This post may contain affiliate links that support the site at no cost to you. Here’s the Blog Income Report October 2024 if you want it.

It must be getting really tedious to keep reading income reports where I just kind of complain!

(I don’t mean to complain. But I’m not doing so great with this lately.)

Like, girl, you’re making money as a blogger! You have the thing you said you wanted, even if it’s on a small scale! What is there to complain about?

But the truth is: I’m having a tough time keeping all the balls in the air with the rest of my life right now, and the blog has become my lowest priority. And I feel a little guilty about it! Like a lot of people would give a lot to be where I am now, and I shouldn’t take my foot off the gas now that I have some real momentum.

But…at the end of the day my kids have to come first, and I need to at least try to stay sane and get some sleep at night.

This sounds like I’m setting up to say that I did something other than make a bunch of money off this, but I’m not!

Looking back on year one

So, I got my hosting plan and domain on December 10 of last year. That means I’ve put about twelve months into this. So I wanted to share some perspectives and lessons from the experience.

I can sort my year of blogging into basically three phases:

• Clueless and overwhelmed (December-March)
• RankIQ pedal to the metal (April-July)
• School year of crisis BUT JOURNEY (August-today)

Starting out clueless (or, what I would do differently if I was starting this site again)

The first thing I did when I started the site was pay for the domain and hosting and busy myself for a while picking a theme and designing a logo in Canva.

I wouldn’t do it this way again. I was really overwhelmed at the idea of doing all this writing and setting up links between different pages after the fact and all these things that turned out to be a relatively small part of the workflow.

No matter what you do, you’ll pay for hosting for a few months with 0 traffic. There’s no way around that. But I paid for more months like that than was really required, compared to potentially having a solid body of posts ready to go before paying a cent for hosting.

If I could do it again, my first payment would be to RankIQ (more on that in a sec) and I’d work up a couple dozen posts before getting a hosting plan set up. At the end of the day, posts are the the things that will bring you traffic, not the logo I agonized over.

(This is also what Carly Campbell is recommending right now — Pinteresting Strategies is still the only Pinterest class I consider to be worth the money, and she’s apparently revising it now for re-release in 2025.)

Also during this period, I ran out of steam on my own keyword research. I did careful keyword research from the beginning, and Ihad set up about 20 posts worth of keywords. It seemed like a lot to me, but once I had written them, I totally stalled out. In February 2024, I only posted twice because I truly did not know what to write about. I didn’t have any traffic yet to tell me which topics were good or not.

Productive daily posting

During March, my fourth month of blogging, I was feeling so clueless that I decided to just go for RankIQ. I was feeling a little hopeless, and worried that I had wasted the hosting money, so I decided to try it. I can’t tell you how much easier it made my writing process!

It was really helpful to have some benchmarks. Google was not my priority at that time, but it was so good to just have a direction and someone to tell me what to do.

Honestly, it also changed the direction of the blog a little bit from “wellness” to “beauty/lifestyle”. I only pick topics that I’m interested in, but it’s good to have some feedback about what’s worth writing that might actually get some traction.

Maybe most importantly, it gave my what is currently my highest-traffic topic, color analysis. This is a topic I’ve always been personally interested in and dedicated to, but it’s not something I likely would have selected without seeing RankIQ reports about it. Many RankIQ reports perform well on Pinterest!

Like I said earlier, if I was starting this all over again, I would start my process with a couple months worth of RankIQ reports, so that when I launched my blog I had a body of posts lined up and ready to go. If I ever decide to do this crazy thing again, that’s what I’ll do.

So, for April, May, June and July, I was kind of a machine. I wrote most days, posted frequently, pinned diligently…I was really living and breathing it.

Some of that was the reward of watching traffic numbers go up through the spring (until they…stopped going up for a while due to Google issues). Some of it was having a class schedule at school that was really supportive of me doing an hour of pretty much uninterrupted writing.

In retrospect, was it too much that put me into burnout on top of a full-time job and two kids? Possibly.

Nosedive (August – today)

I’m having a tough school year. I’ll leave it at that. It’s not the kids! It’s the schedule and a few new responsibilities. There’s no writing time after school anymore.

Our family is also in a little bit of transition! My oldest daughter is starting to do “big kid” activities that are really shaking up our schedule. And my husband has had more irregular hours than in the past.

We’re all doing our best, but this transition is really tough! And the blog isn’t getting the best of my attention yet, when it gets any at all.

It’s great to be profitable, but the blog is not yet making the kind of money where you can pay a Pinterest manager! So I need to work a little harder to be consistent. (I don’t love making pins; that’s a huge part of the problem, too.) I looked really hard for an AI pin maker that I liked, but honestly none of them look right for the posting that I want to do.

Hosting change

I switched hosting companies last week!

 Bluehost was good to me for year one! $1.99 per month was the correct price for a site no one was reading. But as site speed has lagged and my Core Web Vitals have suffered, I knew I needed to move on. (If I ever start another site, I will def start with Bluehost for year one again.)

I picked Kinsta for the new host and waited to see if they would do a Black Friday sale (they did!). I can’t say a lot about the quality of the hosting yet, but the customer service was terrific for migrating my stuff and redirecting the domain.

I don’t know anything about this stuff, and I haven’t learned too much this year if I’m being honest! So having customer support reps that were super helpful, clear, and accessible was amazing. I’m looking forward to having faster hosting and keep the site growing.

The best part: they won’t bill me for the new plan until this month, so I get to say the site is profitable this month!

(In fairness, I didn’t write much the past couple weeks but I did put a fair amount of time into hosting stuff.)

Okay, enough! let’s get to what you came for

Blog income report for October 2024

Let’s GOOOOOOO

• I earned $256.48 for Really Well, Thanks!. $29.89 was from Amazon Affiliates, and $226.59 was from Journey by Mediavine.
• I spent $29 on RankIQ on the Lite plan.
• So the total blog revenue for October 2024 is a PROFIT of $227.48.
• The year to date revenue for 2024 is $229.55.
• And the revenue for the life of the blog, since December 2023, is -$33.75. This is an improvement over last month, when it was -$261.23.

Okay, this is a little motivation for December! The hosting will cost $210, so I need to earn at least $243.75 to break even for the life of the blog before 2025! I can definitely do that.