December 2018 Income Report

2018 has officially wrapped up and here is my last monthly blog income report for the year! December was focused on creating Christmas-themed posts for my home decor blog which paid off and I saw a nice increase in traffic from November.

During December, I accomplished a few tasks to my blog aside from posting.

SEO Updates

In December I did a mini SEO audit on all my blogs and found that I needed to structure them better if I wanted to rank for more keywords. So I updated the Headings on all of my new blog posts in December to make sure that the keyword I was targeting was included in at least one H2 header.

I had also been using H4 headers in my posts when I should have been using H2 headers, so I began the process of updating those throughout my blog posts. Essentially, the title of your blog post is usually structured as the H1 header. That’s the only H1 header you need. The headers you write in the body of your blog post should be used in descending order: so you would use H2 followed by H3 and so on. When I first started blogging I didn’t know that, and used H4 because the H2 font of my theme at the time was just too big.

The more you blog, the more you learn! 🙂

Fortunately, I used the plugin Better Search and Replace to make those mass updates all at once.

Email Marketing

I don’t have the time I wish I did to devote to email marketing, but it’s something I’d like to invest more energy into this 2019. I’m currently using Mailerlite but ever since they were flagged as Spam by several email clients, my deliverability rate has dropped pretty drastically. I had originally switched to them from Mailchimp out of necessity because Mailchimp kicked me off their platform totally randomly and I grew to like the Mailerlite user experience, but now, I’m considering switching back! I’ll keep you posted on this front.

Income

Let’s jump into my December income, where I saw a nice increase in display ad income, but a disappointing fall in affiliate income.

SourceIncome
AdSense$15.18
Mediavine$657.22
RewardStyle$503.56
Shareasale$4.21
Amazon$27.03
Bluehost$0
Skimlinks$8.33
Viglink$0.47
Total$1,207.20

Expenses

No major December expenses, just my web hosting, my domain name, and my trusty Tailwind subscription!

You may recall from November that I recently changed my web host. I have to say that I am pretty happy with the speed increase of my website, but the customer service is just terrible. I went with the less expensive of two options and I’m surely paying for it. That being said, the product itself (I went with a VPS package) seems to be performing well. I’d much rather have a poorly managed customer service team than a faulty product. So there’s that. Again, I’ll do a full write up when the time is right. Probably after I leave this host when the year is up!

Traffic

I had been stuck in a traffic rut since around May, and finally I was able to climb above it in December, reaching 28,014 pageviews.

December 2018 Blog Pageviews

Plans for Next Month

January goals are well under way. This month I’m writing a lot more evergreen content and staying away from holiday and seasonal content as much as possible. I’m writing long-form, quality content that is less image dependent. This is my main focus for January: to pump out as much quality content as I possibly can!

Thanks for reading about my December blog income! How was your month?

Enjoyed this post? Subscribe to my weekly newsletter!

4 Comments

  1. I really enjoy reading your income reports, and I can especially relate to your efforts to guide readers on a journey through your content. I’m trying to do the same thing with my blog so I definitely agree that this is the way to go.

    Reply

Leave a Comment