 12 Pinterest followers this month, none from my pins (interestingly enough) but from my following bigger blogs Pinterest pages that were similar to my own.
This one is my biggest disappointment. I really thought Instagram was going to get more people to my site, but it hasn’t shown much promise for the amount of effort that I’ve put into it so far. I posted once a day on weekdays and followed similar posters. I used Tailwind for this as well to find optimal times to post and for auto posting. A note: if you decide to subscribe with Tailwind, you pay a fee per social media account instead of for all accounts together. If you’re looking for a cheaper/free option, I use Later.com for my other businesses.
I spent a good amount of time looking through Instagram to follow similar posters and I used 30 hashtags per post (the max you can), so I gained 46 followers.
I do have a Twitter page that I have put absolutely no effort into 🙂 I did the same with Twitter as Facebook and just used one hashtag and a link to the blog posts, but no clicks so far and no followers. I’m going to leave this one on the back burner for now as I have a few other avenues that I want to improve first.
So, where did the blog income come from?
I created an Amazon Associates account (which is free, just make sure your website is built first because there is a super easy approval process). Within my blog posts, there were recommended products and I used my custom links to direct my readers there. It doesn’t charge any additional fees for my readers, but I get a small commission when they purchase something from Amazon (even if they purchase something in addition to what I recommended). I also get “bounties” for when someone creates a baby registry with my link. It couldn’t be easier and I’m $11.28 richer so far! 😉
Goals for next month
- Write more than 1 blog post 😉
- Focus on Facebook followers and adding more hashtags on Facebook links
- Continue to grow Pinterest followers
If you’re a new blogger, I hope my first blog income report gives you hope that you can earn some income with just a little bit of work. Good luck!
