(This is Twentythirtyfree.com‘s second blog traffic and income report for the date of June 2019. Each month will feature a complete breakdown of the traffic, expenses, and income generated by this blog. This is to document the progress this blog is making as it strives to reach a wide audience as well as encourage others that making money while blogging is still possible).
This report has been a long time coming.
For the one or two people who may or may not regularly follow the blog, you may have noticed the lull in posting for the months of June and July. Between a mixture of having to take care of family stuff—and having to go back to the drawing board on learning how to craft a solid article—new posts were few and far between. While this wasn’t ideal for gaining and retaining traffic, the amount of content that I was able to research in terms of blog creation and marketing was indispensable.
I’m going to go ahead and admit this upfront: blogging is a lot more complicated and harder than I thought it would be.
And I don’t even mean the writing itself. I have no problem dedicated a few hours to doing some research, writing some paragraphs, publishing a few links, making a pin on Pinterest, sharing the link on my social media feeds and see if I can get any clicks out of it. That’s all well and good. If you’re a writer by trade, you understand the process.
It’s the non-writer material that’s doing me in. Everything from learning about SEO, which tools to use for email-marketing, where to put Pins on Pinterest, trying to keep a Facebook page up and running even though it still doesn’t have any followers are a lot of the things that make it feel like an overwhelming process. If I start to get stressed out, I always try to remember what genius-marketing-entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk has said about content-creation in relation to marketing:
“Even if your ambitions are huge, start slow, start small, build gradually, build smart.”—Gary Vaynerchuk, Crush It! Why Now Is the Time to Cash-In on Your Passion.
I plan to follow accordingly.
Why I’m Doing This.
At this rate, you might ask why I would even bother to do a blog traffic and income report after only a month and a half of blogging. There couldn’t possibly be any high amount of traffic or income generated from a month and a half, right? Wouldn’t it make sense to do one after I start making decent money instead of before?
You’d be correct but I’m experimenting with doing things a little differently.
Even though I haven’t been updating as much as I would like, there are still a few reasons why I’m wanting to do these reports.
- To Track Growth and Progress.
Anytime a new blog is started, I’m always interested to see what the latest post is. Part of this is because I like getting in touch with new bloggers and reading what they have to say. When they come from different parts of the world—or had a wildly different upbringing—I’m always interested to learn their story. To keep in tandem with a blog’s growth is a lot of work; so if my fellow readers are curious about how many other people read the blog, this will allow them to see it.
2. Reader Feedback.
By showing what articles and weeks have been the most successful, this blog traffic and income report allows me to gauge what my readers find most engaging. In a way, this will help me fine-tailor content on this blog and make it more useful for both casual observers and loyal readers.
Viewing Google Analytics is one thing but laying it out and using it to confirm the interests of your reader-base is something else. Another good thing is that if my articles start to dip in quality over time, the reports will let me know through the dip in traffic.
3. Showing Other Readers What’s Possible.
In addition to providing useful information on how to make the transition to adulthood smoother, I am hoping that these will document to readers that blogging is not dead in 2019. In addition to providing an outlet for your ideas, creativity, and knowledge, blogging can still be used as a side-hustle to generate part-time-income as you begin college or a career.
There are a multitude of income reports you can read for bloggers but a caveat to keep in mind is that a lot of the ones that show up on the first few pages of Google have been blogging for years.
So let’s get started.
June 2019 TwentyThirtyFree.com Blog Stats
Pageviews: 115 (The biggest jump!)
Sessions: 79
Average Session Duration: 55 seconds.
Bounce Rate: 69.62%
Due to specific social media numbers for this month being unavailable, the numbers will resume on the August 2019 Traffic and Income Report.
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Expenses: No extra expenses on the blog outside of upfront hosting were used this month.
Income: $0.93 (Google Adsense).
Killing it!
This was a pleasant surprise since I didn’t make any money during my first two weeks of blogging. The amount of traffic I had this month quadrupled the amount of traffic I had back in May. Granted, I had two more weeks to work with in the month of June but I was still surprised I managed to hit over one-hundred-page-views. I’m going to be honest, I thought it would take several more months before I managed to get over one hundred views a month and I’m excited to find out that it only took a month and a half.
The biggest breakthrough in traffic and notification was one of the co-founders of lendedu.com reaching out to me after I had published my article on the differences between a 401k and a Roth IRA. He wanted to run a link to it on his site and offered to do a guest-post-follow-up. Needless to say, I took the offer and got some more buzz as a result.
In any case, the only paltry revenue I’m getting is from Google Adsense and it’s understandable because I don’t have a lot of consistent traffic. Even though I eventually want to have affiliates, ebooks, and other products coming out, that’s not where my blog is at that stage in the game. Right now, I’m striving to be content-focused, not sales-focused.
My audience is coming from all over the place and I don’t even think the advertiser algorithms would even know what to do if a massive influx of traffic came in. All this means is that I will have to keep grinding out articles for you—and the general public—to enjoy.
Social Media Updates:
Twitter and Pinterest are where I’m getting most of my engagement. I’ve mentioned before that other successful bloggers say that joining Pinterest Boards is the rule if you want to get a large amount of traffic. I’ve been able to get on a few boards by joining ones owned by personal finance bloggers I’ve been able to network with on Twitter. Pinterest Engagement is going up although my most successful Pin would not get it’s due until the end of August. You can see that information over on my August 2019 report.
I will be running Facebook ads but I don’t know when. I’m planning on having a blog-specific-article as well as my article on study habits be the pieces of the puzzle in getting people to my blog. The other side of the coin is getting people to come back once they’ve found it. Once I have some more content out—and get back to a regular posting schedule, I will start using OptinMonster, Mail Chimp, or ConvertKit. As of this writing, I haven’t decided which one I want.
Due to still trying to find my swing in this blogging business, I do want to give a shout-out to those who may have read more than two articles and have expressed half-interest at someone who is getting into blogging at a later stage of the game.
In any case, here’s to another action-packed month of writing! And an exciting blog income report as well!
Previous Report: May 2019
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Let’s crush our dreams together,
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