January 2018 was the best month so far, in terms of traffic and income for my blog. I made over $2000 with 2000 Pinterest followers, these both numbers are a bit rounded. I actually made more – $2085.34, and the number of followers has been well below 2000 at the beginning of January.
I had such an amazing traffic growth this month that my following also increased more than in any other month since I started the blog. But the Pinterest following does not define how much traffic you will get. You will see what defines, from this post.
These details are not as important as the statement that I made this income WITH Pinterest. Of course, I used various income sources, such as ads and affiliate offers. You can see below which of them worked the best in January. But one thing is for sure, without Pinterest traffic, none of these income sources would have worked for me.
If you are about to start a blog and thinking, as a newbie, what should be your main focus for the first year – Google, Instagram, Facebook, paid ads (some newbies even think of this option!), my answer is: focus on Pinterest!
When you start a blog, most probably, you are still working full time, your blogging income is not high enough to quit, and you have a limited amount of time to spend on your blog. So, spend it wisely! Spend it for things that really work in 2018!
Later on, when your income is anyhow stable, you can try to look for additional traffic and income sources, and spend some time on other networks.
A blog or, let’s say, a money-making online business, requires a ridiculously low initial investment. With the hosting provider I used for this blog for 1 year, for example, you can start a site at the price of one coffee a month! Literally.
Then you need to invest your time and skills wisely to grow your audience and income as fast as possible, but that’s another story. I have a free 7-day course which will give you the right direction and will help you build a blog that’s not just a hobby, but an income source. But in terms of monetary investment, starting an online business or blog is certainly affordable for anyone. That’s why I always recommend people just to give it a try, put your blog live and keep going, learning. Most probably, you will fall in love with it, like most of us, bloggers did!
If you are interested to see how you can also start your blog in about 10-20 min, I have a detailed post about it here.
This post contains affiliate links to Bluehost. This means I might receive a commission if you buy their hosting using my link. For more information, see my disclosures here.
If you are looking for an affordable hosting company to start a blog, I recommend you Bluehost which is great for any blogger beginner. When you use my link to Bluehost, I receive a commission, and you get hosting + free domain name + free SSL certificate (https) at a 50% discounted price.
You can use this handy Bluehost’s tool to check whether the domain you are thinking about is available:
By the way, I recently had a chance to test Bluehost’s basic plan on my blog when I got 13.399 sessions in just one day (you’ve seen it in the screenshot in this traffic report)! It was a viral pin, at some time of the day my real-time traffic reached almost 100 users. I opened the blog from time to time to see if it was working slower than usual, but it wasn’t. Everything worked fine, so when you are buying the basic plan from Bluehost don’t worry that you’ll have any troubles getting higher traffic on some days. I had to move to another hosting plan a day ago because my traffic for January exceeded Bluehost’s basic plan about 10 times, but for a blog that’s just starting, Bluehost’s basic plan will be more than enough.
Income report for January 2018
| Mediavine | $1441.94 |
| Bluehost | $300 |
| Flexoffers | $147.2 |
| iGain | $81.25 |
| Shareasale | $0.5 |
| Dynamiads | $27.55 |
| Health Affiliate | $52.5 |
| MaxBounty | $34.4 |
| Total | $2085.34 |
TRAFFIC REPORT FOR JANUARY 2018
In January 2018 my traffic and income had the highest peak since I started the blog. I know there was a significant update Pinterest rolled out in the last week of December.
I know that some bloggers were complaining about their traffic tanking in Jan, and others, to the contrary, were very happy with traffic spikes. I was lucky to be in the group of happy bloggers, not only because of those spikes but also because I understood, that I probably have been doing something right, something that Pinterest wants me to do.
The highest traffic I had in a day was about 18,000 pageviews when one of the pins has gone into a viral wild.
After the update was fully released, traffic went a little back to normal, but it still remained higher than before the update. I hope that Pinterest has moved my account and domain into a more privileged category in terms of authority, as this will help my new pins take off faster.
Just to remind you, my Pinterest account can be considered quite small, I started January under 2000 followers and went above this number just a little by the end of the month. By the way, you can follow me here. I might come up with more Pinterest secrets soon, so don’t miss it 
I know that some bloggers (especially newbies) like to track their Pinterest reach in Pinterest analytics. My Pinterest reach has been high for a small account like mine, this January. By the end of the month, it was 5.3M. A pretty number but what really matters is how much traffic you actually received from this reach.
I’ve got 133,692 sessions in total this month. Mediavine will pay me $1441.94 for January. Simple math shows you that on average, with Mediavine bloggers have an RPM around $10.
Conclusions
- January showed me that my Pinterest game is favored by the platform so I will work with more confidence using the same strategy. The way I should work on Pinterest is clear to me like never before. I am somewhere in the middle of my Pinterest course now, guys. When I’m ready to share it with you, I’m sure you will be surprised with some of my tricks and techniques. Update: the Pinterest SEO course is here!
- I worked a lot on generating new content and new pins for older posts, this helped to increase ad income. My affiliate income is not working as good at the moment, but it is pretty clear to me, why it’s not. My blogging and money-making posts which were quite popular 6 months ago, lost their efficiency on Pinterest with time. I simply didn’t get enough traffic to those posts in January, to get significant affiliate income from them. Well, this is life. I have to focus on one thing at a time. In February my focus will be on my Pinterest course and again not as much on my affiliate offers. I’ll get to them in a couple of months, I guess.
- I figured that every blog has stages in which a certain monetization model works the best. When I started and had very little traffic, the only thing that really worked was affiliate marketing. I’m currently at the stage when ad income works better, as my traffic is high enough to work with ad networks like Mediavine. By the way, if you have a new blog and not much traffic on it yet, you can still monetize it way better with Ezoic than you could with Google Adsense. Application to Ezoic is free and you might be making 1.5-2 times more than with Adsense even on a small traffic volume.
- Last but not least: traffic matters. You can have amazing posts and products, smart sales funnels and email sequences, etc. But if you don’t drive traffic to all those goodies, there is no one to convert.
P.S. Updated on May 1, 2018
Since I figured out how to get consistent traffic from Pinterest, I decided I have to try to do it with a brand new blog and see if I use my strategies – how fast I’ll be able to get my site to a significant traffic level. So I started my second blog in Feb 2018, and the new blog momshealth.co already hit 74,000 monthly pageviews in less than 90 days! And again, almost all the traffic comes from Pinterest.
If you are interested in growing your Pinterest traffic fast, you can get yourself set up for success with my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course. It’s over 6 hours of video training packed with my personal know-hows and Pinterest hacks.
I can guarantee that at least 50% of the Pinterest tips and tricks I share with you in the course, are absolutely exclusive and you will not find them in any other Pinterest course.
If you don’t need to grow fast and don’t mind working at your 9-5 job for a lot longer, you can totally keep reading my emails and posts because I also share tons of free advice. It’s just a matter of how FAST you want to grow your blog and income.
