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I’m so excited to be doing my second blog income report – it was a really exciting month for me as a beginner blogger, and I saw some real traffic gains!

So, just a quick refresher if you didn’t read my last income report (which was also my first one!) – I am in my fifth month, and I have really started to take my blog seriously these past two months. 

(Or, more accurately, I was always taking it seriously but I managed to get out of my own head and just start writing and posting in the last two months.)

I set the really ambitious goal of posting every day in the month of May using RankIQ reports, and I almost achieved that goal. I didn’t quite pull it off, but producing so much new content really helped to move things along for the site this month. 

So: in this post, you’ll find (but not in this order):

• an income report, 
• a traffic report with some serious gains,
• what I did this month, 
• how I dealt with last month’s challenges, 
• some thoughts on the Google HCU, 
• and my goals for June. 

Last month’s struggles

Last month’s big issues were: 

• Getting posts indexed on Google Search Console
• Fixing my interlinking so that posts get indexed
• Figuring out how to get my affiliate links in compliance with Amazon’s rules

I’m pleased to say that I made progress on all of these issues! 

For the Google Search Console issue – I went back through and manually re-added all of my posts that weren’t showing up in search to Search Console. This had to be done one at a time, with a wait period while each page was verified, and it was incredibly annoying! But now it’s done. 

They were all added to search in batches, and at this point I have posted 64 posts, and 54 are indexed, so we are keeping pace. 

I don’t expect for a small site like mine that they’re going to be indexing on a daily basis, so I anticipate having to do this manually for the time being. 

Where I’ve landed with this in my workflow: when I’m in a good place, I’m now generally keeping 1-2 days ahead on my posting. (So, on Monday, I write a post that will go up on Wednesday.) So that means I can’t submit the pages for indexing as soon as they’re done. Technically, the page doesn’t exist yet. 

So I’ve been boxing out time on Saturdays to submit the posts that went live that week. This is a good balance for me. I guess technically I’m sacrificing a few days of potential searches, but this is considerably faster than having to do it daily and tracking down the correct post, etc. It’s small time-savers that are keeping me sane in this attempt to write so much!

Similarly, with the interlinking – that’s part of my Saturday process. I go back and find 2-3 older posts relevant to each of the 7 posts that went up that week. And I add links to them. It’s a little annoying, but much less stressful than writing the Tuesday post on Tuesday and frantically trying to finish on schedule. 

And then finally with the Amazon links – I know that the way that I had previously been doing affiliate links was not in compliance with Amazon’s rules. But I was stressed and just trying to get content up on the site and just kept skipping any post topic that was going to need an affiliate link (which is…not financially sound decision-making). 

I messed with a site called Affilitable, and found that I just absolutely did not have the tech skills required. I really wanted it to work because you can use just their basic block for free, but it was not workable. With the amount of time I was trying to spend writing a new article every day, there was just no universe where I was going to spend several hours figuring out how to make these tables work. 

I looked at Lasso, decided it was way too expensive, and landed on AAWP as kind of a middle ground product. It cost $49 for the year and it has dramatically streamlined my process for linking to products. 

(I don’t even want to tell you what I was doing before, because it was this terrible combination of slow, stupid, and in flagrant violation of the Amazon rules.) 

I really try not to overdo Amazon links – my vague back-of-mind rule is “does this post offer some value beyond linking a bunch of stuff?”. And I try to have at least one post with no links for every post that does have a link. But affiliate linking is absolutely part of the business model, so I feel like I gotta try. 

On the subject…AAWP has an affiliate program, and if you choose to sign up for a plan, I would get a commission if you use this link. You’ll see in a minute that I am very happy with the product and support.

So after I went back and corrected all the Search Console issues, I had to go back into my posts and turn every old janky link into an AAWP box. 

It was a little tough to get started, but their tech support was incredibly helpful and actually logged into my site to correct some errors I had made. Now, it’s pretty effortless to set up those links–an extremely short code-phrase type thing.

