April 2017 Blog Income Report: +$4k in Income, Mailerlite

Here is my April 2017 blog income report for Easy Baby Life. It’s been a tough month in some ways. I admit that and share it with you. Blogging isn’t always going perfect, right?

I am a very impatient girl. Now that I’ve started with Elite Blog Academy, my traffic and income should just explode, right? Wrong. I guess I am building my business foundation right now – another word for working on important stuff, but the results are not showing (yet) :-)

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As you may know, I started writing these reports in January 2016 as a way to help myself focus on turning my 10-year-old (!) blog into a business. I had and have lots of traffic but earnings at that time were pathetic. You can check out my very first blog income report here.

You’ll find all earlier blog income reports here.

Now, let’s see how I did with Easy Baby Life during April 2017!

Blog Income April 2017

• Amazon – $398. Last month was $335, so a small increase. Not too bad, considering that my traffic tanked a bit. More on that further down the article.
• Other affiliate income sources – $111 – More than the $69 I made last month, nice!
• Mediavine Ad Network – $3,801 – Last month was $4,478 April was tough! Apart from January, April is actually the worst month of all for display advertising, so I guess this was expected. I still find it depressing, though!

Grand total – $4,310 That’s lower than the $4,882 last month, and 2.5 time higher than in April 2016.

Blog Expenses March 2017

• Boardbooster – $10. I love Boardbooster for pinning to Pinterest and bumped up my allowed pins per month, so now I pay $10 per month instead of $5. If you haven’t given it a shot yet, please do! It is FREE to try out.
• Aweber (email service) – $29.99 (I will soon cancel this, learn more below!)
• Sucuri for website protection – $16.66 per month (I paid for a full year immediately during spring, $199, but count cost for 1 month each month of the year. SO. VERY. WORTH. IT.) My site hasn’t been hacked once since I started with Sucuri. (And I know that IF it would be hacked, they will help me clean it completely without any extra costs at all.
• Cost for my host A2, where I now splurge on a Managed VPS account – $55 (per month with all bells and whistles, 2-year contract)
• Printables design – $400 I am finally doing something to please my wonderful email subscribers! I have had help with creating beautiful printables of different kinds that people get when subscribing to my email list.
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• A plugin for opt-in forms – $60
• I finally upgraded to the paid version of Tailwind. – $104 for a full year with unlimited pins. I have used the free version for so long, but I have absolutely NO pins left on my free version and some awesome tribes I want to continue with. If you want to try out Tailwind, you can get a FREE month if you sign up through my link here.

Total costs – $676 Super high costs due to the printables design and Tailwind.

Net Income in April 2017 – $3,634

Now, let’s have a look at traffic numbers and finally RPM for the month.

Blog Traffic April 2017

Here are some screenshots from Google Analytics to show my traffic for April 2017.
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Page views were down compared to March, from 636,900 to 524,499. That’s an 18% decrease. NOT funny! I was so happy last month that my page views were over 600,000 for the first time ever. A short celebration!

So what happened?

– Google was down some 60,000 page views
– Pinterest was down 27,000 page views (that’s a massive share!)
– Direct traffic down
– Bing down

The only light was that Facebook traffic skyrocketed from 600 page views to 3600 page views! A 6 times increase… That’s the type of growth I want for all my traffic sources, haha!

You can see my traffic sources here below.

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So why did my traffic decrease?

A lot of bloggers experienced the same thing during April. We had Easter and spring break. As far I’ve learned, Pinterest traffic is often low in April. (Are people out and happy because sping is here, or what??)

It is also very possible that Google carried out some update that made my rankings go down a bit. Google goes up and down in periods. I usually don’t worry too much unless the change is massive.

Now putting all this together and calculating RPM (revenue per 1000 page views)…

Grand RPM is $8.2

This is actually a bit better than last month ($7.7) and hugely better than a year ago. SO maybe I shouldn’t sob too much.

Taking my email list seriously

In addition to everything else I am currently working on, I am finally doing something about my email list. I used to have an active list, but then I started focusing on other things. BAD mistake is what I am told.

And I get it. With search engine traffic and social media traffic that can just disappear overnight, emails are super important.

I have used Aweber for my emails for so many years, and we are just not friends. I don’t want to offend anyone and I know a lot of people are successful with Aweber, but it just doesn’t work for me. I have never been able to figure out their templates and so my emails look terrible.

After a lot of researching – and every blogger and her uncle recommend ConvertKit – I ended up with… Mailerlite!

They have great features, great price (1000 first subscribers are FREE), and are so user-friendly. I have only just started and email subscribers are exploding. I haven’t even started to play around for real with great freebies and I am already more than halfway to those 500 subscribers. It is such a great feeling to FINALLY get going with connecting through email!

I have even created a special list only for my blogger friends who want to keep updated with my income reports and other things I write about blogging. And here is my fab signup button, that I made with Mailerlite:

Please join me! :-)

Paula

P.S. I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have on my April 2017 blog income report. Please share by leaving a comment below! :-)

Find all my blogging tips and income reports here.

And do sign up below to follow my blogging journey! I’d love to share it with you! (This is another form I created: :-D )

Paula Dennholt

Paula Dennholt founded Easy Baby Life in 2006 and has been a passionate parenting and pregnancy writer since then. Her parenting approach and writing are based on studies in cognitive-behavioral models and therapy for children and her experience as a mother and stepmother. Life as a parent has convinced her of how crucial it is to put relationships before rules. She strongly believes in positive parenting and a science-based approach.

Paula cooperates with a team of pediatricians who assist in reviewing and writing articles.