How I Made $991.58 Blogging in the First Quarter of 2019

Welcome to my 2019 Q1 income report! In this report, I'll show you everything that went on with my blog from January – March of 2019.

I'm creating these income reports in order to help you on your blogging journey and also to help me track what went well and what didn't go so well with my blog.

Another reason I write these income reports is to show you what it's really like starting a new blog. I'm still in the early stages so you'll get to see my struggles, triumphs, and everything in-between.

If you haven't already, be sure to check out How I Made $1,738.19 in My First Year of Blogging – there's a lot of good info in there!

New Things I Tried in Q1

In order to make more money, I think I need to start trying new things out on my blog. Writing this section made me realize I'm NOT trying enough.

Here's the only new thing I tried this month *sobs*:

• Banner ads – I tried putting up a couple of affiliate links in the form of banner ads on the site with a plugin called Ad Inserter. I kept them up for about a week and took them down because I didn't see much action happening.

Maybe I should have kept the ads up longer but I'm thinking of some new ways to do this. I might just do text ads instead of the banners ads.

I also need to create separate affiliate links for the ads so I can track the results (I don't know why I didn't do this before).

Here's a quick lesson learned:

You can't determine if something works without tracking the results!

Blog Income for Q1 2019: $616.38 Net Profit

How this is going to work:

Affiliates all have different payout terms and times, which means I could earn $100 in March and not get paid until April. For the sake of not being confusing or misleading, I'm only going to tell you about the income that actually hit my bank account from January 1st-March 31st.

Also, since I'm from Canada, all expenses and income are listed in Canadian dollars.

Income Breakdown: $991.58 Gross Income

• ShareASale (promoting HealthyWage and coupon offers): $350.33
• MaxBounty (survey site offers): $281.12
• VIPKid (online tutoring): $160.13
• Mylo (personal finance app): $200

As you can see I had a lot of success with HealthyWage in Q1 which makes sense because it's a weight loss program, and that's a common new years resolution. They also ran a special offer which I promoted to my list in January.

I'm also having success with survey site offers, but they're pretty time consuming to promote. Lots of offers come and go from different networks and I don't want to promote any scammy sites so it takes a lot of research.

Expense Breakdown: $380.20

• GSuite (I use this for all my email needs and it rocks. I can basically have unlimited emails for $5/month with aliases): $15
• Grammarly (If you write often, I highly recommend Grammarly. Even the free version is useful.): $186.85
• Content Views Pro (this is the plugin I use for my blog's grid layout like on my Make Money page): $25.69
• Pretty Links Beginner (this is the plugin I use for all my affiliate links, so it helps me make money): $81.16
• Name and Business Registration (finally got around to doing this): $71.50

I could definitely get by without the Grammarly Pro subscription but I honestly forgot it was renewing and it does come in handy sometimes. Not sure if I'll keep it next year though as I don't use the paid features very often.

In other news, March was a big month because I finally got my business name registered! Probably should have done this a while ago but hey, better late than never.

Traffic Breakdown: 71,756 Pageviews

In the last 3 months of 2018, I got a total of 54,058 pageviews so I've seen an increase of 17,698 pageviews.

I'm pretty happy with this level of traffic, although I would have loved to hit 100,000 page views in the first quarter! I also need to diversify my traffic a bit as over 50% of my traffic went to 5 posts. At the time of writing this I have 39 posts on my blog so having 5 posts pulling in most of the traffic is something that's a bit worrying.

I also don't have enough traffic just yet to apply for MediaVine but I'm getting close! It's gotten to the point where I'm not even sure whether I want to join an ad network or not though so we'll see what happens. I don't want to wreck my user experience with ugly ads.

I'm still focused on increasing Pinterest traffic but things aren't improving much there. Pinterest is a strange beast.

Email List: 175 Subscribers

I definitely need to start doing more with my list. I'm also thinking of creating a new opt-in, maybe a mini money-making course?

My Money Mastery Mini-Course is still pulling in most of my subscribers so I'm glad that's doing well. I think it could use some improvement too though.

So much to think about!

Things I'd Like to Try Going Forward

Now that I've realized I need to start switching things up a bit, I came up with a list of new things I'd like to try in the future. Some of these things might not happen in Q2, but I'd like to do them all by the end of 2019.

• Sponsored posts – If I could get one sponsored post done in Q2, I'd be happy. I'm not even sure how to get started with this though, to be honest. I'll have to look into it more.
• Creating a product – This is something I've been thinking about since the start of my blog, but I still don't have any great ideas for a paid product. I want to start out small, maybe printables or an eBook, but I want to make sure it's something that I myself would be willing to pay money for.
• Accepting guest posts – I was skeptical to do this at first, but I'm now opening it up. If you're a blogger and you want to submit a post, head over to my guest post guidelines.

How Would You Like to Make an Extra $200+/month Blogging?

Like I said above, blogging isn't an easy way to make money online. It takes hard work and persistence.

However, it's also extremely rewarding. I've been blogging on the side of doing freelance writing and digital marketing, and although I make more with those two hustles, I enjoy running my blog WAY more.

Plus, even though my blog isn't making a TON right now, I know it has the potential to. It can also generate income passively which is something my service-based businesses can't do.

Here's what it comes down to:

If you want to help others, build something that you're proud of, and potentially make A LOT of money in the future, then you sound like the perfect candidate to start a blog.

Your blog won't become successful overnight, but in a couple of years, you could look back on it as the best decision you ever made.

Are you willing to give it a shot and potentially change your life?

If so, read my post on how to start a blog that makes money. I'll walk you through everything you need to know: niches, hosts, blog platforms, domains, the whole nine yards. I'll even help you get the tech stuff set up if you need assistance (more info on that in the post).