6th Month Blogging – Income Report for Art Blog

Howdy, howdy howdy.

In late February (early March) of 2022, I started a brand new baby blog.

The baby blog is in the art/drawing niche. (Name to be revealed later)

Initially, I assumed it was pretty low-competition so I thought it would be a cinch entering it.

But there is only so much research you can do before you start a blog.

Once you start a blog, and you start writing about different topics, you begin to actually get a good understanding of the niche and who’s dominating it.

I realized that there are HUGE drawing blogs that have paid artists to create 10-20 blog posts for them daily.

I cannot even in a million years compete with that.

It doesn’t matter if the drawing is crap, they’ve managed to push out tons and tons of posts that have covered drawing almost every possible thing.

This means, that there is very little wiggle room for me to make my mark.

Now, I know that my art is slightly unique and I have 1 advantage – I don’t sound like a robot.

I’m an actual human being that does my own drawings and breaks down those drawings for kids and adults in a very simple way.

I also write like how I talk – this I’m hoping is my number 1 advantage.

But only time will tell.

Because as you all know, it takes at least 6-8 months (sometimes more) to actually start seeing traffic growth. 

I started this blog for 3 reasons:

• I honestly love drawing and it really helps me create fun content (for days I don’t feel like blogging on www.mindspacecafe.com)
• This makes an excellent case study for 2022 (to see how long it takes for a niche blog to grow)
• I want to grow a blog with you (it would be weird for me to advise you on blogging without doing it myself on a non-business-related blog)

And in this post, I want to talk about my earnings and traffic in my 6th-month blogging.

This will give you a relatively good idea of how much a new blog earns within 6 months in the creative niche.

Before I proceed, please read these posts if you’re new to my blog:

• 20 Frequently asked questions in blogging
• How long does it take to get organic traffic? + My case study with my new blog
• How I started my money-making niche blog + how you can start one too

Alrightey, that being said, let’s move on.

But first, here’s a free blog planner from my side so you can keep up with my weekly newsletters (I provide lots of helpful nuggets of wisdom related to blogging).

This post includes affiliate links to products I truly (from the bottom of my heart) recommend, meaning at no extra cost to you, I may earn a small percentage which I will use to buy my poor dogs food.

6 Months Blogging Income Report for my New Niche Blog

In August (Month 6), I wrote a total of 15 blog posts for the new website and in total, I had 97 blog posts on the website.

I was averaging 15-20 posts each month.

I did want to hit 100 posts by month 6 but life got in the way – I was traveling non-stop and I did infact get burned out – hard.

Here’s my traffic for the whole month of August:

Organic traffic for month 6:

So, here are my stats for Month 6:

• Total pageviews for Month 6: 4,284
• Total posts written for Month 6: 15
• Total posts on the whole blog: 97

You can see that the traffic is pretty steady throughout the month and I was getting approximately 100 users per day which averaged at about 120ish pageviews per day.

It’s definitely not great, but it’s alright.

I also want to break down where my traffic came from:

As you can see above, nearly 70% of my traffic comes from Organic search – which is great in my opinion.

16.2% is direct – this is from my very tiny email list that clicks onto links in the newsletter. I’m currently on Convertkit’s free plan so I’m paying nothing for this email list.

And 11.4% is social which is almost entirely Pinterest.

Pinterest traffic for month 6:

Funny thing – I don’t use Pinterest at all except for posting 10 random pins a month.

But I noticed that Pinterest started picking up quite well at the end of August.

This means it takes about 6-7 months for Pinterest traffic to pick up.

I haven’t noticed this kind of pick-up in other niches. Perhaps because this niche is very visual and artsy? Obviously, some niches do much better than others when it comes to Pinterest so this is a very important thing to note.

Aside from that, I’ve been using the Pinterest Keyword Tool for every pin I pin. It really helps me find keywords and also see what are the best pins in a particular topic:

If you are in a Pinterest-friendly niche, please, please get this tool.

I recommend it for bloggers who blog about food, weddings, home decor, arts and crafts, wellness, etc.

I use it regularly and it’s actually helping me rank for all the keywords I find on it. I just put it in the Pin description and it’s good to go!

I just enter the topic in Keywords on the tool. And it fetches me all the long-tail keywords related to that topic. I am also using manual pinning – so no Tailwind or other tools. I spend a nice 10 minutes every time I have 5 pins to add to the platform.

This makes me regret not spending more time pinning. But it’s okay. I’ll take what I get.

I didn’t want to put too much time on Pinterest (on the off chance it never picks up)

But since it’s doing well now, I shall increase my efforts and pin at least 25 pins a month from now on.

Alright, moving on to the juicy news:

Income for month 6:

Here’s how much I made:

• Ezoic ads: $14.28
• Affiliate marketing (Amazon affiliates + others): $81.51
• TOTAL: $95.79

I was relatively surprised that the affiliate marketing is taking off since I only have 3 posts that target affiliate products and they’re all mainly drawing supplies or drawing books – that’s good. I also talk about drawing courses sometimes and I’m happy it’s making me some moolah.

My ad income is rather bleak but I’m not too worried since I just joined Ezoic in June. So, it will probably pick up in another few months. I’ve heard that Ezoic takes time to optimize its ads since they take time to study what works well.

What has been working on my blog?

So far, I’ve only been choosing extremely low-competition, low-volume keywords/topics to write about. I’m using a keyword tool. I currently use Ahrefs but if you find it too expensive, please consider Keysearch (use KSDISC to get a 20% discount)

It’s too early to see which ones are picking up because each post requires at least 8 months to a year to reach its traffic potential.

I’m quite happy with the progress of this website and I really want to focus my efforts on writing more content.

I’m maintaining a healthy balance:

• Finding very small topics to blog about that are not covered in-depth or properly – it gives me an edge.
• Making it very user-oriented and at the same time optimizing it for Google without jeopardizing the quality of my blog posts.

I am not using any AI on any of my blogs – there are way too many Google updates being released this year and I am taking no chances.

All images on the blog are my own. Probably 1 percent of the photos on the website are stock photos.

It’s still too early to predict whether this website will be successful – only time will tell.

At the moment, I am ranking for 1.9K keywords (according to Ahrefs) and getting about 5K pageviews on the website.

I am going to take a small break soon because I want to reassess the success of this website in another 3 months to see if it’s worth adding more posts. But I will keep you posted.

But I am pleased to inform you that Mind Space Cafe is picking up beautifully and I think within the next few months, I might be able to apply to Mediavine. I really don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch because the Google updates are rolling out pretty steadily and a lot of good bloggers have been caught in the recent waves.

But let’s save those deets for another post.

SEO has changed vastly in this year alone and there have been so many Google Updates, that I think I have enough information for a new eBook.

Please let me know if you have questions – I’ll try to answer them as best as I can.