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I love blog income reports. I think it’s terrible how they’ve gone out of fashion. For years I would read them when they came up for me on Pinterest and imagine that income for myself!

I understand why a lot of people opt not to do them — money is private and hard to talk about! But since I’m a semi-anonymous blogger, I figure, why not?

(Did you know that, other than my husband, no one in my life knows about this blog? And I think I plan to keep it that way for a while.)

Why write an income report before you have any income?

Sticker-shock income reports are really fun to read. Five figures a month from blogging? So exciting.

But as an aspiring blogger, it’s not always super helpful to read those and figure out how to get there from where I am today. As much as it can be exciting, it can also be kind of discouraging. Like it feels really far away.

I’m hoping to start this series of monthly income reports today, document my path and how long it takes me to get from April 2024, my first month with any traffic at all, to that kind of blogger income that you’ve seen in other income reports.

I believe I will get there! I want you to be able to come along for the ride, and I want to be able to look back at these posts someday. If I’m going to make a full-time income from blogging, then I need to write about my work like it’s full-time work! And that starts here. We’re manifesting!

A little backstory…

I started a blog once before! It was November 2019…I was on maternity leave, and I needed a creative outlet. So I started a blog about one of my interests and created Pinterest pins for every post. It got a little traction.

I didn’t know anything at all about SEO. A lot of the posts had joke titles or “clever” titles that had nothing to do with search intent (they were funny though!). I followed the directions from a Pinterest course that will not be named from a blog that I now realize was pretty unscrupulous!

(One part of the learning curve of reading blogging-about-blogging material is that once somebody has a course, that becomes a huge part of their income! A person making $50k a month who’s selling a course is making some large share of that money off the course! Which isn’t inherently unethical, but if they’re not up front about that and they’re letting the user think that they’re making $50k off Mediavine, that’s unscrupulous.)

So, that was November 2019 I was shooting for a post a week. Some five months later, the world fell apart and I was doing 24/7 care for my children in a house that suddenly felt way too small. The blog was completely forgotten for some time.

I kept paying the annual hosting fees, and the old blog almostttt breaks even through Amazon Affiliate sales. It only lost $4 last year, so I’ve kept it open. It was a good blog concept, and some of the posts are used and linked in the community for its niche.

So RWT isn’t my first blog ever, but it’s the first one that I’m starting with the idea of making it a business and a full-time income.

The first three months of Really Well, Thanks!

I registered the domain in December and bought a site template from started writing in earnest over winter break from school. I followed the SEO advice to start in a very clear, specific niche with interlinked posts and did keyword research to the best of my limited ability at that time.

Keyword research

I started with Keywords Everywhere, which is $10 to start. It is a perfectly functional tool! But you need a degree of existing knowledge to be able to use it that I just don’t have. I ran searches and scrolled down for Keywords Everywhere’s list of suggested long tail keywords, and what it suggested was all helpful. But I don’t really have the skills yet to really parse what might be an appropriate search volume for me to target.

I wrote posts slowly and in fits and starts. School restarted. Over the first two months I saw almost no traffic despite doing the research (I thought) correctly. I wasn’t writing enough posts to be posting regularly to Pinterest, so I wasn’t getting much traction there either.

One of the ironic parts of this process is that, to use the cheap tools, you need to have a fair amount of existing knowledge that will mean that you’re probably already making some money off this blogging thing. I still use Keywords Everywhere to look at what other blogs are doing, but I now primarily use RankIQ.

RankIQ first impressions

My plan had originally been to switch over to RankIQ once the blog was making the $50 a month that the RankIQ software was going to cost. But with my growing frustration and waning motivation, I decided to go ahead and start RankIQ last month, in March. I know that I’m fortunate to have the $50 a month to spend before my blog is profitable and that not everyone can do this, but if you can, it is worth it to start with RankIQ from the beginning.

It took me all of March and into the first week in April to finish all the March RankIQ reports, but I did it! And because I had a lot more direction, my traffic was beginning to grow on Pinterest. (By which I mean I got 20 blog views in the entire month of March! But 0 to 20 is still growth.)

RankIQ helps you write focused, Google-friendly blog posts by giving you low-competition long-tail keywords. Each keyword gets a report specifying the target post length and what content should be in the post. Rather than sitting down to write some blog post and hemming and hawing about what should be in it, I’m able to write focused, targeted blog posts that I know are going to do well on Google. It takes me a lot less time to write now, and as a result I procrastinate and stress less.

Interlinking (my April rookie mistake)

It took me into the middle of April to decide that it was weird that I wasn’t getting any search engine traffic at all. I dug into Google Search Console and realized that only my very first blog post ever was indexed by Google! I had added the Search Console and Analytics stuff to my site code (AKA asked Bluehost to do it for me, thank you Bluehost!). But for some reason, my post pages were not being indexed.

So I reuploaded my sitemap and manually added some posts. This is still an ongoing issue. As of right now, the blog has 35 posts, and only 18 are indexed by Google! So I’m not getting the full traffic potential of my existing posts yet.

For me, it appears that the problem was that I was not going back to my older posts and adding links to newer ones. I wish I had known this from the beginning! Then, I would have been making much more significant progress with Google traffic by now than I have.

