Passive Income Report February 2017

THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE READ MY DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO

Welcome to my monthly income report for February 2017!

Since October 2015, every month I publish a detailed report with all the accounts for my online businesses. On them I include the earnings and expenses, I tell a little bit about my personal experience and what new things I have been trying during this period of time. I explain as well what my future targets are and if the previous ones have been achieved or not. Why doing this?

1. It helps me to keep track of my personal finances. In any moment of time, I can look back at my reports and see what steps and results I got from determined strategies, like a log book.
2. Increase trusting. I also want to show you that I am a real person starting from the first step. There are many amazing bloggers out there reporting their incomes of thousands of dollars, but I found very little bloggers reporting low amounts of money like me. I think this can help to starters and to people who are not decided yet to start their own online business.
3. Motivation. Writing here my results will put me on that kind of uncomfortable position in which I need to demonstrate that I can go one step further instead of getting lazy and rely on excuses. My finances are open to everybody!

I know that every month I say the same, but it’s the truth. All earnings here reported are coming from Passive Income sources. I am not including any kind of outsourcing because the intention is you show you how far I can go with only passive income sources.

This is my 16th month reporting my accounts and I simply love it! I can’t believe I started blogging more than one year ago, it just feel great =)

You can have a look to some of my previous monthly income reports:

• Income Report November 2015 – $117.61
• Income Report January 2016 – $228.33
• Income Report May 2016 – $346.96
• Income Report August 2016 – $491.87
• Income Report November 2016 – $915.99

IMPORTANT THINGS GOING ON IN FEBRUARY

1. Catch Up With Work And Blog

After my trip to China in January, this month I’ve been ridiculously busy. I’ve been working a lot on my PhD Thesis and I finished and submitted it. Hooray!!

Also, I started a new job which I quite like but there are many things I need to learn about and catch up.

In terms of blogging, I spent many hours on it, but it’s worthy.

2. Change The Appearance of the Blog

If you are one of my regular readers, you noticed that in February I changed how the blog looks like. The theme is still the same (MH Magazine) which I love, but the colours, layout and a few things I wasn’t completely happy about have been modified.

The idea wasto make it clean and easy to navigate through, straight to the point. I’m very happy with how it looks like now. What do you think, do you like it?

3. New Pins and Images

I spent quite a while changing many of the images of my blog (and some more I need to do this month). The colours are now softer and nicer to look at.

Also, I modified some of my Pinterest pins to make them more “Pinterest friendly”. It hasn’t been enough time for testing, but so far the new pins are bringing more visitors to the blog.

Which style do you like more, the old one or the new one?

4. Add an SSL Certificate

Another thing I’ve been working on is on adding an SSL certificate. For those of you who don’t know what is this I will tell you that you need one.

Basically, is changing a website from http to https. The reason to do this it’s because this certificate guarantees that your website is trustworthy and safe. Last year Google announced that in 2017 websites without an SSL certificate could suffer drops in rankings. Now Google will give better rankings to https blogs.

In March I’m planning to write a tutorial on how to add an SSL certificate to your blog so stay tuned.

Content Creation

This month I created a lot of new images for my Pinterest boards and also for Twitter and Facebook.

Also, I’ve been working on a few posts which you will enjoy. Most of them have been written during the evenings after work.

This month I’ve been focused in long posts, between 1,500-2,000 words. The aim is to provide useful content, quality over quantity.

• 28 Reasons Why You Should Start Blogging In 2017
• Passive Income Report January 2017
• 9 Reasons Why You Can’t Save Money Every Month
• How to Make Passive Income with Airbnb (this is a guest post)
• How To Travel On A Budget And Save $1,320 In Your Next Trip
• 16 Ways To Make Your Life Easier in 2017

The 9 reasons why you can’t save money every month have been very successful and I’ve received really good comments, thanks! I’ll keep it up.

And now… let’s start with the interesting part. I know you are here to check out my numbers 🙂

INCOME REPORT

Google Adsense (from niche site 1): $65.47

• Previous Month: $77.03
• Difference: – $11.56

Monumetric Ads (from niche site 1): $70.49        Start with Monumetric for free if you have more than 80k pageviews

• Previous Month: $76.44
• Difference: – $5.95

PadSquad mobile ads (from niche sites 1 & 2): $79.02

• Previous Month: $69.17
• Difference: + $9.85

Paid surveys: $154.10     Read my post 7 Free Online Survey Sites To Join For Extra Cash

• Previous Month: $247.40
• Difference: – $93.30

The websites I use to generate this income are American Consumer Opinion, Swagbucks, TopCashBack, Vindale Research, Survey Downline and Qmee.

