YESSSS, this month I broke a new record and managed to earn $8,038+… omg and it feels so good!
UPDATE: check out my latest income report – How I Made $11,409 in November 2023!
I’ve been blogging for a few years now and one thing I’ve learned; no matter how hard and frustrating things can be, if you have a goal you want to achieve, never give up!
It has been a long time since I shared my last income report… The truth is that there were a few months that my site’s revenue dropped to almost $0. It happened after Pinterest released their crazy algorithm updated that caused my Pinterest account stop getting impressions, and my site traffic dropped from 100k monthly visits to ZERO visits! Just like that, one day without any warnings.
Check out this screenshot of my website traffic during this time – C R A Z Y !
And because most of my site traffic was coming from Pinterest, from that day I stopped getting site traffic, which means no ads or affiliate revenue at all!
I was solely relied on Pinterest traffic without optimizing my website for Google SEO, leaving all my efforts in one basket.
My site was dead. I was depressed, tried to send lots of messages to Pinterest’s support but nothing helped. Didn’t know what to do.
It lasts for a month and a half and suddenly one day my Pinterest account came to life again and the traffic returned. It felt like someone just turned on the switch and things were back on track again, like nothing happened.
But I wasn’t the same person anymore.
I didn’t trust Pinterest. I was afraid that it will happen again and I didn’t feel safe dedicating more time to create content for Pinterest.
I even found a day job, wanted to feel more secure.
It took me months to start publishing new pins on Pinterest again.
Instead, I decided to focus on Google SEO. I tried the “low competition keywords” strategy and managed to grow my traffic to 14k after a few months. But it was moving pretty slow because I had to invest and publish lots of articles per month to grow it faster.
I was desperate to hear other blogger stories on how they handled this situation but I mainly found articles on how much traffic they get from Pinterest and how good it works for them.
So I decided to give it another try and get back to Pinterest, but this time I changed my Pinterest pinning strategy.
And because I got myself a day job, I outsourced my work and hired freelancers to help with my blogging tasks which eventually boosted my blog growth (I share more details about this below).
My New Pinterest Strategy
- First, no more repining old pins (even if they used to be viral) – I used to do it a lot and I felt that Pinterest might consider it as really spamming. Instead, every new pin that I publish, I repin it to 3-5 more related boards. And that’s it.
- Upgrade my pin designs – I signed up to Canva Pro and picked a collection of pins that has a feminine/minimal style. Hired a VA to help design a few more designs and bought premium stock photos to use in the pins and website. Images and attractive designs are critical to get more traffic.
- Publish ONLY high quality articles – SEO optimized, trending topics, minimum 1500 word count. I use Uber Suggest and Ahrefs to track viral topics that will work great on Pinterest. And another good source is Pinterest trends where they share trending topics and keywords.
A year later, after following this strategy, my site traffic reached 150k sessions, I managed to doubled my page RPM from around $20 rpm to $40 rpm (and on some pages even more), and freakin’ reached $8k+ revenue on August this year!
Additionally, I think that hiring great freelancers really helped me boost my website growth. It helps me get the weekly tasks done, meet my deadlines and it allows me to free my time and focus on strategy and blog growth.
Wondering what are the exact earning streams and expenses? Here is a breakdown:
Urban Mamaz Earnings:
$6,582.85 – displaying ads with Mediavine
$1,455.55 – Amazon Associates
$36.65 – Skimlinks
$8,075.05 Total revenue
Urban Mamaz Expenses:
$60 – Rocket.net hosting – love them – this hosting service makes my website so much faster and my website never shuts down like it used to happen often on Bluehost – worth every penny!
$600 – VA – publishing content and graphic design
$1500 – Content writers (increased lately)
$20 – Adobe – professional graphic design software when I need a better tool
$12.99 – Tailwind for scheduling posts
$10 – Buffer ($120 annual plan) for scheduling posts
$12.5 – Canva Pro ($149.9 annual plan) – User friendly graphic design software for my team
$2,215.49 Total expenses
*** I know that the expenses might be a bit high, but because I have a day job, hiring freelancers and getting help allows me to work only 2-3 hours on the website per week.
Here are a few screenshots from August this year:
What’s Next?
Well, the goal is go grow of course… and I have a few cool projects that I’m working on.
To grow Urban Mamaz I plan to:
- Continue publishing more content according to the content plan. Considering to increase the number of monthly articles.
- Plan a strategy to generate free organic traffic from Facebook.
- Google SEO
- Optimize and update old content.
Amazon Merch on Demand
If you visited my website, Urban Mamaz, and you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you probably know that there is also an online shop where you can download lots of free printables and cool digital designs. Because I have many designs I decided to sign up to Amazon Merch on Demand and sell products with my designs. I started on July this year and a few days later I sold my first t-shirt.
I promote the tees through banners on Urban Mamaz and that’s it. So far I sold 9 t-shirts – for each one I earn around $4. I uploaded only 9 designs so far because the limit in tier 10 is ten. Once I’ll sell ten products, I should be able to access tier 2 and upload more designs.
You can actually set your own price for each t-shirt and this way control how much money you want to earn on each product. What’s good about Amazon Merch on Demand (compared to Printify and Printful) is that you don’t need to deal with delivering the products. Just choose the type of products you want to sell, upload your designs, and focus on marketing.
Once I’ll have more time, I’ll plan a good strategy to promote the products through my websites. This can be a great and easy income stream.
Final Thoughts
I know blogging can be complicated. There are so many things that needs to be done. My best tip is to try to focus on tasks that have high ROI. Do things that directly affect your profit when your time is limited. But still remember to plan a long term strategy for growth.
Have any questions or want to share your thoughts? Leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer!
