Blog Income Report and Traffic Stats – March 2016

Welcome to my 10th 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.

March is proving to be one of the most exciting blogging months I have ever had.  If you have not already noticed, my blog looks completely different.  A few weeks ago I went ahead and just revamped the whole site.  I got a new theme and spent about 7 hours tweaking it to make it look just the way it looks right now.   It was a lot of work but totally worth it.   My site speed has improved drastically and not to mention, I think the new theme is easier on the eye and more visually pleasing.  What do you guys think of the new theme?  Did you even notice?  haha!

But the theme change is actually not the most exciting part about my March Blog Income Report.   The real excitement is that  I am breaking records left and right!!  Really exciting news with what is happening to this blog right now for me.   March has turned out to be the best month statistically that I have ever had since creating the blog 10 months ago.   I have broken my page view record and my income record.  I mean don’t get me wrong it’s not a ton of traffic and not a ton of money especially compared to the bloggers on The Ultimate List Of Blogger Incomes but for me, it is freaking awesome and I am not taking it for granted.  Any amount I can make is truly remarkable to me.

So how did I do it?    Well when looking at the stats, the main difference really is the referral traffic from Pinterest.   After months and months of using Pinterest I finally started seeing a lot more traffic.   It was mainly just one pin that was generating the traffic and that was this pin:   The easiest way to increase your cash flow.   What’s crazy about it is that I created that pin probably 7 months ago.  And it just now decided to get some steam.   The flurry of traffic came and went on random days for about 2 weeks and in the past week, it has died off.  So it was a short-lived popular pin and it was because of that pin that increased all my statistics for March.  I am truly grateful for that and I hope that same pin or another one of my pins takes off again some day.

My Pinterest strategy is actually very easy, the main key points is to just create a decent looking image for each post, like the one you see on this post, then use board booster to just automatically keep pinning my pins.    It costs money to use Board Booster but I think it will eventually pay off for me.  This month alone has pretty much already made up for the past few months that I have been using the program and I have a feeling that it takes time for Pinterest to pick up steam.  So for now, I will continue paying my Board Booster expense and see if it continues improving my numbers.  That is pretty much the only expense I have.

So it is clear that there is money to be made with blogging although it is not easy but if you try hard enough, it can be done.   And with zero blogging experience.   I literally had zero experience with blogs and even writing when I started.  If you are interested in creating a blog for yourself, here is the step by step guide on how I created Cash Flow Diaries.  It literally only takes a few minutes and its about $6  per month for hosting if you decide to go with Blue Host who is the provider I use.

All the income I make online is going to be used toward growing my mini real estate empire.  I have 6 investment properties now all making me passive income and I plan on buying more rental properties this year.   To think, that one day, a long time from now of course this blog will buy me a new rental property.  Pretty cool huh!?

 

For all you new readers, here is a little info on when I first started blogging:   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.

Startup Costs:  (Born on date – May 22,2015)
Site Purchase from Blue Host for 3 years:  $-226.08
Logo Purchase:  $-50
Total Startup Costs:  $-276.08

• As of September 7th 2015,  the blog has officially generated more income to cover all my total expenses and startup costs since day 1.  We are running free and clear until May 2018.    So for all you new bloggers out there, if you are wondering how long it takes for a blog to recoup all its startup costs for a 3 year plan.  It took me 3 and half months (108 days) to earn enough money to cover it all.  Initially I had thought it was going to take me a whole year to do this but the blog has really taken off in my opinion and I am definitely making more money from the blog then I ever thought, especially this early in the game.  It has not been easy at all so don’t think it is but if you want to see how I created Cash Flow Diaries, you can check out my step by step guide I created.

 

Now let’s get to the meat and bones of this month’s statistics because I know that is what you really want to see.  🙂

Blog Income Report

Income:

Google AdSense:  $67.70

• These are the finalized earnings from March 1st to March 31st.   This is the most I have ever made from adsense in one month.  Pretty cool!!  I am running a total of 3 adsense ads on my blog, 2 in my posts and 1 in the sidebar and with just those 3 I made the income.   But of course the reason why I made this much is because of the extra page views that I had which you will read more about below.
• In 10 months of blogging, I have now made a grand total of $396.11 from AdSense.  I am very pleased with this number.  Of course I wish it was more and hope that it only gets better but it’s not easy generating traffic to my blog.

Amazon Affiliate:  $2.20  

• I never really make good money from my amazon links but Ill take what I can get.

Flex Offers Affiliate:  $200

• Last month I got a fat goose egg from this one but it finally came back and redeemed itself by coming up huge in March and making me $200.   It was only 2 qualified sign ups that got me this but it’s not easy to do.   I make a $100 per sign up with my Personal Capital affiliate so it is really nice when this one hits.  It’s also tough because not only does someone have to sign up but they must have over 100k in invest-able assets for me to get the pay out.  That makes this one difficult to obtain.    Anyways, for those of you who do not know what this is, it is a personal finance manager online site/app that aggregates all your income and expenses and provides cool graphs and charts for you.   It’s completely FREE and I find it very useful especially for tracking my net worth.