So: if you’re looking for a way to streamline your links, you can spend a little but not a lot, and you aren’t super tech-y, I would definitely recommend AAWP! Since it’s an annual fee not a monthly fee, I wish I had started it earlier and saved myself the headache of going back and fixing things.

What I did this month

Went a tiny bit viral on Pinterest! The traffic report will show you the specifics, but one of my posts got picked up and has hung at around 1,000 impressions (not pageviews!) per day.

Obviously there are people much further along in their blogging careers where every pin they post gets 1,000 views a day. But to go from 500 views total to 4-8 times that with a single pin was really exciting. 

(There was a definite peak of 2,000 views for a few days! But it’s back down to hovering around 700-800 impressions per day) 

But it gave me my first real sense of what content is going to do well on Pinterest, or my first road sign of “write more of this!!!” 

Otherwise: this month, I published a new post almost every day, for a total of 27 new posts. This was honestly extremely hard to do! I have a full-time job and two small kids, so there was a lot of struggle to get it all done this month. 

Of the days I missed — they were days where something came up and I wasn’t a day or two ahead on posts. So it’s been a struggle to maintain a workflow of being 1-2 days ahead during the school year. I’m hoping this will become easier now that school is out.

20 posts were from RankIQ – I was very careful to pick topics I already had a decent amount of knowledge about. I find these posts to go very quickly! The suggested phrases help me figure out how to say things. When I’m in the zone, it’s like a puzzle. Like, fun to put the pieces together. I’m going to come back to RankIQ in the traffic report because I think its other big benefit is in Google Search.

Can I keep the daily posting up forever? No way. But I’m officially on summer vacation now, so I’m going to try to keep it up over the summer and explore stepping it back slowly in August when I return to the classroom. 

If I can keep up with a post scheduled for every day over the summer, I”ll get to over 120 posts before the first day of school. Which is exciting!

Okay, I’m so excited to show you the traffic report! 

Traffic report – May 2024

Let’s start with Pinterest – look at that jump around the middle of the month! That was that baby viral pin. What you can’t see here: the numbers for that pin start to decline around ⅔ of the way through the month, but the impression numbers keep going up because people are beginning to follow my Pinterest account. 

I also think my pin-making improved this month, and I got a lot better and more efficient at keywording my pin descriptions. (Most of my Pinterest strategy points come from Pinteresting Strategies, which I bought in January and found to be worth every penny. I bought a different Pinterest course in my previous blog and another one recently, neither of which I would recommend. But Pinteresting Strategies was reasonably priced and worthwhile.) 

So, in mid-May I had my first ever day that exceeded 1,000 impressions.

And then the next day exceeded 2,000 impressions.

And the next day exceeded 3,000, and two days later exceeded 4,000. 

This was a shocking and exciting ride for me–I was honestly checking Pinterest every few hours while it lasted. 

And traffic has continued to grow, albeit more slowly. I am so pleased to have crossed the 100k impressions mark! 

Here are the other Pinterest numbers — outbound clicks are the ones that matter most!

Google traffic: 

Google impressions continued going up as pages continued to get indexed, and my position in the search continued to improve. This month, my average search position across all keywords moved from the bottom of the third page to the middle of the second page, which is growth that I’m really satisfied with.

However, the actual clicks were modest: just 98 clicks from Google Search in the month of May. This is a small portion of overall traffic.

I have some more things to say about Google traffic, but I’m going to come back to it in a bit to keep this section on topic. 

And finally: the site had 1,780 sessions this month! My goal for May had been 800 sessions, so I am delighted with this. For the last week of May, the average number of daily sessions was over 100 per day, which is huge growth from last month.

I’m feeling really happy with this growth. I feel lucky for sure, but also like I learned a lot – in the site that I worked on in 2019, I did apply a Pinterest strategy but never saw growth like this, especially not this quickly. 

So since the ultimate goal is to get into Mediavine Journey at 10,000 sessions, I am planning to start taking some steps to get ready for that!

Rookie mistake of the month

My primary issue this month was all the time I spent cleaning up the mistakes I made early on. It was really frustrating to have such an ambitious writing goal and then have to spend eight hours fixing product links that I did in some ridiculous way because I didn’t know better. Using AAWP is going to help a lot going forward.

