This post may contain affiliate links for more info visit my disclosure page.
I can tell you right now that March was a frustrating month because I didn’t get a lot of affiliate sales however, I’ve learned to capitalize on my Instagram accounts while my blog takes its sweet old time to earn money.
This is definitely a point when most people quit blogging because it’s a lot of effort to see little results having been at it for 7 months.
Of course this is just me, many others are earning more than me at their 7 months, but I don’t despair and will carry on as I know the money is just around the corner and traffic has increased once again this month which I’m pretty happy about.
I will break down my March analysis:
- What’s happening?
- Fiverr
- Training
- Site Stats
- Social Media
- YouTube Channel
- Google Analytics
- Did I make money online?
WHAT’S HAPPENING?
While your blog is still not your big money maker in the first year, you can do other things online to complement the income. One of those ways is going on Fiverr.com and start selling your services.
It’s not passive income but it’s none-the-less income in the meantime while your blog is not quite earning yet.
Fiverr gigs can start at $5 and you’ll be surprised what you can advertise to do on there.
For me, since I have 2 active Instagram accounts (accounts that are not for this blog, one is 58K and the other is 25K), I started selling my sponsored posts on there.
I was promoting sponsored post on my own before but that didn’t seem to pan out that well and didn’t provide a consistent income.
Ever since I’ve started on Fiverr Mar 8, I’ve received 8 orders on there plus already 2 more in April. That’s 10 orders as of this post.
Funny thing is that, once I started this, the promotions I’ve been doing myself also got better. All in all, I made just shy of $200 for March in sponsored posts on my Instagram accounts!
To learn more how I’ve grown my accounts, you can check out the Top 10 Tips on How To Get More Followers with Instagram post and for how I automate everything, check out my Mass Planner review.
TRAINING:
The training at Wealthy Affiliate has been completed pretty much (except I haven’t gone through all those weekly live video training replays which is a lot!) and I even went through the Online Enterpreneur Certification course as well in March to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I’ve been concentrating on the Affiliate Bootcamp course all this time if you haven’t been following my previous posts.
There’s been a lot of changes in their training, they have first made the menus for the courses easier to follow, track, and navigate.
Coming in the near future is more updates for the courses, plus adding more levels to the Affiliate Bootcamp this year. It’s going to be awesome! I can’t wait to see what this will be about.
This is why Wealthy Affiliate is so worth it, they continually year after year improve their platform without any hikes in our memberships! Whatever rate you joined in at, your membership fee never goes up but your experience on there gets better and better!
That is also why Wealthy Affiliate is the best affiliate marketing training program out there. If you haven’t taken a look, please do so here:
SITE STATS
Here are my site stats at the end of March:
- Posts – 67 (17 new)
- Pages – 13 (0 new)
- Comments – 874 (126 new)
- Subscribers – 24 (3 new)
Since 3rd week of Feb, I’ve increased my publishing to 4 times a week and so glad I’ve kept that up for March. I got more comments than last month as well and it’s so great to see that number climb.
Still not very good with my subscriptions because frankly I still haven’t done much with the email series yet. I want to create a few eBook or eCourse to give away to attract more subscribers but that will have to be done later.
With my writing schedule, I need to keep up the posting of 4 times a week so I can cover my vacation time in July with my family. I swear this writing schedule is the best, and if you want to see how I do it, check out this post.
SOCIAL MEDIA:
Let’s look at the growth:
- Twitter – Followers: 7,256 this month, 5,728 last month.
- Instagram – Followers: 7,036 this month, 4,639 last month.
- Facebook Page – Page Likes: 130 this month, 111 last month.
- Google+ – Followers: 148 this month, 132 last month.
- Pinterest – Followers: 5,153 this month, 3,340 last month.
It’s pretty awesome to see that two of my accounts have hit 7K already and my youngest account Pinterest has past the 5K mark. We’ll take a look at how their traffic is down below.
YOUTUBE CHANNEL:
The stats for my channel is growing:
- Total number of videos: 8 this month, 6 last month.
- Total Subscribers: 47 this month, 36 last month.
- Minutes Watched per Month: 2,473 this month, 864 last month.
- Views per Month: 493 this month, 195 last month.
Wow, what a jump in minutes watched & views per month! More than doubled in Feb. This is definitely exciting and I got 11 new subscribers too!
It appears people like my Mass Planner video, top watched video, and in second was a product review for an internet marketing product. Sounds like I need to make more Mass Planner videos!
Here are my all time stats:
GOOGLE ANALYTICS:
After fixing the site speed in Feb which gave my site a huge boost in traffic at the end of that month, I thought March will continue going up. However, it didn’t but leveled off, that was the most disappointing part, it was a bit frustrating to see that, but you know what, it was still a great month!
My results for March is 1,484 sessions compared to 1,113 in February.
Last month, I finally broke the 50 sessions/day mark, and in March, I had 1/3 of the month staying at or above the 50 sessions/day mark.
My lowest day in Mar is 30 sessions, compared to 21 the previous month. So this is a great sign that my traffic is becoming more steady.
Here’s the cumulative graph for the 7 months:
I like the trend and hopefully it’ll just keep moving up from now on. The tallest spike you see is end of February when I fixed my site speed but never got to hit that level again in March.
Let’s take a look at my traffic sources:
My Social traffic still brings in the most visits and Direct still second, but look at my Organic traffic, it’s about to move into the 2nd position! This is great news for sure. 🙂
Organic traffic increased by 75.3% over Feb, and accounting for almost 29% of total traffic, an about seven percentage point jump.
I’m hoping Organic traffic will continue to increase and will be my 2nd source of traffic in April. This will bring in the most targeted traffic!
Which social platform performed the best?
In February, Facebook had pulled into the top and now in March, it has remained to be the number 1 Social traffic source. It now proves that posting to Facebook Groups works as this is more targeted traffic plus it’s getting me more Facebook Page Likes than before.
This is also automated in Mass Planner, I share the posts on my Facebook Page to the Groups in my niche.
I actually had a technical hiccup in March with Mass Planner, but it doesn’t look like it slowed down the traffic too much. Hopefully I will continue this increase.
Instagram and Twitter are the other most engaged accounts. I always get likes and retweets on Twitter and good amount of likes on Instagram as well.
This is all going to continue the growth of my blog.
DID I MAKE MONEY ONLINE?
Yes, $205!
- Adsense (Site & YouTube) – $4
- Amazon – $4
- Sponsored Posts – $197
Expenses for the month:
- Aweber – $19
- GoDaddy – $2
- HostGator – $4
- Mass Planner – $4
- Screencast-o-matic – $1
- Wealthy Affiliate – $25
Total expenses for March is $55, giving me a Net Income of $150.
Back in the black! Awesome! I know this is not much but if you diversify yourself, you can make money online in many different ways. I will definitely blog more about my experience in Fiverr soon. 🙂
SUMMARY
What a month after all! Though I’m not making much now, I am very excited for the months to come. I don’t know when it’ll give me an up turn but I know that day will come.
I’ve seen it too many times not for it to come, that’s how confident I am about this. If you want to check out why I say this, there are many success stories here you can see. Everyone starts at zero and everyone who sticks with it, always makes a good living blogging!
They all started at Wealthy Affiliate and I hope you will check it out and see what you can learn as well:
Please do not hesitate to ask me anything about this 7th income report or this website in the comments below!!
I will answer your questions and would love to hear your thoughts on how you’re doing and what you have been up to! Thanks for visiting!!
Let’s make money online!
