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Last month, I wrote that October was amazing, because for the first time ever, I made over $4000 in one month. Well. What should I call November then? Super amazing? Unbelievable? I know November is the highest earning of the year for many bloggers, but I am still blown away. November brought in over $5000. For me, that’s pretty huge.

I don’t really know what I expected back in January 2016, when I started these blog income reports. I wanted to make more money. I wanted to treat this website as my business for real. I have learned so much this year and I also realize that I have so much more to learn and to do. Which is great! I enjoy it so much! But it can be frustrating sometimes to not be able to focus on this more.

November 2016 is my 11th blog income report. You’ll find earlier blog income reports here.

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

Blog Income November 2016

• Amazon – $409. Last month was $148, so a nice increase, due to a combination of Black Friday and me knowing a bit more of what I am actually doing thanks to the course Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing that I enrolled in last month.
• Other affiliate income sources – $37- Less than the $57 I made last month
• Mediavine Ad Network – $4,800. Wow, 26% up compared to the $3,811 I made in October :-)

Grand total – $5,246 That’s a 31% increase compared to October. AND my first ever month above $5,000! I had my first ever month over $4,000 last month. This is truly super cool for me!

Blog Expenses November 2016

• 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 – $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)
• VA services – $100 I started trying this out last month. I decided to get an extra pair of hands and eyes for creating social media images and some other tasks. Feels great so far!

Total costs – $212 A normal month. I didn’t invest in anything particular this month. I wish I had had time to start working on email subscribers or Instagram, but I’ve just been too busy. And now Christmas is coming up so I guess these will be projects for 2017. (Fun projects, though!)

Net Income in November 2016 – $5,034

First ever month with net income above $5,000. Or even over $4,000.:-)

It’s great to see affiliate earnings increase. I am learning a lot from the course Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing that I am currently taking. It cost me $169, but I have already made way more extra in affiliate earnings than that price. And it has only been two months. Talk about a great investment!

But in addition to that, display ads through Mediavine totally exploded. I am not surprised – I know display ads are the best in Q4 and probably at its very best in November. But I reduced the number of ads. I had a super high earning ad on mobile (and most of my traffic is mobile), that just made me so annoyed. A “read more” ad. You might have encountered them. They hide the majority of a post and show an ad and then you have to click a read more button to view the rest of the content. I hate those ads. But they are super high earnings.

I was a bit nervous to take it down and Mediavine actually advised to keep it until Q1 next year, but I just couldn’t stand it. I took it down and… income increased! Engagement on my site increased too, so I guess my dear readers didn’t like it either, A great example of “less is sometimes more”. :-)

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

Blog Traffic November 2016

Here are some screenshots from Google Analytics to show my traffic for November 2016.

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Page views down a little bit compared to October; from 484,849 to 472,155. One should remember that November is one day shorter than October, though, so traffic was actually very stable. Google traffic increased by 8%.

What was NOT so very stable, though was my Pinterest traffic. It tanked. It was above 49,000 sessions in October, down to 28,000 in November. Almost a 50% reduction. :-(

Looking more closely at what happened, the main difference between October and November is the number of viral peaks. I had two real peaks in October, and none, or just a few small peaks in November. I don’t know yet if this is normal or not. It seems to me that even if Pinterest traffic it fun, Google traffic is more stable. But, I guess I’ll see how true that is over the months to come. The more normal day to day traffic on Pinterest was quite often higher in November than in October, so I guess that is a good sign, at least. Pinterest is quite new to me while I’ve been doing Google SEO for 10 years. If you want to learn more about SEO, you can check out this extensive online course. It is 5.5 hours of up-to-date SEO knowledge worth going through.

In any case, Pinterest traffic is huge compared to the total 800 page views in total during April and I have a lot more work to do. I am nowhere near done with implementing the tips in the course Pinfinite Growth, that I enrolled in in August.

Update: I started writing this post on 1 December. Putting the final touches to it now on 3 December, Pinterest has gone wild again. One of my pins is viral as I write this. This is fun and amazing and I should probably just go with the flow and continue to increase my presence on Pinterest and follow all the great advice in Pinfinite Growth.

I’d love to have you come with me on my Pinterest journey, that started from scratch in late spring 2016. Follow me on Pinterest here!

You can see my traffic sources here below.
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Now putting all this together and calculating RPM (revenue per 1000 page views)…

Grand RPM is $11.11

This is a nice improvement compared to the $8.3 in October. It is almost a five times increase compared to January 2016. I am doing something right! :-)

That was all for my November 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.

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.