Holy smoke, where do I begin… My March 2017 blog income report is published later than usual. I have been so darn busy during March and April that I haven’t even had time to write!
And most of the time, I feel like I have been working with a deer in the headlights look. Man, there’s so much I should have done differently in the past 6-7 years of blogging. Or that I should have done at all.
What has kept me so busy these past 1.5 months is that I started a course (yes, yet another one) called Elite Blog Academy. It is a super comprehensive, super expensive course that I signed up for already in December 2016. It opened the door in late February and it is keeping me busy!
For example, I redesigned my logo and website, redefined what to write about, to whom and how. It made me start working on my email list and tons of more stuff.
It’s good. And a bit painful and frustrating. I just don’t really have the time I want to work as quickly as I want. Patience was never one one of my key strengths.
As you may know, I started writing these reports in January 2016 as a way to help myself focus on turning my 10-year-old (!) blog into a business. I had and have lots of traffic but earnings at that time were pathetic. You can check out my very first blog income report here.
You’ll find all earlier blog income reports here.
Now, let’s see how I did with Easy Baby Life during March 2017!
Blog Income March 2017
- Amazon – $335. Last month was $426, so a clear decrease. Amazon changed their payment structure for the worse. Super annoying! And part of being a blogger. I really need to diversify my affiliate income streams!
- Other affiliate income sources – $69 – More than the $22 I made last month
- Mediavine Ad Network – $4,478 – Last month was $3,536 so a nice increase and best so far this year!
Grand total – $4,882 That’s significantly higher than the $3,984 last month, and 3 time higher than in March 2016.
I think focusing on earnings and learning things like Pinterest and Affiliate marketing was quite a good idea, don’t you agree?
In addition to Amazon changing the terms for the worse for their affiliates, display ads have not yet recovered from changing my site to secure. Quite annoying, but I try to see it as a strong hint to NOT only on page views to earn!
Blog Expenses March 2017
- Boardbooster – $10. I love Boardbooster for pinning to Pinterest and bumped up my allowed pins per month, so now I pay $10 per month instead of $5. If you haven’t given it a shot yet, please do! It is FREE to try out.
- Aweber (email service) – $29.99
- Sucuri for website protection – $16.66 per month (I paid for a full year immediately during spring, $199, but count cost for 1 month each month of the year. SO. VERY. WORTH. IT.) My site hasn’t been hacked once since I started with Sucuri. (And I know that IF it would be hacked, they will help me clean it completely without any extra costs at all.
- Cost for my host A2, where I now splurge on a Managed VPS account – $55 (per month with all bells and whistles, 2-year contract)
- Social Warfare Premium Plugin – $29 for a whole year. When I changed to secure https, ALL my social counts disappeared. I tried not to care, but failed. I finally decided to invest a whopping in the WP plugin Social Warfare. It claimed to be able to recover all social media counts without a problem. It worked! And it was super easy.
- Logo design $200 – I have wanted to upgrade my Easy Baby Life logo for several years, but never got around to do it. Now, when going throught the Elite Blog Academy, redesigning my website to something I can be proud of, was one of the early steps. I got help with the actual logo, but decided on colors, structure and everything else myself. There’s still lots of improvement to be made, but I like the look of the website MUCH better now!
- Logo font – $20. I bought the font for my logo.
- Stockphotos – $117. Appsumo had an amazing offer of 100 free downloads of high quality photos for $39. I bought 3 batches. I really need great photos, so this was a super deal that will last the whole year. :-)
Total costs – $467 High costs due to the logo design and stock photos.
Net Income in March 2017 – $4,415
Now, let’s have a look at traffic numbers and finally RPM for the month.
Blog Traffic March 2017
Here are some screenshots from Google Analytics to show my traffic for March 2017.
Page views were up a bit compared to February, from 554,076 to 636,900. This felt great and it was one of my first times ever with page views exceeding 600,000. The little SEO boost from converting to SSL might be a part of the explanation, since Google is the main source of traffic increase. Some 50,000 visits more from Google in March compared to February.
You can see my traffic sources here below. Pinterest remained stable at around 60,000 page views, which feels great. Haha, and I want MORE! Melyssa’s course has been golden for me! Actually, I just published a post where I look back at the past year’s quite massive income and traffic increase and review which blogger courses have helped me the most. (Elite Blog Academy is not included yet, I need to see solid results first!)
Now putting all this together and calculating RPM (revenue per 1000 page views)…
Grand RPM is $7.7
This is slightly better than last months and hugely better than a year ago. But… I really hope that all the effort I put in now, will help me reach a whole different earning level at some point soon.
I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have on my March 2017 blog income report. Please share by leaving a comment below! :-)
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Paula Dennholt founded Easy Baby Life in 2006 and has been a passionate parenting and pregnancy writer since then. Her parenting approach and writing are based on studies in cognitive-behavioral models and therapy for children and her experience as a mother and stepmother. Life as a parent has convinced her of how crucial it is to put relationships before rules. She strongly believes in positive parenting and a science-based approach.
Paula cooperates with a team of pediatricians who assist in reviewing and writing articles.
I’m really trying to focus on monetizing my blog – hopefully in a few months I’ll be making what you are! Right now I’m trying out Boadbooster, so it’s nice to see that you’ve been using it and recommend it.