Despite spending 10 days with minimal wifi and no signal, July still turned out to be my most successful blogging month yet! That’s definitely making me feel better about splurging on this UO duvet cover, which I’m almost just as excited about getting this week. Priorities.
As always, if you missed last month’s report, you can check it out here. If you’re not a blogger, this style of post might seem a little out of place, but it’s my way of staying transparent to my readers and helping newer bloggers learn about tracking their progress and monetizing their blogs!
Tbh, this month had a rocky start. One of my goals last month was to prepare a few blog posts to go up while I was on vacation for 10 days, and…that never happened. So basically, I didn’t have a post go up between my June report and my vacation recap, which were 18 days apart! The ironic thing? I hit record pageviews throughout my entire trip, with no promotion whatsoever. I’m still confused, but this happens literally every time I leave my laptop at home.
After I got back, I felt slightly guilty about taking such a long break, so I made some coffee at 7pm (I even tweeted about it because who does that to themselves??) and wrote a 2,000 word post on college move-ins. To say I’m excited about moving into an apartment this month is an understatement.
To close off the month, I landed my first sponsored post in almost a year! While passive income is a great thing to have, I love the challenge of offering genuine advice while sharing about my favorite companies and products. I’m super picky about which campaigns I apply for though, because I won’t write a post unless I think it’s something y’all will actually relate to and benefit from, and I doubt you’ll relate to a post about bacon or toilet paper. If you have any questions about sponsored posts or how I choose the ones I accept, let me know in the comments!
Anddddd stats.
July Income
Bluehost: $325
ShopStyle Collective: $111
Amazon Associates: $2042.16
Google Adsense: $91.22
Total: $2569.38
July Expenses
Creative Cloud: $10.82
Boardbooster: $5
Hosting: $8.95
Advertisements: $30
Website transfer: $30
Total: $84.77
TOTAL INCOME: $2484.61
I honestly want to write a personal letter to the CEO of Amazon for supporting my life financially. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about which affiliate programs are best for lifestyle bloggers, and I absolutely recommend signing up for Amazon’s program. The variety of products you can link to makes it a great choice for bloggers with multiple topics, and since so many people trust Amazon, linking to them leads to more conversions than any other program I’ve used.
July Traffic
I didn’t expect to reach this milestone for a few more months, and I couldn’t be more thankful to all of y’all for visiting my blog supporting me on this journey! While I don’t plan on blogging full-time in the future, having this blog has opened so many opportunities and helped me figure out where I would like to work someday. Basically, y’all are the best.
Takeaways
Since college life is one of my main topics, there’s a lot of temptation to write posts like “How To Prepare For Your First Day Of College”. The problem with that type of post is that it’s only useful to a fraction of all college students (incoming freshman), and it’s only applicable for a short amount of time (say, the month of August). Outside of that range, that post isn’t going to bring in many views, and it’s not likely that it will be shared very often throughout the year.
This month, I came up with a lot of future post ideas that would be helpful for longer periods of time, and to a wider range of people. So instead of writing about the first day of college, I wrote about preparing for a new semester. That expands the audience to any college student, and makes the content relevant throughout the year thanks to the existence of fall, spring, summer, and even month-long semesters (which sort of contradicts the definition of semester…)!
When you’re coming up with post ideas, think about who’s going to read them, and when. You want the majority of your content to be relevant all year long, so it’s constantly bringing in views and gaining shares on social media. For example, my college dorm tour is simply titled, “My College Dorm Room Tour”. I didn’t add 2015 to that, because even though the content is still relevant, readers would see it as outdated. Now, it’s one of my most popular posts and is the first blog post to come up when searching “dorm tour” on Google (another takeaway: video tours are much more popular)!
August Goals
- Successfully move into my apartment: Once again, very excited about this.
- Make an apartment tour vlog: I recently started watching some college YouTubers (HelloKaty is a current fave), and while I’m not sure if vlogging will ever be a thing for me, I want to experiment with it by giving y’all a tour of my apartment. If you’re interested in seeing other vlogs from me, let me know below!
- Become more active on Twitter: 2/3 of the tweets I made this week were sponsored, which was definitely a sign that I need to get on there more often.
Questions
If you have any questions about something in this post, or just blogging in general, don’t hesitate to ask below! You can also check out my blogging archives!