September Income Report: My Fourth Month Blogging

Welcome to Well and Wealthy’s fourth month’s income report for September!

Four months of blogging, wow. For some reason, I thought I was already at five months awkward…

This month I’ve not grown as much as I would like, my pageviews have stagnated despite working my butt off on Pinterest BUT I have managed to get about five months of blog posts written which gives me loads of time now to actually focus on growth strategies and it’s my biggest income month yet!

OH YASSS!

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SO WHY AM I WRITING AN INCOME REPORT?

This blog is all about education and my journey from quitting the 9 to 5 to reaching financial independence.  I want to help you guys and I figured the best way to do that is to be honest with you. Particularly about what I’m doing that works, and what I’m doing that clearly doesn’t.

The best way to detail all that out is an income report. I am planning on doing ‘Net Worth Updates’ as well so that way you will see (hopefully) exactly how I’m making money through blogging and then how I’m managing my money, including my budget and investments. But in fairness, that’s a while off!

Now if you haven’t previously seen an income report before you’re probably a little confused as to why someone would basically reveal all their business’s finances to the world. But that’s what I love about blogging. It’s an entire industry obsessed with being transparent and helping one another succeed. The income reports are not released to brag, they are there to help everyone see exactly how you make money blogging.

HOW WILL THESE INCOME REPORTS BE STRUCTURED?

They will all loosely follow the plan below:

• Any major updates
• Number of posts completed this month
• Pageviews including most popular posts
• Social media stats
• Email Subscribers
• Income
• Expenses
• Profit/Loss
• What worked and what didn’t this month?
• Month Action Plan and Goals

I reserve the right to change this order at a later date if it would clearly make more sense written differently haha. Also if you think I am missing a vital stat that you would really love to see me track then please comment on this post or chuck me an email at sammy@wellandwealthy.org

PREVIOUS INCOME REPORTS:

Launch Day Income Report: Day 1 stats and figures

June Income Report: My First Month Blogging (I made money in my first month!!!)

July Income Report: My Second Month Blogging

August Income Report: My Third Month Blogging

October Income Report: My Fifth Month Blogging

November Income Report: My Sixth Month Blogging

First Six Months Blogging Income Report Roundup FREE Ebook 

MAJOR UPDATES:

As I said earlier I’ve pre-written like five months worth of blog posts. Okay that isn’t really an update I just wanted to tell everyone because I’m so proud of myself!

I’ve also just signed up with ConvertKit and so far I’m loving it, sadly you will have to wait until next months income report to see if it has made any difference to my blogging biz because I only signed up on the last few days of September…

PAGEVIEWS:

Pageviews over September 2017: 2,909 (2,758)

Sessions: 2,017 (1,970)

Bounce Rate: 77.14% (75.23%)

Average Session Duration: 01:21 (01:16)

(Numbers in brackets are last months)

Sheesh give me a break how can I not have hit that 3,000 pageviews per month yet, I’ve been working so hard on Pinterest. It’s super frustrating because I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Like is my content bad, my images rubbish, my strategy no good?

I just don’t know!

Plus what’s up with that bounce rate increasing!!! I’ve been working on decreasing that this month which has clearly not worked! Humpft.

Here is the graph showing Well and Wealthy’s pageviews since I launched on 1^st June. I’m actually going to go into detail in the ‘What worked and what didn’t’ section discussing what I’ve been doing on Pinterest to see if I can figure out what was best for my blog so keep reading for that!

TRAFFIC ACQUISITION:

Social media bringing home the bacon again! But direct traffic is still increasing, awesome! Also check out that organic search traffic, I’m so please that people are starting to find me on Google.

Pinterest is still my number one (more on that later).

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Still focusing on Pinterest, still haven’t crack it grrr.

Pinterest:

As I mentioned above I’m going to look super in depth at Pinterest to see if I can figure out what is and isn’t working for me (that will be down after the income section). Bust first let’s check out this months stats.

Followers: 242

(Increase of 50)

Here is my Pinterest account overview. Still unsure if the numbers related to the last week or the last 30 days…

More decreases, what is going on?

Here is my reach, so the average number of people who see what I pin (76,252) and the average number of people engaged with my pins (2,533). Another decrease, but then it does stay pretty steady, how do I get it to increase though!

And here are the views that pins from Well and Wealthy get. An increased from last month but not huge.

This graph shows the number of repins (or saves) that pins from Well and Wealthy get on Pinterest. An increase from 23 average daily saves to 34, at last some good Pinterest news!

This graph shows how many times pins from Well and Wealthy are clicked taking people to the site. Average daily clicks have increased from 42 per day to 50, well that is good news!

Facebook:

I’m really not focusing on Facebook right now, just keeping it ticking over.

Likes/Followers: 133

(Increase of 5)

Reach: 99

(Decrease of 1,357 I’m not even going to pretend to understand why…)

Instagram:

I’m actually considering stopping Instagram, or cutting down. It takes a lot of time to maintain and I just don’t see much of a return with it…

Followers: 228

(Increase of 35)

Total Posts Published: 130

Total Number of Likes: 940

Average Number of Likes per Post: 33.57

Total Number of Comments: 49

Average Number of Comments per Post: 1.75

EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS:

My email list ticked over nicely this month and I even made an affiliate sale from it that was completely unexpected as I didn’t ‘sell’ the item I just mentioned that I have used it.

