Welcome to the first of (hopefully) many to come Income Reports for I Heart Arts n’ Crafts.
I wanted to start our first income report off with a little introduction since I haven’t really gotten the chance to introduce myself yet and these income reports will give me the chance to ramble on about myself along with the website.
To begin with my name is Sean and I am Jackie’s brother. Back in April Jackie and I decided to start our own blog as a way for her to hopefully earn a living while raising her awesome/adorable kids and I was hoping to gain a little insight into marketing with Pinterest. Well we decided while she makes the content I would handle the technical and marketing side of things, but I ended up noticing a lot of the bloggers in her niche needed some help so I figured I would start generating some content myself giving out advice when I can.
I also was only planning on having this blog as a side project for myself, but I’ve ended up really enjoying giving advice and marketing for this niche so I’ve actually put most of my other projects on the side burner as I focus all of my attention on I Heart Arts n’ Crafts.
Any-who, July was quite a frantic month for me as I had a lot of personal problems come up and my girlfriend and I were finishing moving in together so I wasn’t able to put much time as I would like into I Heart Arts n’ Crafts, but I’ve actually decided to sell my very first site 🙁 so I can start focusing more of my attention here, which means you will be seeing a lot more of me.
Lastly I wanted to explain what you can expect from these Monthly Income Reports. First off I obviously will be displaying our total income including all of our earning sources, but I will also be discussing our traffic for each month. Another thing, which is why I really wanted to start doing these Income Reports, is that I will get to discuss what I am planning for the next month along with statistics of various little experiments I’m constantly doing.
This post contains affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy.
Income Report
- Adsense – $290.73
- Amazon Associates – $1.93
- ShareASale – $1.00
- Web Hosting Hub – $100.00
- Sponsored Posts – $175.00
Income – 568.66
Expenses
- Aweber – $19.99
Income Breakdown
As you can tell for this month basically all of our money came from Adsense, but that was to be expected as I’ve been busy as stated and we aren’t really as focused as promoting affiliate links right now. We’ve been focused on building a good following on our social platforms and our newsletter.
Even though we are focusing on building a strong following, I have been taking a lot of time messing around and experimenting with various affiliate networks and ad networks. I’m going to take my time on this as well because I want to find some good affiliate networks by the time the holiday season comes around.
Jackie did however get the chance to write her first sponsored post as you can tell from the income report, but what I didn’t state in the income report above was that she even got her first product to review, which was for the GB ELLUM Stroller Review post she did.
Traffic Report
Traffic Overview
Referrals Overview
Traffic Breakdown
I’m pretty happy with the traffic for July, especially since I was preoccupied a lot, but the referrals report does slightly worry me. As you can tell with the report basically all of our traffic is coming from Pinterest and I generally don’t like having a majority of traffic coming from one source. Although I do expect traffic from Google and other search engines to greatly increase in the next coming months with all the content we have been pushing and I plan on doing a hefty amount of SEO work over the course of the next couple weeks.
That’ts pretty much it for our first income report, make sure to check back at the beginning of September for our next one! Also feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or even if you want to make any suggestions or give any advice, I’m always looking for help and willing to offer it!
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Hi – happy to come across this site? How are you getting so much traffic from Pinterest. Is it your pinning strategy? I also liked your post on rich pins and followed it. Will Pinterest email me to let me know it’s approved? Thanks for the info!
There are a lot of factors that I can contribute to our Pinterest traffic such as posting in popular group boards (which you can find through http://www.pingroupie.com), being active through Pinterest (as a way to increase your followers), and even the image can have an effect on how many times something is repinned. But I think the big contributing factor would be http://www.ahalogy.com, they have been a big help in increasing our traffic through Pinterest.
As for the Rich Pins they may send out an email but I never recall actually getting anything notifying me of being approved, they just changed to Rich Pins one day out of the blue. Also I’d like to note that I had to apply for the Rich Pins twice, the first time I waited around a month and nothing ever happened, but I reapplied and our Pins changed to Rich Pins within a week.
Thanks for the reply! Can you only pin to group boards by being a member? I’ve just recently figured these are something I need to be a part of, but don’t see how one can easily pin. Sounds like you could write a post on just Pinterest strategy – you don’t have one do you? As for the rich pins – pardon my lack of knowledge – how can I tell once they change? I’m a novice really at Pinterest. Thanks for the advice.
Yep they need to invite you to pin to that board, most of the time the person in charge of the board will give you a way to contact them in order to get invited to pin to the board, they usually tell you how in the board’s description. You really need to make sure you’re active in Pinterest like commenting on other people’s pins, following people (they sometimes follow you back), and pinning a couple times everyday. Also I don’t yet have a post regarding Pinterest strategy but, I’m definitely planning on writing one up sometime in the near future as there are numerous things I could go on and on about lol. As with the Rich Pins, you should easily notice the change. With my Rich Pins post I actually compared a non-Rich Pin and a Rich Pin together and you can easily notice the difference. In that post I compared two recipes, but with regular Pins the changes might only be slightly different but definitely noticeable, like how the Rich Pins will show your site’s Favicon (ours is a heart) on the pin.
Congratulations on your incredible success and for sharing lessons learned with newbies!
Thank you for sharing your success and how you accomplished it! this is my goal eventually but I am doing it all on my own so this is very helpful.
Thanks and good luck! Don’t forget if you ever need any help feel free to comment on any of my posts and I’ll try my best to help you out.
This is so insightful! Thanks for sharing! 🙂
Congratulations!
What a great summary! I’ve really been enjoying these behind-the-scenes type posts. I ALWAYS learn something new.
Me too! I always end up learning something new when I read them.
I’m aspiring to do these, too, but I love the inclusion of your traffic! I think posts like this help remove some of the stigma we experience for monetizing 🙂
Did you ever join commission junction?
I can not see any your income report about it.
I think CJ is also one of the best had very high commission, very easy to join and earn.
I have some more suggestion about affilates program for you: SiteGround, BlueHost, DreamHost, HawkHost, inmotionHosting, Godaddy,… These networks very easy to earn MN 😀