My One-Month Blogging Income Report!

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It has officially been one month since I’ve started my blog! It has been a lot of hard work, and quite the wild ride. And today, I’m going to be showing you my one-month blogging income report!

I’m not sure if I will do them every month, but I always think the first few income reports are awesome!

However, my blogging income report is going to be a little bit different than most. I’m not going to tell you I’ve made $1,000 my first-month blogging. I know, you’ve probably seen those on Pinterest too.

Mine is different though, because of the fact that I haven’t actually made any income at all this first month.

Laaaammme right? But here’s the thing. This income report is going to be realistic. This is what many bloggers face the first few months of their blogs.

The average blogger does not make money their first month.

Or even the first few months, really. Especially as much as I’ve seen some of these bloggers claim to have made.

I always think something fishy is going on behind the scenes of those blogging income report. Or, maybe they’ve just figured out the formula to blogging before me. In that case, more power to them!

So, what can I possibly talk about in an income report when there is no actual income to report?

First, I’m going to go over the expenses of blogging that I personally spend, and then the monetization methods I have chosen to use, with my goals for next month.

My goal for this blog post is hopefully to give you an insight into the average blogger’s life, and maybe give you some other monetization ideas for your own blog.

My Very First Blogging Income Report!

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Blogging Expenses

Convertkit -$29.00

I’ve tried multiple different email services and this is the one I’ve fallen in love with.

At first, I tried Mailchimp, which was free up to 2,000 subscribers. It was great because I didn’t have to pay for it, but I didn’t like the templates they offered. I felt like I was designing a small website for every email. It wasn’t for me.

I just wanted to send out a blank, white background email. A simple email. Mailchimp didn’t offer this option it seemed. It also made the concept of email marketing super confusing to me. This was when I first started out, so I really had no idea what I was doing!

I tried Mailerlite as well and the setup process was horrible. I gave up before I even fully signed up!

Then I fell upon Convertkit. I’d seen it recommended before, but I knew it came with a bigger price tag than the rest. I decided to give it a try for the 15-day free trial and ended up loving it!

The interface really helped me understand email sequences and everything else that came with email marketing. It was super easy to get the hang of and their customer service is excellent!

I decided to go with them because this blog is going to be a business and businesses come with expenses. Before Convertkit, email marketing made me want to tear my hair out. Now, it’s so much easier to understand! So, I take the expense every month to make my life easier!

If you’re looking for a great email service, you need to check out Convertkit.

Check out Convertkit’s 15-day free trial here!

Tailwind- $9.99 paid annually or $15 paid monthly

Tailwind has to be the number one recommended thing for blogging (outside of WordPress itself, which I’ll get to later). I paid mine annually because it saves you money in the end and I wouldn’t have to add it as part of my monthly expenses!

(I technically bought this a month or so ago, but I thought it was worth including in my first income report!)

If you don’t know what Tailwind is, you really should check it out! Basically it’s a Pinterest scheduler. 

If you’ve been blogging for more than a month, you’ve probably seen every blogger rant and rave about how good Pinterest can be for your blog. And for a good reason too!

Blogging keeps you busy, that’s no secret. And the best way to save you some time is to automate everything that you can!

It’s important to remain active on social media, especially Pinterest. But it can be a tedious task to go on Pinterest every few hours and pin things. This is where Tailwind comes in!

With Tailwind, you can schedule pins to go out all throughout the day and schedule as many days in advance as you’d like (With the paid version of course.)

I just started using Tailwind this month so I’m still working on building up traffic with it. But so far it’s been a blessing to know that I can go on there, schedule out a week’s worth of pins and nor have to touch it for another week!

If your interested in trying Tailwind but you’re not ready to pay for it yet- don’t worry I’ve got a thing for you.

Tailwind has this awesome option where you can have a free trial up to 100 pins scheduled. That means there is no time limit of this free trial, you can have the free trial up until you’ve scheduled 101 pins!

And honestly, I blew through 100 pins super quick! I ended up just buying the paid version the day I signed up!

What’s even better than that? They have even more featured like Tribes and an Instagram scheduler too! Its something I’d like to purchase in the future but Instagram isn’t part of my marketing strategy just yet so I’ve decided to hold off there.

In order to keep this post from getting too long (because I could ramble about Tailwind forever!), I’ll be writing a post all about the different things Tailwind has to offer!

