Blog Income Report: $1,1440 in October 2020
After a disappointing slump in September, I had my best month yet on Simplifying College in October! This was my highest traffic and income month since starting this blog back in March of this year.
If you haven’t read my income reports before, I like to start off by saying that I share these income reports to show what it’s REALLY like to make money from a blog. I have been documenting my progress since I started this blog to show you how I make money and what strategies are working for me.
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
Traffic Breakdown
October 2020 Blog Traffic:
- Pageviews: 42,612
This month, my traffic more than doubled compared to September! The majority of this traffic came from a Halloween post, so I do expect things to drop off some in early November, but I have enough holiday content that I think November and December should still be very strong months for traffic!
October 2020 Email List:
- Subscribers: 948
Not much to report here, my email list continues to grow but I continue to neglect it. I do plan on sending a Black Friday email about college gift ideas in November, so I’ll report on how that goes next month.
Income Breakdown
October 2020 Blog Income:
- Amazon: $801.80
- Mediavine: $624.70
- Amazon ebook: $13.85
Total: $1,440.35
Amazon
After having a really awful month with the Amazon affiliate program in September, I came back and had my highest-earning month ever in October!
A lot of my affiliate sales came from this post about Halloween costumes so I do expect sales to drop off some at the beginning of November. However, I have a lot of holiday content for Thanksgiving and Christmas that I expect will bring in lots of Amazon affiliate sales starting next month!
Amazon also offered tiered commission bonuses during October, so my commission rates ended up being higher than normal for most of the month as I moved up in the tiers. I wish this was something they did year-round!
Mediavine
October was a really good month for Mediavine, although my RPMs were slightly lower than they were last time I had a similar amount of traffic, back in July.
Either way, I am happy with earning over $600 this month through Mediavine. I love advertising income because it is totally passive.
Amazon ebook
This month, I made one affiliate sale for Maria’s ebook about how to make money from the Amazon affiliate program.
Maria earns thousands every month from the Amazon affiliate program on her fashion blog, and her ebook is very helpful for all bloggers who want to learn how to make money as an Amazon affiliate.
Blogging Expenses
As usual, I did not have any blogging expenses in October.
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.)
One other thing to note, I realized I do have another blogging expense I have that I pay for annually that I have not mentioned here before, and that is 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
I didn’t set any blogging goals for September, because I didn’t even write my income report for September until close to the end of October!
Honestly, I am going to remove this section from my income reports going forward, because I don’t tend to set many monthly goals.
What Worked This Month
October was a really good month for Simplifying College!
I barely spent any time working on this blog. I was actually traveling for a good part of the month and not thinking about it at all! Yet I had my highest-earning month ever on Simplifying College in October.
As I mentioned earlier, I credit almost all of this to my very popular Halloween post. This month, I continued to make some new Pinterest pins for this post, which brought in a lot of traffic. I also started making new pins for holiday posts so they can go ahead and start getting traffic.
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.
