December 2016 Blog Income Report

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This is my December 2016 blog income report in my fourth month of blogging.

Before I start, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas Holiday! Also, I wish everyone reading this a great and prosperous New Year!

I had a wonderful Christmas holiday! I took a break in the last two weeks of  December and spent time with my family and friends! 🙂

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclaimer for more information.

 

Why I’m Blogging My Income & Traffic Reports

 

When I created this blog, it was to show people how to make money online through online jobs, online businesses, blogs, websites and so on. What better way to do that than to allow them to see me doing it right along with them, right?

 

1. I want to be able to document the growth of my blog.

 

2. I want people to see that it is possible to make money from their blogs and ultimately create a better life with more choices for themselves and their loved ones.

 

3. I love writing, so I will take the opportunity to write anything!

 

Plus it’s all the rave these days and everyone’s doing it! Just kidding! I’m not one to follow the crowd, but I am particularly interested in making money and sharing my experiences trying to do so online.

4. The main aim of my blog income and traffic reports is to help someone, somewhere, learn something from this, and create a better life for themselves by starting their own blog, if that’s what interests them, but they’ve been afraid to take the leap!

 

So, if you’re that someone who would like to create your own blog, I created a detailed, step by step guide on how to setup a blog in 30 minutes or less with SiteGround. If you use my link, you can receive a 60% discount and start blogging for just $3.95 per month (unbeatable value!!!).

I recently learned that it is really possible to make money from a blog and I am determined to do this right and have a super successful blog. I would love for you to join me along the way!

 

I am super excited to share my December 2016 blog income report for my fourth month of blogging (December 2016). This month was great for me, especially since I got to spend time with my family and friends over the holidays!

I notice that many bloggers start income and traffic reports when their blog actually starts to make money, rather than when they first start their blog. I get this since:

1. Many bloggers start their blogs with no idea that they can even generate an income from it, or with no desire to even do so.

2. Some do not even know the concept of a blog income and traffic report when they first start out blogging.

But, I do, and I want to be different and share the progress of my blog from the very beginning rather than from when it starts to actually make progress.

I’M SHARING MY INCOME AND TRAFFIC REPORTS TO KEEP YOU AND ME MOTIVATED!

Here’s what I think

I suspect that many people who start blogging quit before really giving it a chance because they don’t seem to see much progress in terms of traffic and income in the first few months of blogging (month 1-3).

Therefore, blogging seems useless to them.

 

Moreover, many people don’t see bloggers ‘like them’ who aren’t making much money and getting much traffic as yet.

After all, the blogosphere is filled with income and traffic reports from bloggers who choose to share their income and traffic reports when they ‘look better’.

 

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. But this blog is about helping the newbies, like me see full, unedited progress and pitfalls from day one.

I share this in the hope that it will keep newbies motivated and let them see that they aren’t doing anything wrong, they are merely learning and progressing at a typical pace.

 

Also, if you’re not yet a blogger, I hope my income and traffic reports, as well as all my other juicy articles for newbie bloggers, will help you build up the courage to start your own profitable blog as you see that anything is possible with it no matter what your stats are in the beginning. It will get better, way better, if you do the right things consistently.

 

A FEW HIGHLIGHTS FOR DECEMBER

Pinterest Traffic continues to grow! Super excited about this!

I received some spam traffic again. This time it came from a fake ‘twitter.com’ account. :(.

For anyone going through this right now, check out this helpful video to learn how to filter out spam traffic.

I took two weeks break from my blog. During this time, I only promoted some posts on Facebook and scheduled pins to Pinterest.

 

Overall, December was great and I continued to learn and grow as a new blogger! As always!

 

As you may know, this blog was launched on September 1st, 2016 and this is my fourth blog income and traffic report.

As you can imagine, I am still figuring things out and getting a feel for what’s to come in terms of work, ideas and so on.

If you would like to see my progress over the last four months, you should have a look at my previous blog income and traffic reports below.

• September 2016 income and traffic report (very first income and traffic report) $51.29
• October 2016 income and traffic report ($145.89)
• November 2016 income and traffic report ($245.36)

 

These Were My Goals For December 2016 – Was I successful Or Not?

