Let me be honest; I have never shared an income report of themonterabbi.com blog
And yet, I have read so many income reports that inspired me to start blogging in the first place. Yes, I have consumed and even subscribed to income report emails from the likes of Sayan Neogie of prosmartpreneur, Carly Cbell of mommyonpurpose and Nat of themyndset.
To be honest, there are a few reasons why I have never shared themonterabbi.com income reports. They are:
- Google floored me. Themonterabbi.com was on a good growth trajectory around 2020 before Google started rolling out one Google update after the other. Amazon affiliate commissions, which was my biggest earner for the site were also slashed in 2020.
2. Themonterabbi.com has never made enough money that I could brag about. Even before 2020, the site wasn’t making that much money to warrant me to take out my pen and paper to write some juicy story here.
3. I am always hesitant about sharing my online income lest President Ruto and his henchmen come down raining on it and taxing the hell out of it.
4. This site was started to primarily talk about raising kids with speech delay/autism and so I felt no need to talk about money issues. This has changed though over the last one month.
But I do feel that I need to be transparent. This month, I have decided to give themonterabbi.com a chance.
Why am I sharing an income report?
Sharing an income report on this site will inspire other people to tell their stories and show that blogging is not all rosy as most people think. Yes, it has its ups and downs.
I need to also be accountable going forward, especially on matters content creation and creating pins. I have always been finding reasons not to do the two. I feel that sharing my income reports in public will help me be more accountable and transparent. My goal is to see this blog earn more than $1000 per month.
The Genesis of Themonterabbi.com
This blog means so much to me. I started it circa 2019 when I noticed that my son had some signs of autism. I consumed so much content while trying to get a support group of other parents who were facing the same problem in their kids.
My son was diagnosed and said to have been affected by too much screentime.
And so, though I have not been making so much money from the blog, I have decided to keep it. Of course, I have been able to pay the hosting/domain renewal fees since I had another site called hosiped.com that was making me a nice income until things went south when Google decided that HCU updates would be the order of the day.
So somewhere in the middle of this month, November, 2024, to be exact, I decided that I need to go back to creating a good content strategy for this site.
So, I have decided to explore a few content angles for this site:
- Move it in a direction that aligns with the things that we are doing to bring up our second son who is currently 4 months old.
2. Rely fully on Pinterest to bring traffic to the site.
3. Explore content in a way that would relate to a female audience. They are the biggest demographic on pinterest.
What brought in the $52.72 in November 2024
When I started out, I wanted to recommend speech therapy toys for parents whose kids had autism or normal speech delay. I would recommend that they buy these products from Amazon and therefore earn some commission once they bought the products.
November Amazon affiliate income
I checked my Amazon affiliate income and I see that the blog has earned $11.24. I see that most of what has been bought off my affiliate links are noise cancelling headphones(I have them highlighted in yellow).
To increase this income,I will do two things:
1. I will check through my blog post on this and make sure that all images and links are live. If there are any products that are out of stock, I will change the products.
2. I will also create more pins towards this blog post.
Google Adsense income
I have earned 41.48 euros over the course of the month as ad income from Google Adsense.
Going on in December, I will do the following:
Identifying the 5 pages which are the biggest earners and increase the number of pins to them, share these page urls on Facebook.
Blog Expenses
Here are my main blog expenses of themonterabbi.com
Writing
I write everything myself. So no costs involved in this.
For pin creation, I use free templates on Canva, so again no costs incurred here.
When I make enough money, say $1000 per month, I will outsource these roles so that I can take a more strategic look at the business.
Website hosting
I use Google cloud to host my websites. I know there are cheaper options out there but I have been frustrated many times by cheap hosting.
Again since I am in the tech space, I wanted to learn things on how to set up a wordpress site on wordpress, how to troubleshoot cloud DNS issues, how to install the ssl certificate on my site and how to restart a server.
I spend $29.24 on hosting the site.
Actions that I have implemented in November
- Published 8 blog posts using AI. Of course I had to do lots of manual editing to make them readable and authentic.
- Created and published around 60 pins.
- Shared 2 urls on a Facebook group I manage.
What I want to do in December and Going Forward: The 80-20 rule
Initially, I used to pin whatever came to mind, pin to whatever board without a care about the performance, outbound clicks, or the return on investment.
I will be more strategic going forward and here is what I will do going forward:
- Using Google analytics, I have already identified the 5 blog posts that are getting the most traffic from Pinterest. I will go ahead to create more pins for these pages and pin them to relevant boards.
- Identify page Urls that are making the best money when ads are placed on them and optimize for more ad placements such as adding more white space, images and videos so that users can view the ads more.
