Welcome to my second 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.
As mentioned last month, I am still new to the blogging scene so don’t expect great numbers. Regardless what the numbers are, it will not deter me from my ultimate goal 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 and now July 2015 is my second full month of blogging.
July has not been a walk in the park at all as far as keeping up with the blog. I have spent so much time and effort trying to promote the site, writing guest posts for other blogs, trying to write awesome content and just maintaining the blog in general. I think it has paid off though as I shattered just about all my statistics from the first month.
Lets get to the meat and bones.
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 however until I generate enough income to cover all the startup costs. I will be in the RED.
Income Report
Income:
Google AdSense: $29.95
- These are the finalized earnings from July 1st to July 31st. I honestly can’t believe I am making this much money from AdSense already. This caught me by surprise and I am ecstatic to be earning this. I honestly thought it was going to be a few dollars a month when I first started blogging but I have already made a total of $50 from Google AdSense since I started in just two months. I really hope July wasn’t a fluke for me and hope I can match that or do better for August.
Amazon Affiliate: $0.90
- Oh yeah!! I made my first amazon affiliate money! Yes its less than $1 buy you have to start somewhere right?? This is great news for me and I’m hoping it will continue. I had a very low conversion rate on amazon clicks but that is expected because my site isn’t really geared toward advertising products or selling anything. I recommend a few books here and there but that is pretty much it. For now I will just keep doing what I’m doing and if people click on my amazon ads and order something, then great!!
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’m completely happy with this and am not expecting to make a ton of money of these particular ads.
Blue Host Affiliate: $0
- No love yet on the Blue Host affiliate. I had some clicks just not any conversion. For now, will leave it be and just wait and see what happens next month.
Coaching/Mentor: $90
- Wow! I was never expecting to do something like this but I had a reader contact me about offering mentor/coaching advice and I accepted. The reader had zero experience on purchasing real estate and the reader wants to do the same exact thing I’m doing with real estate investing. So I spent time on the phone answering a ton of questions and giving all the advice and knowledge I have on how to get started. I also offered step by step or basically a hand holding through the whole process if and when the reader chooses to take action. For all I know, this person could end up being the next Donald Trump! 😉
Expenses:
Theme Upgrade: $18
- I was running the free theme version for the first month but decided to pay for the PRO version due to features I really needed like Mobile enhancement and a few other little features that just make my life easier for customizing the blog. This was a very necessary expense and Im happy with it.
StumbleUpon Paid Discovery: $20
- Okay this was just me being a bonehead. I was really curious on what kind of traffic I would get If I pushed out a few of my articles on stumbleupon. It cost me about .10 per visit and this was just a bad decision on my end. Overall I got about 200 page views from stumbleupon and they were all pretty much a high bounce rate. Definitely not doing this again. It was really dumb idea anyways for me to pay for advertising because I’m not even selling anything. It just doesn’t make sense for me to pay to get the blog out there so I will not be spending anymore money on advertising. At least not in the foreseeable future.
PayPal Fees: $2.91
- This was just the fee I was charged from Paypal when I got paid to do the coaching/mentoring above. No biggie!
Total Monthly Income for July, 2015: (Income minus Expenses)
$79.94
- Mind blown!! I am actually making money from this blog. I mean I know there are tons of bloggers out there making money but I just never thought it would happen to me. I guess it is just catching me by surprise so it’s hard to wrap my head around it but I think this is super cool.
Blog Statistics and Traffic:
Page Views: 7,176 (+3,182 from June)
- Okay I shattered the amount of page views I was secretly hoping for which was 5,000. I had just under 4,000 my first month in June and thought if I can grow the page views 1,000 more per month I would be happy with that. But this went far and above my expectations. I am super happy with 7k page views for month number 2. I spent a ton of time trying to promote the blog in July and it definitely shows in the number. I will bust my butt again in August promoting the blog and hopefully I can continue doing better.
Bounce Rate: 59.92% (-8.77% from June)
- I improved my bounce rate by about 9% and I think this is because I got a great tip from another blogger about blocking out spambots from the page views. I implemented some changes on the site to not block spambots and I believe this is why the number went down. I think I am happy with this number but ultimately I guess I want it to go down. I just don’t know what a good bounce rate % should be.
