These blogging income reports detail my earnings and traffic for my blog over the past month, during my seventh month blogging.
I also report insights to any major updates I have made to this blog.
This blog report details my income and traffic during my seventh month blogging, during July 2021.
Page Contents
Why I Publish Blog Income Reports
While it may seem odd to publish the details of my traffic and earnings online for everyone to see, it is a tradeoff worth accepting in exchange for transparency.
At Photospire, I want to ensure I am transparent and honest with you all.
I never publish these income reports to brag or to show off – only to show you what is possible with a small blog, hard work and lots of determination.
In a world full of online entrepreneurs and blogging “experts” looking to snatch your hard-earned cash off you, it can be very hard to tell who’s the real deal and who’s not.
A lot of the time, they will promote dodgy and scammy products to make a quick buck, without actually trying out the product or testing to make sure it works properly.
The same applies to the photography niche. Lots of photography bloggers will promote expensive gear and fancy software you don’t really need or worse, is downright poor quality.
They will often hide the negatives of photography and try to get you to set unrealistic expectations.
As a result, they fail to be honest with you and won’t show you the downsides and negatives of blogging and photography.
This is what I aim to combat with these blog income reports. I want to show you the behind-the-scenes of what goes on at Photoaspire and explain my successes and failures along my blogging journey.
I hope that the honesty I provide through my successes and failures with Photoaspire helps to motivate and inspire you through your blogging or photography journey as well.
Feel free to comment below where you’re at with your blogging journey or where you are with your photography. I’d love to hear back from you 🙂
New Blog Posts Published This Month – 1 Post
Although I have been very busy these past few months, I found some time to write another blog post this month:
This post will come in handy for anybody who is struggling to come up with ideas for their Instagram feed. The post will give you all the inspiration you need, with advice on creating unique pictures from different perspectives to make your followers happy.
I have been promising previous blog posts too, to ensure they are properly formatted and up to date for SEO purposes.
This is something I try to do every few months so that I can keep older blog posts updated both for you, the reader and for SEO purposes. This includes tasks such as:
- Adding New Images To Show Better Photography Examples
- Adding New Headers & Breaking Up The Content (and sometimes creating new sections to add new content)
- Adding Highlights To Make Important Sentences Stand Out
- Adding Convertkit Shortcodes To Gain More Subscribers To My Email List
All of these small tasks and edits will make a big difference in the long term when it comes to readability and SEO.
Next month I will optimise more blog posts and look at doing some research in order to write up more blog posts.
If you have any topic ideas for any photography-related blog posts you want me to write about, please let me know via email or in the comments below.
This way I know what YOU want to see from me.
This means my content can be more relevant to the needs of my readers.
Blog Traffic – 91 Users
Unfortunately, I received a slight drop in overall traffic compared to last month.
I received 91 users this month, compared to 81 last month, resulting in an increase in 10 users coming to my website. This is because I have written a new blog post and I have been actively updating previous articles.
Pinterest traffic and views have also been on the up as I have more time now to pay closer attention to traffic. It is also worth bearing in mind I’m tracking USERS, not PAGEVIEWS.
The reason for this is pageviews track the number of times a page has been viewed on a website.
Users track how many individuals visit my website. A single user may visit multiple pages and as such, this may make the stats seem inaccurate.
As a result, whenever I write up these blogging reports I am tracking the individual people (users) who are visiting my site each day instead of just the pageviews.
I have also noticed that my traffic during my seventh month blogging has become more consistent. This means I have had almost ZERO days where the traffic has been stuck at ZERO.
Most days I have received at least 1 user to my website
While I am still uploading some Pinterest Pins, I need to make sure that they are all getting engagement and that they are getting traffic (most importantly).
Once you start getting a trickle of traffic, it is so much easier to scale up and increase your site revenue and growth.
SEO is still producing very few clicks through to my blog and this is something I will need to work harder at in the long term.
While it takes some time in the beginning, all of the efforts will be worth it. It pays off in the long term to be prepared from the beginning.
Pinterest Traffic – 32 Users
Pinterest has accounted for most of my traffic this month, exactly the same as last month.
I have been taking Pinterest far more seriously since late march last month and the effort is starting to pay off. Although I may have dropped the ball this month, I am still gaining more traffic from Pinterest.
This shows that Pinterest is a reliable traffic source and I will continue to stick at it as I believe my traffic will grow consistently over time.
As you can tell from the Google Analytics screenshot, Pinterest has sent me 32 users this month, which is exactly the same as the 32 users received last month.