My other ongoing rookie issue: my workflow isn’t great, and I need to improve it. A lot of pro bloggers describe making pins once a week, drafting all outlines once a week…and I’m not doing that. 

For any given post, I’m doing all the setup, then all the writing, then the tagging, then making the pins, then keywording and scheduling the pins, then dragging myself to bed to fall asleep and do it again. 

For someone with a day job…it’s a lot. And I’m concerned about burning out, because I am FEELING THAT right now. I was able to sustain it after my students’ state tests were over, but it won’t work in the fall. 

So I’d like to spend the summer getting a better workflow going. I always know what the weeks’ posts are going to be, so I absolutely could make a week’s worth of pins on one day, outline posts on a day, all that. I could and should be doing that.

Sometimes I change the order I’m planning to write something, but overall I’m more or less following the schedule and sticking with what I planned. (And if I change it, it’s easier to go back and tweak a pin than to start brand new!)

I’m pretty good at doing the “cleanup” type tasks once a week, like indexing posts and interlinking, but I need a better flow for writing new posts. 

Income report 

In May 24:

• I earned $23.35 for Really Well, Thanks!, completely from Amazon affiliate links. That is the only existing source of income at this point. 
• I spent $49 on RankIQ. I still think this is worth it because it’s improving my workflow and the pages are ranking up quickly in Google.
• I also spent $49 on AAWP for the year. I only wish I had done that sooner.
• So the total blog revenue for May 2024 is -$74.65, a loss.
• The year to date revenue for 2024 is -$172.65, a loss.
• And the revenue for the life of the blog, since December 2023, is -$435.95, a loss.

This reflects the first cent the blog has earned. Even though it’s still in the red, I feel like it’s a big step! 

The ultimate goal is still to make the majority of the money the blog ever makes off Mediavine. That’s still some time away.

On the subject…

Some thoughts on the Google HCU

So, the Google Helpful Content Update that decimated a lot of bloggers that depend on Google Search is a concern to me.

I started the blog after HCU (though before I knew about it, lol/sob) so I don’t have before and after traffic to compare it to. And it’s early enough that I don’t feel like I can come out and say “well, I should have more traffic”. Everything has been pretty clear that Google is a long game. And Pinterest has been good to me so far! 

And my use of RankIQ has helped a lot too. It’s not totally clear from the graphs, but the older RankIQ posts have really leveled up well. For example, on May 30, the last day I have Google Search Console data for, I ranked in the first position for 39 Google searches with a blog that’s five months old! And I was on the first page for 104 searches. So I do feel like I’m doing well with things as they are, and I credit a lot of that to RankIQ!

But changes and things like the SGE AI content at the top of searches do make you wonder about the viability of this experiment…

My Google clicks have been modest so far, but my Bing visibility is virtually nonexistent…I get a fraction of the impressions on Bing that I get from Google, even though I installed their indexing plugin. All the posts seem to be there! They’re just getting really weak impressions. So for the time being, that doesn’t seem like a viable alternative for me.

I’m going to keep it up. Only time will tell. I write the best content I possibly can, stay on top of Pinterest, and hope for the best with Google. It seems foolish to see the growth that I have seen so far and just give up.

My June goals are:

• Write a total of 30 posts on Really Well, Thanks!. 14 will be from RankIQ reports.I got really close to daily posting last month, and now I’m working only half days during summer vacation. So I think I can achieve this. 
• Use the remaining two RankIQ reports to improve the two most popular posts on the other blog (which I won’t identify, at least for now).
• Increase my monthly traffic to 5,000 sessions. I wasn’t ambitious enough last month, so this is me aiming higher. Maybe too high! But it’s a goal. 
• Continue pinning new pins for old posts – step this up to daily now that there are more older posts to work with.
• Pin one of someone else’s posts out of the home feed daily…this seems to be helping my traffic so I’m going to stick with it.  
• Continue to troubleshoot Bing indexing. 
• Install Grow by Mediavine so there’s data in place for when I’m ready to apply for Journey!