My Blog Income Report: December and January 2026
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My Blog Income Report: How I Made My First $9.25
The last two months have been… interesting, to say the least.
Back in November, I ended the month with about $9.25 in blog income from Amazon Associates. That may sound tiny (because it is), but it was my first money ever from blogging, so I was genuinely excited.
Fast forward two months, and things took a bit of a turn.
I completely forgot to write an income report in December! And honestly? That’s because I was discouraged… December 2025 closed out with a whopping $5.93 in earnings. Yep! Down from $9 to $5.93… When you’ve been working hard and staying consistent, that kind of drop can feel really disappointing.
For context, I’ve been blogging for about five months total. During that time, I also had to completely move my site off Squarespace, which, if I’m being very honest, I would not recommend if your goal is to make money from blogging.
Squarespace is fun and easy to use, but it is not SEO friendly in the way a money making blog needs to be. You don’t truly own your domain the same way you do on self hosted platforms, and Google essentially sees your site as part of Squarespace rather than as its own independent authority. That makes ranking much harder.
So when I migrated my blog, a lot of the work I had already done basically went to waste.
The month I earned $9.25 was actually after I fully transferred my site. Everything I built before that, traffic, momentum, structure had to be rebuilt from scratch. I also had to remove the “/blog/” from my URLs because while it’s not the worst thing for SEO, it’s also not ideal. That meant reuploading posts, fixing links, and restructuring everything.
Long story short, I had to start over…
december 2025 stats (the discouraging month)
So back to December, when I earned $5.93.
Here’s what that looked like:
- 7 total sales
- 1 refund, which was deducted
- 0.29% conversion rate
- 20 blog posts published
Every one of my posts includes affiliate links, but I don’t obsess over prices or pushing products. My main focus is always if the content is actually helpful for the reader. I trust that the money will compound over time.
That said, I wasn’t super happy with the content I wrote in December. A lot of it was very Pinterest heavy and seasonal, which is tricky when you’re a new site. Seasonal posts might spike briefly, but then traffic dies off, and you’re left with content that only performs once a year.
At this point, about 25% of my site is seasonal, which isn’t ideal. That realization made me decide to shift gears.
Going forward, I’m focusing on evergreen content for at least my next 100 posts. Seasonal content can come later, once the site has more authority.
Even though my original goal was to write daily, the holidays happened… Life happened… And honestly, for a month where motivation was low, 20 posts isn’t terrible.
january 2026: confidence coming back
January is where things started to feel better again.
I only wrote 9 blog posts in January, but I also experimented heavily with Pinterest. I had been manually creating pins, five per post, and scheduling them, which took forever. Anytime I stopped posting, my traffic completely tanked. When I got sick and missed a few days, my views fell off hard.
That’s when Pinterest started to feel… exhausting.
I discovered Metricool and decided to try batch posting. It costs about $23/month, and for batching alone, I actually think it’s worth it. I spent two full days creating pins and posted 20 pins per day for a week.
Something interesting happened…
Two pins took off (at least by my standards), hitting around 5,000 impressions each. My Pinterest monthly views jumped to about 16–17K, which was exciting, especially because it happened right when I felt like giving up.
And then… I stopped posting entirely.
Here’s the weird part: my analytics stayed steady.
I’ve been sitting around 16.9K monthly views for weeks without posting anything new. That honestly made me question whether Pinterest is worth the effort for me. My outbound clicks are still low, around 100 per month and the workload just doesn’t feel proportional to the payoff.
I’m not saying Pinterest doesn’t work. I’m saying I don’t love it as a strategy right now, especially doing it myself!
Some of this might come down to outdated Pinterest advice. The blogging course I took was incredible but the Pinterest side of things felt more like theory than real, repeatable results.
what is working
The blogging course I took, By Sophia Lee was genuinely amazing. It’s the only blogging course I’ve taken, and I truly believe it gave me everything I needed to get started.
I also leaned heavily on ChatGPT to help plan keyword clusters, which has been a game changer.
On top of that, I found a really helpful creator on YouTube, She Knows SEO who shared great insights about site speed, clustering, and structuring content for growth. Her advice really reinforced my decision to move away from random topics and focus on intentional clusters.
one thing I almost forgot (but honestly changed everything)
One thing I have to mention, because it made a bigger difference than I expected is manual indexing and internal linking.
I went back into Google Search Console, clicked Pages → Indexed, and actually checked which posts were showing up in Google. When I did that, I realized something kind of scary, about 40 of my blog posts weren’t indexed at all!
That means Google literally wasn’t showing them. They basically didn’t exist.
If you’re new, it can take a long time for Google to naturally find your content. Waiting around for that to happen puts you at a disadvantage. Manually indexing your posts gets your foot in the door much faster.
So I went through and indexed every single important blog post manually.
At first, indexing took weeks. Now? Most of my posts index in five minutes. That’s a huge sign that Google is starting to trust my site. So if you’re not doing this yet, please go check because you could be writing posts that Google hasn’t even seen.
The second thing I did before reindexing was fix my internal links.
When you’re new, you don’t have much to link to, so a lot of early posts end up isolated. I went back and made sure every blog post had internal links to other posts on my site.
- Some already had 2 links naturally
- Others had none
For the ones that didn’t, I added 3–6 internal links from related posts.
This helps Google understand your site structure and keeps readers on your site longer. Someone reads one post, clicks another, then another, that’s exactly what you want.
I can’t say for sure that this is the reason my sales improved, but I genuinely feel like it’s helping. Even with lower traffic, I’m seeing more consistent conversions, which tells me the traffic I’m getting is better.
I still personally index every core blog post and make sure it’s internally linked. I don’t do this as aggressively for income reports since they aren’t a core part of my content, but for main evergreen posts, I absolutely do.
If you take anything from this post, let it be this:
make sure your content is indexed and connected.
current focus and goals
Right now, my only real focus is content.
No backlinks
No Pinterest stress
No shiny distractions
Just content!
My goal is 300 blog posts, with no strict deadline. Ideally, I want to publish 1-2 posts per day. These days, it takes me about 4 hours to write a solid article from start to finish. When I first started, one post could take two or three days. That improvement alone feels huge.
I’m currently at 104 blog posts, which I’m really proud of.
Technically, my site is only about three months old in its current form, since I rebuilt everything from scratch. So yes, this blog is still a baby. But I’m starting to see movement.
My sessions dropped from 1.2K to 596, yet I earned more?. I’m also seeing fewer bot heavy international views and more traffic from the U.S. and relevant countries. Even with fewer views, my sales improved—which is honestly exciting.
My long term goal is $6,000/month from blogging. Right now I’m at $16 total for January, so… only a few thousand to go, but I’m optimistic. This is how it starts. 🙂 lol
I’m committed. I’m sticking with my posting schedule, and I’ll keep sharing these income reports even when the numbers are small because this is the real process!
If you’re reading this and feeling discouraged, keep going! Tiny wins still count, and I’ll see you next month.
