This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosure for more info.
Even though I have a full-time job that earns good W-2 income, our family is looking to take steps towards financial independence. My job covers our basic monthly expenses like mortgage, food, utilities, car payments, etc. And we usually have a decent portion of our income (20%) leftover to invest or save.
Lately, we have been working to lower our expenses as much as possible so that we can save more and eventually invest more. And while we have been doing a good job at saving, there are only so many places and ways to save.
So now our goal switches to earning more … which could be unlimited unlike saving. We are already doing things like earning a good side income from dividend stocks. That income stream can cover a couple monthly mortgage payments each year for us right now if we wanted to.
That is a great start towards becoming financially independent. But we want to do more to eventually replace our W-2 income … which means we need to come up with more side hustle ideas.
There are several ideas that come to mind, but I keep turning back to blogging income. There are plenty of negatives when it comes to earning income from a blog … but I feel the positives are worth the effort. Plus it is location independent and most of the work can be done anytime of the day.
Over the past 9 months we have been focusing on a blog we own in the health and fitness niche. We set a goal earlier this year to build up this site so that it could eventually produce side income for us.
Here is a little recap of our health and fitness blog –
Health and Fitness Blog
When it comes to blogging, I am passionate about two topics – personal finance and health and fitness. All of the personal finance “stuff” is covered here on The Money Sprout. Every once in a while I will cover a topic on health and wellness and post it on The Money Sprout … when it relates to money. But overall … I try and focus on personal finance topics here.
However, when it comes to writing about health and fitness … I try and do most of that on a separate blog that I started 3 years ago.
Up until 9 months ago, I never paid much attention to this fitness blog. However, now my focus has changed from blogging as a hobby to blogging as a source of side income. Since launching that site … visitors to the health and fitness blog have been limited and there have been no earnings.
Total Earning to Date – $0
Even though the site has not been earning any income, it has actually had several expenses including – domain name, hosting, and WordPress theme costs. So overall, my heath and fitness site has been cash flow negative since it first started.
The good news is that we set a goal last year to earn $5,000 per month in sustainable income by June 2018 from this niche site.
So in order to stay on track, I have been providing monthly updates on our progress … so here are the updates from February (2018).
Blogging Income Stats – February Updates
At the beginning of every month, I share a few statistics from the past 30+ days … including the social media accounts tied to this site. The plan is to increase these stats month by month … and then next year I can look back and see how much my site has grown.
Here are a couple notable stats for the site at the end of February (2018) –
- Age of site – 3 years
- Posts – 15 articles
- February Pageviews – 55,426 (up 22,221 from last month)
- Highest Monthly Pageviews – 55,426 (new record!)
- Email Subscribers – 49 (up 20 from last month)
- Income Earned – $0
- Pinterest Followers – 182 (up 30 from last month)
- Twitter Followers – 121 (up 2 from last month)
- Instagram Followers – 29 (no change)
Last months results were crazy compared to January. Our pageviews were up by 67% last month and we still hadn’t published any new content since last fall. Every month that goes by, I am shocked at how our pageviews continue to grow … despite spending very little time on the site.
Our short term goal for this site is to drive 100,000+ pageviews per month by June. If (when) that happens, it should open up a lot of potential income streams to the site so that we can work towards earning $5,000 of side income per month.
It is important to point out that almost all of the pageviews in the past 4 months have come from Pinterest. And just to compare, prior to November we had 4,192 pageviews in October and only 1,914 in September. The growth in November through February is all related to Pinterest.
Blogging Income Results for February – How did we do?
The trend for not focusing much on our health and fitness site continued in February. Most of my effort has been dedicated to growing this website – The Money Sprout. Funny thing is … this website gets a lot less traffic than my niche site … and I spend way more time here.
The good news is that I have been researching a bunch of keywords for our health and fitness site and plan to start writing a weekly post. In fact, the first week of March … we finally published our first post for 2018. Hopefully I can ride some of that momentum for the remainder of March and into April.
That Pinterest traffic has been fantastic! But I want long term traffic, which means we need to focus on search engine traffic too. I think the future posts we plan to publish will help us build our organic traffic, which should help compliment our Pinterest traffic.
So despite not publishing any new content in February, we managed to put in a bunch of time researching future content.
Growing Our Health and Fitness Site
The long term goal is to eventually replace my W-2 income (from my full time job) with blogging income from our health and fitness site. To keep everything simple, we set a monetary goal to earn $5,000 per month in sustainable income by June 2018 from this site. In reality, that probably won’t happen unless I really start to focus my time creating new content.
In past blogging updates, we would set goals for the upcoming month. But since I haven’t been doing a good job hitting any of those monthly goals, I didn’t set any in February and won’t in March. Those goals can be a bit stressful I think, especially when you don’t hit them.
If we are able to publish a weekly article on our niche site that hits on a few low competitive keywords, I think we can take our website to the next level – 100,000 pageviews per month.
The good news is that I know there is the potential to earn significant side income from blogging. For example, over the past 4 months, the health and fitness blog has averaged well over 30,000 pageviews. All of that traffic without a single new post published.
That is very encouraging knowing there is interest in the topics that I have already written about. And it shows me there is a lot of potential to build a sustainable income stream from blogging and in particular this health and fitness site.
Are you earning blogging income? Did you hit your February blogging goals?
