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Time for my March 2017 Online Income Report – that came around fast!

The months sure are flying by – my little guy turns ONE this month. Can’t believe that I have a toddler – where did that tiny baby boy go?!

If you’re new to The Million Dollar Mama, each month I document my blog progress, including my income, and what did and didn’t work.

I published my first online income report in November 2016 (my blog was just a baby at the time – only 3 months old.)

I didn’t make much money ($276) but I was really excited – it showed me that it really is possible to make money from blogging.

I also think it’s nice to be able to see my progress from the beginning. If you want to read my first ever online income report, you can read it here.

Thinking about starting your own blog? Join my free 7-day eCourse and I’ll show you how.

Most Popular Posts

In March 2017, I published 11 posts.

The most popular posts (that I published in March) were:

10 Amazing Benefits of Rosehip Oil

How to Use Your Admin Skills and Become a Virtual Assistant

5 Smart Reasons to Open a Savings Account for Your Kids

Why Do I Share My Online Income Report?

People often ask why I share my online income reports?

I think Pat Flynn was one of the first people to start sharing his online income reports. After Pat started sharing his online income each month, a lot of bloggers started doing it. And I read every single one I could find. I found it so inspiring, and I thought to myself, “Why not me?”

My goal in sharing my online income reports is to inspire you, and make you think “Why not me?” Because really, there is no reason why you can’t make money online, if you put your everything into it. I don’t have a journalism degree. I’m not a reality TV star who cashed in on my sudden fame (maybe I will be one day, haha!)

I’m just a normal person – a mom, wife, gym junkie, and personal finance nut, who decided that I wanted to share my knowledge and thoughts with the world. I know it sounds cliche, but if I can do it, so can you.

March 2017 Online Income Report

This is solely money made from my blog. This doesn’t include any other income sources, including freelancing, sales, investments, etc.

Total Online Income March 2017:

In March 2017 I made a total of $5680.50. This is the most I’ve ever made in one one month in my entire life, even when I was working full time. It’s still mind-blowing to me that I’m able to make that much money from my blog while getting to spend every day at home with my little man.

Blog Income Broken Down

Affiliates: $4979.36

The majority of my income comes from affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is an excellent way to make a passive income on your blog. You do need to learn the ins and outs of how to be a successful affiliate marketer (there’s a bit more to it than just putting a banner up in your sidebar) but once you’ve gotten a handle on it, it’s such a great way to make money.

I’ve taken a few affiliate marketing courses but the one I highly recommend is Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers – Everything You’re Missing by Carly Campbell.

Carly is a highly skilled affiliate marketer who makes a LOT of money from affiliate marketing on her mommy blog (so she’s not someone who only makes money blogging about blogging!)

Ads: $701.14

I mentioned last month that I had been accepted into a larger ad network. This was my first full month of being with Mediavine and as you can see, it’s been a big boost. Mediavine does have traffic requirements, which I believe is 30k sessions per month.

I teach all of the strategies I used to rapidly increase my eBook, Blog Traffic Breakthrough. I’ve priced the eBook super low to make it in reach financially for more people, but given that your income will drastically increase once you reach the requirements for Mediavine or AdThrive, the eBook will pay for itself!

Expenses

Even though blogging is a low-cost business to run compared to almost all other businesses, there are some expenses that I incur. Besides setting aside 30% of my income for taxes, here are my expenses:

Hosting – $0

Now that I have higher pageviews, I host my blog through Siteground. I absolutely love Siteground and am incredibly happy with the service they provide. I pay for my hosting upfront so there is no monthly cost.

Convertkit – $79

I recently switched from Mailchimp to Convertkit for my emails, and I couldn’t be happier. You’ve probably heard bloggers raving about Convertkit and for good reason – it’s awesome. Convertkit was created for bloggers BY bloggers, so they know exactly what bloggers want and need.

Since I joined Convertkit, my email open rate went up from around 20% to almost 50%. That’s a HUGE jump and I couldn’t be more excited about it.

Jaaxy – $49

Jaaxy is the keyword research tool I use, and it’s worth it’s weight in gold. I get about half of my traffic from organic search (Google) which is awesome, because I’m not solely at the mercy of Pinterest. Additionally, organic search traffic is more valuable both in terms of ad income and affiliate conversions.

The cost of Jaaxy might seem steep, but it’s an investment that I believe is essential – keyword research is SO important.

I’ve included a handy widget below so you can get a feel for Jaaxy for free.

Boardbooster – $10

I do a combination of manual pinning (thanks to this awesome eBook) and scheduling through Boardbooster. I’ve used different scheduling tools but I’ve come back to Boardbooster. I find it the easiest to use by far, and it’s essentially a set-and-forget system for the most part (although nothing related to blogging is truly 100% set-and-forget.)

Milotree – $9

The Milotree app is a little popup that slides in from the side of the screen. You can connect it to various social media accounts like Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram to increase your followers. I’ve been using Milotree solely for Facebook. I do nothing at all to promote my Facebook page besides using Milotree and my Facebook likes grow by around 30-35 people per week, thanks to Milotree. You can get a free 30-day trial of Milotree here.

BLOGGING COURSES I RECOMMEND

I truly believe that investing in my blogging education and viewing my blog like a business is a large reason for my success. I’m somewhat of a course junkie, which means that I’ve taken a LOT of blogging courses. These are the top blogging courses I recommend:

Billionaire Blog Club – the best all-inclusive blogging course I’ve ever taken. Billionaire Blog Club is packed so full of resources, courses and information that it really should be sold at 5x the price.

One of the features that makes Billionaire Blog Club stand out from other courses is that Scrivs (Paul Scrivens) the creator of the course has started a Slack community where you can chat to him in realtime. He is so generous with his help, advice and information and it’s awesome having someone so successful there to answer any questions you have about blogging.

You can join his free 12-Day Blogging Bootcamp here to get a feel for his teaching style (which personally, I love.)

Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers: Everything Your’e Missing – I already spoke about this affiliate marketing courses earlier in the post, so scroll up if you missed that. It’s an in-depth course by an affiliate marketer who makes a ton of money on her mommy blog.

Pinterest Improvement Masterplan (PIMP) –  this is an advanced Pinterest course by PotPieGirl. Jennifer from PotPiteGirl has been making money online for many years and Pinterest is one of her specialities. PIMP is like no other Pinterest course I’ve taken. The information she shares is mind-blowing, and will change the way you look at Pinterest.