October came and went like a beautiful nightmare, and even though we got lost in planning the perfect Halloween Adult Party, in finding yet other fascinating couples costumes, we (almost) achieved another milestone for the blog. We made 451.50$, and today we’ll show you how that happened in our October 2018 Income Report!
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If you’ve read our previous Income Reports than you can skip this first part if you want and get straight to the point. If not, stick around for a bit and learn something more about us, lovely dreamers.
Related:
1. July 2017 Income Report: How we made our first 260.56$ blogging
We, being my gorgeous wifey (to be) Maya and I – being Andy, admitted from the get-go that we got into this business of blogging to make some money while we help others by sharing our ideas of self-improvement, lifestyle, and our lessons learned in the magical land of blogging.
It’s also true that I am a (very) skeptical man (everyone who knows me can attest that), and I could have never believed that we could make any money online, not to mention by starting a blog!
Apparently, sharing about the struggles of young millennials, our struggles, giving all sorts of life hacks (that actually work) – from cooking, cleaning, money making & management, fun DIY projects we’ve tried, and sharing the life lessons we’ve learned from books, movies & pop culture – and doing it all with our personal geeky twist, can actually make you money.
I sure never thought that could happen! (and now Maya rolls her eyes and smiles)
Our Blogging Story & The Big Problems
Because we love to help others, especially the ones that are younger than us, in every aspect that we struggled in our adult life so far, and because we like to teach people about what we learned from our mistakes, we could not keep it in anymore.
We had to do something.
This, added to the fact that Maya and I are driven by the idea of being entrepreneurs since we were in our teens, and her obsession with Pinterest, pushed us in the direction of blogging.
The skeptical in me was screaming “Lies! They are all liars! You cannot make so much money with a blog!“, all while Maya read amazing income reports to me, from bloggers that make over 10k$ per month to 120k$ per month.
I eventually gave in, because I realized this is not a scam, not MLM bullshit, not a “get rich quick” scheme. This is work, serious work – if you want to actually make money. Plus, Maya’s face lit up every time the blogging topic came into discussion.
Our first big problem was that “old bloggers”, aka those bloggers that have been doing this for years and years, they all tell you that it takes months, sometimes even years, to make a few hundred bucks online.
The relief came from new bloggers who have learned from the mistakes of others and found solutions to make it in the blogging world, much faster.
Our second big problem was that the big bloggers we follow are almost all from America, and we live in Europe. America is more open to the idea of making money online than the rest of the world.
The relief, in this case, was that there are some young European bloggers that make a nice income online, from 4k$ and up! This really helped us in the decision making process.
Our third problem was the fact that I was the only one with a job because since we moved to Spain (that area was basically a Summer Resort), Maya couldn’t find a normal job, besides freelancing as a photographer and online – and that’s not steady income.
Life in that area is expensive, especially if you’re young and broke, and we still have some debt left to pay back home, so we can’t afford to waste hard earned money, not even the 134$ we used to get us started.
After a long, 4 months debate, research and a long list of pros and cons, we finally agreed on giving it a try, on one condition – we’ll be super serious about this.
So we started our blogging journey on the 1st of March, 2017!
Our lives are an adventure, filled with life lessons, so we decided to start blogging and share our mistakes earned wisdom with the world, especially with the young adults that are now starting their life journeys on their own.
When we first started this journey back in March 2017, we had some idea about how it would be, and what it would imply. Back then, Maya, was an unemployed, bored out of her mind, a stay at home fiance, with no friends, suffering from depression and in dire need of a change. We were living in Spain, and still adapting to the climate (hot, hot, hot!), learning the language and the people.
I was working 6 days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day, for so little money that we could barely put something aside. Don’t even think about traveling somewhere further than where we were staying at the time, or buying nice clothes, or having a hobby. Those were dreams.
Blogging was a real financial sacrifice for us back then, but we made it!
Now, we’re in Scotland, we both have jobs, and now we’re adapting to life here. Traveling and our new life has changed our priorities a bit, blogging going from the first thing on our list, to the last. But since we got back into the game, we upgraded our thinking, our strategies, AND our DREAMS.
Our roles are still the same.
Maya is in charge of managing the blog, researching and creating the awesome content you all love, taking the photos and so on. I still work full-time, so my part is simple – I give ideas & help with the marketing, and I have to make every Income Report.
But I have to say that starting this blog must be the best investment in our adult life so far. Not only we’ve learned so many invaluable life skills, but this is getting us one step closer to our dream, to having our own business and freedom.
