Last Updated on August 4, 2020 by ellduclos
If you stumbled upon this post you are probably wondering how I was able to triple my monthly blog income. YEP, I was able to TRIPLE my monthly blog income this year. In June 2019 I made about $3,000 blogging and a year later, in June 2020 I made $10,000 blogging.
I have been working on reaching a $10,000 month for a while now and it was not easy! It took a lot of time and dedicated work. In this post I am going to share with you exactly where my income came from and the steps I took to triple my monthly blog income in a year.
Disclaimer: Affiliate links are used and you can read my full disclosure here. Also note this post is for educational purposes. I had many bloggers appreciate my blog income reports in the past. I am not trying to brag in anyway. Just trying to help you reach your blog income goals too!
How I Tripled My Monthly Blog Income
I first want to share a screenshot of my Paypal sale insights. In this screenshot you will see the amount of income I collected via Paypal last June compared to this June. (Note: I don’t collect every single payment via Paypal so my direct deposit payments are not featured.)
Not featured are direct deposit payments and a few client payments that I receive at the end of the month. (still a few days left in June as I write this) BUT, as you can see my monthly income MORE THAN tripled from last year!
Let’s talk about where this income came from this month. I am a huge believer in focusing on multiple streams of income if you want to have a $10,000 month. Some bloggers are able to make amazing money through just sponsored posts or from one source of income however, that’s not my focus. I prefer passive income and working with clients so I focus on a few different sources and I choose not to focus on sponsorships.
Total Blog Income June 2020: $10,005.02
This income is based on BOTH of my blogs, this one and my lifestyle blog. Collectively between both blogs I was able to make $10,005.02 before taxes and expenses.
1. ADS – $731.11
The first way I made income this month was through ads. For the past few months RPM for ads have been lower due to COVID-19 but, between my two blogs I was still able to make $731.11in April which I got paid out for in June.
A lot of the sales I make and get paid out for is income I made the month or two months before. There is usually a 30-60 day wait period for payouts.
I know a lot of people don’t like having ads on their blog but it’s PASSIVE income. All you have to do is write good content and market that content. I use Mediavine and really enjoy them. Unfortunately they recently raised their requirements so you need at least 50,000 sessions on your blog in the last 30 days to qualify.
If you struggle to grow your blog traffic, Pinterest has been a game changer for me. I have been teaching Pinterest marketing for 3 years now. Learn more about how to master Pinterest marketing here.
2. Client work – $1,777.35
The second source of blog income for June 2020 is client work. I made $1,777.35 working with clients. I offer Pinterest management services and Pinterest audits. My client income is actually lower this month because I had a few unexpected issues pop up in June that affected my mental health. I needed to take a step back from client work and focus on dealing with those issues before picking back up. Even though my client income dropped, my passive income was the best it’s ever been.
3. Affiliate Sales – $2,631.22
My affiliate income was really great in May so when I got paid out in June for my May sales I was extremely happy. I love affiliate marketing because again, it’s passive income! You can make money in your sleep with proper affiliate marketing strategies in place.
Here are the affiliate programs that I use that get me paid each month:
- Amazon
- Shareasale
- Tailwind
- Legal Bundle
- Siteground
- Pixistock
- Stupid Simple SEO
- Styled Stock Society
- Hello You Designs
- Creative Market
4. Digital Products – $4,865.34
Lastly, my favorite way to make money blogging is through digital products that I created. This is an awesome way to make passive income. You create the digital product once and sell it on autopilot multiple times!
This income is from my Pinterest course sales in April (Teachable has a wait period before payout)
Now if I was actually getting paid for my June 2020 course sales, I made almost $8,000 just in course sales in June (this is because I also launched my SECOND course this month!)
BUT, I won’t receive that payment until August.
I also launched 86 customizable Pinterest Templates in June! I use SendOwl to sell my Pinterest Templates and that pay gets automatically deposited to my Paypal account right away which is nice.
A lot of bloggers feel as if they need to blog about blogging in order to create a digital product but that is NOT true!
Here are some digital product ideas:
- printable pages (journaling, planners, organizational charts etc.)
- stock photos
- ebooks (can be motivational and related to your niche doesn’t need to be about blogging)
- ecourses (can be related to your niche. Courses related to health, personal growth, fitness, productivity, mindset, etc.)
- digital graphics
- templates
These are just a few examples. Take some time to brainstorm ideas that relate to your niche.
That’s my main 4 sources of income.
NOW HOLD UP – Just because I made $10,000 doesn’t mean that it’s all mine. I have blog expenses and taxes too! Let’s talk about those.
