This post may contain affiliate links.

It’s been a little over 3 months since I started this blog, and it’s been such a fun, crazy, rollercoaster ride! (In real life, I actually hate rollercoasters. But blogging rollercoasters are awesome.) In the 3 months since I started this blog I’ve met some great people, enrolled in some awesome courses, and made a tiny bit over $276. Wait, what?! I am pretty darn excited to say in this first online income report, I have actually started to make some money with this here little blog of mine!

While $276 isn’t a lot, I am super excited about that $276. It represents countless hours of writing, reading, learning and creating. It represents many late nights, and even more early mornings. And it provides the motivation to keep going.

There are some awesome bloggers who are making $100k a month from their blogs, and while I’m obviously nowhere near that, it really inspires me. $276 isn’t enough to retire on, but the bloggers that are making $100k didn’t start off making that much money. And $276 is definitely enough to help pay some bills!

Most Popular Posts

I’ll start by sharing my most popular posts. These were the posts that drove the majority of traffic to my site. The vast majority of my traffic currently comes from Pinterest.

6 Easy Ways to Make Money From Your Smartphone

5 Things to Give Up To Get Out of Debt

Blogging Income Breakdown

Affiliate Income: $256.24

Ad Income: $19.78

Affiliate Income Broken Down

Affiliate income means that when I recommend a product or service and someone purchases or signs up using my affiliate link, I get a commission. (It doesn’t cost the buyer any extra at all.)

I only promote products and services which I truly think would benefit the readers of this blog – things like TopCashBack which offers cash rebates on online purchases, Swagbucks which is a great way to make extra money online and Ibotta which is an app that gives you cash back on your grocery purchases.

Here’s how my affiliate income looks, broken down:

FlexOffers

$118.80

FlexOffers is an affiliate network with a ton of different companies you can become an affiliate for – it’s the first affiliate network I joined and I think it’s a great choice for new bloggers who are looking for ways to monetize their blog.

Some of the services I promote through FlexOffers include:

Udemy – one of my favorite online learning providers – I have taken a ton of courses through Udemy, including courses on Social Media Management (which helped me land a pretty well-paid contract) and HTML & CSS (which helped incredibly with configuring my blog.) Courses are priced for as little as $10, which is great value!

Swagbucks – I make between $150 – $200 a month taking online surveys and Swagbucks is a site I recently started using. I really enjoy Swagbucks because it’s more than just online surveys – you can make money by performing online searches, watching videos, answering polls…

Betterment – the place I direct people who want to get started investing. Betterment is a robo-advisor which basically means that they do all of the heavy lifting for you. It’s how I started investing, and I still have an account with Betterment that I make monthly deposits into. I’ve had such a great experience with Betterment.

Amazon

$96.45

The Amazon Associates program is one of the easiest and fastest ways to monetize your blog. I have native ads installed on the blog, and I also link to products I have used and enjoyed in my blog posts. Whenever someone purchases something through my Amazon link, I get a small commission.

Shareasale

$1

I only just joined Shareasale after hearing good things about them. So far I’ve made $1 🙂

Ibotta

$40

My absolute favorite cashback app is Ibotta. I love it because they give you cash rebates for buying groceries, which is something we all do! And they’re not always brand-specific – for example, recently I got a cash rebate for buying any box of cereal, bananas, bell peppers, and onions. Plus, when you join Ibotta, you’ll get a bonus $10 – it’s really a win-win!

Ad Income Broken Down

Sovrn

$19.78

I don’t have enough pageviews just yet to join the bigger ad networks, so I joined Sovrn.

Sovrn is an awesome ad network for new bloggers because they don’t have any minimum pageview requirements and they’re super easy to set up.

If you’re a new blogger who wants to monetize your blog with ads, I recommend joining Sovrn.

What worked

Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing

I signed up for this course purely because it was created by Michelle from Making Sense of Cents, and she makes 6 figures a month from affiliate marketing. Before I enrolled in the course I hadn’t made a cent from the blog, and as you’ve seen from my first online income report, that’s not the case anymore!

What didn’t work

Joining too many Facebook blogging groups. 

I kind of went on a Facebook blogging group joining spree and it became a HUGE time suck, for little return. I’m actually planning to go through and delete myself from a lot of the groups. I’ll let you know which ones make the cut 🙂

Participating in too many link parties.

While a lot of people say this is a great way to build connections and drive traffic to your site, I haven’t had the same experience. I’ve participated in quite a few link parties and have seen extremely minimal traffic from them.

Maybe I’m just choosing the wrong link parties to join? I’m not sure… I’m still trying to figure out whether I should keep joining link parties for another month or so, or just give it up. Any feedback on link parties and whether they’ve been worth it for you is appreciated!

Goals for Next Month

Next month is going to be crazy busy. It’s Christmas, my husband is graduating from school, we’re preparing to move to North Carolina…

Because of all that, I’m not going to overextend myself on the goals.

I would like to grow my traffic (who doesn’t want that?), continue growing my blogging income, and just enjoy the holiday season with my little family. It’s my son’s first Christmas, so I can’t wait to celebrate!