Have you started your blog yet? if not, get our FREE e-book Blogging 101 Blogging for Profit to learn everything about the first steps in this world! Or just grab your hosting for only 3,95$ and get started now!
And now, like Maya likes to say, enough chit-chatting! Let’s get to it!
October 2018 Income Report – How we made 451.50$ without blogging about blogging!
I will try to keep this as simple and on point as possible. When we first started, we got overwhelmed with the information you find out there, but we tried to apply some of the most valuable tricks learned before the actual launch.
From having a couple dozen articles pre-written, to how to set up your Pinterest, learning about group boards, SEO optimization, when to apply for affiliate marketing or the ongoing “war” ADS vs NO ADS… we worked a lot!
Today, like always, we will talk about some important stuff that happened in the previous months, that led to our October success.
October 2018 Views & Revenue
Blog Views: 11,208 on the blog (Wow!) Compared to 3,034 in September.
(and remember, this is after a 6 months break, with no Pinterest investment, no new content, no affiliate promoting and no other Social Media implications!)
Pinterest Views: up to 800K unique views! (+ we paused Tailwind).
Total earnings: 451.50$
Financial investments: 15.58$ ( for Web Hosting and Site Backup)
How did we make our money?
ADS:
This month’s earnings are again, mostly from ads. This is surprising, giving that our views are just shy over 11K this month, but that means that we got more clicks on them than the usual. Great! Also, thanks to all of you that are kind enough not to use ad blocking when reading our blog.
Media.net is still in the lead with this one, but Google AdSense is catching up!
Media.net: 317.40$
Google AdSense: 64.10$
Affiliates:
From our many affiliates (that we shamelessly ignored for 6 months but we started re-promoting in September), this month we can see revenue from a few of them.
SendOwl – 44$
SendOwl is an online platform that helps digital creators (e-book writers, course creators) to sell their stuff easily and have a personalized affiliate program for their work.
On SendOwl you can become an affiliate for bloggers you want to promote, like The She Approach, or sell your own products (exactly what we will do).
SendOwl also has its own affiliate program, that made us 44$ this month!
ShareASale – 26$
ShareASale is a totally different thing from SendOwl – it is a marketplace for many companies, from online retailers like YesStyle.com to Social Media schedulers like Tailwind.
On ShareASale, you have the opportunity to find and opt-in for any affiliates you find to fit your target audience’s needs, but it is up to the actual company to accept you as an affiliate.
Yes, it also has its own affiliate program as well.
Amazon Associates & e-Bay Partner Network – 0$
Unfortunately, we were unable to make any revenue from these programs this month, not for lack of trying, but simply because we were not focused on them as much as we should have been.
What changed this month?
This month we were more focused on Halloween, promoting last year’s and this year’s content, and we are happy to say that all of our pins made it into the “Viral Pins List” ( yep! We have one of those now!), with the pins we made last year go from 12K to over 160K impressions.
What we did wrong
We didn’t promote affiliates as much as we could have without being too “salesy” or drowning our followers in them. But the most important mistake is that we did not launch our Pinterest e-book “From “Meh” to Pinteresting!” when we finished it over 8 months ago! Anxiety and life kept us from being out there, but no more.
Since then much has changed, so our e-book is in process of a serious update, but this year it will definitely come out and help you kick ass on Pinterest!
What’s next?
As Christmas is on our doorsteps soon enough, we’ll be very focused on seasonal articles – but again, with quality, value, geekiness, and personality – not quantity!
We will finally release the updated version of our e-book “From “Meh” to Pinteresting!”, and we won’t let anything stop us this time.
We will get our blog secured, as we should have done a long time ago, and we will be adding some new sections to it, so stay tuned for some changes that we know you will love!
What did we do with the money?
We got to finally leave the house and go up to Loch Ness and see if we could find Nessie! Unfortunately, she did not want to come out and play, no matter how much we called out, but we found another gem of Loch Ness – the Urquhart Castle.
What a beautiful place!
Also, we went to the new Fantastic Beasts The Crimes of Grindelwald film, and it was AMAZING! I swear, our jaws dropped in the last minute and we could not pick them up! Had to drag them home! Did you see it yet?
What you need to learn from our October 2018 Income Report:
1. you can make money from ads even with a small audience
2. you cannot be shy when you want to make money with affiliate marketing
3. you must not let anxiety and fear keep you from achieving your earning potential!
And that’s all for today, folks! We hope you enjoyed reading our October 2018 Income Report and that you’ve learned something new today!
If you found any value in this post, be sure to pin it, share it on Facebook, and Tweet it! We will really appreciate it!
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