A few years ago I published my first income report on my food blog, Pickled Plum. My goal was to show that it’s possible to make money while doing something you love, like cooking.
I wanted to change people’s perspective on how they saw blogging – not as a cute hobby where you make a few dollars here and there, but as a full time job that can pay really well.
I shared income reports with my readers for 8 months and really enjoy the process of writing about the blogging industry. I think a lot of people were surprised to see how much a food blogger could make! But I eventually decided to stop publishing these reports since I felt they didn’t fit with the theme of my blog, which is food.
Over the next few years I continued publishing recipes regularly and watched my income steadily increase. Then a few months ago something interesting happened – a couple of my posts about blogging got a lot of exposure and I started receiving requests from bloggers wanting me to share more blogging tips, even asking for private consultations!
That’s when the desire to help others fully kicked in and I made the decision to start another blog, which is the one you are reading now, where I share everything I know about blogging. With 9 years of experience as a professional blogger under my belt, I thought the timing was right. I have put in my 10,000 hours of work and understand how the industry works. I also know how to make money, as you can see!
In these monthly income reports you will find the total revenue of both of my blogs – Blog for Profit and Pickled Plum. I will also share my revenue streams and tidbits about things that I’ve learned during the past month.
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Blog Earnings for August 2020
TOTAL: $19,811.86
The chart you see above is the income I make with Adthrive, which is an ad monetization platform. In case you were wondering, a blog needs a minimum of 100,000 monthly pageviews to join Adthrive.
This shows how much money I made in August ($18,368) from ads that were placed throughout the Pickled Plum blog. I currently don’t have any earnings for Blog for Profit since the blog is still in its infancy. But I’m hoping it won’t take too long before I can share some numbers with you!
I have also made and additional $1,443.86 from affiliates I promote on Pickled Plum and products I have created on my Shopify store. I can only showing you a couple of screenshots because the others show my personal information. Some of the affiliate programs I use are:
Expenses
Here are some of the expenses I have to factor in on a monthly basis. Liquidweb and Convertkit are more expensive because of the amount of bandwidth I need and subscribers I have. Their basic prices are totally affordable for beginners, should you be interested to check them out).
- Liquidweb (Hosting) : $100
- Convertkit (Email marketing): $100
- Tailwind (Pinterest Scheduling Program): $10
- Buffer (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Scheduling Program): $10
- Cloudflare (CDN and Internet Security): $20
- Adobe (Photo Editing Program): $10
- Shopify (Online Store): $29
- WP Tasty (Recipe Card Plugin): $79 yearly ($6.58/month)
- Nutrifox (Nutritional Label Maker): $9
- DIVI Theme from Elegant Themes (the theme I’m using for this blog): $89 yearly ($7.40/month)
Gearing Up For The Holiday Season
September is the time to start focusing on the content you will be sharing with your readers during the holiday season. It’s also the time when bloggers make some serious money because advertisers are blowing their year-end budgets and people are spending more money to buy gifts and take advantage of sales.
So what type of content should you create to maximize your earnings and how soon should you post?
Gift Guides, Roundups, How-To, DIY, Helping with Ideas, Printables
The type of content that does best during the holiday season is content that has to do with chores and activities related to the holiday season. I know it sounds obvious but you would be surprised to know how many bloggers fail to prep for this time of the year!
The niches that see real growth in traffic and earnings are DIY, mom blogs, food blogs, fashion and beauty blogs, pets, lifestyle, and travel. If you have a finance blog, you may not see the same type of growth but you could easily write content about how to smartly spend your money during the holiday season, or easy money saving hacks. You get the idea.
My point is that you should try to stay in line with what’s happening in your readers lives throughout the year, because this will affect how they will respond to your posts.
Here are some ideas on how to create holiday related posts and other types of content.
Gift Guides
Gift guides are great because they are easy to create and can be reused year after year. They are also fun to share on social media (always add a catchy phrase to entice readers to click on the links) and they do extremely well in newsletters.
First, decide who this gift guide is created for – it’s always helpful to know a little bit about your readers so you can cater to their needs. One way to get an idea of who reads your blog is by installing Google Analytics (it’s 100% free). Just follow the link and the instructions are clearly provided. It’s very easy to install and a must for serious bloggers!
Pick 15-20 gift ideas and write a blurb about each one of them. I don’t recommend adding more than that because giving too many options can have a negative impact. I know this because I used to work in retail and learned that sending someone into a changing room with 12 pairs of black pants resulted in no sales. But if I gave my client only three pairs of black pants to choose from, my chances of making a sale were much higher.
