How I Made an Extra $1,554.67 in October 2018

Time for a round 2 update with my Mediavine earnings.

This is an earnings report on how much money this website has made for me based off of display advertising alone.

If you’ve been following my posts, you’ll know just from title alone, that I surpassed my $1,357.56 made in September 2018.

In total, I saw a 13.5% increase in revenue for October.

Not bad seeing as I didn’t publish nearly as many new articles as I had wanted to.

This is one of the beautiful things about running your own website. You can easily see a 13% raise in income without having to do much.

With that said, it’s just as easy to see a 13% decrease by doing nothing as well.

This industry is volatile and without proper attention and focus, you can easily lose what you’ve gained.

I’m going to dive more into my earnings and see how I progressed on my goals in a second here, but first, an update.

(Okay, an excuse to show off Vincent in his Halloween costume.)

Fall 2018 Update

We were invited to a wedding in Vermont this past month.

Neither Amanda nor I have ever been to Vermont so we weren’t about to turn this down.

Especially seeing as it was peak fall foliage season.

Vincent was less impressed by the colors of the trees than we were.

From Vermont, we made our way to Portland, Maine.

And no trip to Maine is complete without a lobster roll.

We were only there for 3 days, but we had to eat at the Highroller Lobster Co. twice.

From Maine, we did a brief stop over in State College, PA to visit our alma mater.

And made it home in time to take Vin trick or treating.

He was an owl.

I’m not sure he understood why people were just handing him candy, but he was totally on board.

More treats ahead!

Earnings Report: $1,554.67 in October 2018

We will just jump right to it here:

All in all, a pretty good month.

My traffic stayed fairly consistent with just a hint of growth.

The large spikes in sessions are from days that I had sent out an email to my newsletter.

Each email typically nets me an extra $50 on average.

I had a daily average RPM of $19.93. Meaning every thousand visits to my site is worth almost $20.

This was an improvement over last month, which topped off at $19.73.

While a plus, I wouldn’t exactly call it significant.

My earnings hit a high of $79.94.

Not bad! I didn’t break the $100 in a day mark yet, but this was a nice improvement over last month’s high of $64.24.

My RPM peaked at $25.11 which also beat last month’s high of $24.60.

All in all, I saw improvements across the board.

My Goals

I set the following goals for myself in the last post.

Here are some updated totals:

• Average Monthly RPM: $25.00 (Best so far: $19.93 on 11/18)
• Daily RPM High: $30.00 (Best so far: $25.11 on 11/18)
• Average Daily Earnings: $50.00 (Best so far: $50.15 on 11/18)
• Daily Earnings High: $100.00 (Best so far: $79.94 on 11/18)

I did top my goal of average daily earnings this month, but just barely. I will leave that one in there for now.

The rest still have a little ways to go. I need to see about a 20% increase on all of them to hit those numbers.

Nothing a little hard work can’t fix.

And these are big milestones I’d like to hit:

• Single Daily Visitors: 4,000, 5,000, 7,500, & 10,000.
• Monthly Earnings: $1,500, $2,500, $5,000, & $7,500.
• Monthly RPM: $20, $25, & $30

I surpassed my first milestone of topping $1,500 in a single month!

I wasn’t expecting to hit these milestones quickly, but seeing progress already has been a huge motivator.

I fell about 7 cents short of being able to cross off the first RPM goal.

I think Q4 will help me get there.

Plans to Hit My Goals

There’s no point in setting goals if you aren’t going to actively work to achieve them.

One of the easiest ways to improve your earnings with Mediavine is to simply follow their advice.

They tell you exactly what you need to work on with their Site Health box.

Here’s mine:

Most of my site is ‘Green’ which is good, but it’s not great.

They do offer a ‘Teal’ badge for when your site is stellar.

My site is pretty close to going Teal, but I still have some work to do.

Resources I Recommend

1. Mediavine

Obviously.

They’re the entire reason I’ve been able to add over $1,000 to my earnings each month.

I first started making money online back in 2005 through Google Adsense.

Display advertising was the reason why I got into this business.

I like that all I have to do is write content and get people to visit my site.

I don’t have to sell anything, link to anything, buy anything, convince anyone of anything.

I write. People visit. I get paid.

If you run a blog and have over 25k visitors per month, you need to sign up for Mediavine ASAP.

2. SEMrush

(If you sign-up for SEMRush using this link, you’ll get 14 days to try out the Pro account absolutely free!)

I credit SEMrush for helping me get my site back on track.

My traffic was in a free fall at the beginning of this year.

The tools at SEMrush helped me identify and correct a number of glaring issues with my site via the Site Audit tool.

They sent their crawlers and found thousands of errors that I had overlooked, including some of the worst possible SEO mistakes you could make.

If it wasn’t for their Site Audit, I firmly believe my site would have very few Google rankings today.

On top of that, their keyword research tools are incredible. The keywords they’ve been able to find, combined with my own personal SEO strategies, have helped propel my site back up the rankings.

Traffic continues to grow and that’s all thanks to SEMrush.

3. Wealthy Affiliate

Wealthy Affiliate is where I really got my start online.

Their completely free membership can’t be beat.

If you have an interest in making money running a website, they’ll provide you with all the tools and training you could possibly need.

You can have your own website up and running at the click of a button in 30 seconds or less.

Best of all, you can become a member there at absolutely no cost to you.

Highly recommended!

Here’s to next month!

November really kicks off the high season when it comes to digital advertising.

I am expecting (hoping) for some nice boosts in RPM this month.

I’ll be back in a few weeks time with an update for you.