How I Made $579.12 With My Blog In May (May 2023 Income Report)

I’m so excited to share my income report for May! This is my highest income report yet and I can’t wait for you to see how I made almost $600 with my blog this month.

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Why I’m sharing how I make money blogging

I actually started this blog 6 years ago when I was a senior in high school. I was looking for ways to pay for college, and I saw some posts of bloggers who were making thousands of dollars a month with their blogs.

I started my blog and worked on it for a few months, but I didn’t have any kind of strategy and gave up pretty quickly. I made a little bit of money from it here and there that was definitely helpful in college, but nothing major.

Fast forward to January 2022, I had just graduated from college with a degree in Entrepreneurship and I really wanted to get back into treating my blog like a business to see if it could work. I was researching blogging tips to try to get a strategy going and stumbled across a girl my age who was making upwards of 40k PER MONTH with her blog.

I took her courses, and after just over a year of applying some strategies and treating my blog like a business, here I am starting to make consistent income with my blog!

I’ve found reading other people’s income reports (especially in the early stages) to be SO helpful in keeping me motivated and giving me and idea of what to expect when it comes to my own blog. Especially with how quickly income can increase month by month once your blog starts gaining traction.

So, I want to document my own journey to show my progress and to show others that making money with a blog is possible!

Previous Income Reports

Like I said before, I didn’t make very much money from my blog for a while because I gave up on it and was hardly posting. So the lack of growth with my previous income reports is because of that! But I wanted to include my previous income reports because it might be helpful to track the progression.

December 2017: $4.25 (2,030 pageviews)

January 2018: $6.02 (3,323 pageviews)

February 2018: $4.79 (3,345 pageviews)

July 2018: $80 (3,460 pageviews)

March 2023: $42.96 (11,505 pageviews)

April 2023: $191.51 (22,240 pageviews)

May 2023 Income Report

I am literally MINDBLOWN that I more than TRIPLED my income in one month. I think that really shows the earning potential of having a blog! Things can increase so fast.

In May 2023 I made $579.12 with my blog. Here’s the breakdown of how I made the money.

*disclaimer- I won’t actually get this money deposited into my account for a 30-60 days, but I find it the most useful to see how much money can be made when compared to pageviews, so that’s why I’m showing the money in the month that I made it and not necessarily the month that I GOT it.

Amazon Affiliates: $373.31

Ezoic Ads: $205.81

Total Income: $579.12

I cannot explain how excited I am to have made this much money with my blog this month. Finally enough to pay my rent! I am mind-blown that I made rent with completely passive income. That is crazy to me and I’m very grateful.

May 2023 Traffic Breakdown

Total Pageviews For May: approx. 43,000

The reason I had to estimate my pageviews is because, as you can see in the chart, my Google Analytics completely stopped tracking for a few days. Thankfully I managed to fix it, but that’s the reason for the discrepancy in the pageviews.

I almost doubled my pageviews this month again! I had some seasonal content do really well and I’m very happy about that.

Pinterest Followers: 1.05K

Pinterest Monthly Impressions: 2.3M

I increased my monthly impressions on Pinterest by more than a million in one month. Wild! And I also finally hit 1,000 followers.

Expenses: Hosting $13.86

There aren’t very many overhead costs when it comes to blogging. The only thing I’ve paid for this year is my hosting which breaks down to be $13.86 per month. I paid $166.87 for the entire year and I’ve already made it all back!

How Did I Do It?

My pageviews really exploded in May. From April to May my pageviews nearly doubled from 22,024 to somewhere around 43,000.

The biggest factor in my increase in pageviews was seasonal content. I’ve been writing seasonal content for this time of year since January hoping it would bring in a lot of pageviews, and it did! I had a bunch of different pins go viral which brought in most of the traffic.

This is also the culmination of a year of work and posting consistently. I’ve been posting at least once a week for over a year (for a couple months I posted less and for probably 6 months I posted twice a week).

It can take a while for things to pick up when it comes to blogging, but if you just keep going, it will happen! After a year of very small consistent growth, it all pretty much exploded out of nowhere.

May Goals Update

Hit 50,000 pageviews

Unfortunately I missed this goal by like 7,000 pageviews this month. I really thought I’d hit it but I’m not going to stop trying. I’d really like to be able to hit 50K sessions to join Mediavine by the end of the summer.

Hit 2 million impressions on Pinterest

I did it! I’m very happy I was able to achieve and surpass this goal.

Hit 1,000 followers on Pinterest

I hit this goal as well! I’ve been waiting sooo long to hit this milestone so I’m happy I finally did.

Make $400

I am so ecstatic with how much money I made this month and that I surpassed this goal by almost $200! It is truly wild how much income can increase so quickly in blogging. A couple months ago I only made $42 in one month (which seemed like a lot to me at the time) and this month I made almost 14 times that.

Write 8 posts

I only wrote 6 new posts in May, but I did update a ton of old content so I’m not counting this as a fail.

June Blogging Goals

I have a feeling that June will be a bit of a slower month due to a decrease in seasonal traffic, but we’ll see! Maybe I’ll have some other posts pick up that will bring in traffic.

Hit 1.1K followers on Pinterest

I know my Pinterest screenshot from earlier shows 1.1K followers on my profile, but I’m really at 1,054 right now. This goal seems attainable but sometimes getting Pinterest followers can take a looooong time. So we’ll see!

Hit 50,000 pageviews

I think I’m going to just leave this goal on my list every month until I achieve it. Like I said I feel like June might be a lower traffic month for me than May was, but who knows. With blogging you never know when things are gonna take off!

Publish 2 posts a week

I’ve been trying to get back into posting at least twice a week, and I’ve definitely been posting more, but I miss the mark sometimes and only post 1. Hopefully I’ll be able to be consistent with posting 2 new posts a week.

Update old posts

I still have a lot of old content that needs updating for the upcoming back to school season. So I’ll definitely be working on that!