Blue Host Affiliate:  $65

• Last month I also made Zero with this one and I was very happy to see I got 1 sign up in March.  At a $65 payout per sign up this affiliate is my favorite and I hope I can get more in the future.   I know people make money with this one, Pat Flynn makes over 40k per month on his blue host sign ups.  He is crushing it!  You can see his income on my Ultimate List of Blogger Incomes and of course he is ranked #1.

Media.net Ads:  $42.12

• The income from this one actually went down a bit from last month which is very surprising since I had so many page views.  I think it has to do with the fact that I changed my blog theme.  On the old blog theme, these ads stood out a little better I think and now not so much.  This is just a complete guess but it make’s sense to me.  Either way I am happy about making over $40 a month from it.

Coaching/Mentoring: $180

• Another decent month from helping people out.   I started officially providing consulting and advice a few months ago and it seems to be paying off.    I know for a fact that there are at least 5 different people who have successfully acquired their first turnkey properties because of the information I have been able to provide them and the questions I have been answering for them.   That is pretty awesome!!
• So if you are a newbie and are looking for help, additional information or advice on how to purchase a turnkey rental property, please check my consulting packages on my Contact Me page.

So I made a total of $557.02 in income all because of this blog in March alone.   This makes my overall earnings to date a grand total of  $2,275.18 since I started the blog.  Amazing!  To me at least! 😉

Expenses:

Board Booster:  $20

• Board Booster is the tool I have chosen to try to increase my pinterest traffic as you will see below in my Social Media section.   So far it is working and I have seen a boost in my pinterest referrals.   I need to run this for a few months before I make the final decision to keep this expense.    This is the only monthly expense I have so far to run this whole blog.  I have been able to do everything else for free and on my own.

Paypal fees:  $6.13

• Now that I am accepting pay pal payments for the consulting/coaching, I have some new paypal fees.  It’s not much and it is the cost of accepting payments so I am quite pleased with this.

Theme CSS Work:  $15.75

• I am very savvy when it comes to technical stuff and can even do a bit of my own coding but there was some custom CSS work I needed to do on this new theme that I just couldn’t figure out.  So I paid a dude from Fiver $15 for it and it worked out great.  I am very happy with my new theme and all the custom changes I did with it to make it look the way it does right now.

Total Monthly Income for January, 2016:  (Income minus Expenses)

$515.14

 

Blog Statistics and Traffic:

 

Page Views:  24,877  (+10,032 from last month)

• This is my new record in page views for one month.   Over 10k more page views then last month.   This is all in direct result from Pinterest traffic.  As I mentioned above at the beginning of this post, I had one pin pick up some steam and generated thousands of views from Pinterest.  It’s pretty exciting!

Subscriber Count:  91 New Subscribers   (626 total subscribers)

• I got 91 new subscribers in March which is also a new record for me.  This is the most amount of subscribers I have ever achieved in one month.   I am extremely happy with that number.  I just love getting emails when someone subscribes.   So if you want to be part of the awesome feeling I get when I get a new subscriber!! ?? Then please subscribe 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:  1,093 New Followers  (6,032 total followers)              Follow me

• Another 1k+ more followers in March.  It is pretty much a lock I will get at least 1k more followers per month if continue to use the Cash Flow Diaries Twitter Strategy.  I have been using it the last few months and it definitely works.   I am doing all of this for FREE and I probably spend about 10 minutes per day making this happen.

Facebook:  339 New Friends  (4,951 total friends)        51 New Page Likes   (321 Total Likes)   Friend me or Like My Page

• Facebook is steadily increasing and I think there is a 5k limit of friends so I will hit that in April for sure.  But it’s okay because I created my blog facebook page a few months ago and that is also seeing steady growth.   I refuse to pay facebook for advertising unless I decide to sell a product or something so I am okay with the small growth on my page.

Pinterest:  440 New Followers  (10,557 total followers)       Follow me

• Since I started using Board Booster, my pinterest referrers are starting to get much better.  Nothing earth shattering but I have way more traffic coming from pinterest now considering I was getting practically none before and of course as you read above, the records broke this month was all because of Pinterest.    I will be writing a detailed post in the near future about how I grew so many followers on pinterest as well as more details on how I am using Board Booster to boost my traffic so stay tuned.   The Board Booster links I have added on this page are affiliate links and we both get $5 off if you use it, so if you decide to use this cool little program, please use my affiliate link so we can both benefit from it.  🙂

 

So there you have it folks, my 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 receive emails on future income reports and others posts when they are released, please subscribe here: