How I made my first $82.79 from my blog (June 2022 – First Blog Income Report)

And here we are…

This is my first blog income report.

June 2022 was a pivotal month for me as I made 5 sales in 3 days!

I made my first income from my blog and I am chuffed to say the least, because…

The thing is, I always thought that this only happens to other mom bloggers, you know?

If I can do it, so can you

I am a non-native English speaker AND a single stay-at-home mom to a very active one-year-old and a beginner blogger.

My time and energy are limited.

However, I built my blog AnyMommyCanMakeMoney between nap times and nappy changes.

And I know if I can do it, YOU can too.

Maybe you can relate to my situation or at least to a part of my story (and I’d love to connect with you if you are also a non-native English speaker mom blogger).

But the important thing is that no matter whether you’re a new mom, single mom, or non-native English-speaking mom, building a profitable blog IS possible. Even for new moms like myself.

Why am I publishing income reports?

I am publishing my income reports for 3 reasons.

Reason #1 – Before I became a blogger I read monthly income reports of how much other bloggers are making. And reading that bloggers can make $5K, $10K, or even $50K a month blew my socks off. I don’t know about you but for me making a year’s salary in one single month, working in your own time, from behind your laptop sounds crazy (in a really good way).

I decided that one day I too would make that kind of money from my blog, and I promised myself that one day I would write my first income report.

Reason #2 – I am publishing my income report to share my journey with you and show you the things I did (and didn’t), what worked and what didn’t.

I hope that they can help you too on your blogging journey.

Your journey will be different than mine and different things will work for you instead. Of that, I am certain because your blog is going to be different than mine.

But if anything, I want to show you that it is possible for us mommies to make money.

Reason #3 – But my third reason, why I am publishing my income reports is that I want to hold myself accountable. I have to admit, that publishing my monthly income reports is scary. Because, what if I don’t hit my income goal next month? The easiest way would be not to publish my income reports and nobody would ever know, do you know what I mean? But I decided to embark on my blogging journey because I have a strong WHY (more on that further down). So that’s my third reason.

Time and hard work (even with a baby)

Before we go further I just want to say that building your own blog takes a lot of time (and a lot of work).

Growing my traffic wasn’t a quick thing like it is for some bloggers. My numbers are not as sexy or not as impressive as they are of other bloggers. It took me 8 months before I saw my blog traffic grow and make money with my blog.

At first, it took 8 weeks to get my first organic traffic from Google. In November 2021 I only had 17 users (1.) compared to 89 users in June 2022 (3.)

If you’re wondering about the spike right at the beginning of my traffic then let me explain. A blogger friend promoted my blog to her audience and it took off with a bang. But then it died down and my real traffic set in with only 17 users (1.).

But as you can see now, my traffic is picking up nicely (even while we are spending time with my family in Germany).

What I like about Google traffic is that it still works, whether I do or not.

According to Google Analytics, last month, I had 763 page views in June 2022 compared to 480 in the previous month of May 2022. That’s an increase of 58.69% in one month alone. That’s also when I noticed my first sales roll in.

In an ideal world, I would have gotten there faster. However, in my real life, I was juggling being a full-time mom to my one-year-old baby girl. And I built my blog after and in between:

• Running the household and doing all the chores
• Putting my baby to bed
• Cleaning up dinner or toys (and some more toys)
• Doing laundry
• Meal planning, cooking, and cleaning up (I am using the $5 Meal Plan. They offer a FREE 14-day trial)
• Doctors appointments
• Oh, and trying to have a shower before lunch, haha

I could go on and on. Does that sound familiar to you?

You might be wondering what that has got to do with my first income report?

A lot, because my day was already so busy I knew I didn’t have a lot of spare time or energy to build my blog.

So I decided to focus on a few important things.

To make it easier for you to understand these things, I have organized them into three categories: Mindset, Strategy, and Execution.

Here are the things I focused on (the things you need to focus on might be different):

Mindset:

• Goal setting: What do I actually want? How much? And by when? (which is the mindset part I briefly mentioned above). I got clear on my goals again. The incredible book Become the CEO of your dream life by Mia Fox helped me work out my goals and a plan to get there.
• Find my WHY: WHY do I want to be a full-time blogger? What is my motivation to do this as a full-time job? And what are the consequences if I don’t reach my goal? I got so clear on this that I can feel this FIRE burning inside me, every time I think about my WHY. So the question is, do you know your WHY and can you actually feel it? When your WHY is so strong that you can feel the pain associated with it if you don’t reach it, that’s when you know you’ve got a strong WHY. And you’ll need it every day when you rather want to sit down on the couch in front of the TV. Or when you feel like calling it a day and saying screw it, I’ll do it tomorrow. My WHY is my daughter and wanting to achieve financial independence so that nobody can tell me to go back to a job which means being away from her. And this WHY is burning so strongly in my guts that it hurts me if I didn’t reach it. But to get to deeply discover this burning WHY took work. And if you don’t know your WHY yet I strongly encourage you to start looking for it, because you need to remind yourself every time you want to give up. Definitely check out Mia’s book.
• Money mindset: I made a conscious decision to improve my money mindset. After some time without making money from my blog, I began to doubt I would ever make any. The problem with that is that as long as you don’t believe you can, you won’t. I knew I had to change my mindset and start believing in myself again. I came across a post by Mia Fox and instantly bought her book Become The CEO Of Your Dream Life the same night. It’s INSANELY inspiring and I picked up a crazy mindset power tool that I started using right away.

Strategy:

• Learn how to budget: Let’s just say this – I am not bad with money. For example, I don’t have debt or a credit card or credit card debt. But I knew that in order to make money as a new blogger I need to first really understand my finances. For example, where is my money going? How much am I spending versus what I think I am spending. How much money can I put towards my retirement, savings, or investments? I wanted to know exactly where is my money going. It was time for me to face my finances and improve my financial literacy. This amazing personal finance book My Money My Way taught me more about money than any other book. You can get the book here.
• Bought Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing: Out of all the online courses about affiliate marketing I had been eyeing Michelle’s course for a long time. Michelle makes $50,000/month from affiliate marketing, and I wanted to learn her secrets over anyone else’s. Please check out Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing here. One of the strategies she shares in the course made everything CLICK for me and I ended up 2 hours improving my affiliate links (and I made 5 sales in 3 days $$$). I’ll talk more about it in this post here.
• Finished Ready Set Blog for Traffic: Elna Cain from TwinsMommy’s course teaches you how to drive traffic to your blog. And the one thing you need, if you want to monetize your blog, is TRAFFIC. In her course, she pulls back the curtain and leaves no stone unturned to share her traffic secrets with you. Please click here if you want to check out her course.
• Used low competition keywords from RANKIQ: As I mentioned earlier, I am using RankIQ to help me write my blog posts. RankIQ is an SEO tool specifically for bloggers and it helps you write your blog post outline and the post itself super fast. Because RankIQ tells you all the keywords you have to include for search engines to rank your posts in Google. Results: Since I’ve been using RankIQ I have 4 posts ranking on page 1 of Google, which is incredible! 

Execution:

• My writing: To write faster. Since I am not a native English speaker or a copywriter I knew that in order to get posts out, I needed to find tools and tactics to help me write content faster. My big problem was writing an outline for my blog post. I knew that once I had an outline I would be 10x faster to write my post. The tool that helps me put an outline together is RankIQ. It’s incredible! I am going to write a proper review about RankIQ soon, but in the meantime, you can check it out by clicking this link.
• Manually pinning: In order to save money, I decided to pin manually. In light of the fact that I wasn’t seeing results from Tailwind and felt I was only spamming my account, I cut it out. However, I had no idea how I would pin manually. So I took Carly Campbell’s amazing course Pintersting Strategies to learn how to manually pin. Carly’s course taught me so much about why manually pinning is better for your account. And, since I implemented her strategies, my analytics has increased dramatically. But once I stopped showing up on Pinterest consistently, my number dropped again. When it comes to Pinterest, you’ve got to be super consistent, whether you pin manually or use a scheduler. UPDATE: I’ve decided for now to purely focus on Google traffic and SEO (search engine optimization). But as soon as I return to Pinterest, I will only pin manually. If you’re planning on using Pinterest for your blog then you should definitely check out her course here.
• Planned out my blog posts in advance: I did a bit of a mixture of things: I used RankIQ to find low-competition keywords but I also wrote blog posts on competitive keywords and only used RankIQ to help me with my post structure. (What I love about RankIQ is that it helps me write an outline for my post super fast, which would take forever otherwise.)