I received roughly 5,140 impressions on my pins in the last month, although this metric is only tracking how many times people have seen a pin of mine on Pinterest, not whether they have actually clicked through to my blog.
While I have received a drop in Pinterest traffic this month, I am confident my strategy is starting to pay off.
My “strategy” for Pinterest is quite simple. Create up to 5 pins per blog post and upload them over a week or so.
I then make sure my pins have keyworded descriptions and they are pinned to keyworded boards that have other relevant, ranking third-party pins.
While I will not get thousands and thousands of visitors to my blog overnight, it is a great way to start getting a few clicks right away.
Due to algorithm updates in 2020 and 2021, Pinterest is turning more and more into Google in the sense that Pins are not necessarily “ranking” or “indexing” instantly.
Now it takes about 8 months or so to start seeing large amounts of traffic pour into the website.
While this is a bit of a shame because it was SO much easier to gain traffic on Pinterest a few years ago, it doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on the platform altogether.
I will keep sticking with the plan and adapt and pivot if necessary. It will be interesting to see how this pinning strategy progresses in the coming months.
Email Subscribers – 10 Subscribers (+0)
To many bloggers, email subscribers are seen as the holy grail of fans.
When you have people visiting your blog, not all of them will instantly become raving fans.
And that’s perfectly fine!
Some of your visitors will read an article and then leave, others may read a few of your articles and then check back once in a while. And finally, the last group will read your article and subscribe to your email list.
You ideally want as many people as possible to be in that third category – You NEED email subscribers if you want to be successful and make money blogging.
Most of your big-ticket affiliate sales and later, your eCourse sales, will be from your email list. This is why I have been trying my best to grow my mailing list.
In order to do this, I have been offering an opt-in freebie so that value is provided upfront.
Long gone are the days where you can slap up a pop-up with big text screaming “Join my newsletter”.
You need to provide value upfront to your reader. For the photography niche, this can be done via video tutorials, checklists and Lightroom editing tutorials, etc.
At the moment, I am testing a variety of different opt-in freebies to ensure that I am providing you all with the best value upfront.
This month, I have 10 subscribers, just like last month. While this is definitely frustrating, there is a reason for this.
Email subscribers are by far the most difficult to gain. People must be willing to place a large amount of trust in you if they are to hand over their email addresses. This is no doubt due to the copious amounts of spam lots of us receive to our inboxes on a daily basis.
But, if you stick at it and you keep testing out new opt-in freebies, you will eventually hit the nail on the head and gain more subscribers.
Once you have found the perfect freebie after consistent testing, you can then focus on increasing conversion rates and scaling up your subscribers.
For me, I am still testing out different freebies at the moment. But, once I find the freebies that work best for you all, I will then move on scaling up the email subscribers and gaining more loyal readers to my site.
Income From My Fifth Month Blogging – £0
Just like last month, I have earned nothing. And that’s not the end of the world at all.
Again, monetisation is not the most important task for me at the moment.
When you’re in the early stages of blogging, you’re being pulled in all directions.
This has also happened to me and it can be a real pain, particularly when you’re trying to keep the focus on one task at a time.
Writing blog posts, setting up email funnels, optimising posts for SEO, creating Pinterest pins, creating affiliate links and articles, outreach to other bloggers etc.
There is a hell of a lot of work to do and blogging involves multitasking. So, I might be writing a blog post and uploading pins one night and then writing emails and creating new images the next day.
As a result, monetisation is not at the top of my priorities at the moment.
I believe it is better to have a solid foundation of content and a successful email funnel before setting up ads and affiliate links.
Once I do start adding links, ads and sales funnels, however, the income will increase.
I will do this by using email funnels, amazon affiliates, sponsored posts and display ads.
But for now, I’m just keeping my head down and writing lots of content and new blog posts.
This will probably be a pattern for my goals for the next few months of blogging as I believe it is best to build up a repertoire of content before trying to add monetisation into the mix.
My Blogging Goals For Next Month
Much like the last few months of blogging, I’m going to continue to keep my head down and write more blog posts.
I will also look at my email funnel and start to improve parts of it where necessary. SEO is also at the top of my priorities and I will continue to optimise some of my older blog posts.
If you want to, feel free to take a look at some of my older blog income reports:
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog income report and it’s nice to use this as an opportunity to catch up with you all. See you in the next one 🙂
Photoaspire
Latest posts by Photoaspire (see all)
- How I Earned £0 My Seventh Month Blogging - September 3, 2021
- How I Earned £0 My Sixth Month Blogging - September 2, 2021
- How I Earned £0 My Fifth Month Blogging - September 1, 2021