Because of this affiliate sale, and because I couldn’t seem to get my open rates up I decided to invest in ConvertKit on literally like the last day of September. You will have to wait for October’s Income Report to see how it is working for me. But spoiler alert my first email sent I got over 5% higher open rate!!!

(In case you’re wondering why an email software could be behind open rate, basically sometimes the free email software doesn’t actually deliver the emails as well and they end up in spam.)

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Subscribers: 223

(Increased by 38)

Campaign Opens: 29.97%

Campaign Clicks: 7%

Automation Opens: 39.50% (Just the Ultimate Freebies automation)

Automation Clicks: 12.20% (Just the Ultimate Freebies automation)

Woohoo opens and clicks both increased a bit which is what I like to see. I experimented with some different types of emails and after plenty of feedback from my lovely subscribers I have settled on a few weekly tips at the top of the email for those who just wanted to gain something quick and don’t have much time. But then I also go super in depth and give load of value about a different topic for those who like to have something to really sink their teeth into.

Emails I sent:

My weekly emails were as follows:

• One where I experimented with just sending out a few quick tips
• One letting everyone know that my August 2017 income report was published
• One talking about why our businesses aren’t making money
• One with weekly tips and an in depth look at how I made my first $100 from affiliate marketing

LOOKING FOR MY MOST RECENT INCOME REPORT?

As of May 2018 all my latest income reports are shared exclusively with my subscribers! Sign up below if you want a behind-the-scenes look at how I make a full-time income from home, online!

INCOME:

Still making money, not loads but it’s pretty consistent. Plus I will be completing the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course in October so hopefully, come November and December I will be making a fair bit more money!

INCOME EARNED IN SEPTEMBER:

SiteGround (Hosting): £30.00

How To Make Your First Affiliate Sale In 24 Hours Using Pinterest from House of Brazen: £7.34 ($10.00)

Haute Stock (Stock Photo Membership): £68.22 ($90)

Tailwind (Pinterest Scheduler): £1.14 ($1.50) (Actually $1 of this was earnt in July and August but hadn’t realised…)

Divi Theme from Elegant Themes: £33.74 ($44.50)

Post Gopher Refund: £44.52

Google AdSense: £2.90

Total Income Earned in September: £187.86 (Don’t forget £44.52 of that is a refund…)

Total Income Earned Since Launch: £316.23 (I didn’t include the refund in this figure)

***Want to start making money from you very own blog? Then check my tutorial on How To Set Up A Professional Blog for Profit!***

My highest month so far! Just remember that I don’t get paid much, if any of that in this month…

INCOME ACTUALLY RECEIVED:

The money that actually hit my bank account this month is: £77.78 (Don’t forget £44.52 of that is a refund…)

Once again it’s more than last month!!!

EXPENSES:

September Expenses:

Post Gopher: £42.52 (I got it refunded as it just wasn’t working for me hence the ‘income’ above)

BoardBooster Strategy by Pot Pie Girl: £22.58 ($29.42)

August Expenses Total = £65.10

Previous Expenses:

Hosting with SiteGround 24 months: £101.94

Divi Theme from Elegant Themes 12 months: £90.15 ($106.80)

Haute Chocolate Stock Photo Membership 6 months: £105.26 ($125.00)

Scan my Post PO Box 12 months: £15.00

Tailwind Pinterest Scheduler 12 months: £73.80 ($89.00)

Traffic Transformation eBook: £42.04 ($50.00)

How To Make Your First Affiliate Sale In 24 Hours Using Pinterest: £19.92 ($25.00)

BoardBooster: £8.01 ($10.00)

The Core Affiliate Strategy: £36.72 ($46.00)

How to Blog for Profit Without Selling Your Soul: £14.74

Income Journey eBook and Email Bundle: £63.73 ($80.00)

BoardBooster: £7.94 ($10.00)

Pinteresting Strategies: £21.59 ($32.00)

Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing: £136.12 ($169.00)

Total Expenses Since Launching = £794.72

PROFIT/LOSS:

Currently at an overall loss of: £672.50

Considering last month I was at a loss of £693.50 I would say I’m heading in the right direction, I may even break even one of these days!!!

SO WHAT WORKED AND WHAT DIDN’T THIS MONTH?

Well my internet decided not to work at one point this month, which did not help my business at all!

Also my time management was fairly off which meant I didn’t quite finish everything I planned to do and I spent the whole month wayyy stressed so I need to improve that for next month!

But it has been my biggest income month ever so that’s a massive win considering I don’t yet have a monetization strategy in place.

SO WHAT WORKED AND WHAT DIDN’T PINTEREST SPECIAL?

I have been attempting to track what I’ve been doing on Pinterest for a little while and seeing as I just don’t appear to be making headway I thought it would be good to reflect with you guys and see if I can figure out what I should be doing now.

