An Income Boost – Blog Earnings and Stats for May 2015

Oh, you want to read last month’s first?  Here’s all of the blog earnings posts.

Boarding Announcements

Money Propeller is my second blog, Unique Gifter is my first. My goal with it is to straight up make some money, while sharing what I believe is valuable information on all things money. With the goal of earning money, I am attempting to be (somewhat) strategic with how I go about this.

Online projects are my main side hustle; if that’s not your thing, there are some other ideas for you here.

The plan is to be totally transparent about everything and to let you know what is and is not working for me, so you can follow me down the path or avoid the mistakes that leave me in a burning pile of wreckage.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think of these posts, or if you have any questions you would like me to answer, or stats you feel I should include.

This post contains affiliate links.

The Strategy

Money Propeller is an experiment in “Spend money to make money.”  When I decided to launch this domain name (I have a collection, like most online hustlers), my rule for pre-launch was that I needed to have 52 posts written and scheduled. That represents six months of posting twice per week, so that I could focus on promoting the posts and developing other aspects of the blog, like the newsletter.

I have used up nearly all of those staff written posts and need to get hustling this summer to write more!

On Money Propeller I also wanted to have a bunch of different voices and perspectives, right from the beginning. Believe it or not, I don’t know everything! Other people know about topics that I don’t, like fashion, and insights into education. You can read about our authors here, and there are even more in the pipeline.

Do you want to tell your story? Give us a shout and come be our guest.

The Earnings and Stats for May

 

There were 7,446 page views in May, which is an average of 240 per day.  Last month had a huge traffic spike for two days, resulting in an average of 414 per day.  The growth rate is picking up nicely compared to the past few months, here’s hoping the summer traffic drops don’t hinder growth too badly.

 

Social media accounts continue to grow, which is great.

In March, I started working with Gretchen, from Retired by 40, on my Pinterest accounts. She literally wrote a book on Pinterest: Generate Traffic with Pinterest: Your Ultimate Guide to Using Pinterest as a Personal Finance, Money, or Frugality Blogger.

Followers are continuing to increase and traffic from Pinterest is growing, substantially as of late.  Look for a case study on ForProfitBlogging.com in the next few weeks.

Definitely consider picking up Gretchen’s book, Generate Traffic with Pinterest: Your Ultimate Guide to Using Pinterest as a Personal Finance, Money, or Frugality Blogger.

I’ve been using Board Booster and I love it.

It’s a Pinterest scheduling tool, that also has a “looping” feature. Looping repins things from your board, so that they get in front of new faces, and deletes the old pin so that there aren’t multiples on the board.

The scheduling tool is also awesome, you pin to a secret board and the tool then then feeds the main board from the secret board.  That means that you can schedule whatever you want, just as easily as you use Pinterest already.  There is even a 100 pin free trial.  I got hooked after that!

(PS: If you are a blogger and want a nice way to track your stats, For Profit Blogging has a free Blog Tracker available.)

The rest of the stats, like Moz, didn’t really change from last month.

The Dollars

Onto the fun stuff!

 

Best month yet!!  The big payment I talked about in April came through.  It is lovely to wake up to hundreds of dollars in your paypal account, my friends.

 

May Revenue

$13.39 – CPC and CPM Advertising  – The jump here is almost entirely due to the jump in traffic 🙂

$8.84 – Amazon Affiliate Earnings

$0.00 – Target Affiliate Earnings

$0.00 – Five Figure Writer: The email template and tips I used to earn $59k my first year of freelancing.

$221.76 – Direct Advertising

$25  – Airbnb – A great way to travel, read about it here. I checked out places in Rarotonga last night.

$0 – Tangerine – Use my Orange Key 23676924S1 to get a $25 bonus when opening an account

$378.39 – Digit – Use this app to help you save money by rounding up your transactions and saving the difference.

$0 – Vayable – Travel with personalized tour guides who are locals

$0 – Gazelle – Trade in your old electronics for cash, or buy refurbished ones for great prices.

$0 – PicMonkey – Add text to your pictures, for free!

$0 – Genesis Framework – An awesome, customizable platform for websites

$0 – Big Scoots – Web hosting that rocks

$0 – Dropbox – Free document storage and sharing, in the cloud

$0 – Rover – Pet sitting, a side hustle or an affordable way to get your pets looked after

$5 – Board Booster – 100 pin free trial – a way to repin your pins and schedule pins precisely

$0 – ViralWoot – Another free pin scheduler, and way to promote your pins

$652.38 Total (Net of Paypal fees)

I can (duh!) highly recommend that you check out the eBook I cowrote with Kathleen, on creating a brand and getting a blog up and running quickly and efficiently (and no, it doesn’t involve spending this much money on your site!):

(Feel free to sign up as an affiliate, as well. You get half of the sales price!)

May Expenses

$211.06 – Writers and VA Time

$5.00 – Board Booster – Pinterest scheduling tool

$ 211.06 Total 

For simplicity’s sake, all of the VA costs are charged to MP, but she does work on other sites of mine as well.  If you’re curious about what she does, I’ve covered some things here.

 

May Net Earnings

$441.32

The best month yet, by a long shot!  That said, a huge chunk of this was the Digit referrals earned in April.  I’d love for that streak to continue.

Bounce! I like that trajectory!

Definitely not at zero, but if months like this could continue, it would only take 3.7 more.  Unfortunately, I don’t think that is likely at this point, especially as we head into summer.  Onward, though!

Lifetime Earnings
($1,596.39)

That’s a big jump up from last month!  It doesn’t look like this site is trending to be profitable after a year, but it should be slightly past the one year mark (which is mid July).

Don’t forget, everyone: it is absolutely possible to start a blog without spending this much!  I am funding this with past earnings from my other site.

Next Steps

 

I have a solid chunk of vacation coming up, and some hazy ideas around “write lots of posts.”  Let’s hope they come to fruition, shall we?  I might get distracted by reading books.  Worse things have happened in life, my friends.

On that note, does anyone have summer day-time activity suggestions for Toronto and surrounds?  I’m planning to hit up the aquarium and at least one matinee theatre production (we are always the youngest people there by several decades!).

Things that I *did* Do in May

I wrote this section in February, because I felt like I didn’t get much done.  I liked it, so it’s here to stay!

 

In May I finally formatted some monster staff written pieces that I have had sitting in draft mode since January.  Yes, January.  There are more in there, too!  Plus a bunch of half written posts by yours truly.  I also redid some more Pinterest images, and I put a lot of time into helping out a blogging friend with a site design overhaul.

Deplaning

Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoyed your flight! I really do appreciate you taking the time to read all of this, and I especially hope that it is helping you to learn from my wins and major losses!  It is all of you fine folks who got me started on this blogging adventure in the first place, and it really won’t go anywhere at all without you.

If you have any suggestions, again, I would love to hear from you with a quick email or comment.

Here’s all of the blog earnings and stats posts, if you want to read more.