The Unsuccessful Blogger's Income Report: April Update (2024)

For those if you that have been following along in this blogging series, this is an update on what I have been working on this past month here at the blog and how it has affected my income. If you have not been following the blogging series then start at The Unsuccessful Blogger’s Income Report and then check out some of the items I have been working on before and during this blogging series with;

Blogging Mistakes: 10 Don’ts for Choosing a Domain Name

Blogging Mistakes: Choosing the Wrong Blogging Platform

Blogging 101: Ten WordPress Blog Design Tips

Blogging 101: Choosing Blog Categories

Okay, so before starting this series I had already moved my blog from Blogspot to WordPress and had a redesign done. I am in the process of updating my blog categories still. Hopefully some of you have learned from these mistakes I have made along the way and can avoid all the work it takes to go back and fix them later like I am having to do. Besides fixing my blog categories there are a few other things I have been working on that have affected my blogging income.

• I signed up for a Blog Strategy Report from Brandi Riley over at Mama Knows It All. Brandi is really great at coming up with strategies for blogs and helping you understand where to focus your energy and what strategies will help build your blog. I learned a lot from the report and am working on implementing a lo of her strategies.
• Brandi also runs a Facebok group called Courage to Earn and you can sign up for her newsletter to get encouraged as well. She does a great job of giving bloggers confidence and courage. I get a lot of emails asking me to do free product reviews or free blog posts (as do almost all bloggers) but I usually just ignore them. This month I emailed two of them back and gave my fee for what they were asking and they agreed. So remember that all those emails from companies asking you to do free stuff is negotiable, it doesn’t hurt to tell them what your rates are. The worst they can say is no.
• I also worked on my Blogging for Money section of the blog and I am focusing on building a very comprehensive list of ways to monetize both for my own sake and for my reader.
• I also emailed Media.net and asked them for suggestions on ad placement. That is the great thing about Media.net as compared to Google. Everyone is assigned an account manager that you can email with questions, there is no way to ever get a hold of anyone at Google to ask questions. They made a suggestion and even added the code to my account for me so I could just go ahead and paste it into my blog. That was only a couple of weeks ago and it has improved my income generated with them.
• After looking over my income from the last time I did it, I realized I wanted to focus more on my affiliates. I have worked them into more posts and more locations throughout my blog and have seen a big improvement because of it.
• I joined BoardBooster to schedule my pins for Pinterest. Not only has this saved me a ton of time but it also keeps me organized so I don’t have to remember which pins have pinned recently to what boards
• I have been using Pingroupie and the Facebook group Pinterest Collaborative boards to find group Pinterest boards to join to get my pins on my boards
• I have been trying to learn more about creating better images for my blog posts using Canva and Picmonkey
• I have been posting consistently and have been trying to post more evergreen content combined with the job postings. That way, these posts can be shared over and over again for months.

So what did all of that accomplish? Here is a comparison between that last report and April. I did not add up income for March because I was still doing a lot of fixes with the blog and had glitches with my ads.

• Sponsored posts Feb $0 Sponsored posts April $125
• Google Adsense Feb $18.58 Google Adsense April $20.53
• Media.net Feb $5.19 Media.net April $23.44
• Affiliate Sales $43.47 Affiliate Sales $82.21

Total for February: $67.24

Total for April: $251.18

Woo hoo! Not bad, I more than tripled my profits in that short amount of time. Still lots of work to do though. Keep following along and we will see if we can keep improving.

What have you been working on that has helped you and your blog?