June 2020 Blog Income Report – $4,118.26 Earned
Poof, just like that half the year is gone. I can hardly believe it. Each day kinda just runs into the next but, I can be glad for one thing at least, the ability to work from home.
I know I am luckier than most and my day job has 100% transitioned to working from home. I’m still putting in just as many hours, but at least I get to hang out with my dog and don’t have to worry about changing out of my PJ’s.
I’ll have to start out by saying that this month, I’m not super pleased with my results. I didn’t post near as much content as I wanted to, two of my sites are dropping traffic 😒, and overall I’ve just kinda been in a funk.
As much as I love P24 dashboard, logging in and seeing graphs like the two on the right isn’t fun. The good news is that if I visualize a trendline…I know they are still OK….still doesn’t mean I’m happy about it .
I could blame my “June Gloom” on testing positive for you know what earlier in the month. A retest later showed I was negative and my doctor said the first test was probably a false positive. Still, despite not having symptoms, it caused worry for me and also some personal issues due to custody exchanges with my kid.
After testing negative, I never really did get back into the swing of things with posting. I am very much the type of person who “gets on a roll”. So this month…I took it easy. Next month, watch out!
With that caveat covered, let’s get to the part you came for, the June income report.
If you are new here, check out my Blog Income Overview Page where you can see a table with each of my blogs, what niche they are in, and their income over time. Just keep in mind it doesn’t look great on mobile.
🥂 Full Time Finisher 🥂
If you read my income report last month you should know that I purchased a membership to the Project 24 course on June 6 of 2019. Their sales page explains Project 24 as follows:
Project 24 means starting a project to replace your current income with money from passive income websites in 24 months.
Income School
When you’re in the course, you can get badges based on your income level (if you want them..they are optional). Since everybody’s definition of “full-time” is different, the Income School guys go on to say that if you hit $4k a month, you’ve made it.
As you can tell from the title…I’m there. Just over 12 months in and I’ve made $4k in income. Sure, there are some expenses but, if I lost my job today I’d be able to let go of my writers and VA and have enough income to cover all my bills while still building my business.
I struggled for many years through many blogging courses. Some very expensive ones, and some more moderately priced. Only two of those courses were useful and Project 24 takes the credit for 90% of the results I have achieved.
If you are on the fence, or in doubt, I highly recommend you take the plunge as soon as you can afford it.
📰New this Month 📰
- Renewed Tailwind – I restarted Tailwind for my largest site. While I still want to get away from Tailwind as a way of pinning, that site gets so much traffic it still makes sense for me to be on there.
- Added Ezoic – I signed up my smaller sites with Ezoic. I had a pageview goal of 1,000 views/month before signing up that two sites met. I figured it is easier to set them all up on it at the same time. Ezoic approved them all and ads should be going live this month.
- Hired More Writers – I started a hiring campaign with the plan to onboard 10 or so more writers. Between my two writers and myself, enough content just wasn’t getting produced on a regular basis and, I have smaller sites I want to start loading more content on. Hiring more writers seemed like the right answer.
- Gave Raises – I gave my two existing writers a raise to 2.5 cents/word. Up from 2 cents per word. These writers have been with me a year now and have specific experience in my main niche. I appreciate that I have to do very little with their articles and the raise was well deserved.
🗠 June 2020 Basic Stats 🗠
22 Posts Published
- 18 Response Posts
- 2 Staple Posts
- 2 Pillar Posts
33,778 words published
3 Products – $171.50 in Product sales.
9 Active Sites
- 250, 981 Pageviews (down from 292,514)
- 208,714 Sessions (down from 242,400)
- 182,619 Organic Pageviews (down from 225,367)
💰 June 2020 Income for My Sites 💰
- Niche Site Project 1: $2,666.77
- Niche Site Project 2: $127.66
- Niche Site Project 3: $963.46
- Niche Site Project 4: $323.37
- Niche Site Project 5: $0
- Niche Site Project 6: $0
- Niche Site Project 7: $0
- Niche Site Project 8: $0
- Niche Site Project 9: $0
- Printable Site: $37.00 (for products not related to NSP1)
Total Gross Revenue for June 2020: $4,118.26
Keep in mind this is money earned, NOT received, in the month of June.
