I am so excited to be completing my final 2015 & 12th blog traffic and income report! What a year it has been.

If you haven’t seen my last month’s income, you can check it out Blog Traffic and Income Report: How I made $5,728.44 in November. 

I am so happy with how this accountability study and goal mastery went this year. I started my monthly income goal small at $500 for the month of January, this method has helped me set realistic goals for myself. See how I did it.

This post contains affiliate links* to help keep this blog up and running. I appreciate your support!

Check out all my Blog Traffic and Income Reports on my new page!

Way back 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 began to hear this reverse engineer method over and over in podcasts that I enjoy listening to. So I began to pay attention. A couple of the podcasts that I love and subscribe to are:

1. Online Marketing Made Easy with Amy Porterfield
2. Build Your Tribe with Chalene Johnson
3. Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn
4. The School of Self Mastery with Adrienne Dorison

By reverse engineering your goals you make them more plausible. In fact, when you write your goals down on paper you are 42% more likely to accomplish them.  I heard that statistic on The School Of Self Mastery Podcast with Adrienne Dorison. 

I began by breaking my income goals into months, but you can take it a step further and break it down to weeks or even by day. That is if you want to get really specific.

Months works best for me with what I am doing.  

I am excited to say that the info I have been presenting this year 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!

I am pleased to announce that I have already surpassed my goal of $15k for the year! It didn’t even take me the whole 12 months to make that goal which seemed impossible at the end of 2014 when I was setting this big scary goal. It goes to show you that you really can do whatever you want as long as you are invested in the time it takes to build. This will not happen overnight.

After switching to BlueHost as my web host at the end of April 2015, I am happy to report that my site has not crashed once! I signed up for a 3-year deal where I pay $4.95 a month. Awesome hosting without killing my blog expense budget. This was not the case when I was hosting with Go Daddy after I started getting more traffic. Also, did I mention that a lot of my photos from my transfer in hosting didn’t make it?? So now I am manually replacing photos on posts and galleries which is super tedious work. This is still something I am working on. No fun!

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 December…

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 now pay $9.95 a month for Canva For Work which is a new service they provide. This works great within a team.

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 2015 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.  Since working with Tailwind and joining more group boards within my niche, I have increased my traffic substantially. 

I didn’t realize how much I could still learn from Pinterest when I felt like I had a really good handle on it with my following when it was at 5,600k. I thought I had 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.  Now I have over 13k followers and I am gaining hundreds daily.

That was pretty exciting. I attribute a lot of my success to Tailwind. Since 60% of my traffic comes from Pinterest, it was so it was worth the investment. 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 element I implemented was back in May 2015. I began working with The Blogger Network! Best choice I ever made to help boost my passive income and take some work off my plate.

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 May, but I am happy to say I am making a lot more now than I ever was with Google Adsense.

I am also happy to report that they admitted me into their “Flight” mobile ad network as well. This is so worth it because I know a lot of my traffic comes from people on their mobile devices and I wanted to reap the benefit of that. This was just implemented at the beginning of June and it really has helped boos my passive income stream.

At the beginning of 2015, 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 100,00+ views in December. Say whaaaa!?!?!

Who knew this post would be such a hit??

This really goes to show you how much of an impact your site can make with a few posts going viral on Pinterest. This can set you up for the rest of the year, bringing in steady traffic. I am so stoked.

I am also decided to move outside my comfort zone to do more work on camera. I participated in an online web series that aired in September 2015 called Design Dare – Episode 2! I competed against a production designer in the tv industry to design a 10’x15′ space under 60 mins. Here is my episode below…

 

I am happy to announce that I won and will be moving onto the next round thanks to all of you who voted for me! I am still waiting on details for the next round where I am now competing against an Emmy award winning Set Decorator. No pressure. 

Here is my November Google Analytics traffic summary. 

Here is my December Google Analytics traffic summary. 

I am pleased with the progress I made last month in August with 335,828 page views and there were 31 days in that month.

Here are the traffic referrer stats from November… 

Here are the traffic referrer stats from December…

 

Here is the breakdown of how I did…