October 2017 Income Report

After a crazy awful September, I had higher hopes for October. October was not-so-great for my personal life but went pretty well for my business!

Running three blogs is tough but so much fun at the same time. I posted 5 times on my interior design blog, 7 times on the travel blog, and 3 times on this blog.

October was my first full month using Mediavine to manage my display ads, and wow, did they blow me out of the water!

At my high point, I was using Google AdSense to earn something like $168 per month. Upon implementing Mediavine, I set a goal of $400 per month (more than double), but once it became apparent I would surpass that number, I set a new goal of $500 in earnings, and yet the site managed to surpass that number!

I’m super happy with my switch to Mediavine.

Now let’s jump into this month’s numbers!

Income

As usual, RewardStyle brings in the bulk of my income, so I try to pay special attention to it and make sure I’m constantly optimizing my posts for sales. My conversion rate went back up to 1% this month, which is awesome. My goal is to keep it at 1% or higher every month.

Expenses

I didn’t spend any money this month which means all this income is pure profit! Of course, my blog income wouldn’t have been possible without upfront costs like my awesome hosting provider A2 Hosting and my favorite Pinterest marketing tool Tailwind. If you’re interested in starting a blog, check out my guide!

Traffic

One of my goals for September was to do a trial run of BoardBooster to increase traffic. I set up a campaign to have BB pin my most repinned pins to my group boards at spaced intervals. I let it run for a week. Truthfully there wasn’t a huge difference compared to manual pinning, so I ended the trial. I was worried about letting the program run for longer because I only have so many pins that can be recycled without looking spammy on the group boards. I’d like to revisit BoardBooster when I have more pins to schedule this way.

Overall, October traffic wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, which isn’t good as I want growth!

I realize that the reason why my traffic kept increasing month over month during the first half of the year, was because of my intense publishing schedule! It seems that growing blog traffic is directly correlated with high-volume publishing. I still think there is a way to optimize my publishing by posting less often, but better content (meaning more likely to be shared), but I have yet to find a magic formula.

What I do know is that these two types of articles bring me a lot of traffic:

1. Posts with many images (20+) which I then distribute to my group boards.
2. Listicles. I used to hate writing listicles because they seemed to click-baity but as Mark Cuban says, “Follow the money” and the money is certainly in listicles.

For example, I have a travel blog that was never intended to be monetized, just a place where I share my travel photos. As an experiment, I wrote a listicle titled something like “20 Awesome Places to See in X” I made a nice graphic for it, and sure enough, with almost no promotion except sharing it on Pinterest, the pin took off, and to this day it is my highest viewed article!

If you want pageviews, write listicles!

Plans for Next Month

I did not get a chance to test out an SEO keyword research tool like I had hoped to in October, but it’s a high priority on my to-do list for November! I think it’s a good thing I waited because now there are two more tools I want to test out before making a decision on which to purchase.

Thanks for reading about my journey to $10K months!