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.
New to Blogging? Start Here!
Maybe you’ve been thinking about starting a blog for quite some time but never found the right moment to pull the trigger. Or maybe it’s all the tecchie stuff that you find scary and confusing? No need to fear WordPress or how to set up your blog – follow this step-by-step tutorial on how to start a blog!
Click here to learn how you can start a blog today for just $2.95/month (this price is only available through this link and includes a free domain name and WordPress installation).
Blog Earnings for September 2020
TOTAL: $23,903.11
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 September ($21,219) 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 $2,684.11 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)
As you can see, September was a really good month for my food blog. In fact, it’s the highest monthly income I’ve ever made with it! Too bad I couldn’t celebrate this moment by taking a trip somewhere or having dinner at a fancy restaurant. With everything that’s going it didn’t feel safe to be surrounded by large groups of people, even with a mask on. So I went online instead and bought myself something nice ?
Selling My Own Products
I’ve taken a few days off from blogging this month to focus on my shop. If you are a blogger yourself, you know how difficult it can be to find extra time to focus on other projects. For myself, the majority of my days are spent creating recipes, cooking food, taking pictures of the food, creating blog posts, and sharing stuff on social media.
The reason why I spend so much time creating new content is because I love what I do (you cannot be successful at what you do unless you are passionate about it) but also because I make most of my money from the advertisements on my blog. This means the more traffic I get (visitors to my blog) and the more money I make. Visitors don’t have to click on a banner or do anything for me to earn an income as I get paid per page views.
Sounds easy but I constantly feel pressured to produce new material in order to maintain my traffic. It can be mentally draining to have to sit down and come up with new recipes that I then have to turn into 1,000-word blog posts, day after day, after day.
I love my job but sometimes I need a break so I can come back to it feeling refreshed.
So I’ve been thinking about other ways to earn money that don’t involve blogging. Since I have a solid platform and plenty of visitors to send to my shop, I should take full advantage of that.
I think the potential to make a fortune selling through my shop is huge but I’ve been really bad at making it a priority, or at least, one of my priorities. I haven’t put enough time toward my shop to turn it into a successful business and even worse, I don’t promote it anywhere on my blog (except in the menu bar) or on Pinterest. It’s crazy that I have spent so much time creating products and building a shop, but little to no time marketing it!
I’ve had my shop for almost 2 years now so it’s time for me to get serious with it! To be a successful blogger you must not only be good at what you create, you also have to be good at marketing.
Creating products is time consuming but also very rewarding. So what I’m doing now is making a list of the stuff I would like to create and sell. Since I’m big on cute stuff, I want put my own cute drawings on mugs, kitchen towels, notebooks, recipes card, and sell them. My ecookbook is also selling well every month so I think that by creating more ecookbooks with the content I already have, I could earn more money.
I’m also going to spend a lot more time focusing on the marketing side since that’s as important, if not more, than product creation. My goal is to get as many visitors to my shop as I can and find the best way to sell to them.
Making Time For My Shop
Everything takes time and free time is something I don’t have a lot of.
So what I’m planning to do is spend the first hour of my work day focusing on my shop. From Monday to Friday, I will make it a habit to visit my shop and give it some love. I know that if I wait until I have a chunk of free time to work on it, I never will because that rarely happens.
To quote James Clear:
The most powerful outcomes are delayed. It’s the work you did long ago –
when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress – that makes the
jump today possible. The only way to win is to get better each day, not
to stare at the scoreboard.
(James Clear, Atomic Habits)
One hour a day may no seem like a lot but it ends up being 5 hours a week, 20 hours a month, 240 hours a year. That’s a decent amount of time to create something substantial ? .
Leave a Reply