How We Made $3,885 in October 2017 Blogging

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What’s going on $avvy readers! We are excited to share our monthly blogging income report with you. If you are new to our site we started tracking our blogging income a few months ago. It’s a great way to track the progress of our blog after quitting my job to work on it full-time. It’s also a great way to follow along if you if you are planning on starting your own online business. It’s crazy to think a few months ago I was working a 9-5 job dreaming about the day I could leave and work for myself. It’s been an absolute roller coaster of emotions. I can honestly say I have never been happier in life. It’s an amazing feeling waking up each and every day excited for “work”. I am so blessed to have the freedom to work from home! A bunch of you have wanted to start your own blog after seeing the success that we have had, and we highly recommend it! If we had not taken the leap of faith in starting our own blog, I would still be stuck bouncing from job to job trying to find my true happiness. When we first started blogging:

We did not know the difference between a domain name and web hosting.
We had never heard of WordPress.
Affiliate marketing was something we never heard of before.
Writing was not our favorite thing to do.
We only had nights and weekends to work on our blog.

Now six months after quitting my job, we are earning a full-time income.

Reason for sharing our blog income

Now some of you might be thinking I must be crazy sharing our blog income publicly. Honestly, it’s extremely scary still! As much as I LOVE talking about money, sharing our blog income is still a challenge. It’s a lot of pressure each month to try and beat last months numbers. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true.

I want to continue to see our blog grow every single month. I know that’s not realistic as it’s a business and there will be ups and downs. The biggest lesson I have learned after becoming an entrepreneur is that you MUST stop caring what others think. Life is way too short to have others hold you back from going after your dreams.

These income reports keep us extremely motivated and focused on growth. We hope that they are as valuable for you as they are for us. If you are interested in starting your own blog we have a FREE 7-day blogging course that you should totally check out. Main reasons we share our blog income report:

To motivate others to chase after their dreams.
It will help us set goals and achieve them.
We want to be as transparent with our readers as possible.
To show that making a full-time income from blogging is possible.
To provide an overall summary of what we have accomplished and been working on each month.

Life before blogging

Before we started blogging, I was caught up switching from job to job trying to find what would make me happy. I was an insurance salesman, office manager, Amazon store owner, UPS driver, and jail deputy before I had finally realized I would never be happy at a “normal” job.

The one thing every job took from me was my FREEDOM. My freedom to be creative, set my own hours, work anywhere, and earn my OWN income. I was sick of feeling suffocated and forced to work for someone else’s money.

One of my favorite quotes of all time, “You either work for an entrepreneur or you become one“.

After leaving my job to run our site full-time, I replaced my income within a couple of months. It was an incredible feeling to have a dream and make it become a reality. The only regret I have is not starting our blog sooner. I was introduced to them in high school and thought they were dumb. What a mistake!

How we made $3,885 in October 2017

Affiliate Sales: $595

Website Ads: $1,082

Freelancing / VIPKID: $634

E-commerce Sales: $149

Blog Coaching: $125

The Good: We had an incredible month for sponsored posts on our site. This is by far the easiest money I have ever made. I spent a total of three hours earning the $1,300 from the sponsored posts. It would be incredible if we could have this happen every month. Our traffic was at an all-time high (80k+ page views) due to a post going viral on Pinterest. It really helped drive traffic all month long which was incredible. We finally topped the $1,000 in ad revenue which we are so excited about. I am continuing to teach English online through VIPKID. I get paid $20 an hour and get to set my own hours. I teach around 1-2 hours each morning before working on the blog. It’s literally the perfect side hustle! We had our first couple blog coaching clients. We really enjoy doing these phone calls and know we can provide great value to other bloggers that are struggling.

The Bad: With a viral post the traffic is only temporary. We are concerned that our traffic is going to drop significantly next month, which will impact our blog income. We had a problem switching from HTTP to HTTPS which caused our site to be down for several hours. Luckily that’s behind us now. Glad we made the switch. Facebook did not like me this month. I got temporarily banned from Facebook groups for a full week. Not being a part of our incredible blogging community sucked! I missed you guys hahaha.

Starting your own blog

If you have been thinking about starting a blog there is no better time than the present! Our biggest regret is not starting one sooner. More than 100 people have taken our FREE 7-day blogging course and we have received incredible feedback. We go over everything you need to know to start your blog, drive traffic, and earn your first income. Seriously, we want to help you change your life forever!

If you are apprehensive and have questions about starting your own blog shoot us an email at savvyklines@gmail.com. We will be more than happy to chat with you!

Top affiliate companies

Course worth taking!

1. Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. This was the first course we ever decided to take. Honestly, this course should be one of the very first things you purchase when starting your blog. Michelle put her heart and soul into this course to help new bloggers learn the in’s and out’s of monetizing a blog. One of the best parts of this course is the lifetime membership. We refer back to this course month after month to review and implement more tactics to increase our blog income. You’ll learn absolutely everything you need to know about affiliate marketing from Michelle Schroeder-Gardner a full-time RVing Millionaire blogger. What’s included:

6 modules, 30+ lessons on affiliate marketing
What affiliate marketing is and how it works
Why affiliate marketing is great
The exact steps Michelle took to earn over $300,000 from a single blog post
How to pick the right affiliate products to promote
How to increase conversions
How to build trust and not lose followers
Required disclosures that you need to know about
The one major tool you need for affiliate marketing
Different strategies to use to promote your affiliate products
How to use Pinterest to succeed at affiliate marketing
In-depth Pinterest marketing strategies
PDF worksheets to easily plan out your business
BONUS – Acess to Facebook Mastermind group
BONUS – Weekly free group coaching sessions
BONUS – Pinterest Strategies to drive hundreds of thousands of monthly views to your site

Social media review

If you don’t already know, blogging is 20% content creation and 80% marketing it to the right people. If you are struggling to gain traction with your blog we offer 1-hour blog coaching sessions that would be very beneficial. Since time is limited we are not cheap, but we guarantee we will provide an immense amount of value. Be sure to join our FREE Facebook groups!