💸 June Blogging Expenses💸
- Affiliate Payouts – $13.00
- Virtual Assistant – $77.25
- GoDaddy – $74.91
- Hosting– $111.90
- Pinterest Templates – $15.00
- PicMonkey – $12.99
- SEM Rush – $99.95
- Microsoft Office – $6.99
- Canva – $22.90
- SendOwl – $24.00
- Zapier – $24.99
- GeniusLinks – $5.00
- Copyscape – $10.00
- SearchProTools – $99.00
- Tailwind – $119.88
- Manage WP – $23.84
- Project24 Course Renewal – $199.00
- PO Box – $55.00
- Printer Ink – $5.46
- Keywords Everywhere – $10.00
- LLC Taxes – $800.00
- Business Consultant – $650.00
Total Expenses: $2,461.06
Net Blogging Income for June: $1,657.20
June Content Expenses
Content expenses were up a bit from last month. I gave my existing writers a raise and started a hiring round the last week or so of the month. I expect content expenses to go much higher next month.
- Upwork – $390.04
Net Income after content investment: $1,267.16
This number is down from last month’s $1,960.64 but, I had a couple of major expenses this month between my LLC Taxes, P24 Renewal fees and deciding to pay a consultant to help me with a few things related to business organization and planning for expanding my team.
All things considered, after decreasing page views, personal issues and annual expenses that hit all at the same time, I’m pretty OK with how this month turned out.
Income Screenshots
Note: This shows a profit of only $69 which is not accurate. I do have affiliates for these products but also setup my main site as an “affiliate” so that I an accurately track sales and attribute the income to the correct site.
Traffic Reports
NSP1 🐹 – 5.21% Increase in Sessions!
This is the second month in a row this site has seen a 5% increase in sessions. Given that the site is so large, I’ll take it.
This probably has to do more with my renewed effort in Pinterest than anything else. As you can see the organic growth is not that great, mostly due to the fact that I haven’t been publishing much content on this site lately.
10 posts in 3 months. I really need to step it up for this site. It’s hard for me because I actually have expertise in this niche and I am pretty particular about what gets published. I need to learn to let go of my perfectionism and just press publish more.
The revenue, though, has continued to increase in spite of not much change in traffic. I think this is attributable to two main factors:
- RPM’s in general are starting to increase overall.
- This month was the end of the 2nd quarter, where RPM’s are normally higher across all sites.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| April | 3 | 287 | 4829 | 130756 | $1,667.35 |
| May | 4 | 281 | 5642 | 139071 | $1,991.12 |
| June | 3 | 285* | 4649 | 140385 | $2,666.77 |
I continue to be amazed at how nicely this site is growing. My income for all of 2019 was $3,824.61. So far the year to date income for the site is $10,211.10 and we are only half way through the year. The fact that this site should very easily hit 25 – 30k this year is still mind blowing to me.
View the detailed profile for this site here.
NSP 2 💲– 6% Decrease in Sessions!
So this site and the one above are going to be my biggest focuses this quarter. At first glance, pageviews for this site are down over 14% and sessions down almost 6%.
On the upside, organic traffic is up over 15% which is awesome! Most of this site’s traffic comes from Pinterest and I just haven’t been pinning a lot lately.
I also haven’t posted much content the past few months so, I’m hoping to kind of reinvigorate this site over the coming months.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| April | 0 | 63 | 0 | 6873 | $93.69 |
| May | 2 | 65 | 1216 | 15196 | $108.19 |
| June | 0 | 65 | 0 | 12523 | $127.66 |
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 3 🏡 – 27.17% Decrease in Sessions
27% Decrease this month. While that sounds horrible (and I would rather it wasn’t happening), I kind of expected it.
A couple months back a post I wrote unexpectedly ranked for a huge number of keywords. I knew that the sudden influx of traffic to that post would probably level out at some point, and that is what is happening here.
Overall my other posts are doing great and I’m not too worried about getting this site’s traffic back up at a more natural pace. Even with the steep drop in traffic, thanks to the end of quarter RPM’s, income didn’t drop too drastically for this site.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| March | 5 | 57 | 14404 | 23189 | $281.60 |
| April | 6 | 63 | 7302 | 152315 | $548.27 |
| May | 6 | 69 | 8144 | 104694 | $1,028.67 |
| June | 5 | 74 | 8310 | 73,201 | $963.46 |
I left March in the table above so you could see the unnatural jump. I’d be happy with 50k or so page views for July. We’ll see. I’ll definitely be adding more content in July though!
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 4 🐾 – 30.27% Decrease in Sessions
If 27% wasn’t enough, this is the second of my two sites showing a decrease For this one though, there was no random post that unnaturally spiked traffic. My best guess is that the decrease is the result of the May Core update.
