August 2018 Income Report

The last full summer month has come and gone and I couldn’t be happier (at least, for my business!) August is always a brutally slow and hard month for online shopping and my blog income barely made an increase from last month!

At the beginning of the month, Google rolled out what’s called a “Core Algorithm Update.” I’m not an SEO expert by any means, but according to the professionals, many lifestyle blogs and sites were affected and saw a drop in Google search traffic.

Personally, my site’s organic Google traffic referrals were down between 3-14% for the month. However, the 14% one was the travel blog and since most people are already traveling during August, or have already taken their summer vacation, it makes sense that traffic would be down anyway. It’s unclear if this update directly affected my sites or not. I’m just going to continue focusing on creating high quality, user-friendly content!

The lesson here is to always have multiple streams of traffic to lessen the blow anytime one of these giant tech companies make a major change. For me, I’m focusing on Google traffic and Pinterest traffic.

On to my income! August rounded out at just over $1,000.

Income

Expenses

My expenses remained the same this month. I purchased my domain from Namecheap, my hosting from A2 (I recommend Bluehost for new bloggers, though!), and my Pinterest scheduler Tailwind.

If you’re thinking about starting a blog, then please click here to read my step by step guide to launching a female lifestyle blog.

Traffic

Home Decor Blog: 20,488 pageviews
Travel Blog: 9,280 pageviews
Blogging Blog: 3,074 pageviews

I’m so disappointed my traffic dropped for my travel blog!! I worked so hard on producing quality content, but it looks like I just didn’t hit the mark that I wanted. I’m not giving up at all, but I have to admit I’m surprised it’s taking me so long to reach 25,000 sessions on this blog!

Traffic for my home decor blog and my blogging blog (The one you’re reading!) remained steady.

Plans for Next Month

I’m working on a new strategy for my blogs called “pillar posts” which I’m going to write a post on soon. Update: That post is here! Essentially it’s a content marketing strategy designed to organize your website around key pillar topics. You write a pillar post for each topic and these posts become the most important articles on your blog. The idea is to tell Google which posts are most authoritative on your blog and hopefully boost their ranking in Google. Can’t wait to share more about this strategy with you all.

Until next time!