I decided to publish a separate income report for my new blog (momshealth.co) as it made quite an exceptional income in the 4th month since I bought the domain name and set up the hosting.
The new (my second) blog made $856 on the 4th month and all this was only possible because of my free (organic) Pinterest traffic! From this post, you’ll find out exactly how I made it.
I guess, not everyone reading this post knows who I am, why I run two blogs and what they are about. I’ll make this story short for you.
- I started my first blog anastasiablogger.com which you are reading now, in Feb 2017 and worked on it part-time while still having a 9-5 job. I decided to focus on Pinterest as a traffic source and even though I started from scratch, with 0 followers, Pinterest worked miracles driving to my blogs organic (free traffic). I get over 90% of all my traffic from Pinterest!
- I quit my job on the 10th-month blogging when I was accepted to Mediavine ad network because traffic was quite high by that time and ad income alone could cover my monthly bills.
- In Feb 2018, one year since I started the first blog, I launched my second blog momshealth.co. I had several reasons for this:
- I wanted to test my Pinterest strategies on a brand-new blog and see how fast I could grow traffic knowing all that I learned in the first year of blogging. This worked perfectly well as in just 2.5 months my new blog was getting 74,000 monthly pageviews traffic.
- Plus, I wanted to have a blog for mom- and health-related posts which didn’t fit much anastasiablogger.com blog.
If you are about to start a blog and thinking, what your main focus should be for the first year – Google, Instagram, Facebook, paid ads (some newbies even think of this option!). My answer is: focus on Pinterest!
When you start a blog, most probably, you are still working full time, your blogging income is not high enough to quit, and you have a limited amount of time to spend on your blog. So, spend it wisely! Spend it on things that really work in 2018!
Income Report for MomsHealth.co – May 2018
- Mediavine ads – $493.17 (the switch from Adsense happened on May 9, so the income from Mediavine doesn’t represent the full month).
- Google Adsense – $31.87
- Product sales – $330.99
Total: $856.03
How Much Money You Need to Start a Blog?
Your initial investment in starting a blog is so much lower than any other potential business you might be thinking about! With the hosting provider I used for this blog for 1 year, for example, you can start a site at the price of one coffee a month! Literally.
I have a free 7-day course which will give you the right direction and will help you build a blog that’s not just a hobby, but an income source.
It’s also not as difficult technically, as many people think. I have a video tutorial which shows you how in about 10-20 min you can set up hosting and domain name for a WordPress blog – see a detailed post about it here.
This post contains affiliate links to Bluehost. This means I might receive a commission if you buy their hosting using my link (no extra cost for you involved). For more information, see my disclosures here. Using my link, you can get hosting + free domain name + free SSL certificate (https) at a 50% discounted price.
You can use this handy Bluehost’s tool to check whether the domain you are thinking about is available:
I recommend this hosting because I was still on Bluehost’s basic plan when I got 13.399 sessions in just one day (you’ve seen it in the screenshot in this traffic report)!
I had to move to another hosting plan only 11 months since I started the blog because my traffic for January exceeded Bluehost’s basic plan about 10 times. But for a blog that’s just starting, Bluehost’s basic plan will be more than enough!
Conclusions
- Traffic first – income will follow. Probably you have seen some “pro” bloggers who claim that traffic is not what grows your income, but I don’t believe in this! Even in the most profitable blog niches, you need an audience first and then you can think about sales funnels and other fancy stuff to monetize your blog.
- I keep driving over 90% of all my traffic from Pinterest – it’s organic and free traffic. If you are still in doubts whether it’s worth investing your time and learning about Pinterest SEO, just keep in mind that my second blog has grown from 0 to 74,000 pageviews/mo in less than 90 days.
- I made an overview of my blogging income and traffic for the first blog and compared with the second blog. I realized that I could have reached the first $1000/mo income much faster if I didn’t start blogging about blogging. I was ignoring for too long the opportunity of driving Pinterest traffic to non-blogging content. Applying to Mediavine became my objective only in about 7-8 months blogging and as a result, I received my first decent ad income ($1440) only on 11th month since I started the first blog.
You might also want to see my income report for May 2018 for both blogs and find out how I made $4000 in one month!
I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.
Comments 5
Hey Anastasia,
First of all, thank you for sharing everything that you share. It is inspiring for people like me, who dream of doing something similar one day! I love your blog and followed your journey for a while now.
I wanted to ask you if you could clarify (or expand) on the point where you say you wish you didn’t focus on blogging about blogging from the start. Is this because you think this niche is becoming a little difficult to get into? Or you found there is more demand for blog posts about other things, like health/weight loss niche?
Thank you very much! xx
Author
Hi, Val! This niche is saturated but it doesn’t mean you can’t find your place in it. I actually try to monetize with courses like my Pinterest course. The reason I regret I didn’t focus on other niches from starters is because you can’t get that much traffic from Pinterest in blogging about blogging niche to monetize it with ads.
Also, it’s very difficult to establish your authority as a blogging expert and sell courses or other products to beginner bloggers if you don’t have some impressive numbers to show. And it’s hard to get those impressive numbers if you are competing in blogging for blogging niche simply because there are not as many people who want to be bloggers compared to your potential audience in health/weight loss/parenting/recipes niches.
Thank you for your response, it’s very helpful, and also it is so refreshing to hear an honest opinion about these things from a blogger! I wish you all the best with your blog and will continue to follow your amazing journey. 🙂
Hi Anastasia! Great to see how well you did in just four months. Do you remember how many pins you created to your site (not including repins to other sites) in this time? Do you think it was under 400 or so? I found your Pinterest account for your second blog and see that you have under 4,000 pins today, which seems encouraging to me since this income report was written a long time ago. You wrote this post a year ago, so you probably had far fewer then (maybe a few hundred at most). I think you said you had only written like 15 articles around this time.
I ask because I am on my second blog myself. On my first blog, I created about 1,000 pins and was only seeing 120 visits a day and $15-30 a month. Then I got to 400 visits a day and $8 a day in revenue by the time I got 1,400 pins.
I feel like I put in a tremendous amount of work to see such a small return, but I think that might be due to how small my niche is (it was on witchcraft which obviously most people don’t use). I am hoping I can see better results on my new site (it is in the cooking/recipes niche) with far fewer pins this time. Do you think I can start seeing some decent traffic this time after around 200 pins or so to my own site (I will still repin other content on top of this)?
Author
Hi, Kalen! I didn’t create a lot of pins but it was more than 400 because when I create a new board, I always save a log of third-party pins first.
Food niche works really great on Pinterest, you should see better results with your second account!