Blog Income & Traffic Report: July 2020

Welcome to Another Mommy Blogger’s seventh blog income and traffic report!

Remember last month when I was super excited that RPM’s were on the rise and I was very optimistic for July? Yea well little ol’ me forgot that July is one of the worst months of the year for ad income, second only to January.

Figures right? The country opens back up and things start to get better, but in one of the lowest paying months of the year. Just so you know I’m laughing because if I don’t I’ll cry.

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be dramatic. I have worked so hard to get to where I am and I am so grateful.

I worked so many hours for pennies to get to a point where I can make over $2,500/month from home working 2-3 hours a day.

I have no boss. No set schedule. I can work from anywhere and the best part is I get to raise my kids. Which if you know me that has always been my dream.

I’m happy, but guys this is nothing money. It pays the bills yea, but with nothing left over. We have a baby coming in September. We have an old house to finish. I feel like I’ve put in the work and I have the numbers to be making money I can do something with.

I know it’s coming, I’m SO CLOSE. It’s just hard waiting.

Anyway, thanks for listening to me vent and ramble. Let’s get into the numbers for this month.

Why Am I Sharing My Blog Income & Traffic Report?

It seems a little weird doesn’t it? Posting my mom blog income report for the whole world to see?

Trust me, the reason is not so I can brag about how much money I make. This is far from brag worthy money and I only plan on publishing my income reports for a year.

So why in the world am I sharing this incredibly personal information with you today? For one very important reason:

I 100% would not have started my mom blog and be on this road to financial freedom if it wasn’t for other bloggers sharing their income reports.

It just wouldn’t have happened. I mean let’s get real, the idea that you can make money online from home sounds like a pipe dream.

You’ve got to be someone special or one in a million to pull that off right?

But I kept reading these mom blog income reports. One after another seriously I couldn’t get enough of them. All these stories of ordinary moms making money blogging from home and I was hooked.

Why I Started My Mom Blog?

I started Another Mommy Blogger in February 2018 because I desperately wanted to be a stay at home mom. Unfortunately, living on one income with a family is not an easy thing to do.

At the time I was incredibly fortunate to have a job working part time as a nanny and was able to bring my daughter with me.

I loved being a nanny but if I’m being honest cooking, cleaning, and splitting your time with someone else’s kids starts to wear on your heart when you wish you were giving all your attention to your own household.

So I started my mom blog. After a lot of hard work and prayer I’m making enough money to stay home with my daughter. Things aren’t perfect and I still have a long way to go but this is a dream come true.

Who Can Make Money Blogging?

I’m writing this mom blog income report because I want to get through to some moms today. I want to reach out to any moms who hate leaving their kids for that 9 to 5 just to end up giving a large portion of the money they make to pay for daycare.

I don’t make money blogging because I’m special or because I’m some tech wizard. The truth is I’m not either of those things. Far from it actually.

I’m a college drop out. I didn’t have any money. My husband and I were living out of one bedroom with our baby at his parents house when I started this blog.

Along the way my computer died and to this day I’ve been running this blog from an iPad praying it lasts long enough until I can afford a new computer.

I didn’t have the funds to take Elite Blogging Academy or to pay for any other blogging books or courses. I have literally not taken a single course or paid for any information to help me blog.

The only reason my blog is successful and makes money is because I have given this my all and I never gave up.

I’m telling you my story because I am the definition of an “ordinary mom”. I share about my journey through motherhood and tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way. All from the comfort of my own home and. IT. MAKES. ME. MONEY.

If I can do this, then anyone who is willing to put in the work can do this.

If you want to make money blogging its time to push aside the doubt and the excuses. If you believe in yourself, if you want this enough and you put in the work I guarantee you can build a profitable blog too.

If you’re interested in starting a mom blog I’ve written an easy to follow guide HERE.

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, please read my disclosure here.

Blog Income & Traffic Report: July 2020

Income:

Mediavine: 2359.12

Amazon Associates: 166.71

Awin: 295.71

Total Income: 2821.54

That is $156.67 less than last month which hurts a little considering my traffic was higher this month by a decent amount.

July is a rough month for ad income but July 31st did mark my one year anniversary with Mediavine and I got a 1% raise. It’s not much but I’ll take it.

Expenses:

imark Interactive: 27.00

BigScoots: 34.95

Canva Pro: 12.95

Total Expenses: 74.90

Blog Traffic

Pageviews: 242,581

That’s an increase of 28,418 compared to last month, and I still made less money. It’s frustrating. Buuut we are heading in to the best months of the year. Traffic and revenue should only go up from here. Hopefully.

RPM: 11.63

RPM means revenue per 1000 pageviews. So for every 1000 views I got this month I made $11.63. That’s an decrease of $2.28 compared to last month.

Boo July 👎 that’s all I have to say 😂

Plans For August

I wish “crawl under a rock and not come out until this pandemic is over” was an option.