So if you are a newish blogger: don’t be intimidated by Search Console. Click on “Pages” and go see if all your posts are being indexed!

(The rookie mistake series)

I hope this info helps some brand new blogger. You’ve got to go back and add links to newer posts! If you think you’re doing interlinking because you’re linking to older posts from newer ones, you’re delaying the Google indexing of your posts. You’ll get search traffic much faster if, every time you finish a post, you go back into older, relevant posts to link to the just-finished one. (I know, I know, another thing to do!)

And, like, in the grand scheme of things, is this such a big deal? Probably not. Maybe it cost me a few months in my Google growth. But at the beginning of a blog, you feel like you’re screaming into the void. Seeing those numbers is really meaningful for overall morale.

I think in each of these income reports I’m going to try to identify a rookie mistake of the month — I googled the Search Console errors ENDLESSLY and only found writeups from experts who may as well have been speaking another language. I like the idea that a new blogger a year from now might find this post and know what to do instead of agonizing over it for a month.

Traffic details

Here are the specifics of my blog, search, and Pinterest activity during April 2024.

So, the above image is from Jetpack. I fell short of my goal of 300 sessions this month, landing at only 255. (Since my ultimate goal is Mediavine and they use sessions instead of pageviews, I’m not going to fuss with pageviews much.) I’m disappointed, but since these views were heavily weighted towards the second half of the month, I remain hopeful that next month will show a lot of growth.
(And look at those growth percentages! 1226% is crazy!)

This is my Google Search Console — it goes back to January 30, but you can see how the impressions barely move until I corrected some of my search issues! I am still hoping to have more posts indexes in the coming days and to see those impressions numbers continue to improve.

I also like how, since the impressions have stabilized a little, the average position is hovering around the 20th position (average is 22!). I feel pretty good about that for a site that’s still supposedly in the “Google Sandbox”.

And these are my Pinterest numbers for April 2024. A lot of room for growth but a huge improvement on March, which was under 1000 impressions. I hope to keep this rate of growth up for as long as I can!

My mid-term goal is to get into Mediavine’s new Journey program, which starts at 10,000 sessions on your website. So I’m hoping to work really hard this summer and achieve that by fall. This is a HUGE stretch and honestly impossible if I don’t figure out this Google indexing issue.

But honestly I am just going to lean into the delusion here. Everything about blogging still feels a little delusional to me. I am still very much wrestling with why anyone should care about my opinion about anything. But I saw meaningful growth this month, so it seems like someone does, and that means a lot to me!

Final income numbers

In April 24:

• I earned $0 for Really Well, Thanks!
• I spent $49 on RankIQ. Overall I feel good about this expense. I really believe it will pay off relatively soon when I can apply for Mediavine.
• So the total blog revenue for April 2024 is -$49, a loss.
• The year to date revenue for 2024 is -$98, a loss.
• And the revenue for the life of the blog, since December 2023, is -$379.30, a loss.

I give you these numbers because I know they aren’t going to stay that way — I know that I’m going to be able to turn this blog into something profitable. I’m writing this income report because I know it’s doable, and I know I can do it. I think some people would find it embarrassing to talk about a project like this before it’s successful, but I know that someday when Really Well, Thanks! is well-established, someone like me will look at this post and think, I could do what Morgan’s doing.

(And these early blog reports will definitely lead them to, If someone this clueless can figure it out and make a living blogging, so can I.)

Looking back on April goals:

Here are the goals I had set for the month of April:

• Pin to Pinterest every day (achieved! And my Pinterest traffic improved a ton as a result!)
• Write 20 posts (exceeded, with 21 posts)
• Reach 300 sessions (fell short! 255 sessions, 305 views.)

This wasn’t a goal, but it should have been: at the beginning of the month I was putting out 2 posts on a weekend day and publishing them both that day to get the traffic out sooner. The last couple weeks, if I can manage a second post in a day, I’ve been scheduling it out for the next day. I’m happy to say that I now have a two-day buffer, so if I’m writing on Monday, the post will get published on Wednesday. This has given me a lot more flexibility. It’s nice to be able to go to bed even if the post isn’t done yet.

Goal-setting May

I’m a teacher, and May is my last month of school. My state tests are already over. So as grading starts to slow down in the building, I’m focusing on ramping up my effort and attention to the blog. I hope to be really, really productive this summer and grow my blog traffic a lot.

My May goals are:

• Write a total of 31 posts on Really Well, Thanks!. 14 will be from RankIQ reports, and I’ve made a list of another 17 that are intended to strengthen my site pillars and improve my interlinking. This is a really ambitious goal but I feel very motivated by the progress I made in April.
• 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 800 sessions. This is more than doubling what I managed in April, but I’m confident based on my Pinterest increases that this is at least a reasonable goal.
• In addition to making Pinterest pins for every post, start pinning new pins for older posts 3 times per week.
• Schedule pins to ensure I’m getting at least 2 pins per day.
• Continue to troubleshoot Google indexing. I really have no idea what I’m doing here but I hope that sitemap reupload works.
• Either figure out Affliatable or get another source for it. I am so overwhelmed with the tech aspect of some blogging stuff, but I need to get myself in compliance with Amazon’s rules for linking like ASAP.

I’m so excited/I’m so scared! But we’re going to keep pushing.