I have had this blog for about 2.5 years because I have always been passionate about personal finance and helping people get out of debt. I never really tried making much money from the blog, but I realized I probably should.
Why am I sharing my blog’s income journey?
There are a million “how to start a profitable blog” articles out there, but I haven’t found many blogs tracking progress. So, I thought it would be fun to do that monthly.
It’s also really difficult to have a profitable blog, and I don’t think many people warn you of that before starting. There are many bloggers out there (I won’t name names) who illustrate how they make millions from their blog, but if you get into the nitty-gritty of their backlink profiles on AHREFS, you find that they got hooked up with high-quality backlinks from prior relationships at the beginning. Most of us don’t have that, so back to square one.
Blog Income: Month 1 ($1886.19)
There are numerous ways to make money on a blog, including:
- Ads
- Publishing Fee on Articles
- Affiliate Marketing (Just started)
- Selling a Product
- Selling a Service
- Speaking Engagement (when you get big)
Saved By The Cents makes most of its money through publishing fees and affiliate marketing. I dabbled in ads via AdSense, but it made my site look horrendous, which I thought would diminish user experience.There are some costs associated with running a blog too, which I’ll highlight.
Blog post revenue was definitely higher this month from a new advertiser that published around 4-5 blog posts. I finally feel that I have made sense of affiliate marketing after trying different things that definitely did not work.
I am planing to try a lot of other affiliate marketing techniques over the next few months, so I hopefully will see some improvement there.
I got $.58 from my Amazon affiliates via my Dave Ramsey recommended books article. That does not seem to be a very profitable niche. People do really well on Amazon affiliates. I have not.
Check out my stats showing 31 clicks that resulted in $.58.
Do you have any questions about starting a blog or monetizing? Feel free to comment below or reach out to me at savedbythecents@gmail.com. Hopefully, I can help.
