Welcome back to another Blog income report. On this page, we will look at Full-Time Job From Home’s income for September 2018. If you’ve missed any other reports, you can see all of my Blog Income Reports here.
After getting feedback on these income reports, I’ve decided to make a few changes. I’ll still be showing you where my income came from, but I’ll also include traffic numbers and discuss more on exactly what I’m doing to make this type of money. For example, I’ll share more of the back-end process of what I’m doing, what’s working, and what is not. Hopefully, the change will make these income reports more valuable to other bloggers.
As always, a few things to cover before we get started.
1) On this list, you’ll see extra income sites that I’ve made $500-$1,000+ with. Most of the income is from referring people to the site. Yes, I use the sites and only recommend sites that I’ve used and been paid by, but it’s not realistic to earn a huge income with these “extra income” sites unless you’re referring 100s of people a month.
2) Making a full-time income with a blog is not easy and takes a lot of time to build up, I started this blog in 2013 and only started making a full-time income a few years back. If you have any interest in making an income with a blog, I highly recommend getting started right away. I learned to blog at a course and community called Wealthy Affiliate. They let you try for completely free. If you have any interest, check out my full Wealthy Affiliate review to learn more.
Now that we have that out of the way, here’s my blog income report for September 2018!
Blog Income Report September 2018
Affiliate Income
Most of my income comes from affiliate marketing, and in my opinion, it’s the best way to monetize your blog. Below is the breakdown of the different sites/programs that I promote and how much I made from each. I’ve left links to full reviews of the sites and a brief description of what the site is. Feel free to leave comments below if you have questions about a particular site.
Wealthy Affiliate – Read Review – $1,005.50 (Blogging Training & Community)
Panthera Network – Read Review – $165.90 (Affiliate Network I Use To Promote Sites Like CashCrate, SavvyConnect, and other sites)
Swagbucks – Read Review – $867.75 (My Favorite Rewards Site)
Ibotta App – Read Review – $155 (Grocery Shopping Cash Back App
Dosh App – Read Review – $25.00 (Automatic Cash Back App)
ShareASale – $54 (
AdBloom – $204 (Affiliate Network I Use To Promote SayABC & Drop App)
Paidviewpoint – Read Review – $86.87 (My Favorite Survey Site)
FusionCash – Read Review – $121.75 (One of My Favorite Reward Sites)
Clixsense – Read Review – $41.31 (Reward Site Available Worldwide)
Earnably – Read Review – $25.00 (New Popular Reward Site)
FeaturePoints – Read Review – $50.00 (Paid To Download Apps)
PrizeRebel – Read Review – $48.93 (Rewards Site)
1Q – Read Review – $40.75 (Paid To Answer Short Polls)
InstaGC – Read Review – $50.80 (Reward Site Available Worldwide)
Qmee – Read Review – $22 (Paid To Search)
Fetch Rewards – Read Review – $25 (Paid To Buy Favorite Brands)
GetUpSide – Read Review – $1,352.60 (Paid To Buy Gas)
Sweatcoin App – Read Review – $900 (Paid To Walk)
TruNow App – Read Review – $5 (Paid To Buy Gas)
Amazon – $46.87 (Amazon Affiliate Program)
Transcribe Anywhere – Read Review – $39.40 (Transcription Course & Training)
ZipRecruiter – $93.55 (New Work From Home Job Leads)
PinterestVA – $118.40 (New Course on How To Work From Home as a Pinterest Virtual Assistant)
Uber – $15 (Refer New Drivers)
My Courses – $10 (My Blogging Course – How To Make More With Extra Income Sites eBook)
Total Affiliate Income: $5,564.53
Ad Revenue
Most of my income comes from Affiliate Marketing, but Ad Revenue is still a profitable way to monetize your blog. Here are the ad networks I use to put ads on my blog:
Monumetric – $1,290.32 (Main Ad Network Need Minimum 10K page views a month to apply)
Google Adsense – $61.27 (Google’s Ad Network. Available to New Bloggers)
Media.net – $7.91 (Bing/Yahoo Ad Network Accepts Most New Bloggers)
Sponsored Posts – $75
Total Ad Revenue: $1,434.50
August Income: $6,999.03
Traffic September 2018
This is really the first time I’ve shared traffic number, so to make it easy. I’ve included a few screenshots and will discuss what’s shown below each.
As you can see, Full-Time Job From Home received over 90,000 visitors in the month of September. Most of my traffic comes from Organic Search (free traffic from search engines) and then the next highest outlet is Social specifically Pinterest (more on this in a bit.)
One thing I am good at is writing SEO optimized content targeting low competition keywords and ranking well in search engines (which is why most of my traffic comes from organic search.) Most of the posts that bring in traffic are reviews of sites targeting low competition keywords, for example, a review of an extra income site or work from home job. Several of my list posts rank well too, but most of the traffic is brought in by the specific reviews.
