My Blog Income Reports - How I Made $3178 with a New Blog (2024)

Updates made in June 2018. This post was originally written in Sep 2017.

My blog is a little over 6 months old now, still a baby hehe 🙂 But I think it’s a good time to sum up some numbers and see if this blogging journey was the right thing to start.

From this post, you’ll find out how I made $3178 in my first 6 months blogging. I started from scratch, having a brand new domain name, a Pinterest account with 0 followers, same for Facebook and Twitter accounts associated with my blog.

In fact, I never used Pinterest before starting this blog, but from this post, you’ll find out how Pinterest literally built all my blog traffic and how I managed to increase my pageviews from Pinterest 10 times in just a week!

Moreover, I have to remind you and myself of something that I wish wasn’t true. Yes, I’m still at my 9-5 job and I have just about 2-3 hours a day to work on my blog. And not even every day, to be honest. So I hope this income report will show you that you can start a blog now as a side-hustle without sacrificing your stable job. And you can quit WHEN you are ready financially and mentally.

If you are interested to see how you can also start your blog in about 10-20 min, I have adetailed post about it here.

This post contains affiliate links to Bluehost. This means I might receive a commission if you buy their hosting using my link. For more information, see my disclosureshere.

If you are looking for an affordable hosting company to start a blog, I recommend you Bluehost which I use for this blog. When you use my link to Bluehost, I receive a commission, and you get hosting + free domain name + free SSL certificate (https) at a 50% discounted price.

INCOME REPORT

• Flexoffers: 1250.25 – so far, this is my best paying affiliate network. I’m very happy with the results from Flexoffers, they have very supportive account managers who even offered me a special commission on certain offers which were converting really good on my site. If you are not registered with them, you might be losing very a good affiliate income!

• Bluehost: 1233 – I run my blog with this hosting provider, they also give you a free domain and free SSL certificate if you use my link to register.
• iGain: 547.5 – I get mostly survey offers from this network, and the income is the third best in my list. Update (2022): this network doesn’t exist anymore, hence no link to it.
• StudioPress: 80.46 – very nice WordPress themes catalog with great support.
• X-Theme: 18.3 – this specific theme is used on my site.
• Tailwind: 15
• Shareasale: 13
• Monetize: 12.54
• Media.net: 4.28
• MaxBounty: 4

Total: 3178.33

• Bluehost hostingwith a free domain for 1 year and free SSL certificate – $99. Great deal!
• Tailwind– 1-year subscription for $90.I’ve got a referral credit of $30, normally the price per year is $120. You can have one month of Premium or spend the 15$ credit to get a discount on your yearly subscription withmy referral link.
• X-Theme– I use this theme on my blog, the price is 72$.

Total expenses – $277

Want to know how I drive over 170,000 pageviews/mo to my blog from Pinterest? And how organic (free) Pinterest traffic allowed me to make over$6000/mo with my blogs? Learn how I do it with a 30-min Free Pinterest Workshop >>

TRAFFIC REPORT

I started my blog in the middle of February 2017, I created a whole newPinterest accountassociated with my blog, so I had 0 traffic and 0 followers for starters. This is how my Pinterest traffic has been gradually growing during these 6 months.

You can see a slight decline in August, I’m not sure it happens with most of the bloggers, but I read regular reports from far better-established bloggers, that they also have a seasonal traffic decline in August. I think it all depends on the niche since I’m generally focused on ways to make money online and blogging, probably my audience just decided to take vacations in August and stay away from their PCs.

However, in September, which is not even finished yet, I have an increase in traffic caused by my new Pinterest strategy. I will give a little more details about it a few paragraphs below, keep reading 🙂

Pinterest keeps bringing the majority of my site’s traffic, however, there is a good tendency because from 94% the share of Pinterest traffic went to 88%. I see it as a positive sign of diversification of my traffic sources because we never know how next Pinterest algorithm change can affect our accounts, and traffic, right? So having multiple traffic sources is always a good idea, but I have yet to work a lot to get into a safe zone.

CONCLUSIONS

For Income

1. Affiliate marketing rules for making money on a new blog! FlexOffers and iGain have been my best paying affiliate network so far.
2. Advertising networks like Google Adsense and Media.net suck. Sorry, but it’s true, I’ve tried both on my site, and even on the days when I had huge spikes in traffic, like 5000 pageviews per day, I’ve got about $2-3 in ads income. This was a test to see if advertising income works for me, but I guess, it’s really just for blogs with a wider audience and big variety of topics. For my blog so far, ads have been an embarrassment.

For Traffic

3. Pinterest rules for traffic! Google takes about 6 months to give at least some trust to a new blog. Pinterest allows you to grow traffic fast and almost for free. Your biggest investment is time! I didn’t mention Pinterest in the income sources, but all my affiliate income wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t get traffic from Pinterest. I promised to tell you a bit about my new Pinterest strategy. It’s a mixed strategy – I use now schedulers in combination with manual pinning 3-4 times a day by 10 min sessions. This is a test because I noticed that my Pinterest traffic kinda stagnated in August, and I wanted to make sure that I’m not being penalized for using only schedules. If you look at my graph above for September, Pinterest traffic is growing, and I believe it’s because I added manual pinning to my strategy.
4. Tailwind rules for growing your Pinterest boards faster! (Update 2018: if you tried Tailwind already and it feels like you are spending too much time scheduling with this tool, most probably you could do it much faster using the scheduling methods I show in my video tutorial).

If you are still doubting, whether starting a blog is a good idea, just look at my 6-month journey and believe me, I’m far from being the best example in terms of traffic and income growth. But that’s what I can do while working 9-5 and spending only 2-3 hours per day improving my blog. So it is definitely worth trying. Maybe in just 3-6 months you’ll write a post how this income report from AnastasiaBlogger.com changed your life 🙂

HOW I USE PINTEREST FOR MY OWN ONLINE BUSINESS AND MY RESULTS

My site is just a little over 1 year old, I started with a 0 following Pinterest account and by the 10^thmonth blogging, I reached172,000 monthly pageviewsto my blog, with about90%of traffic coming from Pinterest.

I started my second blog in Feb 2018, and the new blog momshealth.co already hit 74,000 monthly pageviews in less than 90 days! And again, almost all the traffic comes from Pinterest.

If you are interested in growing your Pinterest traffic fast, you can get yourself set up for success with myPinterest SEO Traffic Secretscourse. It’s over 6 hours of video training packed with my personal know-hows and Pinterest hacks.

I can guarantee that at least 50% of the Pinterest tips and tricks I share with you in the course, are absolutely exclusive and you will not find them in any other Pinterest course.

If you don’t need to grow fast and don’t mind working at your 9-5 job for a lot longer, you can totally keep reading my emails and posts because I also share tons of free advice. It’s just a matter of how FAST you want to grow your blog and income.

Would you like to get back to this post later? Save THIS PIN to your Blog Pinterest board.