Blog Expenses For June
- Keysearch $17 – I use keysearch as a keyword research tool for SEO. I used to struggle with SEO until I took the Stupid Simple SEO course. SEO is HUGE and can help increase your sales. I recommend you check out his free webmaster class here if you are struggling with SEO.
- Siteground $50 – I have two websites hosted with Siteground which costs me about $600 a year or $50 a month.There are cheaper plans if you start out with the basic!
- Pinterest Ads $197.10 – I tested out a few Pinterest ads on my Boss Girl Bloggers account
- SendOwl $15 – This is what I use to sell some of my digital products and pdfs.
- Teachable $39 – I use Teachable to host my courses
- Stock Photos $66 – I use stock photos for my graphics and on this blog. My memberships equal out to about $66 a month. I use pixistock, styled stock society, hautestock, and Canva Pro
- Mailerlite $35 – I use Mailerlite as my email list builder for both of my sites.
- Canva Pro $12.95 – I love Canva. I use it to create all of my graphics and their pro version is an essential to my business.
- Podbean $14 – I use Podbean to host my podcast
Most of the time bloggers are hesitant to invest in their blog but, if you want to make a full time income blogging you need to treat it like a business and INVEST. I spent about $446.05 this month on expenses so that makes my income now $9,558.97 before taxes.
You can claim your blog expenses when doing your taxes which is awesome! So keep that in mind.
I usually save about 25% of my monthly incometo prepare myself for taxes. Taxes are NO JOKE and you want to make sure you are saving and doing quarterly taxes if you don’t want to get slapped with a HUGE payment at the end of the year.
What helped me triple my blog income?
1. Time
The most important contributing factor to my blog income tripling is time. A lot of bloggers will go into blogging expecting to make income right away and that’s usually not the case. It takes time.
I have been blogging since April 2017. You can read my other blog income report that shares how I made $40,000 my first full year blogging and how I made my first $1,200 6 months into my blogging journey here. I also share my Q1 of 2020 blog income report here.
Be patient with yourself and don’t let others’ blogging journeys effect your own. Often times we compare our beginning to someone else’s middle or end. When you compare you start to feel down about your own content. Instead use it to fuel your energy to want to continue to learn and keep pushing. If I can do it and if they can do it, you can do it!
2. I created multiple streams of income
Another huge factor of my blog income tripling was because I created multiple streams of income for myself. I created a second blog and got accepted to Mediavine on BOTH of my blogs which helped me increase my income.
I suggest trying to focus on multiple sources of income instead of just one and I highly recommend focusing on passive income which include products you can sell on auto pilot through Pinterest and email marketing. It also includes affiliate marketing that allows you to earn commission when someone purchases via your link.
Adding additional sources of passive income helped increase my blog income this year.
In 2020 I also tried focusing on promoting high commission affiliate products that I love instead of multiple products with smaller commissions. This helped me improve my affiliate income a ton! It’s hard to find high commission products though. You can try to reach out to the brand directly and see if you can work out a collab with a higher commission per sale. Doesn’t hurt to ask and present an idea.
If you are wanting to learn how to increase your affiliate sales, create and sell digital products successfully, and attract your dream clients for services then I highly recommend you take this course! You will learn it all step by step.
3. I fixed my marketing strategy
My Pinterest course and affiliate sales have sky rocketed this year because I focused on improving my marketing strategy. Thanks to improving my marketing strategy, more people got hands on my course and it spreads word of mouth.
Last year I didn’t focus as much on email marketing but, little did I know I was missing out on tons of potential sales by ignoring my email list. I started creating more sales funnels and tripwires and my income started improving almost immediately. I talk about this in detail in Mastering Sales With Ell.
The combination of email marketing, Pinterest marketing, SEO, social media marketing and engaging in my Facebook community has been successful for me. You can read more about my content marketing strategy in this post.
I also focused on creating quality content that helped me push my affiliate and digital product sales a few times a month and focused heavily on marketing that content.
I spent less time creating content and more time marketing content that had the potential to help me increase my income. If you have a blog post that includes affiliate links you’ll want to focus on marketing that blog post rather than focusing on marketing content that doesn’t include affiliate links. Always push your money making content!
You don’t need to publish a new blog post every day to make money blogging. You want to focus on creating a few quality blog posts each month and really focus on marketing that content. Marketing is KEY! Without a marketing strategy you want get the sales you want.
I also had a lot of affiliates sign up to become an affiliate of my Pinterest course which helped increase my sales as well.
