Every income report you’ve ever read probably starts with a big number. This one starts with zero.
Month 1. Total revenue: $0.00.
My Hostinger affiliate application is still being reviewed. I haven’t been approved yet. I haven’t earned a single dollar from this blog.
And yet I spent the last two weeks writing three detailed articles about Hostinger — a real speed test review, a WordPress setup tutorial, and a comparison against BandwagonHost. I did it before I was even accepted into their affiliate program.
Why? Because the hosting genuinely works. I’ll explain at the end. First, the numbers.
The Traffic Numbers (Month 1)
Period: approximately June 18 — July 18, 2026. Data from Google Analytics 4.
| Metric | Number |
|---|---|
| Active Users | 484 |
| Page Views | 2,439 |
| Pages per User | 5.04 |
| Avg Engagement Time | 1 min 08 sec |
| Google Search Clicks | 3 |
| Google Search Impressions | ~138 |
| Revenue | $0.00 |
484 real visitors in month one. I was surprised. I expected maybe 50.
But before you get excited — almost none of it came from Google. Three clicks. That’s it. The 484 visitors came from direct traffic, social media shares, and people I personally sent to the blog. Organic SEO has not started working yet.
That is completely normal at month one. It usually takes 3–6 months for Google to start sending meaningful traffic. I’m not worried about it. I’m building the foundation now.
Top Pages This Month
- Homepage: 607 views (108 users) — people checking out “what is this blog”
- /tools/: 336 views (51 users) — the interactive tools page gets traffic without SEO
- /building-in-public-experiment/: 136 views (20 users) — honest content attracts curious readers
- /tools/wander-china/planner.html: 123 views (25 users) — my China trip planner tool
- /tools/major-vote.html: 97 views (20 users) — a “which college major” voting tool
Notice what’s missing from this list: the Hostinger articles I just published. They haven’t been indexed yet. That’s month 2 work.
Revenue: $0
Let’s be completely honest about this.
I have no revenue. Zero. I applied to the Hostinger affiliate program and I’m still waiting for approval. No other monetization is active on this blog. The Google Analytics revenue column shows ¥0.00 across every single page.
I’m not embarrassed by this. Most income reports at month one are either fake, inflated by family clicks, or from people who already had an audience elsewhere. I had none of those advantages.
The real question is whether the foundation I’m building will pay off later. I think it will. Here’s why.
What I Built This Month
The most important thing I did this month wasn’t getting traffic. It was building the content cluster that will eventually earn.
Three articles, all Hostinger-focused, all with real data:
- Hostinger One-Month Review: A China User’s Honest Take — 8 real screenshots: GTmetrix A grade, Pingdom B/84, PageSpeed 97 desktop, WebPageTest 0.653s LCP. Plus real price comparisons against Alibaba Cloud (¥958/year) and Huawei Cloud (¥1,478/year). Spoiler: Hostinger wins by a lot.
- How to Start a WordPress Blog on Hostinger: What I Actually Did — Not the official tutorial. The real one, including a bug I found with FTP file mapping that the official docs don’t mention.
- Hostinger vs BandwagonHost: A Chinese User’s Comparison — I used both. BandwagonHost is a VPS for tech people. Hostinger is shared hosting that actually works for normal people building their first site.
These three articles form a cluster. They link to each other. They target different search intents (review, tutorial, comparison). When Google eventually indexes them properly, they should reinforce each other’s rankings.
Why I’m Promoting Hostinger Before I Earn Anything
This is the part I want to explain carefully.
I’m Chinese. I’ve tried a lot of web hosting services over the years. Most of them were either too slow for international traffic, too complicated to set up, or priced in a way that made no sense.
Hostinger surprised me.
The speed was better than I expected. GTmetrix gave me an A grade on the first try — 99% performance score, LCP under 750ms. That’s not something I had to work for. The defaults were already good.
The interface is clean. Setup was under an hour. The hPanel dashboard is the least confusing hosting control panel I’ve used.
The price is lower than any comparable Chinese hosting option. By a significant margin. I did the math in my review — the Alibaba Cloud equivalent costs nearly double per year.
Is there a bug? Yes. FTP shows different files than what you see in the browser. That’s a LiteSpeed caching issue. It doesn’t break anything, but it’s confusing the first time you see it. I documented it honestly in my review.
Overall: I’m recommending Hostinger because I actually use it and it works. The affiliate application is pending, but my recommendation isn’t. If you’re building your first English-language website as a Chinese person, this is the hosting I’d point you toward.
Check Hostinger pricing here — the Premium plan is usually around $2-3/month when on sale.
Cost Breakdown: What This Blog Actually Costs
| Expense | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hostinger Premium Hosting | ~¥350-500/year | Shared hosting, WordPress pre-installed |
| Domain (.com) | ~¥70/year | Registered via Hostinger |
| Plugins | ¥0 | Free versions of Yoast SEO, LiteSpeed Cache |
| Content tools | ¥0 | Claude AI via existing subscription |
| Total | ~¥420-570/year | Less than ¥50/month |
Less than ¥50 per month to run a website. That’s the entry cost. I need to earn about $70/year just to break even. At Hostinger’s affiliate rate structure, that’s roughly 1-2 referrals per year. Extremely achievable if SEO actually works.
What I’m Doing in Month 2
- Wait for Google: The 3 Hostinger articles need 4-8 weeks to rank. Nothing I can do to rush this.
- Submit to Google Search Console: Request indexing on all 3 new articles immediately.
- Cross-post to Medium: With canonical URLs pointing back here, Medium gives backlinks and additional distribution.
- Build internal links: Link from older posts to the Hostinger articles where relevant.
- Keep publishing: 2 new posts per week, focused on topics that have real search volume.
- Wait for affiliate approval: Once approved, I’ll add proper affiliate disclosures to all three Hostinger articles.
I’m not in a rush. Building a blog that earns passively is a 12-18 month project minimum. Month 1 is about setting up systems that will compound. That’s what I did.
One Honest Observation About Blog Income Reports
Most blog income reports are marketing. They’re designed to make you feel like you’re missing out, so you’ll buy the course, the template, the email list, or the hosting plan through their affiliate link.
This one is just a record. 484 visitors. $0. Three articles written. One affiliate application pending. One blog that I actually use to think out loud about AI, investing, and trying things that might not work.
I’ll post Month 2 in about four weeks. By then, the Hostinger articles should be indexed. We’ll see if they generate any clicks.
If you’re building something similar — an English blog as a Chinese person, using AI to help create content, targeting Western audiences — I’m happy to compare notes. Drop a comment below.
The Hosting I’m Using
This blog runs on Hostinger. I tested the speed. It’s fast. The price is lower than any Chinese cloud equivalent. Setup took under an hour. I wrote a full review here with 8 real screenshots if you want the details before deciding.
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