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No suspense here: I got into Mediavine Journey this month!!! Like, three days ago.

More on that in a sec. This month, let’s talk about the least blogging I ever did and the first major milestone on this blogging journey. Here’s last month’s blog income report if you want to refresh your memory.

Thoughts on the long game

Blogging is a long game, and Pinterest is longer. The work you’re putting in on, say, April 1 is not going to show you any results until summer, at least if you’re a new blog and a new Pinterest account.

I had a tough month for blogging. I went back to school in the middle of August, and my kid broke her arm the week that she went back to school. It’s been incredibly difficult! It’s so hard to see your child in pain, and since it’s her dominant hand she needs help with a lot.

All this to say: I only wrote six blog posts in August, and I didn’t consistently pin every day. (My pinning schedule is heavily biased towards new posts since I do typically post so often!)

And nevertheless…I got into Journey this month!

I know that really, this is based on the work I did in the spring. Posts are picking up, I’m getting a lot more traction on Pinterest. And finally, I hit the place I needed to be!

It was a burst of positive motivation at exactly the right moment. The blog had fallen completely off my priority list between the first week of school and my injured child. I almost feel like I might have let things fall off a little bit longer if it wasn’t for this little push at exactly the right time.

Core Web Vitals Update (aka still the rookie mistake of the month)

I wrote in last month’s post about how my Google traffic had plummeted because my mobile pages were loading so slowly.

Basically: my traffic reached a certain point where Google had enough information to see how long my pages were taking to load, and as soon as they did, they pushed my traffic down because it was taking too long.

Mostly the problem was images, because I didn’t know what file size an image had to be, and I had 100 blog posts before I found out. I’ve had to replace those images one by one. And now that that work is done, it still isn’t really fixed yet!

The average load time is slowly, slowly coming down, but it’s not fixed yet. Because the historical score is so bad, and because the traffic is suppressed, it’s taking a long time to improve.

It might take months to fix, which is so annoying! And it would have been completely avoidable if I had known what to do properly in the first place. No courses talked about this.

If you are thinking of starting a blog and that’s why you’re reading blog income reports, here’s what you need to know:

• I make my pins in Canva. They default to a 1000×1500 image size, so I thought that was the correct size and didn’t think any more about it. In addition to the pixels, though, you also have the file size, which is measured in KB or MB. Canva defaults to saving in PNG, which is too large. Change your settings to JPEG, which is a lighter, faster file type.
• Once you’ve saved your JPEG, you can upload it to Pinterest as is. Pinterest doesn’t care about the file size.
• Before you upload it to your blog post, you should run it through a site like tinyPNG, which will make it even smaller. My target is always to get all images on a page below 100 KB, and I wouldn’t post an image that was above 150 KB.

If you’re a newish blogger — I can’t say strongly enough how much I wish someone had told me this! This cost me months of growth and days of work and frustration. If you have 20 posts, go back and check them NOW. Don’t wait until Google penalizes your traffic.

Journey onboarding and tips

Okay, but let’s talk about what you came to read about: I opened my email last week to the Journey welcome email!

I still haven’t hit the 10k number. It appears to me that the trigger for getting into Journey was having several consecutive days of traffic above 200 hits per day, rather than a specific monthly number.

The onboarding was super easy and took about 20 minutes.

If there was one thing I wish I had known before signing up, it’s that if you want your blog to have an LLC, you should file it while you’re waiting to get into Journey. The first thing they asked for was either a business name or your name to put in a file available to advertisers. I don’t necessarily want my blog associated with my legal name, so I am in the process of getting that LLC set up now!

You don’t need a lot of tech knowledge for the Journey onboarding — my ads.txt file did not initially install correctly, but there was a button in the software that just said “Troubleshoot” and that fixed it! I wish I’d had that kind of support with all these Google issues I’ve been having.

Okay, but what did Journey pay you?

I’ve been in Journey for three days, and I’ve made only $3, but it’s probably the most exciting $3 I’ve ever made. I finally understand why pizzerias put the first dollar they earn up on the wall! On the first days, the only ads I had were from Grow/Mediavine themselves! But I just looked and now I’m serving ads from Sephora and VRBO, which is pretty cool.