 

GOAL #1: GET 9000 PAGE VIEWS

I set a goal to reach 9000 page views in December, and, I’m glad to report that I achieved this goal! Yay for me!

Successful!

I received 9900 page views for my fourth month of blogging!

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GOAL #2: Engage with bloggers more in Facebook groups 

I was successful at this for sure! I love to use facebook groups to promote, however, just dropping a link for traffic and leaving feels empty. There is absolutely no connection!

I started to not only promote my posts by linking to them in facebook groups, I also took the time to ask questions and try to understand the person’s concern before or even after I have left my link.

This was great and I feel really good doing it! I’m sure the person who had the concern felt good too!

Successful!

P.S, I have created a facebook group for newbies like myself. I believe we can connect and help each other out in this group. If you want to be a part of it click the image below to join!

 

GOAL #3: Make $560 from my blog

 

Unsuccessful 🙁

To be fair, I think I could have made $560 this month, however, I took two weeks break from my blog (although I promoted a bit…just not as hard as I would have done on any other day).

Anyways, here is how my income went:

 

INCOME

Google Adsense: $66.46

Web hosting: $200.00

Guest posting: $0.00 (I still haven’t submitted any guest posts!)

Jaxxy Affiliate: $44.00

Flex offers Affiliate Network: $44.00

TOTAL INCOME: $354.46

 

EXPENSES

Web Hosting: $3.95

Tailwind: $15.00

Canva- $1.00

TOTAL EXPENSES: $19.95

 

Net income: $334.51

 

GOAL #3: Publish 8 blog posts (each 1500 + words)

MAJORLY Unsuccessful. Again!

I only published 3 posts.

I got caught up with promoting as well as with my two-week break. So 8 blog posts were impossible!

I also know why my posts are not being published. Guys, I never planned out my blog posts. They have all been mostly spur of the moment ideas. I saw many bloggers (both pros and amateurs) talking about creating content calendars for 2017.

People actually plan a full year worth of content!

I used google Calendar (nothing fancy) and created my own, for the first quarter of the year. Guys, I’m so excited, I came up with some really good ideas for my content for the first three months of 2017.

And it’s so organized! And everything is themed! I forsee a great outcome from me using an editorial calendar to plan my content.

 

Anyways, Here Are My Blog Related Posts I  Published In December 2016

Third Blog Income Report

The Basics Of Understanding SEO

The Major Differences Between WordPress.com And WordPress.org

 

GOAL #4: Guest Post two (2) times

Failed

Guys, to be honest, I feel like my blog is not ‘good enough’ to be featured on someone’s really popular blog.

 

GOAL #5: Get 50 more email subscribers

Failed

I got 41 email subscribers in December 2016.

GOAL #6: SOCIAL MEDIA STATS

Pinterest Goal: Get 155 more Pinterest followers in December

Failed!

573 followers (up by +118 followers from November)

I am no longer using my facebook page. In fact, I have created a facebook group called New Bloggers Network. I find that facebook groups are much more engaging.

If you’re interested, you can join it here.

GOAL #9: Spend 24 hours in this month (1 hour a day) working on my first e-book

Successful

I’m working on an awesome e-book for newbies! I will be sharing it with you guys very soon!

What do you think of my accomplishments this month? Let me know in the comments below.

Let me know in the comments below.

 

Takeaways From December 2016

 

I set goals (for accountability and focus). I did not accomplish all my goals for the month of December but I am super happy with my progress this month.

At the beginning of every month, I will set some and we will see if I accomplish them! I will outline my goals for January at the end of this post.

 

BUT FIRST, FOR THE TAKEAWAYS FROM DECEMBER

 

PINTEREST

I continued to see great progress from Pinterest. Both my Pinterest traffic and followers grew.

In December, I continued to learn and implement good Pinterest strategies that help with my growth.

In case you want to start using Pinterest to get blog traffic, I suggest you take advantage of this free month trial of Tailwind by clicking this link.

