Welcome to my 3rd edition of my monthly blog income report. Each Month I will prepare a report in which I will publish all my blog statistics and income that have been generated from Cash Flow Diaries. If you would like to see all or previous income reports of mine, you can do so here.
August was officially my 3rd full month of blogging. I am still new to the blogging scene so don’t expect great numbers but I must say I am extremely happy about August. I actually do not think I will be able to match my August numbers for the rest of the year, you will see why below. Regardless what the numbers are, my ultimate goal is to retire early. The main purpose of my blog is to help motivate me and others generate enough passive income to retire early. Any income made from this blog is just icing on the cake.
Cash Flow Diaries was born on May 22nd, 2015, that is day I bought the domain name. The remaining month of May I spent creating the first posts and making the blog ready for showing the world. June 2015 was the first full month which I was very pleased with.
Wow! I must say August was a very weird, wild and crazy month. I had my first negative net worth update which I was sad about. This mainly happened because of black Monday and the whole stock market crash. But I also went on vacation and had a blast. I am in the process of buying my 4th turnkey rental property. My poor dog was also bitten by a brown recluse spider and had to have about a third of her ear chopped off. It was really crazy. She is fine now though so don’t worry although overall it ended up costing me about $1000 which sucked! And last but not least, I had a post go viral (in my opinion) which really boosted up my August numbers.
Now let’s get to the meat and bones because I know that is what you really want to see.
Startup Costs: (Born on date – May 22,2015)
Site Purchase from Blue Host for 3 years: $-226.08 **Affiliate link**
Logo Purchase: $-50
Total Startup Costs: $-276.08
- I will not include my startup costs in my monthly blog income reports as it was a onetime expense on day 1 however until I generate enough income to cover all the startup costs. I will be in the RED. Note, after next month I should have made enough money to pay for all of this! Schweeeeet!
Income Report
Income:
Google AdSense: $67.43
- These are the finalized earnings from August 1st to August 31st. I am blown away by this number. My first month I made $20, 2nd month I made $30 and now $67. For a grand total of $117.43 in google adsense since I started blogging 3 months ago. I can’t begin to express how happy I am with that number especially after reading how much other longer established blogs are making with their adsense. I do admit right now though that the majority of this was made in 1 day in August. And it was the day this post went insane on the web. I will talk more about how this happened below, so keep reading.
Amazon Affiliate: $12.97
- Last month I made my first ever amazon money at it was $.90. So as you can tell, this is a huge jump from 90 cents. Almost $13! I know you are probably laughing in my face about that amount but I love it. It feels great to get additional income from the blog even if it’s not much. $12 pays for my netflix account so that is one more bill knocked off by side hustling. Yeah!!!
Flex Offers Affiliate: $0
- I have 3 affiliate ads from Flex Offers that I’m using however there was zero money made from any of these. I did have a few clicks but just no conversions. It’s okay though, I have nothing else to put where these ads are so Ill just leave them up and hope for the best.
Blue Host Affiliate: $65
- Whooohoooo!! I made my first Blue Host affiliate money in August. One person created a website from my links and I made a whopping $65 for this. I really wish and hope this one takes off some more because it pays so well.
So I made a total of $145.40 just from blogging in August. That adds up to a total of $265 of money the blog has earned me since birth. You know what that means folks? I am $12 dollars away from paying off all my start-up costs and expenses I have had from creating this blog. So I’m assuming after next month, this blog will be running free and clear for the next 3 years. My startup costs were high because I paid for the next 3 years of hosting. On my first blog and income report, I estimated it would take me 1 whole year to do this. I am very happy that it should happen in 4 months.
Expenses:
Zip, Zilch, Zero, Nada: $0
- That’s right folks. Zero expenses for August. I am no longer buying anything more for the blog because I don’t think I need it. We’ll see down the road but I am not planning on paying for advertising or anything else unless I decide to have something that I can actually sell on this blog. Which may happen. I just need to figure out what and how.
