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Every month I publish an income report. It's a way for me to show you the work I do and keep myself accountable. This post will be about May 2021 and what happened in terms of my blogging business. 

Before we get started, make sure to sign up for my newsletter and get tons of tips and tricks to boost your blogging business.

This month was packed with ups and downs! If it weren’t for this income report, you probably would not have noticed the difference. I am happy you are here!

Previous recap reports

What are you doing after this blog post?  If you're anything like me, you'll be reading the recap reports from last month.  You know, the ones that tell us how many visitors we had and what posts were most popular.  It's always a little bit of a letdown to read those stats because I'm not there anymore with my readers – but it's satisfying at the same time because it means I've done my job well enough for them to come back again! Might as well check out these previous monthly recaps while we're here…

Instagram stories for engagement 

During the last week of May I started to create videos, especially for stories using Moovly. In addition, to curated content, I’ve dedicated time to add polls and questions to stories.  

Increase frequency of tweets 

Yes, I increased the frequency of tweets by 33% and attracted returning visitors to the website. 

Improve load speed for mobile and desktop

Unfortunately, we did not set time aside for load speed. Currently, the load speed is at an all-time low—more on this on the next steps.  

Continue to contribute to the Substack Newsletter

The Substack newsletter has been such a great outlet to connect with you! 

May Income report 

Incomes and expenses are two important words to keep in mind when running a business. How these are recorded on the financial statements will tell you a lot about my company’s health, so it's a good idea to be aware of what they represent. Here is a listing of the incomes earned and expensed by Blogging Business Owners.

Expenses

The total expenses for Blogging Business Owner was $2,371.64. Here is an itemized list. 

Expenses
	May
Cloudways	10
Headliner	25
Shortly	40
Conversion	100
Frase	40
Subscriptions	1,363
Xero	5
Upwork	788.64
Total	2,371.64

Admittingly, this is above my usual cost. Upwork was about double the amount due to hiring and training. Subscriptions this month were considerably high. 

ReMaster Media

ReMaster Media is a professional sound mastering plug-in for digital audio and video. I've used the plug-in to minimize background noise, equalize volume, and add emphasis to speech.

Acadle 

As I prepare for the course, launching the correct platform was one of my biggest concerns. Luckily, I found Acadle, an all-encompassing system for employee training, customer onboarding, and inbound marketing. Best of all, Acadle is offering a lifetime license when you use my code. I’ve decided to purchase 10+ lifetime codes to enable live streaming, multi-language, gamification, mobile SDK, and in-platform communities. 

Moovly

We all know that one friend can turn textbooks into engaging video tutorials or a professor who can present information via animation. Now it’s your turn! Moovly allows you to create professional, dynamic videos with custom templates and animations. With over 450 downloadable templates and graphics in the library, you can generate anything from an explainer video to a promotional video for your business in no time at all!

Unlock Hundreds of Templates: Embed headlines, captions, and camera angles on 360-degree previews of each template, so you get to choose just the right design for what it is that you want to say – then dress up your projects in royalty-free content taken from our extensive collection of graphics libraries featuring over 200,000 clipart, templates, and social media graphics.

Overall, I am happy with the purchases and looking forward to further exploring each feature. 

Income

I am proud of our income this month. This is by far the most I’ve made on Blogging Business Owner to date!

Income
	May
Survey's
Podcast	1.10
Total	1.10

We broke the $5 within the first six-month milestone last month, and I am glad to see that we continue to make an income. 

Revenue

In total, I am in the negative this month and glad of a narrowing gap. 

Revenue
	May
Income	1.10
Expenses	2,371.94
Total	-2,370.847

In April, I came out with about $2K in the negative. Here's hoping that the next month will be positive. 

Compared to last month, it is substantially more! This is because of subscriptions and Upwork. 

Revenue
	April	May
Income	21.63	1.1
Expenses	591	2371.64
Total	-569.37	-2370.54

Top affiliate companies 

This month I signed up with more affiliates I’ve been working with. Below is a list of affiliate companies:

ConvertKit: ConvertKit supports small businesses with email marketing, e-commerce stores, and much more. I use ConvertKits free landing pages for months before starting my blog. It helped me create my email list and gave me a URL to start posting on my social media pages. 

Frase.io: This is a blogger’s best-kept secret! This website gives free trials to make comprehensive outlines for your next blog. It is definitely worth a visit, and I would love to know how it’s helped your business in the comment section. 

Website Policies: This service helps me sleep at night! Having a website means having a responsibility to disclose your privacy policy with users. Website Policies helps you set up your policy privacy in minutes. I love that users can buy multiple policies, such as return policy and disclosures, on the same website.  

Cloudways: This is a cloud hosting service that gives new users free trials to use their service. It is easy to scale your business and set up your website. 

