How I Made $3,950 in May 2018 Blogging [Monthly Income Report]

This article contains affiliate links.

Welcome to my monthly income report. I publish these online income reports to share not just the revenue from my blog and freelance writing business, but also the mistakes, lessons and new projects.

Make sure you check out all my income reports.

Read on to see what’s been going on over the past month. Hopefully, this will inspire you to add a new income stream to your business, start a profitable blog, make your first money freelancing, or simply work on a new business idea.

If you haven’t started a blog yet, make sure you enroll in my free course Launch Your Profitable Blog:

What Happened in May 2018 on My Blog and in My Business

Joining Mediavine Publishing Network

I stayed away from displaying ads on the site for years. However, I believe we should all test different blog monetization methods in order to find what works best for our audience, skills, content, etc.

So I decided to sign up with Mediavine – a reputable publishing network that’s collaborating with some pretty big names in different industries.

In terms of traffic, other publishing networks usually require a website to hit 100,000 monthly views. With Mediavine, however, it could be 30,000, which means I could apply.

I did that and my application was approved. After which people from the company started reaching out with welcome emails and next steps.

This is a serious collaboration as it requires me to keep the ads for at least 3 months in order to test them and see the full potential of the site in terms of making revenue through ads.

They also have some detailed guides on what a blogger should do before the guys from Mediavine place ads on the new website.

That might mean removing some plugins, changing the settings of others, displaying your content in a way that’s easier for the reader and for ads to appear, etc.

They usually require sites to have a sidebar, but they made an exception as I still want the focus to be on the content of the page. That means the ads on Let’s Reach Success are in-content and show up after a certain number of paragraphs.

They aren’t pushy, are customized well and are from trusted partners. I saw them myself, and as someone who’s always had a minimalist-looking blog, I liked how they look. So I’m keeping them to see where this goes.

Working on New Courses

I recently mentioned I’d soon create my first paid course. After falling in love with Teachable as an incredible way to create courses that look stunning and professional, and after releasing my free course How to Make Your First Money Online Freelancing, I set on a mission to decide the topic of my first paid course.

The new one is about Productivity. 

Why? Because it’s one of the first ever things I improved in my life that allowed me to do so much more. I might even say it’s the reason I was able to start an online business, move to another country, and now double my income.

Getting more done, ditching procrastination, eliminating distractions and finding focus, prioritizing, tracking, saving time… All this is something I’ve changed in my life through a ton of researching and experimenting. 

And because I write less on the topic but have covered it in details in the past (even have 2 books on it), I decided to pack all the knowledge I have about Productivity and Time Management and turn it into an online course.

I already created the homepage for it on Teachable, collected some old content that I’ll update, and made a plan on some of the steps I will have to take next. It’s a ton of work but it’s worth it.

It won’t be released just yet as this time I want to go the extra mile and launch not just another digital product of mine, not just yet another course on Productivity, but the ultimate resource that includes anything and everything you need to know about getting stuff done in less time.

Stay tuned!

Making The Most of Teachable

As you might have heard, I’m now a big fan of Teachable – my favorite place online to take courses and create your own ones.

It all started when I purchased my first paid online course – Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing (here’s my super detailed review of it).

Then, that inspired me to create my own course and provide value in a new way. That’s how How to Make Your First Money Online Freelancing was born and I see new students enrolling every day.

As I’m now working on my next courses, free and paid, I also decided to use more of the wonderful features that Teachable offers.

When you get to the numbers of this income report, you’ll notice a new monthly expense. That’s $39 for Teachable as I signed up for their basic plan.

Here are some of the benefits if you’re wondering:

The one I needed, in particular, was Integrated email marketing.

I noticed that every time a student signed up, the system saved their email and I could even reach out and let them know about other courses. So it would be great to have these people on my actual email list here at Let’s Reach Success.

With the new Teachable paid plan, I connected Mailchimp and Teachable and now each student is also signed up to my newsletter.

Another cool feature I will use some time this year or the next one is Affiliate marketing.

As I’m about to launch my first paid course, one of the strategies to promote it might be to have affiliates. Teachable handles all that for me and gives them unique codes, a dashboard to track their sales, and much more.

How Bloggers Can Make $10,000/Month from Home

Decided to write more about the big picture of making money blogging. Many people just starting out in online business get discouraged looking at the stories of all these bloggers earning 10K/month. But they too started from $0 in blog profits and got to where they are today the hard way.

I calculated my earnings from the last 3 months and made a list of what I did differently to double my income since the beginning of the new year. Together with that, I shared what it really takes to get to making $10,000/month from your blog. 

Check out How Bloggers Can Make $10,000 a Month from Home

GDPR Compliance

Whether you’re an online business owner, have a blog or are just an Internet user, you might have received multiple emails from apps and brands you’ve subscribed to about the updates in their privacy policies. That’s because one of the biggest changes in the last 20 years related to data privacy is happening right now – General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

It concerns site owners based in Europe (like me) or those outside of Europe but who receive traffic from there (which, let’s face it, is almost any platform online). So we have to make certain changes in order to meet the requirements.

In a nutshell, GDPR is about giving greater protection to website visitors, being careful with the personal information site owners gather and letting indiv