Subscriber Count: 36 New Subscribers (59 total subscribers)
- I got 36 new subscribers in July and that I am super stoked about that number. That is more than 1 person per day. I put in a new subscriber pop up that comes up after 1 minute of being on the blog and I think people like that better. 59 total subscribers is great! At least for me it is.
Social Media Stats:
Twitter: 210 New Followers (437 total followers) Follow me
- 210 new followers in July. I am quite pleased with this number but I wish it was higher. Im finding it a little difficult to get more twitter followers. I feel like I can do better than this. I will probably read some articles on if there is any strategy to growing my twitter feed. When comparing the growth from twitter to my other social media, this is by far the slowest one and that is why I am not totally pleased with this. But I do love my followers!
Facebook: 1,229 New Friends (1718 total friends) Friend me
- Huge jump on my facebook. I got 1,229 new friends in July and I think that is a lot!! I joined a bunch of groups and have been requesting friends with other people who are in the same groups. Most of the groups are real estate investing groups but there are a few personal finance and blogger groups I joined as well and it seemed fitting. I will continue what I am doing on facebook for August and hope the aggressive growth trend continues.
Pinterest: 5,432 New Followers (6,159 total followers) Follow me
- Wow this account has been blowing up far faster than the others but this is also the one that provides the least referral count. I barely get any page views from Pinterest. There is just not a lot of love for real estate investors on here. People just love animals and food it seems like on this site. But it’s okay. The fact that I get a few hits from this is good enough for me and I don’t spend that much time on this. Plus I’m thinking the bigger following I get the more options I’ll have in the future once I figure out a way to use this properly as a source generator.
So there you have it folks, my second 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 39 different bloggers.
How do you think I am doing so far? Any tips or suggestions?
Hey great job at this blogging thing, how do you drive traffic? Is it mostly through social media? Seeing as you detailed that you have many, many followers makes this seem as the spot to be.
Do you have a background in marketing or anything like that? It is amazing to see how well you put together this site, and like you said, with 0 experience.
Have a great day,
Erik
Thanks Erik! I have been trying really hard to drive traffic. Yes most of it is through facebook actually. I get the most hits from there and then twitter is 2nd on the list. I also get hits from a few real estate forums I post regularly in too. I have got some really good traffic from writing guest posts.
I actually do not have any background in marketing but I have a crazy work ethic where I tend to over achieve and figure out how to be the best at anything so with that being said. I have been doing a lot of research on how to drive traffic and am spending a bunch of time improving this aspect of the blog.
Really appreciate your comments.
You’re doing incredibly well. I’m a digital analyst, but the actual implementation of marketing strategies has proved to be less exciting than I thought. I think that starting this month, I will be working on intentionally creating a social media presence.
Hopefully, I will find some success!
Hi Hannah! Social Media has definitely been my driving force in my traffic so I would absolutely go that route if I were you. My guess is that it will only build and get better over time as you grow more followers/friends. That is what is happening to me and I love it!
Im pulling for you and let you know if you have any specific questions about how I have done the social media thing.
I’ve been enjoying your articles about turnkey properties and they are honestly making me think about investing in them myself. (Thus far, I’ve mainly been a passive index investor.) However, because of the leverage of real estate and the slightly more hands-off nature of turnkey, it seems like it may be a faster path to financial independence.
This is another inspiring post type–it’s nice to see how far some hard work can get you! Thanks for writing. 🙂
Hi Selina! Thanks for stopping by. Im really happy to hear you have been enjoying the articles. I am not surprised one bit you are thinking about investing in rental properties now. The truth is that as long as its done strategically, it definitely can be the fastest way to reach financial independence. The returns are great!
Feel free to ask me any specific questions if you ever have any.
That’s pretty awesome progress. I’m still curious how you’re getting that much from Google AdSense. I don’t have as much traffic as you yet, but if I could make even $5 a month to cover web hosting, that would be nice. I’m working on building up my social media presence but I kind of have a deep rooted biased hate for Facebook. I should probably try to get over that. I actually kind of have a hate for all social media. I guess I’m just a little out of place in this world.