Humans like variety but just like with tv channels, give them too many and they get frustrated and confused.
When writing your blurbs, take your time to explain why you think each gift is so special and unique. Remember, each blurb is a sales pitch so it’s worth taking an extra minute or two to refine them as much as possible. And don’t talk too much about yourself – this is about the person receiving the gift so talk about why he/she would like it so much and what the benefits are.
Where to promote your gift guide: On your blog, social media, Pinterest, in your newsletter (keep it there until the first week of January since some people like to shop a little later).
Roundups
This might be hard to create if you don’t have a lot of content on your blog, but you can always create roundups using other people’s content as long as you give credit to the image you are using and are linking back to the original post.
Never steal another blogger’s photo and never copy and paste another blogger’s recipe or post, word for word, on your blog. The blogging industry is small and word gets around fast if someone finds out that you cannot be trusted. Respect other people’s hard work and they will respect you back equally.
Roundups are always popular among readers because they focus on one specific category and share a list of the best in that category. Every time I publish a roundup I instantly get more page views because people click on more than one link (this only works if all the content you share in the roundup is your own).
For the holiday season you can create roundups about:
- Food (e.g: 10 boozy Christmas drinks to keep your family merry)
- DIY (e.g: 7 easy homemade wreaths)
- Fashion (e.g: 8 affordable and festive dresses) <- this would be a great way to add affiliate links and make commission from sales.
- Travel (e.g: Top 10 travel destinations for this holiday season) <- another great way to make affiliate sales.
Roundups are also great because they take less time to create than posts written from scratch. Adding one here and there will lighten up your work load while still keeping your readers engaged.
Where to promote your roundups: On your blog, social media, Pinterest, in your newsletter.
How-To, DIY, Helping with Ideas
Everyone knows how hectic and stressful the holiday season can be. Most of us are busy running around shopping for gifts, decorating, planning holiday dinner parties and family outings. Creating content to help your readers manage their time and money better can be very helpful.
It doesn’t have to be anything complicated, just think of problems that most of us experience during that time of the time year and provide some helpful tips. Stuff like:
- Time saving hacks in the kitchen
- How to serve vegan food to meat lovers
- How to wear the same little black dress four different ways without anyone noticing
- How create the most festive table setting
- How to make your own Christmas tree decorations
Where to promote your How-To, DIY, and Ideas: On your blog, social media, Pinterest – this is where Pinterest shines so make sure create beautiful pins to promote this type of content! – in your newsletter.
Printables
Printables are extremely popular during the holiday season and are also a great way to make a few extra bucks! You can create your own printables using Pages, Word, or any other word processing document.
Printables are basically documents you create that people can download and print from their own home. Many DIY bloggers will give away free printable Christmas cards and gift tags to help their readers save time and money.
You can also create printable lists to help with organization. Last year I created a free printable checklist of basic food prep to help home cooks stay organized in the kitchen. The list showed them how to calculate the amount of time a turkey needed to thaw according to its weight, how chopping most veggies can be done the day before, etc… It was a huge hit!
If you are planning to sell your printables, make sure they are priced reasonably. You can get a good idea of pricing by looking at stuff that’s being sold on Etsy. Just type words like “printable Christmas tags” and you will get a page full of ideas and prices.
Where to promote your How-To, DIY, and Ideas: On your blog, social media, Pinterest – this is where Pinterest shines so make sure create beautiful pins to promote this type of content! – in your newsletter.
Timing is Everything
It’s important to publish holiday content 1-3 months before the season begins. The reason is that Google takes time to index content, especially if your blog is fairly new. So if you are planning to post a “best eggnog” recipe, plan to publish it in September to give Google a chance to find it and add it to its search index.
Timing is also important for gift guides and printables since most women are in full holiday thinking mode by the first week of November. I suggest creating most of your holiday content in September and October and publishing the posts you wish to rank in Google first (publish all of them in September/early October) and save your money making ones for later (late October/early November).
Make sure to re-share this content throughout the holiday season (between Thanksgiving and Christmas) on social media and Pinterest. Sharing once is not enough if your goal is to make money! And place the money making content on your blog’s sidebar so it’s always visible to your readers.
You might even want to add a temporary category to your blog’s menu bar called “Holiday Gift Guide” or “Holiday Tips and Tricks”, and take it down in January. The point is you have to give your content as much exposure as you can so it can be viewed as much as possible.
With all this information in hand, you should now be ready to craft your first holiday post. Write down some ideas of the type of holiday post you would like to create and start writing!
Awesome information! Drives me to do better. Thanks
Thank you Devin! 🙂