April 2019 Income Report

After a record-breaking March income report, I had high hopes for April. Unfortunately, I didn’t break my new record, but I did generate a solid income from my blog.

New here? Read my first income report to learn about the beginning of my blogging income journey!

After focusing on some personal projects the first quarter of the year, I knew that if I wanted to grow my blog income beyond its current stagnation I would have to get serious about focusing on my biggest sources of revenue.

For the last year or so, I’ve been constantly torn between developing new projects and focusing on the current ones. As much as I wish it was, blogging is not a passive income source. When I neglect a blog, it suffers very quickly afterwards!

So I decided to focus my energy on my top money-making blog: the home decor blog I started in 2014. It isn’t my passion, which is why I started other projects, but for now, it earns me the most money. The reason being: it’s focused on affiliate marketing for furniture and home decor items.

So much of April was devoted to publishing new, keyword focused posts.

Income

So as you can see, RewardStyle is my big earner. I use RewardStyle to promote furniture and decorative accents on my home decor blog. As many bloggers advise, you need to focus on what’s bringing you the most income, and double down on those efforts if you want to grow your income. Forget literally everything that won’t bring you income. So that’s the philosophy I am taking!

Expenses

My blogging expenses to date are:

• Domain Name: I purchased my domains from Namecheap (they have coupons)
• Hosting: I started off with Bluehost, and eventually moved to InMotion once my traffic grew enough to warrant the additional expense
• Tailwind: Tailwind is my Pinterest scheduling tool that I use with my image-heavy blogs. Tailwind has helped me successfully grow my Pinterest traffic by 4X.
• LLC: I formed my LLC without a lawyer to protect my business and personal assets

Traffic

In March of this year, there was a Google algorithm update which thankfully I benefited from. I noticed an immediate jump in my Google traffic which lasted through April. While I’m super happy and thankful for this boost, I’m also aware that Google can adjust their algorithm at any moment. Many bloggers in the Facebook groups I am a part of saw their traffic drop drastically.

That’s why I think it’s a good idea to pay attention to Pinterest just as much as Google. Pinterest also adjusts its algorithms and pins that ranked for certain terms a year ago no longer rank for me today. So it’s a never-ending game of creating new content to hopefully rank and replace the content that drops over time. The only constant is change, as they say!

In April, I was so close to hitting 30K pageviews, but fell just short at 29,093!

I’ve been working on integrating custom related posts links to the middle and end of my blog posts so hopefully that will decrease my bounce rate over time!

Plans for Next Month

May is already off to a really, really great start. I have a feeling it will be record-breaking month based on my income so far, but you’ll have to check back next month to know for sure!