I don’t intend to share specific RPM data, because the onboarding email asks you not to. I’ll tell you that my RPMs started at almost nothing and have increased daily for five days. Others have described that they continue to go up over the early months, so we will see!

I was very worried about site speed with the ad scripts, but it doesn’t appear to have had a significant effect. Adding the Grow plugin made my site slightly slower, but the ads haven’t had any further effect.

It’ll be a while before this is a real source of serious income. But it’s so, so exciting to have it started!

Manifesting my Journey journey

It’s never been my goal to quit my job, like it seems to be for many other blogging hopefuls! I like teaching, and I’m good at it. I don’t think I’m the type of person who would do well working alone for long stretches of time.

What I am doing with this blog is bringing a third full-time (or more than full-time) income into my household! I am blessed to be financially stable and to have enough without this blog, and I am so grateful for that. But I know that this blog has the potential to pay down my mortgage, save for my children and their educations, and to build wealth.

I was very lucky to receive a good financial education in my childhood, and my dad taught me to save money, to use my retirement accounts, and to set financial goals. Would I love to take my family on an expensive vacation every year? Absolutely! But this blog exists mostly to speed us along to financial freedom.

So, we’re manifesting it: this time next year, I am making a double mortgage payment every month and putting $5,000 into my brokerage and 529 accounts every month.

And now that the first milestone has been achieved, the next target is the full Mediavine membership: 50,000 sessions per month. This is a big growth target (10x my current sessions!!) and it might take time, but that’s the next step towards the eventual goal of making this a sizeable income.

Traffic this month

First: I broke the 5k mark this month, finally! The past two months have meant a real setback with Google growth, but Pinterest has finally caught up to where Pinterest + Google were previously.

(The dotted line is last month’s traffic — you can see where I accidentally uninstalled Analytics for three days in July.)

My Pinterest impressions picked back up too:

This supports my theory that Pinterest suppressed my traffic in the month or so after I paid for ads. What a crappy business model! The ads didn’t really pay off, and then impressions suffered after they were over. I wish I hadn’t bothered, and I wouldn’t recommend it to other new bloggers. (Or, really, anyone who isn’t using an agency.)

I’m continuing to stick with RankIQ reports too. A few new posts have popped up and been successful in August — all were written in May or June, and all were from RankIQ reports. I feel like now, after six months with them, I’m ready to write a full review of RankIQ for total beginner bloggers, so I hope to do that this month. I absolutely don’t think I would be in Journey right now without RankIQ.

Goals for September

I didn’t even set goals for August because July was so defeating. But let’s get back on the horse!

Here are my goals for September:

• Write a total of 17 posts on Really Well, Thanks!, posting Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.
• Use RankIQ reports to improve the earliest posts on the blog, and two posts on the other blog.
• Increase my monthly traffic to 8,000 sessions.
• Reach 75 Pinterest followers.
• Have Journey earnings exceed Amazon Affiliate earnings!
• Four pins per day, a mix of new and old. Wednesday is Pinterest day, where I schedule pins for the week.
• Research new hosting options! Bluehost was a good place to start before I was making any money, but I’m going to switch when my annual plan expires in December. I need something faster now. (If you’ve got a suggestion, I would love to hear it.)

Blog income report for August 2024

Let’s GOOOOOOO

• I earned $26.83 for Really Well, Thanks!. $23.77 was from Amazon Affiliates, and $3.06 was from Journey by Mediavine.
• I spent $49 on RankIQ. This has still been super worth it to me, but since I have so many unused reports from last month, I might downgrade for a couple of months to get caught up.
• So the total blog revenue for July 2024 is -$22.17, a loss.
• The year to date revenue for 2024 is -$316.43, a loss.
• And the revenue for the life of the blog, since December 2023, is -$579.73, a loss.

My hope is that in September, I’m able to report the blog’s first profitable month ever!

If you’ve been on this journey with me, thanks for being here. I hope I have more good news the next time I’m here!