Total Monthly Income for August, 2015: (Income minus Expenses)
$145.40
- I love blogging and it would be a dream if I could quit my job someday and just blog and invest in real estate. Of course that is a dream and if it does happen, it will be because of the passive income I make from real estate, not this blog.
Blog Statistics and Traffic:
Page Views: 19,773 (+12,597 from July)
- My first month I had 4k views, 2nd month I had 7k views, and now it jumps all the way up to almost 20k. This all happened because the good people at The Penny Hoarder added one of my posts to their Facebook feed. They have over 1 million likes on their Facebook page so in just one day of posting it, I got 9k views. To me that is going viral but I know that is just chump change to other experienced bloggers. I tell you it was a wild ride that day looking at my stats. I could not stop looking at it. Was so amazed at the amount of traffic coming in. I loved it! The next day I got 1k views, then after that it was like it never existed. Right back down to my normal numbers which seems to be about 200 – 400 page views per day. So if that were never to have happened, I probably would have got just under 10k views. Which is still awesome and I would have been extremely happy with that number for month #3. I know this will not happen again unless I get super lucky so next month. I am expecting to go back to reality and hopefully I can get 10k views for September.
Bounce Rate: 74.46% (+13.93% from July)
- My bounce rate took a nose dive because of that one day. I mean it was great to get that many views but they weren’t very engaged readers. Most of them just took off after that one page and I don’t blame them. Honestly I really am caring less and less about this statistic. It really doesn’t matter to me and I may just remove this stat all together for next month. What do you think?
Subscriber Count: 72 New Subscribers (131 total subscribers)
- I got 72 new subscribers in August and a bunch of that did come from those 2 days. I doubt I will ever get this many more subscribers in one month but it feels really good having over 100 subscribers now. In all honesty, I think my articles are very helpful and I only send out newsletters on new posts. So twice a week. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do. I would love you forever. 😉 You can do so just by typing in your email in this little box right here. Nice and easy. I promise you won’t get annoyed by my posts.
Social Media Stats:
Twitter: 206 New Followers (643 total followers) Follow me
- 206 new followers in August. I am quite pleased with this number. I honestly didn’t spend more time on getting more twitter followers this month as I did last month but I still gathered about the same amount. I think the more you get, the more will start following you. I doubt I will spend a bunch of time this next month either but Ill spend a little time on it for sure.
Facebook: 594 New Friends (2312 total friends) Friend me
- I got 594 new friends in August. It is a lot less than I got in July but this was also because I didn’t spend a lot of time or effort to build this. I maybe spend 5 or 10 minutes max on Facebook now. August was just a really busy month for so maybe that will change this coming month. We’ll see.
Pinterest: 960 New Followers (7,119 total followers) Follow me
- Okay last month I got 5k new followers and I spent a lot of time on it. This month I still got 960 new ones which is not bad at all. Again on this one I also reduced the amount of time I spend on it. I get very little traffic from Pinterest so that is mainly why but I will one day figure out how to get some awesome pinterest traffic. I read a lot of these blog reports and see there are bloggers who get the majority of the their traffic from pinterest.
So there you have it folks, my third full month blog statistics and income from a new blogger who started with zero experience. I hope you enjoyed reading the stats. I seem to find great pleasure in reading how other bloggers do each month. I really love the idea of posting the monthly income report which is why I created:
The Ultimate List of Monthly Blogger Income Reports where you can view actual monthly incomes from over 40 different bloggers.
How do you think I am doing so far? Any tips or suggestions? If you would like to recieve emails on future income reports and others posts when they are released, please subscribe here:
Love the updates! I would keep reporting (and tracking) the bounce rate. As you write, it tells you that the traffic from “The Penny Horder” wasn’t very engaged – that’s good information to have! Maybe in the future you’ll get a link for somewhere, far fewer page views but a very low bounce rate (the people who come dig through your entire site).
I’ve had a similar experience, a traffic spike and at the end of it not a whole lot to show for it. The subscribers you got are a great long term benefit!
With twitter you definitely get more followers as you have more (and as you follow more). Twitter recommends followers to you from accounts you follow, so more followers mean more people who are referring others to you.