So I’m going to share below my sessions (not pageviews) from Pinterest and then I will explain a few of the different things I’ve done and hopefully an obvious next step will become apparent.

30/07/17 – I was using a combination of BoardBooster and Tailwind to schedule to Pinterest and at this point I started pinning around 60% of my own stuff to my boards as well a sending it out to group boards.

11/08/17 – Stopped using BoardBooster and started testing a new Tailwind feature.

14/08/17 – Started deleting pins with 0 to 1 repins to see if that boosted my Pinterest account.

31/08/17 – Stopped using the new Tailwind feature as it wasn’t pinning how I wanted, started using Carly’s Pinteresting Strategy.

02/09/17 – Ran out of pins to delete so stopped deleting pins (ran out because everything else had 2+ repins)

Until now I have just continued to use Carly’s Pinteresting Strategy, which is manual pinning.

Here I have plotted the events above so we can see exactly when they occurred.

So my main issue is that I decided to try two very big things (the new Tailwind feature and deleting pins) at the same time. Silly me indeed.

I had that lovely massive spike in August which I don’t think I can attribute to deleting of pins because that’s just too soon. I’m also not sure whether I can attribute it to the new Tailwind feature because that was only a couple of days earlier as well. It could however have just been down to pinning more of my own stuff to my own boards as I started doing that around 14 days earlier, plus I had that other decent hump a few days before.

Sheesh I can’t really see anything clearly from this (if you can please please please tell me). What I can see is that Carly’s Pinteresting Strategy provides me with a nice steady amount of traffic but doesn’t really increase.

I think I will try using a similar strategy but scheduling in BoardBooster (as I’m struggling to manually pin every day) but manually repin content back to my own boards. Depending on how that goes (ie if there is no obvious change) I will try pinning 60% of my own content to my own boards again to see if that helps.

Then if there is still no change I will have a go at deleting pins to see if that causes a massive dip or a high. At least by that point I should know something right!!!

LASTS MONTH’S TO-DO LIST:

Main items –

• Create 16 blog posts DONE

• Continue to implement Carly’s Pinteresting Strategy DONE (I only missed one day)

These two are my main two priorities, everything else comes after and is just a bonus if I mange to get them done!

• Sort SSL thing DONE

• Create better interlinks in posts DONE

• Make menu better DONE

• Place popular posts in sidebar DONE

• Sort out my headers so they advertise my Ultimate List of Bogging FREEBIES LINK DONE (but not sure I link it)

• Set up Blog Audits sales page LINK STARTED (I have done it now but this was one of my time management issues)

• Add some new boards to my Pinterest account DONE

• Create a system for joining new group boards DONE

• Look into site speed STARTED (was wayyyy more complicated than I realized, oops)

• Consider buying and installing Post Gopher DONE (but got it refunded as it wasn’t working for my audience)

• Change all my affiliate links so they are no follow FAILED (just not enough time)

OCTOBERS BLOGGING TO-DO LIST:

• Create DIY Blog Audit freebie

• Write guest post

• Change all my affiliate links so they are no follow

• Compress all images on my blog (for site speed)

• Consider changing to Social Warfare (do more research)

• Complete Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing

GOALS:

So how did I do with my new type goals? Let’s find out!

Level 1 goals are realistic and attainable while level 2 goals are what I really want it to be but much more difficult to attain!

Engaged Pageviews Percentage:

(Number of people who visit my site but also join my subscriber list as these are people wanting to be part of the Well and Wealthy tribe)

August – 2.9%

Level 1 Goal – 3.2%

Level 2 Goal – 3.8%

September – 1.3%

A big drop! Not good although to be fair I’m well overdue a new freebie which is probably a large part of that.

Bounce Rate:

August – 75.23%

Level 1 Goal – 75.00%

Level 2 Goal – 73.00%

September – 77.14%

Okay completely failed on reducing this and I thought I was doing things that would help, clearly not…

Pinterest Click Through Rate:

August – 42 (average daily clicks)

Level 1 Goal – 50

Level 2 Goal – 80

September – 50

At least this went up, not by loads but I did meet my level 1 goal!!!

Pinterest Reach:

August – 85,917 (average monthly viewers)

Level 1 Goal – 90,000

Level 2 Goal – 115,000

September – 76,252

Failed here as well… I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong on Pinterest!

Well at least I reach one goal right. Still just because I didn’t reach my goals doesn’t mean haven’t had other wins this month. I mean it was my highest money-earning month yet!!!

OCTOBER GOALS:

I’m going to be controversial here and not set any goals at all this month. Why is that you ask? Well basically I really want to learn a lot from the Making Sense of Affiliated Marketing course so I want the pressure off so that education is all I’m focused on (and completing a few other bits and pieces that need doing).

Hence no goals October!

As always comment below or email me at sammy@wellandwealthy.org with any thoughts, questions and especially if you can think of anything that would improve the site for you or that you want me to write about!

LOOKING FOR MY MOST RECENT INCOME REPORT?

As of May all my latest income reports are shared exclusively with my subscribers! Sign up below if you want a behind-the-scenes look at how I make a full-time income from home, online!

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