In September 808 of my 897 published posts brought in at least a few visitors through organic search, so my rankings are pretty good sitewide.
If you’d like to learn more about How I drive free traffic from Google check out my course!
Above you can see the breakdown of my social media traffic. As you can see, Use Pinterest and forget the rest has pretty much been my motto. I’ve worked hard to drive traffic from Facebook, and I always seem to fail. When I look at the results Pinterest gives me, it makes it much easier to forget about Facebook and focus on what’s working, which is Pinterest.
Several years ago I did some video reviews, but I found my limited time to be better invested in creating blog content instead. Good to see they are still driving a few visitors a day though!
I hope to have a course or at least an eBook on driving traffic to your blog using Pinterest sometime soon, but for now, I recommend this one.
Compared To Last Month
Before we compare income and traffic to last month, there’re a few new sites to mention this month. The two new sites are listed below:
Sweatcoin App: Sweatcoin is an app that pays you to walk. You’ll earn points that you can exchange for fitness related products and services. They recently added gift cards and PayPal payments as well. This app won’t make you rich by any means, but you can get free stuff for walking.
TruNow App: Several months ago I found a legitimate site that pays you cash back when you buy gas called GetUpSide but it’s only available on the East coast and in Texas. I did a lot of research and finally found a legitimate app that pays you 2% cashback anywhere in the US when you purchase gas. I’ve been paid by them now for a few months so make sure to check it out.
Now let’s take a look at income and traffic compared to last month.
Income Compared To Last Month
Spoiler alert, traffic was down quite a bit from August, but that did not affect my income because it went up.
August Income: $6,418.80
September Income: $6,999.03
As you can see income was up about $580, but that really has to do with a few big payouts that I got in September that won’t be the case in the coming months.
Even though income went up in September, I won’t be surprised if income goes down in October.
Traffic Compared To Last Month
As mentioned, traffic was down in September. Sitewide traffic was down almost 20%, which is a pretty significant number.
The biggest change was organic search traffic, and I don’t really have an explanation. I use a tool called Jaxxy for keyword research and to monitor rankings of my posts. Really everything is still ranking very well, and most of my posts that bring in the most traffic haven’t changed in rank.
So really the only explanation is that more people were searching for topics I write about in August compared to September.
(This is nothing new, organic search traffic differs month to month, but a 20% drop is significant.)
What’s Working/What’s Not?
Pinterest Traffic
Even though Pinterest traffic was down from August, September Pinterest traffic was up 25% from any other month this year, so Pinterest is really working!
If you have any experience marketing on Pinterest, you probably have heard of BoardBooster. It’s no longer a thing, but it was an automatic repinning tool that was a dream come true for Pinterest users.
They closed down June 28th, and since then Pinterest traffic and follower growth have been through the roof! I was very worried once BoardBooster closed down, but maybe it was a blessing in disguise.
Since the close down I’ve been using Tailwind exclusively to share my most popular pins and it’s working very well (I was using them before boardbooster closed down to share other people’s content.)
Over the next few income reports I’ll keep you informed on how Pinterest is going, but for now, it’s working.
Email Provider Switch
I attended a blogging conference at the beginning of September, and one thing I learned within a few classes is that I wasn’t taking advantage of my email list. So I did the only logical thing and immediately switched email providers…. in hindsight, I should have made changes to my current emails to see how well the improvements affected different metrics, but I did decide to switch right away.
Since I started this blog, I’ve been using Aweber to manage my emails, but I just switched to ConvertKit.
Since the change, my email open rates have been up 15%-20% and I’ve set up autoresponders that seem to be more engaging to subscribers, so that’s great to see.
I will say that I could have done this at Aweber and probably seen similar results, but as I said, I switched right away.
The switch really took place the last ten days of September, so I don’t have a ton of success to share at this point, but so far the new email systems are working!
Affiliate Programs Saying Good-Bye
It’s no secret that most of the income from Full-Time Job From Home is from Affiliate marketing, referring readers to join sites. One thing that is a disadvantage of affiliate marketing is the product creator, in my case the sites I promote, control the program. That means that the payout can change at any time and sometimes the program can end without any notice.
It’s nothing new, but over the last few months, a few programs have ended abruptly, and one program dropped my commission from $1.75 to $.75 which really has affected my earnings. With that being said, it’s part of promoting others products and services so I can’t be butthurt about this.
Income Mindset Shift
On these new blog income reports, I wanted to share what I’m doing to help other bloggers, so I figured I’d share my new mindset.
I’ve never had all of my eggs in one basket when it comes to income with this blog. I make money with over 20 affiliate programs and several ad providers, but I have decided to put more eggs in one basket.
My mindset change has been to try to focus on a more consistent income month to month. How? I’ll be putting more focus on promoting recurring affiliate programs instead of the one commission per sign-up programs.