IvoryMix: Stock photos, Pinterest and Instagram templates, Freebie templates, Facebook group, and tutorials all on Ivory Mix! You can start for free and sign up to receive membership information. 

Grammarly: Grammarly checks your grammar as you are writing to improve readability. It is powered by a complex AI algorithm to support your writing. 

Instant Spelling And Grammar Checker

SmashBaloon: This is a plug-in for your website to displays your Instagram feed.

Tailwind: Your one-stop for Pinterest marketing, promotion, and scheduling.

Shortly.AI: Is your writing assistant, with just a click of a button Shortly will generate a story and generate ideas for your story development. Whether you need support with writing blogs or storytelling, Shortly is here to help.

Conversion.ai: Conversion is a copywriting tool that uses machine learning to write high converting copy. Use Conversion for sales and marketing messages in seconds.

Later: Later is the leading visual marketing platform that allows you to plan, schedule, publish, and measure results on your favorite social media platforms.

Acadle: Acadle is the easy and smarter way to train your employees, customers, partners, and prospects. With easy-to-use features such as employee participant onboarding automation with structured content, automated customer/prospect landing pages, inbound marketing strategy & more it’s never been easier to keep all of your teams’ training needs in one place.

 For a complete list of recommendations, visit the recommendations page.

Analytics

When looking at the analytics for web pages, I look for conversions into more visits and traffic. The most crucial aspect of web analytics is knowing when I'm getting enough traffic from social media accounts, user behavior, and monetization. 

Social Media

This month social media was overall consistent with growth.

Instagram 

Instagram has been glitchy this month, with interruptions in Reels and consistently being logged out. The data is primarily consistent with audience demographics. 

There were significantly more stories than Reels because of glitches with the platform. Though Instagram underperformed in the last half of May, it had a great start and managed to post 28 Reels. 

Compared to April, the account reached +93% of more accounts! Which is impressive considering the challenges with the platform. Overall, the account outperformed last month’s metrics. 

I am happy to continue to grow the account and look forward to increasing engagement with my current audience. 

Twitter 

My Twitter posting increased by 33% this month and dropped in total impressions. 

This leads me to believe that my account is beginning to niche down and establish itself as an authority in the field.  

LinkedIn 

This month I opened a business account, which is why I reported fewer followers. By opening a business account, I can tap into analytics and represent the business more transparently and professionally. In just one month, the account grew to 40 followers, which is impressive!

I’ve posted LinkedIn articles as well as being active on stories. The first month of data indicates that most people who visit my profession are in the education management industry. 

However, followers are mainly in the entertainment industry. This may be because I’ve tapped into similar groups such as bloggers and podcasters.

Last month, I garnered 527 impressions, with less than 10% choosing to follow the account. Those are pretty great metrics for a new performance. 

In a deeper dive into the content analytics, I notice that the last two weeks of May were inactive. This may be due to technical difficulties on the business part. 

From the first 30 days on the platform, I see that people visit the profile and follow if they have a previous connection. And visitors who want to learn more sometimes follow the account. Those visitors are generally in the education industry. 

Reddit 

Reddit has stayed consistent. 

Pinterest 

Pinterest grew by another 100K this month! Unfortunately, there were glitches on the platform too. Such as losing the ability to post idea pins for a few days. This happened when Pinterest switched from “story pins” to “idea pins” and revamped the platform for that content. 

Because of the glitches, the account underperformed on various metrics. 

I expect the account to continue to underperform till mid-June. At least that’s what happened in my experiment in April. It took two weeks for the account to bounce back and make some growth. 

The “1st Month of Blogging” has consistently gained +70K impressions each month, which is wild! I am so proud of the pin and hope to replicate the success soon. 

Okay we can’t keep it a secret anymore: Idea Pins, formerly known as Story Pins, are now available to ALL Creators! Tap through to get the full low-down✨📌
https://t.co/yDoXGi2VxT pic.twitter.com/72W5N0rHBp

— Pinterest (@Pinterest) May 18, 2021

With all of the new updates, I plan to explore the idea pins feature a lot more this month. Idea pins are now open to everyone, and the platform has a ton more potential. 

Podcast

The podcast overall dropped in plays. 

The podcast somehow managed to make over $1 this month, which maybe because of the overall plays. I think the podcast dropped for several reasons (1) people returned back to work, (2) the priority on a side hustle has decreased, (3) the quality of the podcast is low.  

WordPress

I use WordPress (WP) to host the Blogging Business Owner (BBO) website. The following is a recap of May’s analytics. 

WordPress
	Month 1	Month 2	Month 3
Pageviews	119	223	372
Sessions	142	101	127
Bounce Rate (percentage)	62	52	59.84
Time-on-site (minutes)	2	1.2	1.51
Users	39	70	69

Sessions and Pageviews

There was an increase in both pageviews and sessions. I love seeing the consistency in the growth in page views and an above 100 monthly session trend.  

