Blog Income Report: 2022 & 2023

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Photo by N ick Morrison

I am not making a ton of money blogging right now, but that’s my goal someday! So, I want to start documenting how much I make along the way.

I have been super inspired by Michelle’s blog income reports at Making Sense of Cents and I want to share the inner workings of how my blog is doing, too.

I think it will be motivating for me to see my income grow and I hope it will be inspiring to others to maybe start their own blog. Maybe not right now because I am currently in the negative 😂

I keep track of my expenses in Notion, so for now, I am just going to keep it to yearly reports! I don’t feel like I am currently making enough to do monthly reports for it to be worth my time.

2022 Breakdown, Net Income: -$844.33

Income: $13.57

I launched my blog in July 2022 so I am excited to report that I had a little bit of income!

The breakdown:

Digital products: $9.00
Ad Revenue — Google Adsense: $4.75
Total: $13.57

My aunt made my one and only digital product sale (LOL!) I had a planner that I was selling via Payhip and later decided I didn’t want to have any digital products just yet.

Although I made some money from Adsense, they don’t give you a payout until you hit $100, which I haven’t, but I am still counting it as a win! Because I wasn’t making much from Adsense, I decided to remove the ads just a few months in because it just didn’t feel worth it to have them on my site.

2022 Expenses: $857.90

This year I feel like I spent a lot on hosting fees and subscriptions that I didn’t really need. For example, I bought a year of Tailwind, which I used for a few months, but then decided to cancel it because I didn’t want to put my energy into Pinterest anymore.

I also bought a larger subscription package with Convertkit email marketing service than I needed. Live and learn…

Traffic

I launched my blog on July 7th, 2022 so this is traffic from July 1, 2022, to December 31, 2022.

6.9k views with an average of 1.15k views/month.

Here is a breakdown of traffic acquisition and sessions.

Most of my traffic was coming from organic social and direct, with my organic search being in 3rd. This is not surprising to me at all because I was still learning SEO.

Apparently, I had 1,930 sessions which is about 321/month. Not many compared to my pageviews.

2023 Breakdown, Net Income: -$1,306.22

Income: $779.44

In May of 2023, I applied to She Media ad agency and was accepted! At the time I had about 800 sessions a month. I read somewhere that their threshold is 20k sessions, but that they review people on a case by case basis, so I gave it a shot. SO happy they accepted me.

I did not sell any digital products this year.

This year, I submitted to a writing contest for Social Work News and won! They liked my submission so much they asked me to write 1 article a month for them. I attribute this all to my experience writing with my blog because I don’t think I would have ever been comfortable submitting to something like that before I had my blog.

The breakdown:

Ad Revenue — She Media: $29.41
Writing contest — Social Work News: $300
Freelance writing — Social Work News: $450
Total: $779.44

My ad revenue from She Media is not huge, but it feels significant enough to keep the ads on until I can qualify for a larger ad network. Mediavine here I come! (they require 50k sessions a month and are serious about it.)

Expenses: $2,085.66

This year’s expenses are a bit higher because I went to two conferences, which I am including in my blog expenses because I feel they are related! I also bought some courses and various other things.

I can’t call this a side hustle yet… because I am currently in the negative 😅

In September, I applied for a business license to make this official so I can apply for grants and open a separate bank account/credit card to keep my expenses separate from my personal. It’s getting serious, y’all!

Other exciting stuff:

I attended my first FinCon
I was on my first podcast
I was a finalist for a Plutus Award
I wrote my first guest blog post for Michelle at Making Sense of Cents
First official press feature

Traffic

I spent the entire 2023 blogging, so this traffic breakdown is from January 1, 2023, to December 31, 2023.

8.9k views with an average of 741 views/month. A little lower than last year which is interesting. You can see I had a few major spikes in traffic getting close to 600 views in a day.

One of these days I remember was when Delyanne Barros shared this post on her Instagram story.

Here is a breakdown of traffic acquisition and sessions.

I still have a majority of my traffic coming from social and direct links, but my organic search is definitely catching up! I am happy to see this because I have really been putting a lot of time into learning and implementing SEO.

I had 6,081 total sessions which is about 506/month. This is exciting growth compared to last year.

Blog Goals for 2024

I had one post in 2023 that was ranking on Google and giving me most of my traffic so I am hoping to do that again this year.

Here are my official 2024 blog goals:

Increase my email list subscribers from ~60 to 100
1-2 ranking posts that are getting me about 800 sessions a month
1 guest post
Double my Instagram following to 1,392
Post on Instagram at least 2x a week
Apply to 3 grants
$500 total blog income
Finish my Financial Social Work Certification

I am excited to continue my blogging journey this year. I am feeling so happy with how my blog has done so far. Blogging is a long game to see success and this data is definitely motivation to keep me going.