May 2016 is my fifth post on blog income earnings. 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.
May 2016 was an active and good month. After I switched to A2 for web hosting last month, my website started to function better. But honestly, not as good as I expected. A2 proved themselves as the super supportive company they claim to be and helped me both optimize my account settings and pinpointing what else to look at. It turned out that the banner ads on my site totally destroyed site speed. So I took yet another drastic decision and started to cooperate with another ad network. Learn more below!
Now let’s take a look at my blog earnings and traffic this month.
Blog Income May 2016
- Google Adsense – $222
- Sovrn Ad Network – $2
- Amazon – $59
- The Blogger Network – $818
- Mediavine Ad Network – $491 My NEW network – only used them during 10 days of May :-)
Grand total – $1,592 That’s slightly less than in April. I expected this since I changed to a new ad network. Still a bit disappointing. RPM is also still quite low for seasonal reasons.
I also realize that I have to start looking into affiliate earnings a lot more.
Blog Expenses May 2016
- Aweber – $29.99 (Still considering other alternatives…)
- Sucuri – $16.66 per month (I paid for a full year immediately, $199, but will only count cost for 1 month. SO. VERY. WORTH. IT.)
- 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)
Total costs – $102
Net Income May 2016 – $1,490
This is slightly down compared to last month due to the somewhat lower income. Still so very much better than in January 2016!!
Let’s have a look at traffic numbers and finally RPM for the month.
Blog Traffic May 2016
Here are some screenshots from Google Analytics to show my traffic for May 2016.
Page views fell a little bit to 333,161. It might be the good weather already affecting page views.
I used a little bit of time to start setting up things over at Pinterest. It is a lot of fun, but oh, I wish I had started earlier!!!
Traffic sources are, as usual, mainly Google. I hope with me getting my head straight on social media, I will gain other traffic sources over time. Pinterest traffic actually increased by 29%, but from very low numbers.
Now putting all this together and calculating RPM (revenue per 1000 page views)…
Grand RPM is $4.78
April RPM was $4.90, so pretty much stable despite changing ad network. That said – it is still quite pathetic numbers, don’t you think? :-(
One thing I have to show you that I am very happy about – site speed. After changing to Mediavine, my website is finally working really well. They don’t use video ads, which is a major relief.
Some stats: Load time after changing to A2 for hosting and Mediavine for banner ads – from around 60 seconds to around 2 seconds. Isn’t that wild?
Also, file requests according to Pingdom Tools went from 900 to 200. And the site never hangs anymore.
I am super happy!
Find all my blogging tips and income reports here.
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.