WordPress
	Month 1	Month 2	Month 3
Pageviews	119	223	372
Sessions	142	101	127

Overall the trend suggests that people who visit the site are exploring about 2 pages each visit. 

Bounce Rate 

The bounce rate has increased since last month. However, it is still a lot better than the first month. I am glad we’ve had a consistently low bounce rate, and we will continue to keep it down.  

WordPress
	Month 1	Month 2	Month 3
Bounce Rate (percentage)	62	52	59.84

Top Pages 

The most trafficked page is the home page, with 74% of visitors clicking on the page and spending 28 seconds on it (an increase from last month's 24 seconds). The second page that experiences the most amount of traffic is the “April Income Report” post.  I love that people enjoy reading the income reports! 

To my surprise, the third most trafficked page was the Instagram post which was launched on May 30th. Just a day shy of the end of the month! I am glad social media marketing is interest to my audience. 

Time-on-Site 

Time on-site was 1 minute and 51 seconds, with most visitors discovering the website for the first time. 

Traffic Sources

This month the website’s traffic diversified a bit more with a noticeable increase in organic search. I gained access to Google AdSense, which may indicate that my website may be showing up on the search results. 

Overall direct traffic had an average duration of almost 3 minutes on the site. The flow of traffic was consistent throughout the month.

Related: HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR BLOGGING WEBSITE IN 2021

Overall the social channel that pushes the most traffic was Facebook. 

I deleted my profile from Facebook about a month and a half ago, but the content must still be circulating. 

Pinterest and Twitter came in second, attracting the same percentage of visitors to the website. Looking at the data closely, we can see that Twitter is consistent while Pinterest dropped by 50%. The clear winner this month is LinkedIn! It improved by 100% by doubling its traffic from 1 to 2. 

Substack Newsletter

This month there was one direct subscriber. 

I connected with the subscriber before they subscribed, and to my surprise, they then sign-up for the email list without prompting. 

What worked 

In reflection of this month’s wins, here is a summary. 

Consistency

Though the business experienced a ton of change as far as internal structures and systems. It did not impact the company in the eyes of the consumer. 

What failed 

Here’s what failed.

Social Media

There were so many glitches this month. I’ve connected with the platforms and hope to have all of the issues resolved soon. So far, I am down to my last glitch, which is the Reels function not appearing on my mobile. 

Excited to introduce Insights for Reels, Live and Reach to help creators and businesses better understand how your content is doing ⭐️📊 pic.twitter.com/oTvUGYK0sy

— Instagram (@instagram) May 24, 2021

It’s likely that with the new updates to the platform, some features were compromised. Fingers crossed this is resolved this month. 

What I’ll be working on next month 

Now that I reviewed this month’s wins and growth. Here is a list of my focus for May. 

Load speed

This month our load speed is at its lowest, with the mobile speed at 16 and desktop speed at 28. 

Our plan this month is to boost the load speed on both mobile and desktop. 

Consider Medium

During June, we will consider branching into Medium for the weekly newsletter. Medium allows creators to keep the intellectual rights to their posts while making a profit. 

Reddit and Quora

Familiarize myself with the community guidelines to Reddit and Quora and make time to post regularly (once per week).

Pinterest

Continue to learn about idea pins and new updates. Post fun and vibrant idea pins that replicate the success of the “1st Month of Blogging” pin. 

Podcast

The podcast has received a sort of subtle revamp. We have included an intro to commercials and are dedicating more resources to curating the best listener experience. This month we will focus on editing the podcast for fluid and seamless cuts and paying particular attention to the audio quality. 

Course Waitlist 

Now that I have Acadle, I can now begin the social media marketing course waitlist. I’ll learn more about launching and waitlisting in June. 

Tip: Ivory Mix will host a webinar in June about setting up a waitlist. If you are interested in learning more about that, sign up for the membership!

Blog Posts

Writing, editing, and graphic design have all been part of the changes in the internal structure and systems of the business. I’ll work on getting ahead with content to have a smooth launch in August when we’ll be posting twice per week! 

Future plans for my blogging business 

Here are plans for the business.

Course

I am so glad I found Acadle! It really has given me peace of mind to know that I’ll be on a platform that supports community engagement and simplicity. Now, it’s time to create the course. 

My vision is to make the course adaptable to any learning level, with tons of visuals, step-by-step, and practical suggestions. 

Tips to Become a Blogger 

After one more month of blogging, here are some blogging tips.

Don’t worry, be happy

Keeping records of your business without judgment is healthy! Make a conscious effort to reflect on your experience.

Recap 

I hope you found my blogging income report to be informative. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comment section below. I'm happy to give my best answer(s).

Thanks for reading.

💛Ana

Originally posted on June 13, 2021 @ 12:49 am