I am so excited to be completing my 5th blog traffic and income report. If you haven’t seen my last month’s income, you can check it out Blog Traffic & Income Report: How I made $1451.70 in April.

I really wanted to start May off right by taking care of my monthly analysis first thing! During this process of reporting my earnings in 2015, I have received so many lovely and supportive comments and emails supporting what I am putting out there. I think since my goals started small at $500 for January, it allows for people to help set realistic goals for themselves.

This post contains affiliate links*

In December of 2014, I took some advice from Bonnie at Hobbytohot.com who said to create your annual goal $$. She says to then work backward to help figure out your monthly goals to achieve your large goal for the year. Since my large goal is $15,000 for the year, I was able to work in the order she suggested to help create smaller manageable goals every month.

I am excited to say that the info I am presenting has been inspiring others to start a blog or take their blog to the next level which is the best feeling in the world for me. My main goal when starting these income reports was to show others (in a very specific way) how they can make money online. Especially those that are just starting out and trying to figure the whole blogging thing out. I remember how intimidating and confusing it was when I first started.

The process of really tracking my earnings along with my blogging expenses has been so helpful. It is quite eye opening to the amount of change that can occur within a month!

To reach my $15,000 goal for the year, my income goal was to reach $2,000 income goal for the month of May.

I am so pleased to say that for the first time this year, I have exceeded my goal for the first time with my total revenue equalling $2,299.58!!

The crazy thing is that I would have earned more this month, but I had some issues with my web hosting through Go Daddy. My site kept going down for 60 minutes here, 40 minutes there during February, March, and part of April. Needless to say…it got old quickly. All Go Daddy support could tell me was that it was because of maintenance they were doing on the Cpanel. I’m sorry, but I think Go Daddy should know how their maintenance will affect people’s sites and at least give them a heads up. And to not have a valid reason why the service I pay a lot for isn’t working is unacceptable.

On impulse, I decided to switch from Go Daddy Hosting to BlueHost because I have heard so many amazing things about Blue Host from other bloggers. Boy did I not know what I was getting myself info.

I only say that because I had never transferred my site to another web host before. I didn’t really understand how lengthy and confusing it would be. BlueHost was great, though. They were super helpful on the phone to help me get my site back online. My site was down for a total of 24 hours and it was devastating to my traffic and earnings for that day period. Also, did I mention that a lot of my photos from my transfer didn’t make it?? So now I am manually replacing photos on posts and galleries. It has been super tedious, time-consuming, and annoying.

If you want to learn more about the art of blogging (because it is an art form) you should check out my Essential Bloggers Resource Guide to get more details if you are thinking of starting a blog to even just improving the one you already have.

I am really trying to put myself out there to (hopefully) inspire newer bloggers with my current and future monthly blog income reports. I am also doing this to hold myself accountable to continue pushing forward with my income goals for the year. 

Moving on to the details from May…

This year I have really been trying to focus on creating beautiful images… specifically, pin-worthy images. I have also been working more and more with canva.com to do this. I had a couple posts go viral on Pinterest last month because of my images! Super happy about that one.

I began implementing a few new things this month in social media specifically.
I must preface, that I didn’t start really investing in my blog until April when I started making over $1000/month. Now that I am making a decent side income each month, I don’t see any harm in freeing up my time to finish my ebook and work on more DIY projects.

• I have been using the social media automation tool Meet Edgar for a couple months now and I swear this was such a great move!  I am saving so much more time every day by not having to be on my phone scheduling posts on FB, Twitter, and Linked In. It is a little bit of a splurge costing me $49/month. But this is a solid investment because it frees up my time to other things.
• Another tool I began using is Tailwind. I heard about it from the fabulous Blogger, Erika, over at Olyvia.co. She wrote the most amazing post about HOW TO GET PINTEREST FOLLOWERS + REPINS: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE.

I didn’t realize how much I could still learn from Pinterest when I feel like I had a really good handle on it with 5,600k followers and a lot of traffic coming to my site daily. But this article taught me so much and showed me Tailwind. This automation tool is geared specifically towards Pinterest and Instagram. I can schedule an unlimited amount of pins for weeks ahead of time with their easy interface. I love setting it and forgetting it!

Best. Thing. Ever.

** You can try Tailwind for free and schedule up to 100 pins before they ask you to pay $15/mth for 400 pins a month. Or you can pay $119 for the year for unlimited pins. Since this platform is my largest traffic referrer, it was worth the investment and I paid for the annual membership.

Another new concept I implemented this month was working with The Blogger Network. They are an ad management company that helps bloggers make more money with their own “holistic ad placement.” These ads were just implemented at the end of the month, but I am happy to say I have already made money with them. Yay! I am also happy to report that they admitted me into their “Flight” mobile ad network as well. This was just implemented at the beginning of June. So stay tuned for more info next month about this feature.

A couple months ago I wrote an article about how to make your space look more expensive on a dime that went absolutely completely viral on Pinterest bringing me an additional 49,000 page views in March for that post alone! I am happy to report that this post is still my #1 Popular Post on my site still earning me 57,480 views in May. Who knew this post would be such a hit??

Another thing I really worked on in May was building my following on my social media platforms a bit more and applying for more affiliates and media groups. I worked with Clever Girls Network, Cooperatize*, and Linqia* this month on some fun campaigns!  I hope to do more campaigns with ALL of them in the near future!

Here is my April Google Analytics traffic summary.

Here is my May Google Analytics traffic summary. 

**Things are a little different this month because when I switched my web hosting my google analytics account went down while my site was down. After some edits, I was able to get my google analytics back up and running on May 9th.

Here are my traffic referral stats from April…