Hey John, Thanks for the love man! Yeah it wouldve been great if the readers from the PH stuck around and clicked on at least one more page. Ha! Its all good though, im grateful for the exposure. I think this month I am going to spend more time trying to get more twitter followers. Thanks for the feedback.
Hello!! I am so happy that your website is going really well!! I follow you in every post, this is the second time I write you.
I am specially interested in two aspects of your earnings.
The first one is if you could share with us how many items did you sell in Amazon and which products. I am trying Amazon on my website for almost a month and I didn’t experienced any purchase (I receive 40k page views/month).
The second aspect is about Adsense. You got a spike when one of your posts went viral, did you earn all the money in that day or better asked, how much did you earn that day? So I can deduct how much is the normal amount of money you get from Adsense without taking into account the spike.
Last bit and as well I guess very interesting point is if you could share with us your Social Networks strategy. Normally how do you promote your website? Social networks? backlinks? SEO?
Thank you very much from one of your followers!
Hi Francisco. Thank you so much. It means a lot to me that you follow my blog. I really appreciate it. Let me answer your questions:
1) Amazon. The $13 I made from amazon was from 11 products sold. 4 books, 3 toys, 1 dvd and 3 small electronics. Not one of those items are items that I recommended on the blog. It really was just luck, they must have clicked on the amazon link through my blog and just ordered random stuff.
2) Adsense, that day I got 9k page views I made right about $30 from adsense. The rest of the money I made was just from random days through out the month.
3) Social media. For facebook, I joined a lot of real estate investor groups and just started friending people. Each time I post a relevant article, I post it on my facebook feed and all the groups that I belong to. For twitter, I just follow people and hope that they follow back. Those are the only 2 that I really get traffic from so I won’t mention the others.
4) I make sure that all my posts are SEO friendly, I dont do anything special for backlinks, I just get lucky and people link my blog. I have done about 3 guest posts and I get some decent traffic when I do those.
Let me know if you have any other questions and feel free to reach out to me via a private message using the contact page.
Thanks!
Thank you for your answer. I always love when you reply back!
I think you have a pretty solid strategy and it is giving really good results. I will tell you about my own experience and then I will ask you something else.
In February I created my website, it is a Video game niche, in particular is about a specific game. The keyword has around 300,000 monthly searches and has a lot of long tail keywords (right now I am on my 8th month). I am ranking 22 on google for my main keyword, but for secondary keywords I rank 1-5 in google. Well, I receive an average of 30,000 sessions per month with a total of around 70,000 page views and a bounce rate of 68%. Out of those 30,000 sessions, 12,000 are coming from organic traffic (almost 500 sessions per day).
The thing is that the traffic is pretty good. Now the problem is coming from the monetizing aspect. I combine Adsense and Amazon (I put it last month). I only received money from Adsense, las month was around 25$, but I feel that for the traffic I receive is pretty small.
Now, my question, what CPC and CTR do you have in your website with Adsense? My CPC is $0.13 and my CTR is 0.15% with I believe is very low.
My website is http://beathem.org/ and very soon I want to start creating income reports.
Thank you very much for listening.
I think its great that you are doing that niche website and you get loads of traffic. Impressive! I checked your site out and it looks like you have all the ads in the correct location. Your CPC is ver low and I don’t know how google determines what that is. My CPC is $1.03 right now and my CTR is .17
I think its just that the companies that pay for adWords just pay more for the type of ads that show up on my site since its real estate related. The only other thing that I might do different on your blog is to get a youtube affiliate program where you can put ads on your videos and get money through that source also. Then when someone watches one of your reviews, they will just have a short ad to watch first and you will see some more money.
Let me know when you start creating income reports and ill add you to the Ultimate list.
Looks like you are off to a good start. It takes time to build an audience. Keep adding great content and they will come. 🙂
Thanks Brian! I appreciate the feedback. I will keep trying my best to make good content and keep my fingers crossed!
Congrats on the viral post. That happens to me every so often too but it sucks when the activity goes away a couple of days later.
Nice to see you will break even on your blog next month, way to go!
