Welcome to my online business income report! I love reading the income reports of other bloggers and wanted to start sharing mine as a way to be transparent, as well as motivate myself (and hopefully others!) to create a successful business. I’ll also be including my traffic and social media stats as well as goal tracking since those are important parts of the business and it’ll help me keep track as I move forward.
Please note: Due to pregnancy + maternity leave I put my business (mostly) on hold for about a year between October 2014 – October 2015. This is me basically starting over! Just thought I should clarify.
JOURNEY TO $5,000/MONTH
Tracking my income is part of my goal to make $5,000 per month by October of 2016. I recently made that a goal and gave myself a year to achieve it. Join me on my journey!
WHAT’S INCLUDED
I include all of my online business income and expenses from blogging, design, and any of my other business income streams. The only income I don’t report are my Jamberry commissions (due to their policy to not share earnings) as well as any extra income I make selling items which I do regularly to simplify and declutter. All other sources of income and the related expenses will be shared here.
DECEMBER’S INCOME
I’m happy to report a significant increase in income again. I booked a design project and collected the deposit (50%) which was most of my income for the month. Other than that I did a few small orders with Fiverr while I had time. Google Adsense and Youtube Ads are very small amounts and I don’t see them increasing significantly in the near future. I may just combine these as “advertising” next month.
Income for December 2015
How to Sell on Instagram Ecourse: $0
Google Adsense: $1.05
Youtube Ads: $8.42
Amazon Affiliate: $0
Fiverr: $58
Design: $570.50
Total: $637.97
Income Tracking
December: $637.97
November: $183.67
Difference: +$454.30 (247% increase!)
Total for 2015: $845.52
DECEMBER’S EXPENSES
Another high expense month, but this should be my last one for a while. I’ve cancelled Meet Edgar which will save me $49. I also am done doing Christmas card designs so the printing + shipping will likely disappear next month. I added in Dropbox which is something I was paying out of my personal account up until this month. The goal is for regular monthly expenses to be at, or around, $100. Removing Edgar, HostGator (hopefully) and Printing + Shipping should get me much closer.
Expenses for December 2015
Payment Fees: $15.83
Printing + Shipping: $50.30
Hostgator: $11.95
Boardbooster: $10
Meet Edgar: $49
Squarespace: $12
Education: $0
Dropbox: $9.99
Leadpages: $37
Total: $196.07
Last Month: $511.44
Difference: -$315.37
TRAFFIC & SOCIAL MEDIA
December was the second month in a row that my traffic (pageviews & users) have gone down, but I knew this would happen when I removed my lifestyle posts that brought in a lot of Pinterest traffic. While that was kind of crappy, I knew it wasn’t bringing my target audience here. Even though those two stats are low, take a look at my bounce rate. That has gone down, which is a good thing because that means a higher percentage of people are sticking around instead of showing up and leaving. My pages per session count and my session duration count are up too which means people are clicking around and hanging out on the website longer than that month.
So while my pagevies are down, I am seeing imporant increases in other stats that mean while I am getting LESS traffic, I am getting MORE quality traffic. And by quality, I mean people who are finding my site useful as a business and blogging site. All good things!
Note: Last months numbers are in parenthesis for comparison
AileenBarker.com Statistics
Pageviews: 4,268 (4,495)
Users: 2,760 (3,244)
Bounce Rate: 82.73% (88.27%)
New vs Returning: (84.4%/15.6%) (82.2% / 17.8%)
Pages per Session: 1.36 (1.18)
Average Session Duration: 54 seconds (41 seconds)
Facebook: 298 (298)
Twitter: 466 (462)
Pinterest: 811 (754)
Instagram: 15* (669)
Email List: 295 (228)
*Instagram is much lower because I started a business instagram account. My primary account (which is where last months numbers came from) is now my personal/lifestyle account.
For my Miss Tightwad blog, pageviews are down for a couple of reasons. I moved my free meal planner printable to leadpages which is how a lot of people got to my site through my youtube videos. Also, while doing a lot of work on older content in this blog, I slacked off on posting on Miss Tightwad. That should go back up slowly as I get into a new routine.
MissTightwad.com Statistics
Pageviews: 574 (826)
Users: 361 (482)
Pages per Session: 1.5 (1.37)
Bounce Rate: 80.1% (86.38)
New vs Returning: 92.4%/7.6% (78.7 / 21.3%)
Average Session Duration: 1:12 (56 seconds)
Youtube Subscribers: 1,277 (1,248)
Facebook: 173 (173)
Twitter: 74 (73)
Pinterest: 7 (0)
Email List: 97 (90)
DECEMBER GOAL REVIEW
Finish Removing Irrelevant Posts | SUCCESS! I sure did. I moved my lifestyle posts to Life By Aileen where I can feel free to write as much or as little as I want and share whatever I want without feeling like I’m risking my business.
Finish Enhancing Existing Content | PARTIAL FAIL. I didn’t finish. I did enhance a few posts, but it’s a little more time consuming than I had planned so this is a work in progress.
Reader Survey | FAIL. I did not do this. I actually decided against this for a couple of reasons.
Ecourse Planning | FAIL. I’ve been focusing so much on getting my business and blog ready for 2016 that I haven’t had a chance to physically write down and hash out my ideas. They’re in my head though!
JANUARY GOALS
Hit 400 Email Subscribers
I’ve finally learned that this is one of the most important, if not the most important, thing to have. These are my peeps. The people who want more from me and have trusted me with access to their inbox.
Stick to Blogging Schedule & System
I already put a system to simplify my blogging in place. But now the goal is to stay on track and see how it changes the way I blog.
Survive Design Project
I am thrilled to work on my first big design project since having my son. It’s going to be a greuling, but awesome, three weeks. What’s even more fun is my client is also a friend of mine. I’m excited to get back to work full force!
That’s all for this month! So excited to see what next month brings.
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