4. I got clear about my income goals
In 2020 I really got clear about my income goals. I used to not set monthly income goals for myself. Once I started doing so I began to feel more motivated to actually reach the goal I set each month.
For example, let’s say I set a goal of making at least $3,000 selling my Pinterest course for the month.
I would then break that number down into how many courses I need to sell each month to reach that goal. My course is currently $39 so, I would need to sell at least 77 courses that month to reach my goal which equals out to about 2-3 sales a day!
When you break down your income goals to daily goals it seems a lot more achievable.
Try to set income goals for each source of blog income and then set goals for yourself each day that will help you reach those income goals.
If I wanted to sell at least 2-3 courses each day I would try to:
- Mention my course in my FB group when it helps answer a member’s question
- Send out a tweet about my course
- Create new pins that link to my course each day that I pin
- I could test out an ad on Pinterest. I don’t use ads on my lifestyle Pinterest account since I currently don’t sell a product related to that niche. I don’t need to spend money on blog traffic with that account as I get organic Pinterest traffic. I only recommend Pinterest ads if there is a benefit like (email list sign ups, digitlal products, promoting services or high potential for an affiliate sale)
These are just some daily goals I could set to help me reach that one income goal.
5. I invested
When it comes to making money blogging you want to invest. Everyone is so hesitant to invest in a course, self-hosting, and just in general when it comes to blogging. One of the mindset blocks I hear from most bloggers is “I don’t want to invest in my blog until I am making money from it.”
Hate to break it to you but, that mindset isn’t going to get you very far. The best thing I could have done for my blog is invested in things that help me learn, save time, and grow.
Don’t get me wrong, courses can be a hit or miss. Everyone is making a course nowadays because they think it’s the only way you can make money blogging. You have new bloggers creating courses on a topic that they just learned from purchasing a course from someone else, instead of promoting the course they originally took. (It can be a hot mess express)Do your research before buying a course. Always!
You want to make sure you trust the person who you are purchasing the course from . If you are wise about the courses you invest in, it will be worth the cost.
The best part about courses is that they help you save time and time is extremely valuable when you are trying to build a business.If you can get all the info in a course instead of researching for hours (which most of the time leads to outdated info anyway) then that’s investing your money wisely. You then have more time to put into content creation and proper marketing strategies.
I invested in the Stupid Simple SEO course this year and I was hesitant because it was over $300. I am not one to usually spend that much on a course but DANG it was worth it! There’s so much that goes into SEO and instead of spending tons of time researching the topic, I learned it all in that one course. BONUS because the content was all updated.
When it comes to investing into your blog you want to invest in things that will save you time and help you learn and grow.
Use your invested money as a way to light a fire under your butt to actually make blogging full time work for you! When I know my money is invested in something I am going to work 10x harder to make it worth my money. If I continue going about blogging without spending a dime, I have nothing to lose and therefore, I don’t try as hard to make it work out.
When you invest you don’t want to learn and then let it go. You want to learn and then put what you learned into action. I see a lot of people who will purchase a course, skim through it and then hope for the best without implementing what’s taught. I also see people who don’t read the course in full. That’s wasting your investment and it will lead to disappointment.
Learn a strategy and implement the strategies consistently.
6. Personal connections and trust
When it comes to making sales blogging there is nothing more important than having an engaged audience that feels connected with you and trusts you fully. Without connection and trust you are never going to make the sales you want to make.
In 2020 I continued to put out free valuable content, I continued to engage with my audience, and I continued to communicate in my Facebook community with my members to build personal connections. When people trust you and you continue to be authentic and provide real value, your sales will continue to grow.
Authenticity is so important. It’s so easy to look at a blogger that you might feel inspired by and want to copy their exact move, step by stepeven down to their branding. You don’t even realize you are actually just trying to copy their success and hope that it works for you. The reason these bloggers are so successful is because they are authentic. They learned strategies from other successful bloggers but then made it their OWN. Every single strategy that works for one blogger isn’t going to always work for you. You have to tweak what you learn and make it work for you and your audience. Don’t try to be a copied version of another blogger. Be authentically you!
Overall, despite all the crazy things that have happened in 2020, it has definitely been a year of growth for me so far. It’s crazy the year is half way over. Now is the time to really learn, fix your marketing strategies and set those blog income goals.
If you are ready to take action leave a comment saying HECK YEAH!! Because now is the time to take control. You can do it! I believe in you!
If you read this and haven’t started a blog yet, NOW IS THE TIME. Sign up for my FREE “start a money making blog” crash course here!