Thanks Steve! It was such a great day the day it went viral. It goes away just as fast as it comes but its so exciting!
This is very cool man! I found this article through a personal finance group I am a part of on Facebook. We started blogging around the same time, but you are much farther along than I am. My question to you is: was it hard to become affiliates for Bluehost and Amazon? I’d like to become an affiliate for both. Also, how do you get paid by them? Is it through PayPal?
Hey Joe! Awesome, im glad you found me on FB! Thanks for checking out the post and commenting. It wasnt hard to become an affiliate for bluehost or amazon. You just go to the sites, sign up and hope the accept you. I didnt’ have any problems with it so that is why I don’t think it was hard. You should just try it out and see what happens.
Although I have made money on those, I actually havent been paid yet. I did have to fill out w-9 tax forms and setup a checking account so it will be transferred to a bank account via an ach/wire payment when I cash out.
Blue host has a rule that you cant cash out unless you have at least $100 so I will just keep that money in there until I can get another sign up through them. It will come one day!
Wow, that’s a very good start mate. That’s more than enough for a 3 months old blog. The first blog I ever started took me more than an year to make its first dollar. Anyway, good luck mate 🙂
Thank you so much! I appreciate the kind remarks. I have been busting my butt for sure since day 1 and I have been monetizing since the beginning. Its not much of course but I like it!
Nice stats man! I haven’t put much effort into drumming up followers yet, because we haven’t put anything on our site to monetize it. I’m kind of torn, part of me wants to make a little $ off it (and it mostly sounds like a little) and part of me wants to leave it as is and not deal with ads and placement and all that stuff. Anyway, like reading the posts, keep it up!
Sidenote: Is that draft king link still active? I keep forgetting, but wanted to get signed up tonight before tomorrow’s kickoff! Yeah football!
I read from other bloggers that the only thing they regret is not trying to build followers since the beginning. You should do that even though you have not monetized. Once you get approved from the ads, you just put them in similar spots where I have mine and just let them be. Theres not much too it after the first time you include them. Thanks for commenting.
Ha, yes please use that link! Im trying to get in on that 1 million dollar contest: https://www.draftkings.com/r/joelags
Right now I have 10 lineups all in the $3 entry contest, first payout is 100k. Ill keep my fingers crossed. Im so addicted to this and really excited about tomorrow nights Thursday Night Football!
You are certainly off to a great start my friend.
Keep up the good work.
Cheers
Thanks Dominic!
Wow! I can say I am a jealous man but you worked for it. Insane adsense after just 4 months :p I just got to 50 cents and I am already thrilled haha!
Just started my first project today, first post will be up this week. Hope it goes well and that I can join you in the rise!
ha! Yeah i remember the fist penny I made from it, I didnt know it if was real because i didnt understand the whole “finalized earnings” thing. Then it kept growing and it felt awesome. Really excited to watch your blog grow too man!
Awesome! Great way to start off your blog. I’m still in the early PF blogging stages myself, so it’s great to see what’s working for others. Your detailed post is fantastic. Congrats again on the viral post.
Thank you for the kind words Michael. I really appreciate it! It looks like you and I started right around the same time. Cool!
That’s great for your 3rd month. I’ve been blogging for a while and haven’t made any money off bluehost yet. Hopefully that changes soon.
Thanks a lot Jason! Yeah the blue host affilite is amazing. Its such a great pay out. Im happy to say that I already got one more blue host payout for September which I will be writing about in next months blog income post. I love blue host!
Hey man,
Great update. And congrats on making your first affiliate sale with Bluehost.
I have been promoting them here and there on my blogs for a while but haven’t made a single sale. But congrats on making a sale and seeing positive results from your blog.
Cheers! 🙂
Thanks so much Arbaz! I appreciate it! Yeah bluehost is great! I really hope that one takes off for me. I actually have already made one earnings from blue host for September and im really excited about that. I will write about it in my September Blog and Income report next month. Cant wait!
Wow Alex, you’re doing really well here! Excited to keep on following you & interested to know how you put the subscribe box into this post
I’ll keep reading buddy and have nearly caught up with all of your posts :)!