This post may contain affiliate links that support the site at no cost to you.
Okay, I have done nothing but complain in these income reports since summer. You can see the December 2024 income report here.
And this wasn’t a perfect month…but I did a really good job and I’m proud of myself.
Is it the least money I’ve made since my first full month of Journey? Yes.
Was the site down for 48 hours this month before I noticed? Uh…also yes.
But…I did a good job staying motivated this month, and I’m celebrating that today. The monetary rewards will come later. (Right?)
Posting success!
I had planned to post 18 times in January, and I posted 16 times.
The two that I missed didn’t get written were during the site outage. I was instead doing tech support stuff, trying to get the site back up and running.
(I could have written the post in RankIQ or a Google Doc and still stayed on track. But I was pretty frustrated, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to do both.)
Even better: I committed to posting 5 pins per day every day in January, and I did that every single day except the two days that the site was down. I deleted the pins that were scheduled to be posted those days … I was concerned that my account would be penalized for posting a broken link.
But other than that – 5 pins a day, every day, baby!
And my Pinterest account is showing growth as a result! I had a baby viral pin catch on from one of my nail design posts, so there was a good bump in the middle of the month.
(The nail design post was old! So just one of those things, I guess.)
My Pinterest numbers are still very modest compared to people who did what they were supposed to do from the beginning.
And it’s pretty ridiculous of me to be like, wow, doing what literally everyone says you should do consistently had results. Like, gosh, unbelievable.
But I have never really pinned as consistently as this. In the beginning I was too focused on writing content, and I really do find the pinning to be the most annoying part. I let it slide a lot of the time.
But now I have almost 140 posts, and I should have had a better traffic uptick than I have so far. So I’m going to double down on the pinning, especially pinning old posts. There are some older posts that I haven’t pinned since I wrote them that are now performing well!
Like, I wrote this post about pregnancy affirmations, and it didn’t get any traction. So I didn’t touch the topic again. But now, a pin for that post is doing really well!
So: February, I’m striving for another five pins, every day. Doing 3-4 days at a time turned out to be about the sweet spot for me. Any more than that, and it got annoying or tedious.
I made a little printable to help me keep track of what pins I was posting: I’m linking it here as a pin tracker free download in case any blogging friends who are also struggling with this might benefit! The numbers on the side are the times I schedule my daily pins for. (I honestly don’t know if this matters at all but it’s what works for me right now.) It’s not pretty, but it has kept me really organized.
This is honestly the part of blogging I am most eager to pay someone else to do. I mostly like writing posts. But in the meantime – I’m going to embrace the suck, and I’m excited to see my account continue to grow.
Traffic milestones
I hit 8,200 sessions this month, which was a big deal for me! This is my best traffic month ever in the life of the blog.
(If you’re new to the blog: I had steady growth through the first half of 2024, then in the summer of 2024 I had site speed issues that Google penalized me for that basically cut my traffic back for ages. It’s been about four months of slow re-growth.)
So I’m feeling good about this! It would have been over 8,500 without the site being down for all that time, and I feel even better knowing that.
I’m going to keep grinding on traffic sources. I’m getting some traffic from Google Discover, but I can’t see what pages that traffic goes to.
But it feels good to see real growth.
Site outage
So, I have no one to blame for this but myself.
When I moved my hosting from Bluehost to Kinsta, I did not correctly set up a few of the necessary changes to redirect the URL to the new server.
(I’m not sure the sentence I just wrote is completely correct. But it was something like that. I’m not great with this stuff.)
So it didn’t backfire immediately. But eventually, the Bluehost grace period ended, and the site went down.
Andddd because I was ahead on my posting schedule, I didn’t notice for two days. So that dead drop in the last third of the month up above? No one to blame but myself.
Once I noticed it, Kinsta’s tech support people were able to iron it out for me pretty quickly. They gave me the directions to give them access, and then they fixed it for me (thank goodness). I have been really happy with the speed of the site and the quality of their tech support.
And I guess I should also say that there was an option to have them do all the site transfer stuff for me! I just didn’t want to pay $50 for it at the time.
Blog income for January 2024
After all that good news… it was a really weak month for blog income!
$153.81 in Journey by Mediavine ad revenue, and $27.90 in Amazon Affiliates.
The better traffic was offset by terrible RPMs. (Journey asks that we not specify RPMs, so I won’t….but mine were half of what they have been previously.)
In my first full month of Journey, with much less traffic, I made more than this. I’m trying to stay positive by remembering how excited I would have been by this money this time last year.
“Real” bloggers say that January is always a weak month. So I’m assuming this was a fluke and I’m keeping my head up.
So the official blog income report:
The blog made $153.81 from Grow and $27.90 from Amazon Affiliates, for a total of $181.71.
I paid out $29 for RankIQ. I’m starting to see significant growth in Google traffic from these reports — I think RankIQ is a lot more of a slow burn, but I’m getting a LOT more traction from search lately.
So the total blog revenue for January 2025 is 152.79.
Since we’re in the first month of 2025, the year-to-date revenue is also $152.79.
And the revenue for the life of the blog, since December 2023, is $83.60. This is the first month of true overall profitability! (Last year I was profitable for five minutes, then had to pay the annual hosting and was underwater again.) The blog is officially no longer a money pit!
It’s funny to think of it that way, because quite apart from paying for hosting and RankIQ, my primary investment in the blog is time. I probably spend about fifteen hours a week on the blog. And last spring, it was probably more like 25 hours a week.
It still doesn’t make much. But I have faith that I can make it happen, and it’s good to feel like the overall early investment is worthwhile. There have been times where I felt like I wasted the setup money!
I’d like to write a post soon about what I’d do differently if I was starting over again. I think I would have made some different choices if I had known more. So keep an eye out for that.
February Goals
I’m sticking to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday post schedule. It worked in January. I never got too overwhelmed.
My goals for February:
- Post three times a week, for a total of 13 posts in this short month.
- Pin five pins per day, no exceptions, no excuses. Re-pin older pins that have been neglected.
- Try to batch some of the post work – prep all the outlines at once, set up all the pins at once, set up all the posts at once. When I’m on top of this, it makes the whole process go more easily.
- Go back through from post one and improve the interlinking of my posts. Because I schedule posts ahead of time, I never go back into old posts and link to the new one. I know that I should, and that it won’t actually take that long to do it.
- I’m going to wish upon a star here: hit 10,000 sessions. This number is no longer as important as it once was since Journey took me at 6,000 sessions. But it’s still a big deal to me to hit five figures!. I think it’s attainable if I keep grinding away at Pinterest.
Okay, that’s the end of the first February post. Let’s get it!
