Blog For Profit
Monthly Blog Income Report – October 2020
In these blog income reports I share how I make money blogging and include tips on how to improve your blogging skills.
A few years ago I published my first income report on my food blog, Pickled Plum. My goal was to show that it’s possible to make money while doing something you love, like cooking.
I wanted to change people’s perspective on how they saw blogging – not as a cute hobby where you make a few dollars here and there, but as a full time job that can pay really well.
I shared income reports with my readers for 8 months and really enjoy the process of writing about the blogging industry. I think a lot of people were surprised to see how much a food blogger could make! But I eventually decided to stop publishing these reports since I felt they didn’t fit with the theme of my blog, which is food.
Over the next few years I continued publishing recipes regularly and watched my income steadily increase. Then a few months ago something interesting happened – a couple of my posts about blogging got a lot of exposure and I started receiving requests from bloggers wanting me to share more blogging tips, even asking for private consultations!
That’s when the desire to help others fully kicked in and I made the decision to start another blog, which is the one you are reading now, where I share everything I know about blogging. With 9 years of experience as a professional blogger under my belt, I thought the timing was right. I have put in my 10,000 hours of work and understand how the industry works. I also know how to make money, as you can see!
In these monthly income reports you will find the total revenue of both of my blogs – Blog for Profit and Pickled Plum. I will also share my revenue streams and tidbits about things that I’ve learned during the past month.
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Blog Earnings for October 2020
TOTAL: $22,197.13
The chart you see above is the income I make with Adthrive, which is an ad monetization platform. In case you were wondering, a blog needs a minimum of 100,000 monthly pageviews to join Adthrive.
This shows how much money I made in October ($20,233) from ads that were placed throughout the Pickled Plum blog. I currently don’t have any earnings for Blog for Profit since the blog is still in its infancy. But I’m hoping it won’t take too long before I can share some numbers with you!
I have also made and additional $1,964.13 from affiliates I promote on Pickled Plum and products I have created on my Shopify store. I can only showing you a couple of screenshots because the others show my personal information. Some of the affiliate programs I use are:
Expenses
Here are some of the expenses I have to factor in on a monthly basis. Liquidweb and Convertkit are more expensive because of the amount of bandwidth I need and subscribers I have. Their basic prices are totally affordable for beginners, should you be interested to check them out).
- Liquidweb (Hosting) : $100
- Convertkit (Email marketing): $100
- Tailwind (Pinterest Scheduling Program): $10
- Buffer (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Scheduling Program): $10
- Cloudflare (CDN and Internet Security): $20
- Adobe (Photo Editing Program): $10
- Shopify (Online Store): $29
- WP Tasty (Recipe Card Plugin): $79 yearly ($6.58/month)
- Nutrifox (Nutritional Label Maker): $9
- DIVI Theme from Elegant Themes (the theme I’m using for this blog): $89 yearly ($7.40/month)
How Often Should You Publish?
This is a question that many, who are new at blogging, are wondering about and trying to figure out. It’s easy to check out successful blogs, look at all the content they have and feel deflated. Anxiety suddenly creeps up and you feel the pressure to publish daily, otherwise, how will you be able to catch up with them? Especially if you want to make a full-time living from it – do you need to publish that often for your blog to be a success?
The short answer is – publishing frequency doesn’t determine how successful your blog will be.
I’ve been there and let me give you a valuable piece of information: stop looking and comparing your blog to other blogs.
We all work differently and react differently to work loads and schedules. Some of us can blog full time, while others have children to take care of. Some of us can take on a mountain of tasks and execute each one of them calmly, while others get overwhelmed with just a couple.
Some of us have trouble concentrating and coming up with the right words to type, while others can type perfectly formed sentences without having to think too much. You get the idea – we are all different and that’s okay.
So how do you know how often YOU should publish?
First, you will have to go through a period of adjustment.
Start by figuring out what your rhythm is. The perfect rhythm is somewhere between being able to push yourself hard enough that you get stuff accomplished daily, and being able to sustain that rhythm daily, weekly, monthly.
Here’s the thing about blogging – consistency is what makes a blogger successful. It’s not posting daily if you can’t keep up with it.
Blogging is more like a marathon than a 100 meter sprint. It takes time and lots and lots of patience to succeed.
That being said, you should at least post once a month. Anything less than that is not recommended.
If you have a very busy schedule and can only post once a month, that’s totally okay but make sure that whatever you are writing about is very informative and a decent length.
I’m not an expert at this stuff but I would say a minimum of 2,500 words per post would be something to strive for. Since your blog will have a limited amount of posts to choose from, you can compensate by making them longer and more informative.
Personally, I feel comfortable publishing once or twice a week but no more than that. It took me a couple of years to find the perfect rhythm and once I did, it changed the way I blogged. I became a lot more consistent and disciplined because I was able to complete all the tasks I would assign to myself, daily.
And that’s very important – If you cannot finish all of your daily tasks, you have too much on your plate. Lighten up the load until you can comfortably complete them. And I promise that once you do that you will find your own magic number.