Try Tailwind’s free trial here!

Domain hosting with Namecheap- $3.88 paid monthly or $22.88 annual

This is the very first thing I purchased. It’s the bases of self-hosted blogs! And I have to say, the set up was super confusing! Everyone made it seem super easy and I did not find it that way.

But, honestly, it was my own fault. I didn’t do enough research or have enough knowledge about what I was doing. Setting up your own self-hosted WordPress site is not as easy as they made it seem!

I decided to go with the annual namecheap plan, just to cut down on my monthly expenses. But, it was a blogging expense and even though i bought it a few months ago I thought it was worth it to add in here. They have tons of other plans that you can purchase too!

I researched tons and tons of hosting platforms before finally choosing NameCheap. And I can confidently say, I am happy with my choice!

Even though I made the setup process a huge mess, their customer support is awesome! They really took the time to make sure my problems were fixed and that I knew what I was doing!

The good thing is, the problems I had were of my own doing and not because of NameCheap, so that’s why I always recommend them!

On top of that, everyone always comments about how my site loads super fast and I haven’t experienced any downtime, which is super important when you’re running a blog!

Interested in buying Namecheap hosting? Check it out here!

There were other things I bought from Namecheap like my domain name ($14.94 annual) and my SSL Certificate ($8.88 annual) but I won’t go over those in detail here!

Creative market theme -Ella Sophia WordPress Theme -$25

This was another one thing that took a bunch of browsing around to choose. I never bought a theme before, I just always used whatever free theme I could find.

The problem with the free themes was I didn’t like a lot of them. There were so many options but none of them looked like the website I had pictured in my head. They didn’t look professional enough and I always ended up changing them.

When I decided to buy a theme, I wanted to make sure I liked it. It would be a waste to buy a theme and then end up changing it a month in! Then I found this theme here in the creative market shop and fell in love.

It was the exact theme I had been envisioning but could never find with the free themes. Finally, I bought it, at a super cheap price of $25! I saw some super expensive themes on Creative market, and I wasn’t willing to pay that much so I’m glad I was able to find one in my budget!

Install was easy and they even had instructions on how to create the header with Photoshop. I didn’t have photoshop, but they had a solution for that as well!

All I had to do was send them an email with what I wanted on the header (my blog name) and I could add a tagline as well! In no-time, they sent me over the header and I had it in place super quick!

This was another thing I bought previously but I decided to add it into the income report.

If you’d like to check out my blog theme, head over to Creative Market here!

I think that’s pretty much it for my blogging expenses! So here’s our grand total!

Income from August 2019: -$196

Probably the worst income report ever right? But, it is realistic. And honestly, I haven’t really done too much with monetization just yet. I started adding affiliate links into my blog post during the last week or so of the month. So obviously no one is buying yet.

My goals for next month

My strategy right now is to focus on one thing at a time so I don’t overwhelm myself. Focusing on too much at once is something I did in the past and it really cost me in the end.

So for my first month (August), I focused on my blog content and social media marketing strategy first.

I think these are the two most important things, the blog itself and gaining traffic to it. I did this because you can’t monetize if you don’t have a decent follow (hence the social media strategy) and people won’t stay on your blog if you don’t have content or a great blog (which is why I’m focusing on the content).

This is the month that monetization really will come in. I’m slowly dipping my toe into affiliate marketing. I started that a bit last month by applying to affiliate programs and getting in contact with brands to become an affiliate for their products!

After that, I will work on my email list, and after that, I will work on launching a product!

I hope that by month 2 I will have gotten affiliate marketing pretty much down. Which, by the way, everything I have learned from affiliate marketing has come from Michelle Schroeder-Gardner at Making Sense of Affiliate marketing!

She makes over $100,000 a month in affiliate income!

So when I heard she had a class teaching all her methods, of course, I jumped right on it!

Her class is $197 and it’s not included in this blogging income report because I bought it a while back for one of my other blogs.

If you’re looking to get into affiliate marketing, which is a great semi-passive income source, you need to take her class. Check it out here!

I think that’s it for this first-month blogging income report! As I said, it wasn’t a very good income report, but hopefully, it was a good report in other ways!

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What are your income strategies? Have you done income reports for your own blog, or do you like reading them? Let me know in the comments below!