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Feeling Stuck as a Blogger (Plus May Income Report)

By
Industry Observer with About Social Anxiety

Have you ever felt stuck with your blog or website? If so, this post is for you. I feel you! That's where I am right now. And it's not even that I'm not making progress. It's that I'm stuck in this limbo between needing to do freelance work to earn income and wanting to work on my blog to develop passive income.

I know the answer is to just keep plodding along with my blog while working the regular job, but man it's hard sometimes! For those who don't know, my day job involves writing articles for Verywellmind.com as well as editing Academic journal articles for Cactus Communications. Honestly, the writing is fine: I'm paid well and it doesn't take more than 3 days a month. It's the editing that is draining me! Cactus changed our pay schedule last fall, and since then I'm making less money for the same amount of work. Can you say lack of motivation?

Anyway, this post isn't about my day job, but more about how I'm at that teetering point of wanting to work on my blog but being stuck in the day job. And yes, I'm still a real estate investor! But that really takes none of my time.. it takes my initiative (more on that in the future).

Anyway, this week I thought I would write an update on some things I'm doing on my site as well as post an "income report" for May. Honestly, I'm doing this mostly for myself but maybe it will help you too. I feel like I should be writing this all down somewhere, but my blog doesn't feel like the right place.

Facebook Ads

I did a little test run of a Facebook Ad to see how it would go (it's part of what I'm supposed to do for Elite Blog Academy, which is the course that I am taking). I spent $2 a day for a few days and got about 20 subscribers. So that was good, but I can't keep paying to get people to sign up! I needed to find a better way.

Tripwire Product

I decided that if I was going to run ads, I needed to have a product to sell that might help to offset the cost of paying for ads. I already had this cognitive-behavioral workbook for social anxiety that I'd created so I decided to put that up for sale on Teachable and then offer it as a tripwire after someone signed up for my email list. Outcome? I made one sale! Now, I'm not running off to the Bahamas anytime soon. I'm selling the ebook for $10 and the tripwire offer is for $5. After fees and whatnot, I get about $3. But... if I could scale that somehow. If you want to learn more about tripwires, I suggest checkout out Kara Fidd's website simplifyingdiydesign.com. She's awesome.

Working on SEO

I have to admit, my first love is SEO and Google. I really feel like my people are out there on Google and I just need to reach them. It could be the 10 years I've spent working for About.com (rebranded as Dotdash), but I really believe in the power of SEO. It seems like a lot of bloggers write it off as impossible to rank high in Google. I KNOW that it's possible! I rank in the number one position for SO many of the keywords that I'm trying to tap into now... but unfortunately they are for Verywell and not my own site. I'm literally trying to outrank myself (I can write more on that another time).

Income Report for May

I'm not sure why I feel the need to do this? I've heard people say that mental health bloggers shouldn't share income reports because it's like telling your customers how you've made money off them. Quite honestly, I haven't really made any money yet. Maybe I will feel differently about this down the road. Right now, I think this is a good practice for me to track how I'm doing. Plus.. if I ever figure this out, I'd love to show my readers the way. 

So here we go! Forgive me if this is very basic. It's a start. If I've used a "~" sign it means I didn't check at the end of the month and it is approximate.

May STATS:

Pageviews: 5755

Sessions: 4470

Users: 3895

Mailing List Subscribers: ~365 

Pinterest Followers: ~316

Facebook Followers: ~4794

Twitter Followers: ~2977

Instagram Followers: ~88 (I don't post to Instagram yet)

Posts published: 9

For example: Best Vitamins for Anxiety

(The following are according to SEMRUSH)

Organic search: 123 

Backlinks: 185

Organic keywords: 297

May INCOME:

Advertising (Media.net): $1.86

Advertising (Infolinks): $0.60

Amazon: $0

Products: $0 (I did not actually have my product for sale yet)

Total income: $2.46

Monthly expenses:

Email: $0 (I'm switching from Mailerlite to Convertkit so there will be a charge next month)

Tailwind: $14.99 

Keysearch: $13.60 (This is how I find my keywords for SEO - totally worthwhile!)

Active Rain: $39 (Why am I paying for this when I have no income? I'll write about that in a future post)

Total expenses: 

I also invested in some courses this month but I won't include those here. They were Debbie Gartner's off-page SEO book and Jennifer Maker's List Love. I had previously purchased Debbie's on-page SEO and Jennifer's Pinterest Launch Plan.

Phew! I think that's enough for now. 

Net blog income: -$67.59.

So basically, right now this is a moderately expensive hobby.

Well, that wraps it up! I think my point with this point was to show how difficult blogging is at the beginning. I've read so many success stories that I'm not giving up, but when you're caught between doing paying work and doing things you love that don't pay... well it's just hard. Hopefully, it all starts to swing in a positive direction.

 

 

Comments (1)

John Pusa
Glendale, CA

 Arlin Cuncic very good post about blogger and May income report.

Jun 12, 2019 03:10 PM