This post may contain affiliate links that support the site at no cost to you.

Proud to report that I’ve had my first ever profitable month as a blogger! This is the eleventh month that my blog has existed and my first full month of Journey.

(It’s also the worst month I’ve ever had as far as sticking to what I’m supposed to do!)

Here’s last month’s 2024 blog income report if you want a refresher. Let’s get into it!

Having trouble sticking to the plan

It would seem like I should be having new urgency and excitement for blogging now that I’m not losing money on it!

But … that hasn’t been the case.

I only posted two times in September. And one was the last 2024 blog income report. And I haven’t been pinning consistently.

The truth is that my real life is a little overwhelming right now. Family, a new role at work, and a lot of mental blocks about the blog are all in the way of me doing what I need to do to keep the blog moving.

I’m going to do better in October, and I’m going to use this income report as a push of positive momentum! I have this post and an almost-finished one for tomorrow, and that will give me the head start I need to get back in the game.

Good things happened anyway

I had a lot of good results anyway this month!

With my first full month of Journey, the blog pulled into profitability anyway! I can’t wait to share those numbers with you later in this post.

Also, remember my whole drama with the Core Web Vitals? (If you missed it, you can get the backstory on the last few months’ worth of income reports.)

My site has FINALLY been re-rated as having good site speed. It took literal months to recover this score from 5 seconds to below 2.5. Because traffic was suppressed, it took ages to balance out the month or so of very bad data.

I hope to write a whole post for absolute newbies like myself about how to avoid this! But for now: I’m hopeful that my Google traffic will take off now that I’m back in their good books. Weirdly, my traffic has been low the last two days! But that’s not long enough to reach any conclusions.

The other good thing: I have barely been pinning, but my Pinterest traffic has been pretty even. I’m in a Facebook group for a Pinterest course I bought where a lot of people are complaining that their traffic has dropped to nearly zero. (I won’t name the course because it wasn’t very good; if you want a course, I do recommend Pinteresting Strategies 2.0.) So, even though traffic isn’t going up…it isn’t going down either.

My overall traffic this month did get up to 7.2k sessions!

Journey by Mediavine experience

I am really liking Journey so far!

Since I installed it, I haven’t really had to do anything for it. They’ve asked that I not be specific about RPMs, but mine have steadily gone up over the first month. (Others have expressed that this typically continues for the first two months until you land somewhere.)

This month I made $158.07 on Journey for a blog I barely did anything with, which is pretty wild. $47.55 of that came from my best-performing post, which is Best Hair Colors for Soft Summer Type – Color Analysis.

(and that seems like a lot, but I just looked back, and in June that one post made up 80% of my traffic.)

I do hope my RPMs keep going up! But this feels like real money in a way that I kind of didn’t expect.

I’m hoping that traffic improves in October now that Google is ironed out, but overall, things are good! I added more than 2,000 sessions this month, from 5.1k last month to 7.2k this month, which is the largest jump I’ve ever made.

(I am happy about this! It’s a little bittersweet to think it might have been more if I had been pinning and writing with as much focus as I had in the spring!)

I’m also happy that, based on these numbers, almost a third of my users either click around the site or come back for another session.

My Pinterest impressions are insanely flat — I usually have a lot more movement than this. I guess since I haven’t really been pinning daily I am just grateful it wasn’t going down!

And finally — here’s my Journey graph. I deliberately cropped out the numbers, but I thought the lines were interesting anyway. They show you how my RPMs are going up and down. The orange line is the number of sessions for that day, and the purple line is earnings.

I think those little wobbles where the two lines pull away from each other are so interesting! I think it’s the algorithm trying to land on what an appropriate RPM is for me.

Goals for September – review

• Write a total of 17 posts on Really Well, Thanks!, posting Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. (not even close)
• Use RankIQ reports to improve the earliest posts on the blog, and two posts on the other blog. (did use RankIQ for what I wrote!)
• Increase my monthly traffic to 8,000 sessions. (did not manage this, but this month was still my biggest jump ever.)
• Reach 75 Pinterest followers. (achieved! 76!)
• Have Journey earnings exceed Amazon Affiliate earnings! (yes, by far!)
• Four pins per day, a mix of new and old. Wednesday is Pinterest day, where I schedule pins for the week. (failed miserably)
• Research new hosting options! (did this — I think I’m going to Kinsta.)

Goals for October

• Write a total of 18 posts on Really Well, Thanks!, posting Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Let’s try this again.
• Use RankIQ reports to improve the earliest posts on the blog, and two posts on the other blog.
• Increase my monthly traffic to 10,000 sessions.
• Reach 100 Pinterest followers.
• Reach $250 from Journey.
• Schedule a month’s worth of old pins at once to ensure at least one pin per day. — aiming to do this on Thursday for the whole month.

Blog income report for September 2024

Let’s GOOOOOOO

• I earned $181.82 for Really Well, Thanks!. $23.75 was from Amazon Affiliates, and $23.75 was from Journey by Mediavine.
• I spent $49 on RankIQ. I have so many reports backed up that I have downgraded to the light plan, so I’ll only pay $29 in October and for a while until I catch up on these reports.
• So the total blog revenue for July 2024 is a PROFIT of $132.82. This is my first profitable month ever.
• The year to date revenue for 2024 is -$183.61. This is still a loss, but the deficit has been reduced. Last month, the loss was -$316.43.
• And the revenue for the life of the blog, since December 2023, is -$446.91. This is an improvement over last month, when it was -$579.73.

Okay, this part feels good! The blog probably won’t turn a profit this year, because in December I’ll need to pay the startup costs for the new hosting, but each month will be profitable from here on out.

I still love that in 2024 blog income report posts can still have good news! This is the beginning of a new path.