Welcome to my August 2019 blog income report!
I’ll be honest, I went back and forth about whether to post this. I’ve never seen a mental health blog share a blog income report.
But, I love to read them myself. And, working from home is a topic that I want to cover on this site, because I think it can be a good option for some people with social anxiety.
So, I’m going to chronicle how this blog earns money, in case that can be helpful to someone else who wants to do the same thing. If you’re curious how I went about setting up this site, you can read more about that in this post about how to start a mental health blog.
August STATS:
Pageviews: 18150 (9529)
Sessions: 14940 (7346)
Users: 13398 (6545)
Mailing List Subscribers: 724 (585)
Pinterest Followers: 601 (475)
Pinterest monthly viewers: 686k (390k)
Facebook Followers: 4942 (4906)
Twitter Followers: 3057 (3026)
Instagram Followers: 113 (89)
Posts published: 20 (10) – I posted every day for the first half of the month as an experiment. I didn’t notice any increase in my traffic and also noticed I had no time to work on anything else! So I went back to posting twice per week.
SEMRUSH stats:
The following are according to SEMRUSH. I love figuring out how to rank my posts higher in Google, because I think this is the best way for articles about social anxiety to be found by the people who need them.
There isn’t as much “viral” potential to what I write, because many people might feel embarrassed (rather than excited) to share. So, I’m really intent on Google recognizing my site as an authority on the topic of social anxiety—so that you the reader can find me more easily.
Organic search: 435 (404)
Backlinks: 319 (300) – I need to do more work on this as I focused less on SEO this month.
Organic keywords: 1068 (911)
August BLOG INCOME REPORT:
My income right now comes from three main sources: ads on my site, affiliates, and my own products. Right now I have Media.net and Infolinks serving my ads. I do not have Google Adsense as they have yet to approve my site. I was approved for Monumetric, but decided to hold off as I hope to apply to Mediavine soon.
(If all of this sounds confusing to you, but you want to learn more, I suggest taking a basic blogging course that will get you started. I took one from Abby Lawson at Just a Girl and Her Blog that’s not available anymore, but there is another highly rated course called Blog by Number by Suzi Whitford that I’ve heard nothing but good things about.)
Advertising (Media.net): $11.13 (7.85)
Advertising (Infolinks): $5.30 ($0.64)
Amazon: $7.71 ($10.26) (I took part in the Amazon Prime day promotion last month)
Products: $39 ($9.49) This is from my product on Teachable that is offered at a discount when someone signs up to my email list; this is actually a combined offer for two digital download workbooks, one on cognitive-behavioral therapy strategies for social anxiety and the other on mindfulness strategies for social anxiety.
If you want to take advantage of this deal, simply sign up to my newsletter, and you will see the $7 offer (each workbook is normally $10 each).
Total income: $63.14 ($28.24)
Monthly expenses (none of these numbers differed from the previous month):
Email (Convertkit): $29
Tailwind: $14.99
Total expenses: $57.59
Net blog income: $5.55 (-$68.35) (This is the first time I have actually had a positive number here!)
Thoughts about this month:
When I look over the numbers for August one thing is pretty clear—nearly every number doubled except my social media followers. Hopefully, this trend continues in September. Meanwhile, my expenses stayed the same. I actually cut an expense this month as I felt I was too early in the journey to invest in it (I had an account on a website called Active Rain for the purpose of generating backlinks to my site – it’s actually where I posted my blog income reports prior to this one).
My goal is to have at least 1000 subscribers by the end of September, at which point I will be launching a new product.
Is there anything you’d like to know more about? Feel free to leave a comment below and I will reply!