Blog Income Report: $2,227 in December 2020
I can’t believe this is my final income report of 2020!
December was my best month ever on Simplifying College. And much like last month, I hardly spent any time working on this blog. In fact, I’d estimate I spent no more than 5 hours on it this month, so everything I earned was passive income.
I can’t believe this blog I started back in March was able to grow so quickly! (Honestly, much faster than any of my other blogs have grown.)
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
- August 2020: $1,000.18
- September 2020: $352.33
- October 2020: $1,440.35
- November 2020: $1,250.22
Traffic Breakdown
December 2020 Blog Traffic:
- Pageviews: 41,891
This was my second-highest traffic month this year, right after October. I was happy with this traffic, and the fact that one-third of that was organic search traffic.
December 2020 Email List:
- Subscribers: 999
Another slow month for email list growth, but I am not super focused on email marketing for this blog anyway.
Income Breakdown
December 2020 Blog Income:
- Amazon: $1,278.77
- Mediavine: $942.12
- Skimlinks: $6.79
Total: $2,227.68
Amazon
This month was great for Amazon affiliate sales because of my holiday gift guides about Christmas gifts for college students and Stocking Stuffers for College Students.
In fact, this was my highest-earning month ever from Amazon! I had an extremely high conversion rate (19%) which tells me that my gift guides are doing a good job at making sales.
However, I see affiliate sales going way down in January now that the holidays are over.
Mediavine
My RPMs in December were even higher than November, which is to be expected during Q4. So I also had my highest-earning month ever from Mediavine in December, thanks to the high traffic and RPMs I had.
However, I also expect this to drop off a lot in January!
Skimlinks
In December, I once again made a bit of money from Skimlinks, which is an affiliate network that allows you to earn commission from hundreds of different brands. My favorite thing about Skimlinks is that it automatically converts links on your blog into affiliate links, making it extremely quick and easy to use.
Blogging Expenses
My direct expenses for this blog in December were zero, as usual. I do have two expenses for this blog that I pay for annually though.
I pay for web hosting through Bluehost annually, and it’s about $170 a year. (This is due to the fact that I have three blogs. If you are just starting one blog, you can get web hosting from Bluehost for just $3.95 a month.)
I also pay annually for my email marketing platform, ConvertKit.
I mainly use ConvertKit for one of my other blogs, but my Simplifying College email list is contained within the same account. I pay over $800 a year for ConvertKit (because I have over 5,000 subscribers total) but if I were just paying for my SC email list on its own, it would be about $29 a month.
Blogging Goals
As I mentioned last month, I didn’t have any goals for this blog going forward except to let it run on autopilot while I focus on my two other blogs.
I do plan to sell it at some point this year, I just need to decide when.
This will also be my last income report on this blog, but I hope these have been helpful in showing how I have grown a brand-new blog from scratch!
What Worked This Month
I did NOTHING on this blog all month except publish my November income report and create a few new pins at the very beginning of the month.
The holiday content that I created back in the summer/fall started to rank in Google (including one popular post that was in the top spot in the search results!) and take off on Pinterest. So this provided a lot of traffic without me having to do anything.
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:
- Decide what you want to blog about (AKA your blog niche.)
- Choose a name for your blog.
- 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.)
- Choose a WordPress theme. (Mine is from 17th Avenue Designs.)
- 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.