Blogging for Income July 2016

People, things are down.

I didn’t do a report last month.  Reasons were two-fold.

1.  It was truly depressing
2.  I was on vacation.

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Anyway, just a quick recap for you all this month.

Sessions are down to about 130k/month.

Pinterest traffic just took a nose dive for me.  When I was at just about 240k sessions — and now to be at THIS, it hurts.

Income is about half of what it was at about 4.8k

{sigh}

But frankly — that number is still pretty awesome.  I really can’t complain about earning that doing something I love.

Also, traffic is inching up, slowly.  I have tons of new back to school content that I hope will do well!

I did switch all my ad inventory over to MediaVine in June and things have been great.  It’s nice to have it all under one umbrella.  They are SO responsive and helpful.  CPM with desktop and mobile with them was around 6 bucks.  Of course, July is also a bit of a down month for ad income due to it being a new quarter.  I’ve seen it rising lately.

Affiliate income is down a bit.

BUT, the big highlight is that self-income is up! (by self-income I mean income made by products I created)

I did a book launch.  It pretty much failed.

BUT, my prenatal class is starting to take off.  I did a drastic price change in July, and at the same time I started some timers on the page.

And WOAH, they are SERIOUSLY helping.  I really think it’s the timers.  It could also be word of mouth.  From the surveys I have gotten, people are finding the book really helpful!

I’m starting to track my conversion rate for people who hit the page (btw, as far as I can tell I need to do this myself as I have yet to find an app or a plugin that finds all the sales and puts them on Google Analytics).  With the timers I’m converting at over double what I was.

I am THA-RILLED!!!!

And somehow, price changes don’t seem to have that much of an effect on the book sales.

Weird, no?

Ok, back to my book launch.  This month I launched School Mom.  I was hoping to sell 150 copies and I think I’m close to eeking out 30 copies sold. #fail

A few thoughts on my big fat flop:

1.  I just don’t think “the launch” works as well when you’re selling to moms.  It just doesn’t.  I think I ticked off a lot of my newsletter with the emails they suggest you send.  Next time I’m not going to do as much.  Besides the first few emails, they haven’t converted into sales.
2. It’s a tough time of year.  A lot of moms are holding off thinking of school for a few weeks, but since we started so early I wanted to jam in the book.
3. The book will likely continue to sell well during the back to school season.
4. I bundled it with my Family Systems and that has actually sold the best, by far.  Who knew?  That was a last-minute idea.

Anyway, that’s what’s up around here on the curls.

Oh, and I had 5 companies (you read that right — FIVE) fail to pay me for sponsored posts last month.  It’s super disappointing.  I’m not sure what to do about it, other than not write for them again.  Let me know if you have thoughts on that!

Oh, and I’m trying to decide if I should switch hosts this month.  Don’t miss my post all about how to pick a host.  I think I may suffer from “grass is greener” hosting envy.  I’m not sure I need the pressure. 🙂  I really am fine with my current host, but I always wonder if the grass is greener elsewhere….

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