How to Earn Blog Income – November Results

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosure for more info.

How to Start Earning Blogging Income as a Side Hustle - November 2017 UpdatesJust a few days ago, I was discussing our plans to grow our side income next year (2018) so that we can help fund my wife’s IRA account. Well based on our November results, I am encouraged about the potential to earn blogging income as a side hustle.

To be clear, we haven’t actually earned any side income yet from our blogs. At this point, we have two main blogs … one of which is this site The Money Sprout. This is where we discuss things like investing in dividend stocks, living well below our means, building side hustles, and reaching financial independence.

Our other main blog is 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 have 2 passions – personal finance and health and fitness. I handle the personal finance side of things here on The Money Sprout. For covering health and fitness topics … I started a separate blog for that over 3 years ago.

For years, I never gave the health and fitness blog much love … only posting every couple of months. I didn’t have any plan or purpose for the site and treated it more like a hobby.

Now my focus has changed from blogging as a hobby to blogging as a source of side income. To date, visitors to the health and fitness blog have been limited and there have been no earnings.

Total Earning to Date – $0

Instead of earning any income, the site has incurred 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 goal we set earlier this year was to earn $5,000 per month in sustainable income by June 2018 from this niche site.

Each month I provide an update on our progress … so here are the updates from November (2017).

Blogging Income Stats – November 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 November (2017) –

  • Age of site – approximately 3 years
  • Posts – 15 articles
  • November Pageviews – 37,506 (way up from 4,192 last month)
  • Highest Monthly Pageviews – 37,506 (new record, previously was 4,192 Oct-2017)
  • Email Subscribers – 12 (up from 1 last month)
  • Income Earned – $0
  • Pinterest Followers – 98 (up from 69 last month)
  • Twitter Followers – 127 (up from 116 last month)
  • Instagram Followers – 28 (down from 29 from last month)

No … that 37,000+ pageviews up from 4,000+ last month is not a typo. My pageviews actually increased by over 800%!

Why so much growth? All of those pageviews came from the growth of my site’s Pinterest account. I have not been actively posting new content to this site, but I have been growing it’s Pinterest account. And as a result, our pageview growth exploded.

Even though I didn’t work too much on the blog directly last month … we did grow our Pinterest account and got a big jump in traffic.

I didn’t do very much to grow our Twitter account in November and even less with Instagram. However, we still managed to grow the number of Twitter followers despite not spending any time there.

For now … it is all about mastering Pinterest as that gives us the biggest return right now.

Blogging Income Results for November – How did we do?

We didn’t spend a lot of time (again) on publishing new content on the site. However, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a successful month. In fact … the results from last month have really given me a good feeling we may be on to something that is sustainable.

Our long term goal is to earn $5,000 per month in sustainable income by June 2018. Not sure we are going to hit that target at this point as there is a ton of work that will need to be done over the next 6+ months.

Here is a recap of our goals for November –

Goal #1 – Publish 8 new posts of at least 1,000 words each

Nope … didn’t come close to hitting this. We actually posted 2 new articles that were over 2,000 words each. It seems that whenever I start writing content for the site, my goal for a 1,000 word post turn into more and more words. So instead of writing a bunch of smaller posts … I write fewer longer posts.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing … I guess.

Goal #2 – Continue to grow our Pinterest Account

As you can see from the Pinterest followers noted above … we really grew this social media account last month. I am really starting to see huge returns from Pinterest.

I realize we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket … but there is no better way to explode your traffic right now other than Pinterest.

We have also been leveraging our Tailwind account (which I highly recommend). I spend about 20 minutes per day now in our Tailwind account scheduling pins. And you may be surprised … but 99% of the pins we schedule are not from our niche site.

I plan to write future post(s) about growing a Pinterest account … but for now just know that it can really help push traffic to your site … at least in the short-term.

December Blogging Income Goals – New Goals

I have been getting carried away with setting goals on publishing new posts. So in December, I want to try and set a goal that will be sustainable. At the same time, I want to continue growing our Pinterest account so we can push past 30,000 pageviews and hit 100,000!

For December our goals remain simple –

  • Publish 4 new posts of 1,000 words or more
  • Schedule 20 to 25 new Pins per day in our Tailwind account (most of which are from other great blogs)

One last thing … for several months I had been posting that I couldn’t seem to get any email subscribers. Well in October, we got our 1st email subscriber and in November we added 11 more. I hope to continue this trend of adding subscribers in December.

Growing Our Health and Fitness Site

After seeing our pageviews explode last month, I am very encouraged about getting traffic to our niche site. As long as I can dedicate time to producing new content on the site, I know Pinterest can drive traffic to the blog.

From there … it will be a matter of building that precious email list and further down the road monetizing it.

Now that I have narrowed down my monthly goals to just a few, I should be able to stay on track and start building this site.

Are you earning blogging income? What strategies are you using to grow your site and income?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.