Finance Blog Income Report: How I Made £1,600 in August 2020

The last (and first) blog income report I shared was back in January when ProjectFinanciallyFree.com had just turned one year old. The total monthly revenue for January was just over £300. Fast forward to August and that has increased to over £1,600. I know hearing from fellow bloggers who are just getting started that people are keen to know how other bloggers are making money. So I thought it was about time I provided another update on how things have progressed and the breakdown of where this revenue has come from.

For the last 5 months (including August) the site has consistently generated over £1k each month. I’m absolutely delighted with this. Not just with the amount but also with how consistent the site revenue is proving to be. I fully expected ad revenue to be fairly consistent but expected affiliate income to be much more erratic so that has been a pleasant surprise!

Revenue Sources

Ads – £185

Ad revenue for the site has now been sitting around the £170 – £210 range for the last 3 months. This could have been higher however I have done a bit of testing with different networks and ad placements. Currently I’m using Ezoic. If you haven’t heard of Ezoic, they are essentially a premium ad network. You can apply to join the network once you hit a minimum number of pageviews in a month (I think the minimum is 10k pageviews monthly although don’t quote me on that). You also need to already have Google Adsense running on your site to apply.

So far I’ve had a very positive experience with Ezoic – have done quite a bit of testing between Adsense and Ezoic Ads there is no question that I’m earning significantly more from Ezoic (estimate around 30% – 40% more overall). Along with the increased earnings I also utilise their speed accelerator tool which has significantly improved my page load speeds.

The great thing about the ad revenue is I know if I continue to add content to the site and grow the traffic then the ad revenue will grow along with that.

Affiliate – £1,439

I’m honestly blown away with how well the site has performed with affiliate conversions. One key aspect is how well the, what I would call ‘higher ticket’, affiliates have performed. When I started the site I assumed that any affiliate revenue would likely come from cashback site referrals and the like where it’s free to sign up and you might get £1 or £2 for referring a new customer. However the majority of this revenue has come from sources that require fairly significant investment up front. This is particularly pleasing as not only does it mean higher commission! But it also means that people reading the posts trust the content and are getting value from it.

I’m not going to provide a full breakdown of where this affiliate revenue has come from, however a look around the blog will give you a pretty good idea. I will say 99% of the affiliate income has come from financial products. With only £3 coming from Amazon affiliates. Over previous months Amazon had been generating around £20 – £30 however this was mainly from widgets in related posts which I realised was likely to the determent of the content. I’ve since removed the bulk of them and I’m unlikely to be adding them back in.

Total – £1,624

At this point the site has been live for around 19 months and I’m delighted with the revenue it’s bringing in.

Costs

This is one thing that I didn’t include in the first income report however I think it’s important to understand that there are costs associated with running a blog. For the month of August my total costs were £340. This is split between various things like hosting, software subscriptions and paid plugins for the site. I could definitely reduce costs significantly by using free software rather than paid versions. However these save me significant time so I feel it’s well worth the cost.

Traffic

In August I had just under 12k page views in total (93% from organic). I want to share my traffic numbers as I think it certainly highlights that you don’t necessarily need a ton of traffic to start making significant income from a blog. Providing you have good quality content and you are targeting the right areas, you can generate good revenue.

What’s Next?

The plan now is to simply continue creating content and hopefully continuing to grow traffic numbers over the next few months. I’m going to continue to focus on traffic from organic search. I have experimented a bit with social, mainly Pinterest, however the reality is it just doesn’t interest me and doesn’t seem to convert very well. I know some finance blogs get significant traffic from Pinterest so it’s potentially something I will revisit in the future but for now I’m 100% focused on organic traffic.

If you have stuck around this far then thanks! In terms of ongoing blog income reports I’m not likely to do another one until the income significantly changes. However if you are a fellow blogger or just thinking about starting a blog and you have any questions at all please feel free to reach out.