Blog Income Report: $1,250 in November 2020
Welcome to my November income report!
This month was another really good month for my blog, and best of all I spent a total of maybe just 20 hours this month working on it.
As I’ll discuss later in my post, I do potentially foresee a slump in traffic come January through April or so, but right now I am enjoying all the holiday income!
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
Traffic Breakdown
November 2020 Blog Traffic:
- Pageviews: 29,766
My traffic in November was much lower than October, but it did not impact my income that much which is great! I obviously would like to see this number consistently go up and maintain a higher level of traffic, though.
November 2020 Email List:
- Subscribers: 981
Like last month, my email list growth was slow (due to the seasonality of my one and only email opt-in.) I FINALLY sent an email to my list about Black Friday sales, which resulted in a total of about 60 clicks to my blog.
Income Breakdown
November 2020 Blog Income:
- Amazon: $507.02
- Mediavine: $726.81
- Skimlinks: $16.39
Total: $1,250.22
Amazon
November was another pretty solid month with the Amazon affiliate program. I had a lot of sales coming from my posts about Friendsgiving decorations as well as Christmas gifts for college students.
I expect this amount to go up even more in December (fingers crossed!) as people continue to do their holiday shopping online.
Mediavine
I had a great earnings month from Mediavine in November! Despite my traffic being MUCH lower than it was in October, I earned even more from advertising due to the high RPMs that this time of year normally brings.
This is another thing I am hoping to go up even more in December!
Q4 (particularly November and December) are known to be great months for advertising, and I definitely saw the increase in RPMs for my blog this month.
Skimlinks
I made a small amount of money this month from Skimlinks, which is an affiliate network that allows you to earn commission from hundreds of different brands. What I really like about Skimlinks is that it automatically converts links on your blog into affiliate links, which is so easy and hassle-free!
This month, my Skimlinks affiliate sales came from Erin Condren planners and BirchBox. Although it’s not a ton of money, I’m still happy with these sales.
Blogging Expenses
My direct expenses for this blog in November 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
Last month I said I was going to remove this section from my income reports, because I don’t tend to set monthly goals for blogging. But I do want to share my general goals for the future of Simplifying College.
I started this blog with the intention to sell it, like I’ve sold two other blogs already. Now that I have built up a solid library of content (50+ blog posts) on this blog and am getting decent traffic, I am not planning to write any more new posts. My focus will be on increasing traffic to my existing content.
In 2021, this blog will probably be taking a backseat to my other two blogs I currently run. However, I am pretty confident that this blog can basically run on autopilot now and still generate consistent income. I’ll probably aim to sell it at the end of 2021, but I have not fully decided yet.
What Worked This Month
At the beginning of this month, I created a bunch of new pins for my holiday content. This includes my posts about Friendsgiving decorations and Friendsgiving ideas, which both did really well in November.
I also created a lot of pins for all my Christmas content, which I expect to pay off next month as traffic increases to those posts.
Another thing I did this month was write two Valentine’s Day posts. Hopefully these will start generating traffic and sales in January/February. I do foresee a potential traffic slump after the holidays though.
I have kind of determined that the main “seasons” for my blog are:
- College graduation (May/June)
- Back to college shopping (July/August)
- Halloween (October)
- Holiday season (November/December)
So I think January through April might potentially be slower months.
One other thing that really started paying off this month for me was SEO.
Some of my holiday blog posts started ranking in the number one position in Google search results, which led to a massive increase in search traffic. I’m really pleased by this and it goes to show that SEO does pay off eventually!
I have really struggled with SEO on my other blogs, but I’m glad to see that the efforts I’ve made with it on SC have paid off.
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.
Hi there! Thanks for the inspiring post. I have a question–currently I have 2 blog posts ranking well on Google. The rest of my blog posts are nowhere near ranking well on Google, but I have shared them on Pinterest.
My Amazon affiliate income comes from just those 2 posts which are ranking on Google and receiving organic search traffic.
I am getting no sales from the posts I pin to Pinterest about home appliances, even though some of these pins have gone viral.
Do you get your Amazon affiliate income from the posts you pin on Pinterest? If so, do you have any tips for getting conversions from Pinterest traffic?
Maybe target audience matters too.. I think my blog readers are mostly in their 40s according to Google Analytics, and may not be the demographics of people who browse on Pinterest, clickthrough, and buy.
Thank you.
Chloe
Hi Chloe,
Great question! First of all, from my understanding, organic search traffic IS the most valuable for conversions on affiliate sales. So I think improving SEO and getting more posts to rank should be a top focus.
That being said, I do personally earn a lot of my Amazon affiliate income from posts that do well on Pinterest. (For example, I had a post about Halloween costumes go viral on Pinterest last month, and all the traffic/income from the post came from Pinterest.)
In your case, it might have to do with your audience/niche, but also the types of posts you are getting Pinterest traffic from. If the posts are not targeting users/keywords who have active and immediately buying intent, you might get traffic to the posts but no sales. I would make sure you are doing everything you can to optimize clicks in these posts that get traffic from Pinterest, and also link to your 2 posts which do bring in the most conversions for you.
Hope this helps!
Hey!
Your income reports are very inspiring! You mentioned that you have three blogs (including this one), my question is how do you manage these three blogs with Pinterest and everything?
With Pinterest’s new algorithm, and the fact that they now prefer completely new content and manual pinning, how do you manage growing three blogs?
And what will you do with this blog (you mentioned that you want to run this blog on auto-pilot) if you are not planning on writing new content?
Thanks!
Maya
Thanks! I typically batch create a bunch of pins (20-25) every month or so and schedule those using Pinterest’s native scheduler. I honestly don’t spend much time on Pinterest. I plan on selling this blog at some point this year, but it’s also at the point where it is getting consistent traffic on its own.
I love your blog! It really has inspired me to really focus on my Pinterest and google SEO.
1. So if you are writing something 3 months in advance, I run out of pins on tailwind regarding that specific post within like 2 weeks. What would I do?
2. I know you glanced over this but I’m still a bit confused. How do I know which post to make new pins for?
3. Also one thing I never understood about Google SEO is how many keywords should I put in a post?
Thank you so much.
Great questions!
1. I don’t use Tailwind but let’s say I create a Christmas post in September, I would go ahead and create a few pins for it right away and share them on Pinterest, but then I would wait until November to create more pins and schedule them on Pinterest! (I use Pinterest’s native scheduling feature.)
2. I don’t have an exact strategy for this, but I typically make new pins for whichever posts are bringing me the most traffic in that month, as well as seasonal posts. (So I’d make new pins for a Halloween post in early October, etc.)
3. I’m not an expert on SEO but I just use the Yoast SEO plugin which lets you know how many times you should use your keyword in a blog post (the longer the post is, the more you should use it.) I also work in variations of the keyword too.
Hope this helps!