This is the scheduling tool I use to schedule my pins. I love this tool guys! It saves me tons of time plus, it gives me detailed insights on how my pins are performing and how my Pinterest boards are performing.

I love this since it helps me understand where to put my focus when it comes to my Pinterest account.

 

 What I Did In December

• I scheduled and pinned 120+ pins daily. Use the free trial of Tailwind to make this easy breezy!
• I joined some more Pinterest Group Boards
• I started using Tailwind Tribes. So far I love them. I’m able to add my pins to Tailwind tribes where they have a chance of getting seen by additional people and repinned or shared!

 

What I Plan To Do In January

• Continue implementing those practices that worked for me in December. I also plan on learning as much as I can to get better at Pinterest and make my current Pinterest strategy better.
• Creating more Pinnable images for my published posts. Melyssa Griffin and some other successful bloggers recommend creating about 10 Pinnable images for each post as this can help increase visibility or reach on Pinterest. At this point in time, I have an average of 4 pins for each post.

 

FACEBOOK GROUPS

 

What I did in December.

I networked and promoted a lot in Facebook Groups in December. My focus was on giving value to members of those awesome facebook groups who needed help, It feels good to be of help to newbies like myself!

I also worked on my own facebook group called New Bloggers Network. It’s specifically for bloggers under 2 years who are looking for a place to network, grow and support each other. You can have a look here!

 

What I will do in January

Continue to network and build relationships with bloggers in the awesome facebook groups that I am a part of.

Work on growing my Facebook Group and connecting with bloggers and online business owners like myself.

 

ORGANIC TRAFFIC

I almost doubled my organic traffic in December!

To be fair, I only got 300 sessions from the search engines.

However, this is a great improvement from last month. The best part is that my session duration from the search engines was

 

The best part about my search engine traffic?

According to Google Analytics,  my Average Session Duration from my search engine traffic was a whopping 5 minutes, 35 seconds compared to an average of 2 minutes from social, direct and referral traffic!

This means that the people coming to my blog from Google are more engaged, and, dare I say, more interested in what I have to say on my blog!

I’m super excited about Organic traffic and I foresee great things happening with and from my search traffic.

 

If you want to improve your own SEO and search traffic,  have a look at the exact steps I’m following for my own blog. Read this article on a proper keyword research tool, that’s way better than Google Keywords Planner.

Also, read this article on the basics of understanding and implementing good SEO strategies

What were your takeaways in December 2016?

I’d love to know what you were up to, as well as what failures, successes and lessons you learned in December, so share with me in the comments below! 🙂

 

Blog goals for January 2017!

1. Get 12,000 page views by the last day of January 2017. Can I do this?

2. Engage with bloggers more in facebook groups and grow my own to 100 members.

4. Make $560 from my blog. I’ve kept this monetary goal since I did not achieve it in December.

5. Publish 4 blog posts (each 1500 + words). I have planned them out on my editorial calendar and I’m sure I will be able to do it!

6. Get 100 more email subscribers.

7. Get 180 more Pinterest followers.

8. Complete a super detailed content upgrade for my ‘How To Start A Blog’ post.

My overall aim for January is to network and grow and provide value in the form of great posts and information for my readers!

Will I achieve these goals at the end of January? Stick around to find out how I’m doing!!

Also, if you have any questions at all, leave a comment and I will help out! 🙂

I would love to know your plans for your blog this month! Share with me in the comments below!

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Learning Material That I Highly Recommend

 

Pinteresting Strategies: This e-book helped me increase my page views drastically. My blog went from 12,000 page views to 56,000 page views in a few months!

Making Sense Of Affiliate Marketing: This course is a must for anyone interested in making money online through affiliate marketing. I’ve learned so much about affiliate marketing just from this course and I have been able to grow my blog’s income from $1700 to $3000 exactly 1 month after getting the e-course and implementing some of its strategies.

Pinterest Traffic Avalanche: This e-course walks you through absolutely everything you need to know about succeeding on Pinterest. It’s super in depth and will teach you some amazing Pinterest strategies that you won’t find anywhere else. This course is especially great for helping you create the best pins which in return, help you get loads of traffic from Pinterest.