Yearly Income Report: How I Made $43,521 in 2021

Hello and welcome to the blog income report for the whole of 2021 where I made over $43521 from this blog.

If you are following this blog for some time, you know that I haven’t published income reports for a while. That is because I am a very personal man who doesn’t share much.

Then I realised how I came into this blogging world and how I brought this blog to this level. All of this started because of income reports of other bloggers who are earning good money from their blogs. I read income reports of many bloggers and thought of giving it a try from 2017 to 2018.

After a few failed blogs, I started this blog in 2019 and wrote a few detailed posts before losing motivation due to the lack of users and earnings. Then again after a year when I opened this blog in 2020 in Covid lockdowns, I saw I have made a few dollars ($5.75 to be precise). That was not a huge amount but it was enough to raise my spirits to get going.

After telling you all this, I will be lying if I say money is not a major motivation for me to run this blog.

If the thought of earning money gave me motivation, I thought why not share my story with my readers who might get inspired to start their own blog and one day they will be sharing their story and will be thanking me like I now thank Ben and Hubber from Dollarsprout.com and Michell from makingsenceofcents.com.

This is the sole reason I am sharing this income report with you so that you can have your own side hustle.

The Income Breakdown: $43,521

To say that it was a wild year for this blog will be an understatement. I never expected to make a full-time income from this blog. I was aiming for more like a few hundred to thousand dollars as a side hustle.

But this blogging world has a lot of surprises for you if you are ready for them and are willing to take the first step.

SOURCE	AMOUNT
Adsense Ad Income	$19204
Affiliate Income
Impact	$12591
Flexoffers	$11558
Others	$168
TOTAL	$43521

The major source of income has been ads by Adsense. While on the web I read reviews that Google AdSense pays the lowest, my experience has been good with them after initial hiccups. I am regularly getting around 100rpm with them which is more than double the best network recommended by other bloggers.

In my opinion major reason for the high conversion rate might be due to the high quality of traffic that is coming mostly from the US through google search. I might be lucky in other things in the sense that I chose a theme that is perfect for their ad serving and my content keywords where I rank for bringing in high CPC (my average is above 2).

This suggests that what works for others might not work for you and vice versa. So before jumping on the gun try for yourself.

For affiliate income, Inboxdollars, Stash and Acorns affiliate programs are the best performers for me.

Right now I am not making any money from the audience that comes for blogging related posts, mostly because I am right now super focused on the growing authority of my website in side hustle niche. After maybe 25-30 posts I will start giving more attention to the blogging sub-niche and then the next targets will be to start generating income from web host affiliate networks.

Income Proof:

Here are the screenshots of two major affiliate networks that I am part of.

Impact:

Flexoffers:

Blog Expenses for 2021

SOURCE	AMOUNT
Blog Hosting	$672
Courses	$55
Pro theme	$75
Canva Pro	$60
TOTAL	$862

Blog Stats for Year 2021

Traffic:

As I said earlier, most of the traffic is from Google search and 10% is from Pinterest. My last year target was to take Pinterest traffic higher but I only managed to take it up to 2500 users per month even after taking the Pinterest strategies course by Carly. Though it’s not her fault, I decided to publish 5 new pins every day, but I am able to publish only 2-3 every day.

Hopefully, I will be able to reach this target soon.

Overall, google traffic is growing steadily. Plus point is that initial traffic in March to August was a majority from one or two posts. Now traffic is more evenly distributed through the posts, which means a lesser risk of losing all the traffic overnight.

Over the last few months, multiple posts have started ranking, which hopefully will convert into more traffic. In addition, domain authority is also increasing which makes it easier to rank for new keywords.

Targets for the new year are to churn out at least 10 posts every month or more and hire someone to help with writing. Although thanks to doing a lot of writing in Ph.D., writing comes easy for me, I am not able to spend the required time on the laptop as I am staying home with my one-year-old kid, who demands entertainment :p.

To Conclude

Here you go… This was the summary of my blogging journey in 2021. Hopefully, you will find this post useful and will give a thought about starting your own blog or working hard and smarter to grow your blog if you already have one.

If you are ready to start your journey, you know what to do.

Go to this step-by-step guide to starting your own blog in half an hour learning from my experience.

For any questions, just drop a question below or mail me.

See you soon in the next post..