Other advertisements: $1.62

• Previous Month: $1.12
• Difference: + $0.50

Other Income:

• Bluehost: $130.00        How to start a blog with WordPress and Bluehost
• Amazon Affiliate Program: $18.48
• Other blog income: $3.27

EXPENSES

Last year I needed an upgrade for the host of my Niche Site 1. Before I was using a shared hosting with a limitation of 150 GB of transfer data, now I have my own VPS in where I have up to 5,000 GB and I can host an unlimited number of domains. 

• VPS (Host Niche Site 1): $63.00
• Other Expenses: $13.89

The initial investment for the hosting and domain name (for PIW) was done in October and this one is already running for free.

Net Total Balance: $540.23 – $76.89 = $460.74

• Previous month: $490.74
• Difference: – $30.00 (-6.1%)

February was an all right month in terms of earnings, a small drop compared to January but almost negligible (considering February has 3 days less than January, it’s even). Next month I’m expecting increasing significantly the blog earnings, let’s see!

Every month I try to spend around $100 in plugins and other useful stuff to improve my blog performance. This month I didn’t purchase anything. However, I would like to purchase ThriveLeads anytime soon. I’ve heard amazing things about it and it will help me growing my email list.

This is my 17th month reporting my accounts and it seems to keep growing little by little which make me so happy. Obviously, it’s nothing to compare with other famous bloggers, but for a starter like me, it’s considered an important milestone. I am having more than $450 profit and this is starting to be very exciting.

Imagine what would you do with an extra $460 extra per month?

The graph below shows my income and expenses since I started with my Niche Site 1 in February 2015. It seems incredible that I’ve been on this for more than one year!

The graph below shows the balance or profit which is calculated as:

Balance = Income – Expenses

January is the 6th month I am donating a part of my income to children with health issues and learning disabilities.

Since September, every month I’m sharing how much money Passive Income Wise is giving to help these families.

Income Donated This Month: 10%($460.74) = $46.07

Total Income Donated Accumulated = $280.57

Nice! One step closer to build a school in China!

TRAFFIC AND METRICS

After a few months, I am back reporting my traffic and metrics. And I do it because of you.

I received emails, comments, and even a phone call just asking to continue reporting my traffic.

I will report the metrics only from this blog.

Passive Income Wise

Since I started using Tailwind (Pinterest pin scheduler) my traffic has increased a lot. A few months I ago I barely received a few hundreds of visits, and now thousands!

I went from 3k to nearly 10k page views! 3 Pinterest viral pins brought me nearly half of the traffic this month.

The traffic sources are mainly coming from Pinterest (64%) and Direct. A couple of months ago I didn’t receive any traffic from Pinterest and this month it’s my main source of traffic thanks to Tailwind and the pin scheduler tool.

If you want to try Tailwind for free you can do it following this link (and get a $15 discount). It offers auto scheduler for 100 free pins at optimised times depending on your audience.

Organic traffic is building up month after month. I already have some long tail keywords ranking in positions 2-3 in Google.

The most visited posts during February were:

It seems that people from Pinterest like tips to make/save money, 6 out of 10 of the most visited posts are related to these categories. The favourite post is my list of more than 25 ways of saving money every month, which is a compilation of tricks I use on a daily basis to save up to $800 every month.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I  only report social media related with PIW.

Twitter. If you don’t want to miss any of my new tweets follow Passive Income Wise on Twitter

• Followers:  13,459 (+3,188)

Pinterest. Check out my new Pins by following Passive Income Wise on Pinterest

• Followers: 2,956 (+395)

Facebook. Support Passive Income Wise Liking us on Facebook or with a Friend Request.

• Likes Page: 244 (+7)

Email List.

• Subscriptions: 433 (+38)

That’s everything for this past February. I wanted to publish also my targets for the next month, but you know what? I keep it for myself for now. If for a couple of months I see that I achieve them I will share here with you 🙂

Did you like my February Income Report? Are you interested in earning income online?

If you are thinking about starting your own blog, I created a tutorial-guide that will help you start your own blog for cheap, You need very little investment, starting at only $3.95 per month (this deal is only through my link) for blog hosting. Additionally, you will get a free blog domain (valued at $12-15) through my Bluehost link, only if your purchase is for at least 12 months of blog hosting. My recommendation is for you to be self-hosted. This is important if you want to monetize your blog because your website will look more professional.

This post contains affiliate links. These products have helped me to grow my blog and to generate more passive income.