August is back-to-school, back-to-work, back-to-blog, and back to earnings! :-) Not that I did terribly bad last month, but August was definitely better than July 2016. August 2016 is my eighth blog income report. I decided in January 2016 to focus more (i.e. at all) on what I earn from my blogging. You’ll find earlier blog income reports here.
After four weeks of vacation last month, I went back to work in August. Advertisers did too, I guess because even if traffic was still summer-low, my earnings increased significantly. I actually had my first month with over $2000 in income! Compare that with the $800 I made in January this year – a nice improvement!
Now, let’s see how I did with Easy Baby Life during August!
Blog Income August 2016
- Amazon – $81 Not much to brag about but double the amount in July! :-)
- Shareasale – $0 this month. :-(
- Mediavine Ad Network – $1,964 That’s a 38% increase compared to July!
Grand total – $2,045 That’s a 39% increase compared to July. AND my first month above $2,000! I am super happy!!!
Blog Expenses August 2016
- Boardbooster – $5. I am learning more and more about how to use it. Very practical for pinning content to Pinterest. If you haven’t given it a shot yet, please do! It is FREE to try out.
- Aweber – $29.99 (Still considering other alternatives – maybe ConvertKit – what do you think..?)
- 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 new host A2, where I now splurge on a Managed VPS account – $55 (per month with all bells and whistles, 2-year contract)
- The full cost for Melyssa Griffin’s Pinterest growth course – Pinfinite Growth – $397. Call me crazy. The course is expensive. I’ll outline my thoughts behind investing in it below!
Total costs – $503 Oops, highest costs ever for a month! But that’s due to investing in the Pinterest growth course. And I am actually very happy with that decision. Read on to learn why.
Net Income August 2016 – $1,542
Ha, almost $200 above July despite my course investment!
Let’s have a look at traffic numbers and finally RPM for the month.
Blog Traffic August 2016
Here are some screenshots from Google Analytics to show my traffic for August 2016.
Pageviews were slightly down compared to July; from 308,284 to 302,780. Nothing surprising due to summertime and vacation time.
Those of you who have followed these income reports during the past months, maybe remember that I woke up in April and realized the Pinterest train was definitely leaving the station without me. I got myself an account and started reading and experimenting with how to connect with Pinterest users and hence increase my traffic from Pinterest. I learned (sort of) how to use both Boardbooster and Tailwind, to scheduling pins to Pinterest.
In July, I saw my Pinterest traffic growth 55% to 1,400 blog page views. 55% is cool, but 1,400 page views are not so cool – especially compared to my Google traffic!
Now, what happened with my traffic during August? Have a look!
As you can see, my Pinterest traffic continued to increase. It increased by another 55% to be exact. That’s a pretty massive growth rate.
So why then on earth by a super expensive Pinterest growth course, when traffic is obviously growing very quickly as it is?
Well, the table above doesn’t tell the full (and very cool) story.
In the graph above, you find my Pinterest traffic during August 2016. As you can see, it was pretty stable at around 30-40 visitors per day until August 16. Then it jumped. So what happened?
What happened is that after reading, thinking, reading, changing my mind, thinking, and FINALLY deciding, I bought Melyssa Griffin’s Pinterest growth course – Pinfinite Growth on August 8 and started implementing her tips during the week after. It only took a few days for my traffic to more than double! More about this below…
Now putting all this together and calculating RPM (revenue per 1000 page views)…
Grand RPM is $6.75
This is a huge improvement compared to July RPM of $4.78. It is all driven by higher display ad revenue. Thanks, all advertisers and thank you, Mediavine!
My Reasoning Behind Buying Pinfinite Growth
I promised to tell you about how I decided to buy the course Pinfinite Growth for $397. I think it is very expensive. Almost annoyingly expensive. And I still bought it. Here’s my thinking about it:
- I want to increase my earnings from blogging because I really, really love blogging and I want to be able to make a living from it if at all possible. One way to increase earnings is to increase traffic. My Google traffic is great, I know that, but there is huge potential in Pinterest.
- Investing is a course steals my cash. But NOT investing and thereby gaining traction more slowly also steals my cash!
- As a business owner, I should consider making investments in my business to grow it and make it more profitable. To be honest, I have almost never done that. Partly for just being cheap. Partly for being lazy. Partly for not knowing what the heck to invest in!
- I decided to look at investing in a course to learn Pinterest just the same way I would consider any other investment. It should pay itself back and more in a certain amount of time. So what is reasonable payback time for an Internet-related course? 1 year maybe. Not more. After that, who knows what has happened to algorithms, networks, and so on.
So I decided that if I can find a course that I believe can pay back the investment in 12 months or less by increasing my revenues, then it is a good investment! :-)
I checked out several Pinterest growth courses, both paid and free, and found Melyssa’s course to be packed with useful stuff on the agenda! And where ever I went in forums, people who had taken her course were very happy about it. She also offered a 60 days money-back guarantee.
$397. That’s a lot! What traffic would I need to earn that back? Well, assuming I learn nothing about affiliate sales (my next project), my RPM is likely to continue to be around $7. To earn $397 from that RPM, her course needs to help me generate 57,000 additional page views. After that, every page view from Pinterest is pure profit.
57,000 additional page views in 12 months… That’s 4,750 extra page views per month. With 1,400 page views from Pinterest in July, this would be about a tripling on my Pinterest traffic. That has to be doable, I thought! I am sure it is! I decided to buy her course and take the two months offered through her guarantee to really try to implement it and see if it leads anywhere.
The result so far? Way beyond my expectations. As you could see above, my Pinterest traffic more than doubled almost immediately after starting to implement her tips. And from what I’ve seen of September so far, development is really really good. (But more about that in the coming September income report soon.) :-)
That was all for my August 2016 blogging income report! I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have on this. Please share by leaving a comment below! :-)
Find all my blogging tips and income reports here.
Please let me know what you think about these blog income reports by leaving a comment below! :-)
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.
