Update #36 – July 2025 Traffic & Income Report

I debated writing the July 2025 Traffic and Income Report because it’s been a rough month.

Google did a core update and it brought me down…hard.

If you had asked me in the middle of the month if I planned to write this update, I would have said no.

I still have not recovered, but I am more optimistic than I was.

I remember telling myself that I can’t only write about the good. Honestly, my good isn’t even that good but it’s better than it was at many steps along this website building journey.

So I talked myself into writing this and sharing the monthly update.

For those that haven’t been here before, I’ll be sharing the following:

Let’s go!

July 2025 Traffic

As always, let’s (painfully) share the last six months of traffic from Google searches:

Ugh. Now you see what I mean.

I did a little research and there was a Google Core Update that I believe hit me hard.

My impressions basically went from 9,000 to 2,000 in 30 days.

The last time I was hit with a Google update, it took me over six months to get back to where I was before the update.

I was immediately discouraged.

Biggest impression day in June 2025:

• 9,110 impressions (actually, this was the best of the year)

Biggest impression day in July 2025:

• 8,878 impressions, which was July 1st. It was all downhill from there.

I didn’t even want to crack open my laptop. Initially, it was shock that kind of rolled into a defeated sadness.

I stopped pinning on Pinterest.

I stopped writing. Luckily, I had built up some articles and I did continue posting throughout the month, but I stopped writing and now I’m not ahead of the game like I was prior to the downfall.

June Total Impressions – 172K and June Total Google Clicks – 2.96K

July Total Impressions – 78K and July Total Google Clicks – 1.25K

Click through rate is 1.6% for the month of July, which only dropped 0.1% from last month, so that is a tiny shining star.

My average position dropped significantly, with some pages that were top 5 now in the 50th range, so I’m surprised click through rate remained as it did.

Now let’s look at total visits from all sources, not just Google:

My goal was to get to 6,500 visitors and that didn’t happen. I’ll keep that goal for the remainder of the year.

1,483 of these visitors came from Google, which is about half it was the previous month.

This does mean that I picked up steam with other sources.

Pinterest clicks were down as well. Not quite half, but 2/3 of what they had been prior.

I think that for future income reports, I’m going to switch it up and stop focusing on how many clicks I receive from Google, but rather what clicks look like overall.

But for now, let’s keep going…

Social Media Updates

I told myself that I was going to post every other day on Facebook in September and I’m sticking to that plan.

As for Pinterest, I stopped posting when I started feeling discouraged.

I just need a moment to regain my balance. The Google drop tripped me up a bit.

However, I did start running a Pinterest ad during the last few days of July. I’m doing $5 a day right now and I have it running until the end of August.

This was kind of a knee jerk reaction to be dropped by Google. After a couple of weeks of seeing little search engine clicks, I pulled the trigger on the Pinterest ad.

Now I did cancel something else in order to make up for the $5 a day I’m spending on Pinterest. More on that in the income section.

As for Pinterest followers, I only gained one during the month of July.

My impressions are up, but I’m not going to share that information because it really doesn’t matter.

Impressions are up because I’m running an ad.

Challenges

Learning to accept that everything won’t go smoothly on this journey has been difficult for me.

It’s a lot of ups and downs.

You think that you’re on a great track and everything is improving and then something happens and it’s back to fighting for improvement again.

This could be worse. Way worse.

Let’s talk about all the ways it could be worse because it makes me feel better.

• My whole site could be hacked. I’ve heard of that happening to others.
• I could have 0 impressions after the Google update, like I had over a year ago after that update.
• I could have stopped posting because I was discouraged.
• My website could give me the white screen of death and cause me not to be able to edit anything.

The list goes on…

Successes

I cannot believe I wrote 7 successes last month.

I was so proud of myself.

This month, there aren’t many.

I think that my main success is not giving up.

Second success would be posting six articles – that is pretty great for me.

July 2025 Income

I’m calculating this as I write this article so I really have no idea how much it is at this moment.

(5 minutes later…) ⏰

Here we go….

Journey Ad profit: $43.33 (about $20 less than the month prior)

Amazon Affiliate Links: $32.56 (about $3 less than last month – thanks Prime Day)

All other miscellaneous affiliates: $7.25 ($30 less than last month)

Total in July: $83.14

$56 less than last month.

On to expenses.

I don’t have many monthly expenses. I purchased Divi Lifetime Membership as my theme in 2023 and I’m so thankful I did.

Currently, I spend $29 on Sellfy to sell digital products. Yes, I’ve talked about suspending this for a few months while I come up with some digital items to sell…but I haven’t done it yet.

$29.50 for WordPress.

For subscriber/email list, I use Kit, which is free!

RankIQ – I said I was going to drop this if I didn’t make $130 this month and I didn’t, so I dropped it. I will pick it back up later in the year after I’ve earned some more and stop running the Pinterest ad.

I like RankIQ so much, I wrote an entire review on it here, but it will have to wait.

Pinterest ad – $45.18

Total expenses = $103.68

I lost $20.54.

July Goals

Don’t give up.

That’s my main goal.

To not overload myself during my poor website mental state, I’m only creating one other goal.

That goal is to post five articles in the month of August. I know I can do that.

Final Thoughts

Sorry for the bla traffic and income report.

But I think it’s important to share that it’s not all rainbows and sunshine.

The loss this month has got me thinking about some things:

• Am I monetizing like I could be on the website?
• Why aren’t I getting into social media and pinterest more so I don’t depend so much on Google?
• Is owning a website worth it as the world turns to AI for answers?

For now, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and see where this goes from here.

To go back and see how far I’ve come, check out my previous traffic and income reports:

March 2025 Traffic and Income Report

April 2025 Traffic and Income Report

May 2025 Traffic and Income Report

June 2025 Traffic and Income Report

Or check out all of my reports here!