Thanks Kyle! I honestly have no idea how Im making that money on adsense. I think maybe the ads that pop up on my pages are very appealing to real estate investors and Im guessing my readers are more prone to clicking them. Who knows?!
I think you should definitely do the social media thing, just keep it strictly for your blog (business). I actually had deleted my personal facebook awhile back but created a new one just for Cash Flow Diaries.
Great job on getting that much traffic your second month of blogging. If you keep working this hard you’ll definitely be able to make a good income. And since you made $29 from adsense it looks like your blog may get a high CPC which will drastically help with ad income 🙂 I make decent money with ad network income and see other people with higher pageviews make a third of what I make. It’s all about having a high CPC and positioning 🙂
Thanks so much! That means a lot to me coming from you because you are definitely a blogger I look up to. That is very interesting what youre saying about CPC. I literally don’t understand any of that but I am going to research this today and find out what you are talking about. I really don’t know how adsense works. I just post the ads and cross my fingers. I didn’t realize the CPC affects the income but it sounds like this is going to be a very good thing for me based on what you are seeing.
I thought you can only add adsense to blog after six month
Apparently not, they accepted me my first month. I had about 9 or 10 posts published already. Thanks for stopping by!
Well done!! With only 2 months our numbers look incredible.
I am starting doing something similar but I have one question. What kind of advertisments are you using? I see 10 banners in this page, but I know that Adsense is supose to allow only 3 per page (4 if the content is big). Please, could you share with us what kind of advertisment services you are using and the number of banners you use of each of them?
Thank youuu,
One of your followers!!
Thanks so much Francisco! I appreciate the kind words. I have 2 adsense ads in each post, then I have 2 more adsense ads on the right widget which I guess technically doesnt count as the same post? They havent said anything to me about it yet so Im just rolling with it. I have 2 more on the right widget that are from FlexOffers and then 2 more amazon ads on the right. And I only display those on post and pages, not my home page.
Thank you so much for posting about your StumbleUpon experiment! I was going to try exactly what you did, but was worried the outcome would be what you found.
You saved me $20! =)
John
Hi John,
Im glad the post helps you. It was definitely a wasted $20. Maybe if I ever decide to actually sell something from my blog then I will pay for advertising again but I can guarantee you it wont be from stumbleUpon.
It’s weird, a friend and I ran a blog years ago and the two of use would occasionally submit posts from the blog to StumbleUpon – through our accounts, not as ads. We got LOADS of pageviews from those, it was one of our best sources. I think they police that more carefully now – at least they warn you’ll get in trouble if too many submissions are from the same domain.
Ha that is a very clever thing to do. I read a ton of stories from other people of how they get a ton of traffic through stumbleUpon which is why I tried that little paid advertising stint. It definitely works for a lot of people, I guess its all about what kind of content you are submitting and maybe my blog just isn’t stumbleupon worthy.
This is great traffic and income from such a little time blogging. I’ve been blogging 6 months and it still doesn’t exceed what you you made in one month! Awesome progress!
Hi Shirra!
Thanks so much on the feedback. Looking back I am amazed I was able to pull these kind of numbers just on my 2nd month of blogging. Im now 8 months in and it has improved but i’m pushing for more progress. 🙂
It takes a lot of time and effort to get the blog out there so if you need any advice just shoot me an email.
Thanks again!
I think you’re doing awesome! I’m amazed with your success. Starting from zero that’s impressive! I can’t decide if I want to go after it hard and try to make money on mine or not. It kind of sounds like it’d be fun.
Hey Jordan,
Yeah I have been going at it pretty hard since I started and it was all based on just seeing how others are doing it and trying to do it better. I think if have a blog then it makes sense to monetize it and try and generate more traffic. Even if you just make enough to cover the costs of having the blog with the hosting and all that. You should do it!
Love your post and your honesty. I’m just starting out also and my main affiliate is also Bluehost. Hang in there, you got some great content and I love your writing style. In fact, your bounce rate is incredibly good. Mine is like 84%. Keep rockin it.
Thanks Erik! Things have going pretty good for me. Im pulling up on one year now of blogging and ive seen improvement but not really where I want to be yet. I will keep at it! 🙂