The reality is I don’t know for sure and it really doesn’t matter. This site is long overdue for new content.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| April | 0 | 39 | 0 | 27,738 | $311.59 |
| May | 2 | 41 | 2235 | 30,594 | $443.32 |
| June | 2 | 43 | 2887 | 20,174 | $323.37 |
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 5 🐘 – 111.03% Increase in Sessions!
Almost 1,000 page views per month on a site that only has 14 total articles seems insane to me. But, it goes to show how a site can start to gradually come out of the sand box even with very little content.
This site is now 9 months old and very neglected. Now that it is starting to gain more traffic I’ll go ahead and throw some content at it and see if I can get it to take off.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| April | 1 | 12 | 912 | 192 | 0 |
| May | 0 | 12 | 0 | 463 | 0 |
| June | 2 | 14 | 2135 | 995 | 0 |
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 6 🦔 – 59.53% Increase in Sessions!
This site should be starting to come out of the sandbox very soon. This month marked the 7 month point for this site and it’s definitely had some decent content added.
I can see a nice increase in page views this month. Content wise I added 2 pillar posts and I still have a few more articles that just need to be edited and added to the site coming up in July.
This niche does well on Pinterest so I may try throwing up a few pins as well. Maybe like 1 pin per post per week and see how that does.
Of course…I’m writing this on July 5th and I haven’t started making pins yet so we’ll see how far I get with that project in next month’s report!
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| April | 17 | 41 | 20630 | 229 | 0 |
| May | 13 | 54 | 30404 | 363 | 0 |
| June | 2 | 56 | 7146 | 560 | 0 |
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 7 👶 – Not Forgotten
My parenting blog is not a focus right now. Traffic is crazy low. I haven’t added a post in over a year. At some point I might do something about it but now is not that point. Just adding it in here so you weren’t wondering how we went from project 6 – 8.
Also, maybe I should name my sites something better than Niche Site Project 1, 2, 3, etc. Maybe it should be more like “Project Pacifier” for example, or something clever.
I have a blog coming up in the sewing/fabric craft niche. Let me know in the comments what you think I should call it.
NSP 8 🧰 – 10.71% Decrease in Sessions!
I’m not too worried about the decrease in sessions here. It’s a difference of 112 sessions last month vs the 100 even sessions this month. This site is still so deep in the sandbox that these numbers don’t really matter at this point.
I have 16 more posts from TextGoods written for this site. My plan is to publish 8 in July and 8 in August.
This niche, DIY/Home Improvement, is notoriously hard to rank for but I know that even though it might take longer, the increased RPM’s will more than make up for lost time once I do get it to rank.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| April | 13 | 25 | 22539 | 95 | 0 |
| May | 9 | 34 | 17337 | 140 | 0 |
| June | 0 | 34 | 0 | 147 | 0 |
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 9 🪑 – 64.15% Increase in Sessions
Say hello to Niche Site Project 9! This site is one of the newest ones. In fact, I don’t have a profile page for it yet.
The first post for this site went live on April 13th. I wrote the first 10 or so posts myself and have just recently started outsourcing content.
This site could be a potentially huge site, right now though I am focusing on just one content silo. Once the 60 posts I have planned out are finished I’ll start branching out into other silos.
The niche for this one is home and garden.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| April | 3 | 3 | 3574 | 138 | $0 |
| May | 7 | 10 | 7210 | 474* | $0 |
| June | 6 | 16 | 7618 | 1219 | $0 |
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MY NICHE SITE PROJECTS
Interested in reading about my niche site projects? Check out my Niche Site Project List to see my projects & their individual status.
RESOURCES I USE
I keep an up to date list of all of the tools and resources I use to manage my blogs, including how I create the awesome dashboards in my income reports, on my Tools and Resources page.
These are my top tools:
- ClickUp – It has easily helped me 10x my productivity.
- Big Scoots Hosting – (or, alternately, SiteGround)
- Tailwind for Pinterest
- ConvertKit for Email List
- Airtable for data tracking/spreadsheets when I first started (though I use ClickUp Exclusively now)
- Project24 the main course I took to learn how to blog, and my primary blog course recommendation.
- BloggerPlot for Analytics and Search Console Analysis in one place.
- Amalinks Pro for Amazon links and awesome tables.
- OnlineJobs.ph for my Virtual Assistants
- Pinteresting Strategies Course for Pinterest
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