How I Made $1,000 in August 2020 (Blog Income Report)

Blog Income Report: $1,000 in August 2020

It’s the beginning of a new month, which means it’s time for an income report!

I started sharing income reports for this blog in order to show that it’s possible to make money from a new blog, even if you don’t have much time to work on it.

I run two other blogs in addition to Simplifying College, and I would estimate that this month I spent no more than 10 hours working on this website. Yet I was still able to earn $1,000 in passive income from this blog.

How did I do it? Read on to find out!

Are you interested in starting your own blog? It’s a great way to make money online and anyone can do it if they’re willing to put in the work.

The only cost associated with starting a blog is web hosting (I recommend Bluehost because they offer web hosting for $3.95 a month and a free domain name) and the optional cost of getting a premium WordPress theme for your blog. (I use a theme from 17th Avenue Designs.)

If you want to start your own blog, be sure to read my guide on how to start a blog for beginners for a step-by-step tutorial on how to get started.

Now let’s get into my blog income report for this month!

Previous Income Reports

Looking for my previous income reports? Here they are:

• April 2020: $33.47
• May 2020: $205.42
• June 2020: $681.50
• July 2020: $1,254.74

Traffic Breakdown

August 2020 Blog Traffic:

• Pageviews: 35,258

My traffic this month was unfortunately lower than my traffic last month. I’ll talk about why I think this happened later in this post.

August 2020 Email List:

• Subscribers: 828

This was another good month for growing my email list! I went from over 500 subscribers last month to over 800 this month by offering my free college packing list. I still need to figure out what to “do” with my email list though.

Income Breakdown

August 2020 Blog Income:

• Amazon: $429.30
• Mediavine: $542.35
• Skimlinks: $13.73
• Amazon ebook: $14.80

Total: $1,000.18

Amazon

Unfortunately, my Amazon affiliate sales really dropped off towards the second half of this month. I would attribute that to most people having already moved into college, so by the middle of August they were no longer shopping for college and dorm things (which is where I lost traffic too.)

I am going to focus on blog posts for the holiday season in order to hopefully boost my Amazon affiliate earnings again.

I saw a lot of my Amazon earnings this summer come from blog posts about graduation and then back-to-college shopping, and both of those events are basically over now (well, until next year!)

So I really want to focus on more seasonal content (for things like Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, etc.) to keep my affiliate sales on the rise.

Mediavine

This was another solid month for Mediavine, although again, my earnings dropped during the second half of the month because my traffic was down.

Hopefully I can boost this area of my income by increasing my traffic through more seasonal content over the next few months. Q4 is coming up and that’s when ad spending is the highest, so I am hoping this is reflected in higher RPMs (revenue per one thousand pageviews) for me.

Skimlinks

This month I added a new income stream through Skimlinks. 

I really LOVE this website because it automatically turns links on your blog into affiliate links, so you don’t have to join a bunch of individual affiliate programs and keep track of them all. Highly recommend!

My earnings this month came from Erin Condren planners and Society6 prints.

Amazon ebook

I made one affiliate sale this month for Maria’s excellent ebook about how to make money from the Amazon affiliate program.

This ebook is very affordable (I’ve seen courses that charge 10x the price of this ebook for the same information!) and contains everything you need to know to make money as an Amazon affiliate.

Blogging Expenses

I didn’t have any blogging expenses this month. 

The only recurring expense that I have for this blog is web hosting through Bluehost, which is something I pay for annually.

I am on a web hosting plan that costs $170 a year due to the fact that I host multiple blogs. However if you are just starting one blog, you can get web hosting from Bluehost for just $3.95 a month.

Blogging Goals

Last month I said I wanted to publish four new blog posts, and I did not quite meet this goal. I only published three new blog posts.

I did achieve a goal from June, which was diversifying my income. I made a little bit of money through Skimlinks this month and I am hoping that number continues to go up! Although I think at this point it’s obvious the Amazon affiliate program converts the best for affiliate sales.

My goals for next month are:

1. Publish three new blog posts
2. Come up with a strategy for my email list

What Worked This Month

In my July income report, I mentioned that I really only worked on my blog for about two weeks during the first half of the month.

This month, I spent even LESS time on my blog because I was traveling and spending time with family and friends. I only worked on the blog during about one week out of the whole month (maybe 10 hours total.)

So I was definitely pleased that I still earned $1,000 in passive income!

Setting up this blog to be successful by writing high-quality blog posts that are optimized for monetization has really paid off. Also, establishing Pinterest traffic (and search traffic, even though SEO takes longer to start working) has helped me get consistent traffic even with a new blog.

I feel pretty confident that I could not touch this blog again and still earn a decent amount of money from it each month.

Of course, that is not my plan! I don’t think I am anywhere close to the traffic/earning potential for this blog, so I am going to keep up a hands-on approach with it for at least the rest of this year.

Want to Learn How to Start a Blog?

Starting a blog was by far the best decision I made in college!

I now earn over $5,000 a month between my three blogs, and this is still something I do only part time!

You can read more about how I started blogging, along with the step-by-step guide to start your own blog, in this post.

Basically, it boils down to the following steps:

1. Decide what you want to blog about (AKA your blog niche.)
2. Choose a name for your blog.
3. Get your domain name and web hosting through Bluehost. (Your domain name is FREE and web hosting with them is only $3.95 a month.)
4. Choose a WordPress theme. (Mine is from 17th Avenue Designs.)
5. Write your first blog post!

Starting a blog is actually really easy and something you can do today. You don’t need any experience. My biggest tip is just to get started and learn as you go!

Click here for the full step-by-step guide on how to start a blog.