I’m currently 35 weeks pregnant. So I’m about to have a baby and I was really counting on my almost 4 year old to be in preschool three days a week, but it’s really looking like that isn’t going to happen.

I’m doing my best to prepare myself for the newborn stage. I really want to enjoy it this time and avoid the postpartum anxiety I suffered from with my first born.

My plans for August are to do everything I wish I did before my first baby was born and I’m doing a pretty good job of that. Also still trying to get some extra content written so that when the baby comes in September I won’t have to do much work wise for a while.

I’m not where I want to be but the best part about what I do is at this point the income is mostly passive. As long as I keep up my Pinterest strategy and put out at least four posts a month on the blog I don’t see myself going backwards.

I’m so grateful that I will have an income when this baby comes that only requires me to pop in and check on my blog during nap time. Do a little work maybe an hour or two a few times a week. I’m sure I won’t see any growth doing that but I’ll be content just maintaining what I have while enjoying my family for a little while.

Email Subscribers: 32

That’s an increase of 2 from last month. Pathetic, I know. I’m so embarrassed of this number and I only share it with you for two reasons.

One is to show you that if you don’t actively try to gain email subscribers then they will only trickle in at a pace slower than death. Because as I mentioned in my last income report I do not have a plan in motion to gain email subscribers.

Two is to show you that even though I do believe that growing an email list is critical to your success as a blogger, you can still make money without one.

A great way for mom bloggers to gain email subscribers is to create free printables and to promote them with an email service provider. If your readers want your free printable, let’s say it’s a printable family meal plan with grocery list, they sign up for your email list and they get the printable.

The only reason I haven’t done this yet is because I still don’t have a computer and it’s almost impossible for me to create printables with my iPad. That and email service providers cost money as well.

So if you’re like me and not ready to spend the money yet, know that it is still possible to make money blogging without an email list. Just know you are missing out on a lot of free traffic.

Social Media Followers

Right now I’m still only using Pinterest and Facebook to promote my blog. Pinterest accounts for 99% of my traffic so it gets most of my attention.

Pinterest: 3462

An increase of 246 from last month.

Facebook: 217

An increase of 0 from last month.

Blogging Strategy & Resources

So I’m sure you’re wondering how I managed to get almost 250,000 pageviews in July with only 32 email subscribers and 3,679 total social media followers.

My secret weapon is PINTEREST. About 99% of the people that come to my blog find me on Pinterest. Followed by a very small amount finding me through Google and Facebook.

Its definitely not a good thing to have all your eggs in one basket and I would love some more traffic from Google. But that takes time and I’m sure there are some secrets I’m missing from courses I haven’t been able to take yet.

Thats something I plan on working on this year. For beginners though I recommend focusing on Pinterest.

Pinterest Strategy

You can drive a huge amount of traffic to your blog using Pinterest without a huge following because Pinterest shows your pins to your followers first and then based on their popularity they distribute them to the entire Pinterest population.

From my Pinterest stats I can see that even though I only have a just under 3500 followers my pins get seen 2.1 million times a month.

I’ve gotten my reach on Pinterest to over a million by doing the following.

– Creating multiple images for every one of my blog posts that can be shared on Pinterest and linked back to the my posts.

– Setting up a keyword rich profile including adding keywords in my about section, board titles, board descriptions and pin descriptions.

– Pinning consistently 15-25 times a day about 80% my own pins and 20% other peoples pins, pretty evenly spread out between 10am-12am

I can not stress how important it is to be consistent on Pinterest. You can’t do all your pinning in one hour once a day or even worse only pinning a few times a week.

It sounds like a lot of work but for me it only equals about 15 minutes spread out through the day.

I pin other peoples content to my boards between 10am and 6pm manually and then I use Tailwind to schedule my pins to automatically pin between 11am -12am (mostly in the later half of the day and maybe one or two pins in the morning)

Blog Strategy

My secret blogging weapon and again I can not stress this enough is CONSISTENCY. You have to be consistently putting out new blog posts. Aim for 8 posts a month but don’t post less than 4.

I went hard my first three months with this blog and my traffic started to grow pretty quickly. But then we moved to a new house and I lost focus so my traffic slipped. It wasn’t until I spent month after month consistently putting out 5-8 posts a month that my traffic finally exploded and continues to grow.

This is my blog traffic by month since I started my blog in 2018.

I would start building momentum again but something would come up and I wouldn’t do anything for a few weeks and when I’d start working on the blog again it was almost like starting over.

It wasn’t until I spent month after month consistently putting out 5-8 posts a month that my traffic finally exploded and continues to grow.

You get what you work for. I’m able to put in about 25 hours a week working on my blog. If I had more time I’m sure I would be more successful. If I hadn’t lost focus so much in the beginning I know I’d be father ahead now. You get what you work for.

I am so proud of how far I have come though and I’m excited to see where this year takes this blog. I plan on sharing my monthly blog income and traffic reports for this entire year so you can follow along and learn from what I’m doing.