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Okay, so I wasn’t really sure whether I should share my blog income report for this little blog of mine, since it’s not even 5 months old yet. And also because this blog isn’t making me tons of money. Yet.
But I’m happy to report that it is at least making me something, even though it’s not much. And so I’ve decided to do a blog income report for July 2020 to show you all that yes, you can still make money blogging with a brand new blog started in 2020.
About My Blog
Firstly, I’d like to share some info on my blog so you can understand where I’m at currently:
- I bought the domain for this blog on 16 March 2020, since I was stuck at home and didn’t really have much to do. For a fun little back story, I had just quit my job end of February in preparation for my move to Canada from South Africa (yes, I’m South African). And then, as you probably know, lock down started, and everything closed down and my plans got put on hold (and I’m still stuck in SA). So yeah, I started this blog.
- When I bought my domain, I also opened a Pinterest business account, since I planned to promote my blog on Pinterest in order to get traffic. I didn’t have any posts yet, but I started building up my Pinterest account (created boards and pinned other people’s pins).
- On 23 March, I published my first blog post, and from there tried to publish 3-4 new posts every week.
- I started pinning my own posts to Pinterest somewhere early in April, when I had about 5-7 posts published.
- I applied for Google AdSense on 28 April. At this point I didn’t have a lot of traffic – I only had 914 sessions for the entire month of April, but decided to take a chance.
- Yay! I was approved for AdSense on 4 May 2020 and started showing ads on my site. That’s 42 days after hitting publish on that first post.
- But I quickly saw that I was not going to make money from AdSense. They pay peanuts. And so I decided that I needed to get to 25k sessions quickly so I could join Mediavine. But then on 15 June, Mediavine announced they were upping their requirement from 25k monthly sessions to 50k sessions. Okay, so Mediavine was out. For now.
- This was how I decided to join Ezoic to serve ads on my site. I did look at Monumetric, but didn’t want to invest $100 for them setting up the ads on my site.
Okay, now you’re all caught up to how I started my blog and decided to monetize it with Ezoic ads.
My Experience With Ezoic
When I first joined Ezoic, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t join via any sort of referral or anything – I literally went to the website myself and registered an account for my blog. I didn’t even know if there was any sort of approval process in place. Like I said, I just created an account and then followed some steps to integrate my site with Ezoic (I did it using the WordPress plugin cause it seemed the easiest option).
But after the integration and all that, there were still no ads on my site. Honestly, the interface and how to get everything set up was a bit confusing. But after watching a few YouTube videos, I learned to set up some ad units and installed the Ad Inserter plugin on my site where I added the Ezoic ad codes. With all this in place – STILL no ads!
So I decided to reach out to support and they were actually very helpful and quick to respond. Turns out there is some sort of approval process, and my site just hadn’t been approved yet.
I also found out that I had an account manager who I could reach out to and was given his details. He helped me get approved, and also optimized my ad placements for me. (So a tip for any of you who do want to join Ezoic, reach out to your account manager and let them help you get set up, it’s so much easier than trying to figure it all out yourself.)
Finally Ezoic Ads started showing on my site end of June. So July was the first full month with Ezoic, which is why I decided to write this blog income report for July 2020. So you’re probably getting impatient and wondering how much I made with Ezoic in July.
Blog Income Report For July 2020
Okay, so, I made a whopping $202 in July 2020. I know this is not a lot, but keep in mind this was only my 4th month blogging.
Here’s my Google Analytics screenshot for you.
As you can see, I had about 22k sessions in July (I was so close to getting into Mediavine).
Almost all of this traffic comes from Pinterest. I’m happy to say that my Pinterest strategy seems to be working quite well and that I’m well on my way to over 1M monthly viewers (vanity metric, I know I know) and over 1k page views daily. Hoping I’ll reach this before end of August but we’ll see.
My Pinning Strategy
I had my eye on driving Pinterest traffic from the very start. Of course I’m not neglecting Google SEO, but it just takes longer. And I wanted traffic from day one.
Before even hitting publish on my first post, I already set up my Pinterest business account and created multiple boards with proper SEO keywords in their titles and descriptions. I filled up my boards with 3rd party pins that were ranking high in Pinterest search results. I made sure to only pin legitimate pins (not spam or stolen pins). This helps to inform Pinterest what the board is about, so I highly recommend you do this with every new board you create.
Once I had enough posts of my own to pin, I started mostly pinning my own pins. I currently create and pin between 5 – 15 FRESH pins DAILY. This is what I believe has really helped my account to grow so quickly. Pinterest now prefers fresh pins over saves, and my account keeps growing every month with this strategy.
If you’re also looking to grow your Pinterest account and traffic but don’t have time to create and pin fresh pins each day, I also now offer Pinterest management services. You can check it out here if you’re interested.
I also have some high converting Pinterest templates for Canva available that will help you create pins quickly and effortlessly. These are some of the Pinterest templates I use myself which allows me to easily create fresh pins daily. You can check them out here.
Going Forward
So what am I doing next for this blog? Definitely not focusing on ad revenue anymore. It’s become more obvious to me now that it’s not as easy to make money with ads as it was before.
A few years back, you could start a blog, push out tons of posts, pin like crazy and watch the money roll in. But Pinterest has changed over the years and it’s not as easy to get thousands of visitors to your site quickly anymore. It’s a bit of a longer game now.
But it is STILL possible to make money blogging.
I’ve seen some people say blogging is dead. I guess it depends on what they mean by blogging. Sure, the average person is not going to make tons of money by starting a random blog and throwing all sorts of round-up posts on it. Can you still do it? Probably, if you are able to pump out round-ups round the clock and pin like crazy. But those sorts of sites will mostly always be focused on making money via ads and rely on huge traffic volumes.
And trust me, this is NOT where you want to be headed. I wanted to go for huge traffic and ads with this blog, but I realize now it was a mistake. I should have focused on monetizing via affiliates and product offers from the start. It’s alright though, I can still change my tactics (and I am).
I just want to let YOU know, especially if you’re new to blogging, don’t rely on money from ads. It’s nice to have as an extra income, but it shouldn’t be your sole income. Rather create something of value (a course, a product, a service) for your audience.
If you provide value to your audience, the money will naturally follow. I’ve read about this before, but I guess it didn’t click until I experienced this myself. The focus shouldn’t be on you, but on your audience. Provide something of value to THEM. This is the only way to build your tribe.
For those of you that read this that are thinking about starting a blog, my advice is – just start. You can check out my guide on how to start a blog here. You don’t have to wait until you know everything before you start your blog. If you do, then trust me, you’ll never start. Rather learn as you go. If you start today and stick with it, just think, in 4 months from now you could also be earning an extra $200+ a month. More if you avoid the mistakes I made.
I’m currently working on an eBook detailing my Pinterest strategy and all the tips and tricks I used to grow my Pinterest account quickly. If you’re interested in knowing when it will be released, or just want to hear from me and what I’m up to with my blog and how much I’m making, you can sign up to my mailing list below 🙂
Pin this blog income report for July 2020 for later!