Below is our monthly breakdown and review of our social media growth. This is another great tool we use to analyze our efforts and ensure we are focusing our time where it needs to be. Every social media platform we grew from ZERO followers. It’s great to see month after month the hard work pay off. We made the switch from MailChimp to ConvertKitand it has completely changed our email marketing.

Facebook: 1,450 page likes (7% increase from 1,352)

Twitter: 10,925 followers (4% increase from 10,488)

Pinterest: 2,430 followers (11% increase from 2,191)

Instagram: 2,406 followers (1% increase from 2,383)

Email List: 1,650 subscribers (17% increase from 1,412)

Monthly blog goals

It was awesome to break the 80k page view this month! We crushed our goal from last month for 60k. The next two months are HUGE in the blogging world as the holiday season is upon us. We have been working hard to take advantage of the uptick in traffic this time of year.

We are looking forward to seeing what our traffic does on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I am taking a digital marketing course this month. We really want to branch out our business and start offering digital marketing services for local businesses in our area. Next months blog goals:

Exceed $4,000 in blog income
Grow blog traffic to 100,000 monthly views (yikes!)
Increase our Pinterest followers to 2,800
Twitter following to 11,500
Grow Facebook page to 1,700 likes
Increase Instagram to 2,450 followers
Grow email list to 2,000 subscribers
Get interviewed on another blog/website
Get a paid sponsored post
Create 1-2 screen capture videos on our YouTube Channel

Life goals & plans

It’s important to set life goals and plans alongside your business. We have a few things in the upcoming month we are excited about. We continue to run a frugal budget, which is allowing us to save like crazy. We have the goal of having a net worth of well over $100k before turning thirty.

If things continue the way they are we should have no problem achieving it. We continue to chip away at Brittany’s low-interest student loans. Most of our leftover money is going into our investment accounts.

Our old beater cars are still running strong with no repairs last month. We drive a 2005 Toyota Camry and a 2006 Hyundai Santa Fe. Both with well over 100k miles on them. Talk about saving money, we have NEVER had a car payment and plan on keeping it that way. Looking forward to spending time with the family this Thanksgiving. Definentally one of our favorite holidays.

Resources we love

You can check out our entire recommendations page to see all of our favorite products and service we use.

Here are our favorites from this month:

Bluehost: If you’re looking to start a WordPress blog cheap, then choosing Bluehost for your hosting company is your answer. Bluehost has been one of the top web hosting companies since 2003 and you can start your own blog with them for just $2.95 a month! Another bonus is if you sign up using our link you will get your domain for free if you purchase a 12 month or longer blog hosting plan.

Pinecone Research: Your search for the highest paying survey company is over. Start making money while you watch TV. Pinecone makes taking online surveys a breeze.

Rakuten: Save on all your online purchases. The simple and easy to use cash back program. Grab your free $10 credit here.

Social Warfare: The best social media plugin on the market. Drive traffic to your blog and get your content shared! We have a post get 5k page views in one day with help from Social Warfare.

Tailwind: Another absolute game changer when it comes to Pinterest! We spend maybe 2-3 hours a week on social media marketing. Our reach and following almost doubled our first month of using Tailwind on our Pinterest account.

Old traffic/income reports

Featured question of the month

Starting last month we started this featured question section. Basically, we take one question from the comment section below and answer it the following month. We love giving back so this is a great way to try and help other bloggers out. Monthly featured question: How have you grown your blog so quickly after quitting your job?

This should be a fun one! Basically, I did not have an option but to have our site succeed. I honestly went all in on making our blog successful. I committed to learning as much as I could as fast as I could. Many times new bloggers are stubborn and think they know everything already, I was one of them. The faster you can humble yourself and learn from those who are succeeding already the faster your blog will grow.

One thing that completely changed our blog was watching a free webinar hosted by Rosemarie Groner from Busy Budgeter. She had an incredible presentation about chasing ROI (return on investment). Basically making sure you are focusing on the right things that bring the most value to your blog.

If you are spending hours posting on Twitter and it is not driving traffic to your blog why continue? Remember 80% of your success in business comes from only 20% of the tasks you do. Focus on figuring out what that 20% is and throw everything you got at it!

We will be featuring one question from a reader in each monthly income report. Please leave a comment below if you have a question that you would like us to answer!

Final thoughts on starting a blog

Remember that a year from now, you’ll wish you started today. It’s always good to remind yourself where you want to be a year from now, five years from now, and ten years from now.

Do you want to be stuck at a 9-5 job that you dread each and every week? A job that has little upside in the future? Or would you rather be making money from multiple income streams working from the comfort of your home? Or traveling full-time with the luxury of being able to work anywhere you want?

Put in the work now so you can enjoy financial freedom in the future. Instead of watching another episode of Game of Thrones tonight hoping your life changes, start your blog.

How We Made $3,885 in October 2017 Blogging

Reason for sharing our blog income

Life before blogging