June is here and that means another blog report! This will be my second one for this blog, so if you missed April’s you can catch up here and get an idea of where this blog started.
As I expected, May was a bit all over the place for me! I had five finals over the course of three weeks, so studying took up a huge chunk of the month. I never ended up reaching out to companies for sponsored posts because of that, which is why you’ll notice in a bit that all of my income is from affiliate marketing. I’m settled back home now though, and I’ve been doing tons of behind the scene work that’s making me extremely excited for this summer!
The biggest change I made was merging The Blogging Brew (my old blog) and JessicaSlaughter.co, which I talked in depth about in this post. Basically, about 50 new posts were added to this blog, almost all of which were blogging tips and tutorials! I’m still working on remaking graphics (probably the most tedious part of the process), but otherwise the merge went perfectly! If you have any questions about combining two blogs, feel free to ask me in the comments!
Now I’ll get into the numbers!
May Income
ShopStyle Collective: $42
Amazon Associates: $76.46
Total: $118.46
May Expenses
Creative Cloud: $10.82
Boardbooster: $5
Hosting: $8.95
Total: $24.77
TOTAL INCOME: $93.69
As with last month, my entire income is currently from affiliate links, but thanks to some fun emails over the past few days it looks like that’ll change next month!
May Traffic
Taking the blog merge into account (those fifty posts were receiving around 10,000 pageviews a month), I’m still extremely excited about the growth that happened over the past few weeks! Each of those spikes marks one of my pins getting super popular for about a day or two, which is why I recommend any new bloggers to focus on Pinterest more than any other social platform. Last month my daily pageview average was around 1000, but that doubled to around 2000 for May (not including those spikes).
Takeaways
My takeaway this month was that seeing results from your content takes time, and that you shouldn’t expect to get hundreds of views or repins as soon as you pin a post! My most popular post this month, which created those first two spikes, was this list of 12 college dorm room must haves, which I wrote back in January. The last spike was from this guide to starting a studyblr, which was hardly receiving even 50 views a day since I posted it in February, but is now getting over 400 a day! Basically, don’t freak out if your recent masterpiece of a post isn’t doing too hot. All it takes is one pin to get popular!
June Goals
- Start talking to companies: I’ve never actually reached out to a company myself before, but there are so many brands I’m completely heart eyes over and would love to work with, so I want to create a media kit and figure out how all that works.
- Post twice a week: School’s out, so no more excuses.
- Focus on Instagram and Facebook: When it comes to sponsored opportunities, having a lot of Insta followers gives you a huge advantage, and I haven’t even hit the thousands yet, so I know I need to work on that! As for Facebook…I really don’t enjoy promoting on Facebook. I just can’t get myself to try on there. But lots of sponsored opps want a FB post made, and given that I have a total of 19 likes right now isn’t much of an incentive for them to choose me! So if you want to help a girl out…
Questions
If you have any questions about something you read here, growing your blog, or just blogging tips in general, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments! You can also check out my blogging archives for all those new blogging tips added in the merge.