Long story short, shortly after doing all these things I made 5 sales in 3 days!

I’ll include my screenshots to prove it to you.

So, how much money did I make and how did I make it?

Breakdown of June 2022 income

In June I earned my first income from my blog. Here’s how the income breaks down.

At this point, I only have two income streams from affiliate programs – one from selling a course and the other one from Amazon Associates program.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate income – total income $82.79

• Affiliate course sale – $78.80
• Amazon Associates – $3.99

What is amazing about this screengrab is that I already had 987 clicks, but nobody bought the course. However, as I mentioned above, after I took Michelle’s course Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing I changed my links. And soon as I did that I made my first sale.

To be honest, I love the affiliate marketing model and am going to focus on hitting my next income goal with more affiliate sales.

Google Adsense

Depending on how much traffic I am able to build I’ll be looking into ad income at some point too.

My long-term goal is to get into ad networks like Ezoic and Mediavine.

Digital Products

And even further down the line, I am also planning to add my own digital products, like selling Printables in my own Etsy shop.

Things I DIDN’T focus on:

Social media: I knew that I couldn’t dance on all social media platforms and really, my long-term strategy was Google traffic. So I made a hard decision to focus purely on Google for now.

And it seems to be paying off slowly.

WINS – My traffic grew to over 4K+ page views from October 2021 organically this June 2022.

GOALS I had for this month – June 2022:

• Start my email list: SUCCESS I started my email list AND I got my first subscriber, yah! I love using ConvertKit to build my email list. However, to save costs, I’ve decided to manage my email list manually until I make money blogging consistently. With my link, you can use ConvertKit for FREE for your first 1000 subscribers.
• Make $69.67: SUCCESS I reached my income goal of $69.67. I set the goal to pay for RankIQ. And once it was on paper it felt real and no longer something intangible. I can strongly encourage you that you write down your goals and read this book. Once I wrote it down I actually made $82.79.
• Publish 4 blog posts: FAILED We came down with Corona for 5 weeks I only managed to publish 2 posts. I also started planning for our trip to Germany and hardly had time to work on my blog.

Goals for next month – July 2022:

• Make $500 from my blog
• Publish 6 blog posts
• Grow my email list to 20 subscribers

First family time trip

This July I and my baby girl are off to Germany for 6 weeks. It’ll be the first time that my family gets to meet her and I am so excited.

I’m planning to continue working on my blog every day but from experience, I know finding the time and a quiet place to work will be challenging.

How to deal with unsupportive family

Unless you work a 9-5, my parents don’t really get that I still work from home.

But this time I have a strategy that I picked up from Clever Girl Finance How To Stay Focused On Your Goals With Unsupportive Family. Instead of sharing my plans with my unsupportive family, I’ll be only sharing my WHY I am doing this. I am sure this will make even my unsupportive family understand.

Try it if you too suffer from an unsupportive family.

Closing thoughts

I hope you have enjoyed reading my first income report and will be back to read my next one.

What I love about blogging is that I can earn passive income from the work I did up front.

Blogging is a great way to build an online business to earn extra money. But you’ll have to build it little bit by bit, literally between nap times and nappy changes. And who knows, blogging is one of those side hustles that can earn you a full-time income while working from home as a new parent with little kids for example. So don’t feel disheartened if you’re not making money in your first year blogging. If you’re interested to start your own blog but are worried about how to set up all the tech stuff, then check out my FREE step by step tutorial on how to start your blog on WordPress and Bluehost. I’ll be walking you through the entire process from start to finish and help you set it all up.

Did you find my blog income report helpful? What was your biggest takeaway? Please leave me a comment below.