Most of my monthly income from this blog comes from programs that I earn a one time commission on. Meaning that if you sign up for a site, I may earn $1.50 but I won’t earn anything after that.
I’ve started to make the switch to promoting more paid sites that require a monthly fee, so I can build a new income with new sales but have a base income each month from recurring sales.
This will hopefully allow me to slowly increase my base income each month and then any income from one-time commission programs is just icing on the cake.
I want to stress that the type of content I create will be the same and there will plenty of one-time commission content coming in the future!
Plans/Predictions For Next Month
Honestly, seeing how much my traffic was down from August was pretty discouraging, so at this time my predictions for October aren’t great. Factor in a few huge payouts that happened in September (that won’t happen in October) and I won’t be surprised to see my income go down in October.
With that being said, we are heading into the time of the year where ad revenue usually increases quite a bit. So I’m hoping organic and social traffic will pick back up.
So far I’m doing a much better job with bringing email subscribers back to my site so hopefully, that can help increase traffic too.
I’ve been told that a few of the affiliate programs that paused in September will be back live here soon which should help increase income in October.
Overall I’m not extremely excited about my predictions for October but we will see if the positives outweigh the negatives!
Where Do I Start If I Want To Make Money With A Blog?
I hope you enjoyed this blog report and that it was much more valuable than my previous reports. If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to leave comments below and I’ll be happy to share how I’m promoting a site, how I’m driving traffic to my blog, or what’s working for me.
If you have any interest in making an income with a blog, it’s important to know that it doesn’t happen quickly, which is why I always recommend getting started right away. The course I took and the one I recommend is called Wealthy Affiliate.
They let you try for completely free; you’ll understand the process of making money with a blog to see if it’s right for you before you pay anything.
If you have any interest, read my full Wealthy Affiliate Review to learn more!
If blogging isn’t for you, make sure to check out these other helpful links:
Work From Home Companies Hiring Now
Extra Income Sites That Pay Me Each Month
If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to leave comments below!
Hi Brok,
is really Wealthy affiliate an educational site with admin really replying to you
Hey there Sameh. First off thanks for reading.
The short answer is yes.
Wealthy Affiliate was started by Kyle and Carson, who both are actively involved in responding to questions, giving advice, hanging out in the chat, and much more.
You can even private message both of them. Along with the owners, you get direct access to me along with 1,000s of others who make money online with websites, which includes a ton of bloggers that are much more successful than me!
If you decide to join, I’ll welcome you shortly, then if you need anything feel free to reach out and I can answer your questions and give advice at any time.
Brok
Hey Brok,
Really great encouraging Income results from your blogging sites. You mentioned that you are actively participating in more than 20 affiliate programs over the years, Should we participate in as much possible affiliate programs to increase our affiliate revenue?
You also mentioned putting more focus on promoting recurring affiliate programs instead of the one commission per sign-up programs and I think this is a great tip for all and also thanks a lot for introducing tailwind, I was not aware of this program.
Do Wealthy Affiliate has a recurring affiliate program, and what is the best way to promote Wealthy Affiliate?
Thanks,
Regards,
Jivita
Glad you enjoyed the income report and thanks for reading Jivita!
Some people don’t believe in that and if you have a very narrow niche a few different affiliate programs might be all that makes sense. With my niche there’re a ton of available programs that are all fall into my niche.
My recommendation, even if you’re in a narrow niche, is to at least have a few options. That way if an affiliate program changes you do have other options in place to try to replace that income.
Yes it’s a recurring monthly fee and the affiliate program commissions are recurring as well. WA is easy to promote because they let you join for completely free. Really all you need to do is send people their way and if it’s someone who is really interested in making money with a website they will see the extremely value available there. If they can’t then blogging isn’t for them and they probably wouldn’t have been interested in any product that you had to offer about blogging.
Hope this helps and thanks again for reading,
Brok
You mention here that most of your money comes from affiliate marketing, and that is a subject I have been looking into recently with great interest.
How did you find the initial learning stages – the learning curve if you like? I’m interested in learning the ropes but I’m unsure about how hard it is going to be, and how long it will take to earn any sort of money?
Thanks for reading Chris and Wealthy Affiliate is the blogging course and community that I highly recommend. It’s where I learned and they let you try for completely free so you can get an understanding of what you’ll be doing before you pay anything.
To be honest, creating a website is extremely easy now. You can do it within a few seconds with a few clicks.
There’s a learning curve to understanding the process and how to write content. But as you continue to work at it you do get much better and then it becomes very easy to do.
When it comes to making money everyone is different. Really depends on how quickly you catch on and how much time you can devote to it. Most people can start making money within 3-6 months and some people sooner than that.
In my case I was making cents with ads within the first month and then really started making a few affiliate sales a week about 3 months in.
If you have any interest, I highly recommend checking out my Wealthy Affiliate Review.
Thanks for reading
Brok