May 2018 Income Report for Two Blogs

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

Welcome to my May 2018 income report, the second income report for Blog with Stephanie and my fourteenth blog income report for Aroma Mama!

I have a page with links to every income report I’ve ever written, in case you’re interested.

The income reports in my first twelve months of blogging are on my first blog, Aroma Mama. From now on, my income reports will be published here.

I share this income report with you to show how a beginner to intermediate blogger with no products can make money blogging.

Aroma Mama (Launched April 4, 2017)

Aroma Mama is a health and wellness blog. I started this blog last April 2017 with no experience in blogging, marketing, graphic design, or writing. I launched my blog with one blog post and have continued to post once a week ever since. It’s definitely a long strategy of consistency. This allowed me to learn how to blog and write blog posts without hitting burnout or feeling the need to quit.

This strategy definitely involves patience to see steady growth over a longer period of time. I’ve placed more importance on SEO (search engine optimization) and domain authority than into pageviews. As a result, many of my posts are on the first page of Google for the keyword it’s ranking for.

Organic traffic accounted for 21% of my overall traffic again this month. The percentage is usually higher, but I participated in a round-up post of EBA students income reports on the Elite Blog Academy blog which brought in the most referred traffic this month.

Pageviews: 4,875

Published Blog Posts: 4

1. A Healthy Vegan All-In-One Nutritional Shake (sponsored post)
2. Five Amazing Benefits of Self-Care (guest post)
3. 11 Easy Recipe Ideas for Chocolate Hazelnut Spread (sponsored post)
4. 10 Healthy Benefits of Malaysian Palm Oil (sponsored post)

May was a busy month as I experienced the first full month of running two blogs and went to a Ray Edwards copywriting event. I only took on sponsored posts with Moms Meet and a friend contributed a guest post.

Alexa Ranking: Global Rank – 3,186,380; U.S. Rank – not rated this month

Domain Authority: 22

Blog Income Earned: $462.61

• Affiliate Marketing: $217.57
• Sponsored: $215.00 (products and gift cards)
• Ads: $30.04

Blog Expenses: $163.95

• BBBU Membership: $37.00 (Monthly)
• The Complete Blogger Template Toolkit: $38.00
• Yoast SEO Premium plugin: $71.20
• WP GDPR Fix plugin: $18.75

Net Income from Aroma Mama: $298.66

Blog with Stephanie (Launched April 27, 2018)

Blog with Stephanie was launched on my one year anniversary of blogging with one blog post. My goal is to publish 4 blog posts a month for this blog.

Pageviews: 2,700

Published Blog Posts: 4

1. April 2018 Income Report for Two Blogs
2. Why Self-Care for Bloggers is So Important
3. Why WordPress.org is the Best Platform for a Blog
4. 5 Healthy Habits for Entrepreneurs

I’m improving my copywriting skills with the help of Ray Edwards and his students. I struggle whether to use strong keywords in my titles versus writing a headline with a good hook that may not include my longtail keyword. I’ve been experimenting with this a little and have found that the headlines with the hooks are performing better for traffic.

One post I tested with a headline hook still scored pretty good for SEO too. These results are growing my awareness of writing good headlines and trying to fit in just enough keyword placement for SEO.

The following headlines were A/B tested for the last two weeks. I have a Thrive tool that does A/B testing for post headlines. Here are the results:

• 5 Healthy Habits for Entrepreneurs (engagement 10%)
• You Only Have One Body so Don’t Screw it Up! (engagement 20%)

Alexa Ranking: Global Rank – 8,575,763; U.S. Rank – not rated this month

Domain Authority: 2

Blog Income Earned: $164.40

• Affiliate Marketing: $164.40

Blog Expenses: $0

For Blog with Stephanie, my goal is to use the tools that I have already have so that I don’t have any expenses for this blog.

Net Income from Blog with Stephanie: $164.40

Free Blogging Resources

SEO Course for Beginners

I’m so happy to share with you this free Yoast SEO Course for Beginners. I’ve taken a handful of SEO courses and I still learned some new things. It contains a lot of value for someone in need of SEO training and it’s free.

The Yoast Google Suggest Expander is a resource I learned about in this course. It can help you with longtail keyword suggestions for your topic.

Alexa Ranking

“Alexa Traffic Rank is a rough estimate of this site’s popularity. The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to this site and pageviews on this site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1. ”   -Alexa.com

Click here to find out your Alexa ranking. The lower the number, the better.

Domain Authority

You can find out your domain authority by adding the Mozbar Chrome extension. All blogs start with one and the highest score possible is one hundred. A few factors that affect domain authority are time, consistent posting, popularity, and backlinks to and from your blog. A higher domain authority helps your SEO and gets you a higher visibility in ranks on search engines.

One of My Favorite Blogging Courses

As you can see, I make the bulk of my income from affiliate marketing. Once you set up the blog post with links, it becomes passive income! This is why I love affiliate marketing.

I’ve taken many affiliate marketing courses and my favorite is still Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. It’s so comprehensive and includes actionable steps to get started right away.

I hope you’ve had a take-a-way on how to grow or make money blogging from my May 2018 income report!