Welcome to the first ever Foxy Folksy Monthly Income Report!!! But before we begin, a little background about me and  Foxy Folksy.

I started Foxy Folksy in January 2014 as a hobby after moving to Germany in mid 2012 to join my husband, Armin. With little prospect of finding a job due to my limited German skills, I thought to make myself busy by setting up a blog, thus, Foxy Folksy was born. I created Foxy Folksy from scratch all by myself, from research to set up and design and it has seen a lot of changes along the way, and no, I didn't (still don't) have special computer skills. I just learned and pick up what I needed (from Google) as I go.

Then on April 2015, I got a regular job in an electronics company. I was in charge of their Logistics, which is very interesting but also a challenging job so Foxy Folksy has to take a back seat. It has remained a hobby until now...but all that is about to change.

Just recently, Armin and I decided to take Foxy Folksy to the next level and maybe try to earn (serious) money from it. This means I have to give up my job to give my 101% attention to Foxy Folksy and so I have to say goodbye to my colleagues this coming end of October.

A GLIMPSE FROM THE PAST

I started adding ads in my blog early on thinking I could at least break-even with the cost of maintaining my blog which mainly was the web-hosting with Hostgator. The first one I applied for was Google Adsense since it was the easiest to apply for even for new blogs. This year I started applying for other Ad networks, below is a table showing how Foxy Folksy was doing on previous months.

Below are the numbers for the month of September:

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and all of the products listed below are products and services I have personally used or still using.

INCOME:

• Adsense - $122.74
• Gourmet Ads - $79.58
• Sovrn - $30.89
• Swoop - $2.01

Total Income: $233.21

EXPENSES:

• Hostgator - $11.84
• Boardbooster - $5.00
• Monthly Giveaway - $25.00

Total Expenses: $41.84

NET INCOME: $191.37

TRAFFIC:

These are actual screenshots from Google Analytics:

TRAFFIC SOURCES:

FINAL THOUGHTS...

I was only able to make 3 blog post for the month of September but I am relieved that my total pageviews were still up by more than 10,000 from the previous month. Thanks to all the post I did in the past years that keep the traffic flowing. But I know that if we want to raise Foxy Folksy's income, we have to really work hard on increasing our pageviews. So the first order of business once I become 'full time' blogger is to increase the number of monthly post, posting at least 2-3 times a week.

As you can see, the main source of Foxy Folksy's pageviews came from google/organic search. It means that I got some pageviews when someone searched for a word in Google (usually a recipe) and one of my posts came up in their search and they clicked on my URL and these clicks were coming from my old posts. So the more post I have the more chances of getting more pageviews in the future as well.

Pinterest is also one of our top sources for driving traffic to Foxy Folksy and last June, I  started using BoardBooster for automated scheduling of pins to various boards to Foxy Folksy's Pinterest Page and I've seen a continuous growth in traffic and Pinterest followers. Once I have the time, I plan to maximize this tool further.

Armin and I also thought of working on building Foxy Folksy's Mailing List. We started an experiment last April to have monthly giveaways where anyone who has subscribed to Foxy Folksy's newsletter are eligible to win. It seems to be working  as evident by the jump on Foxy Folksy's email subscriber from 42 in April to 364 in September.

So that's it for now and thanks for taking the time to check out our first monthly income and traffic report!

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Thinking of starting your own blog, you may want to visit my blog post on How To Start A Blog with a checklist of the things you should know before actually creating one and How to create a Blog for the step-by-step procedures on building your blog. You may also want to check out my Resource Page for the tools you need for your blog.