In these blog income reports I share how I make money blogging and include tips on how to improve your blogging skills.
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 November 2020
TOTAL: $24,447.28
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 November ($20,870) 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 $3,577.28 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)
Seasonal Content – What to Know
What is seasonal content?
Seasonal content is a post written with a specific holiday, event, or season in mind.
- Evergreen content: Green salad recipe
- Seasonal content: Christmas cookie recipe
- Evergreen content: Best ways to save money
- Seasonal content: How to prepare for tax season
Creating seasonal content is great for many reasons – it’s easy to repurpose year after year, it keeps your readers engaged because you are providing topical information that people are looking for, and it gets great engagement on social media because you are sharing content that’s trending.
Another reason why seasonal content is good is because advertisers tend to spend more money promoting these specific holidays and events. The Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, 4th of July, back to school, Halloween, etc… What this means is that RPMs (revenue per 1,000 impressions) are higher than normal and bloggers can stand to make substantially more during these periods.
November and December, especially, are extremely lucrative for bloggers who have a big library of content geared toward the holiday season. Content such as Thanksgiving and Christmas recipes, holiday gift guides, family centered activities, elegant Christmas table settings, and much more, can increase visits to your blog significantly.
Combine that with skyrocketing RPMs – the end of the year is when RPMs are at their highest because advertisers are blowing their budgets – and you have plenty to celebrate!
How to Write Good Seasonal Content
Now that you know the importance of having seasonal content on your blog, the next step is to learn how to do it well. The good news is that it’s not that hard, you just have to do a little research and plan ahead of time.
How to Find High Performing Seasonal Content
Content search tools like BuzzSumo are great because they show you the most popular posts that have been shared on social media. All you have to do is type in keywords related to what you are looking for and hit the search button. BuzzSumo will pull the most shared posts on social media and this will give you an idea of the type of content to create since you now know what performs well.
Or use Google Auto-fill to see what pops up when you are typing about a specific subject. Pay attention to the drop down menu as this will give you an idea of the most searched topics on Google.
Be a Problem Solver
I say this all the time to beginner bloggers – don’t talk too much about yourself since most people don’t care. Don’t start a blog if all you want to talk about are your likes and dislikes, or share what you ate and wore today. You will do much better on Instagram.
What makes a blog interesting is the type of information it contains. If you are writing content with the readers in mind, I promise you will succeed. Why? Because you will consistently create posts that help solve your readers problems.
Your blog must provide helpful tips and improve the readers life in some way. It doesn’t have to be unique or extraordinary – a simple soup recipe is helpful for someone who is new at cooking – but it must be useful.
Create ‘Best of’ and ‘Favorites’ Lists
You can’t go wrong with a ‘best of or ‘favorites’ list, everyone loves them. In the beginning you probably won’t have enough content to create a roundup consisting of 100% your posts, and that’s okay. Instead, make a list of your favorite blogs and choose 1 or 2 posts from each one of them to add to your roundup.
For example, if I’m making a ’12 best rice salad recipes’ roundup and only have two rice recipes on my blog, I will pick the remaining 10 from food blogs I follow or like to read. Make sure to always credit their image and link back to the original post.
Once the post is live, I will email the bloggers that are included in my roundup to let them know that their rice salad is featured. This is a good way to introduce yourself to other, more successful bloggers, thus making yourself more visible.
Some bloggers may thank you by sharing your roundup on their social media channels, while others will return the favor by including one of your recipes in one of their future roundups.
Plan Ahead
Finally, you will need to create those seasonal posts 2-3 months ahead of time to give them a chance to gain some traction and get some exposure.
It can take up to 6 months for Google to index a new post (especially if your blog is new), and you also want to make sure that your content is ready to be shared on social platforms at least 2 weeks before the actual date of the holiday or event.
It’s also good to create and share pins on Pinterest up to one month ahead to get as many eyes on your pins as possible.
So as you can see, creating seasonal content isn’t very hard but does require some planning, organizing, and a little searching. They may not be evergreen but are still great to have since they can be reused year after year and are very easy to update.
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