Welcome to my first ever 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 pretty important parts of the business and it’ll help me keep track as we move forward.

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 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 companies policy to not share numbers) as well as any extra income I make selling excess items which I do regularly. All other sources of income and the related expenses will be shared here.

October’s Income

I didn’t do so good last month! I’m still adjusting to being a work at home mom and some days (most days) I’m mostly mom and can only fit an hour or two of work in at the end of the day. I am working on several things behind the scenes that aren’t ready to bring any income, but I know it will come! This is an abnormally low month for me as I usually have at least a little design income, but I just haven’t had any inquiries that have panned out and I haven’t had the time to really market my services.

I am, however, still selling my How to Sell on Instagram Ecourse that I created this time last year! It’s not a large chunk of income, but it’s not something I have to do any work on anymore so it’s a nice little boost.

Even my Amazon Affiliate income was basically nothing this month which is odd because it’s usually at least a few dollars. I’ll definitely do much better next month!

Income

How to Sell on Instagram Ecourse – $12
Google Adsense Ads – $2.65
Youtube Ads –  $7.36* (estimate from youtube)
Amazon Affiliate – $0.37
Izea – $1.50
Total: $23.88

October’s Expenses

I somehow managed to spend a lot more this last month than I usually do. I’m going to cut back quite a bit until my income picks up regularly. Since I’m only taking on a couple of design projects each month in order to give each client more one on one focus, I’ll be saying bye to 17Hats. It’s such a useful tool, but at the volume I’m selling my services simple invoicing and paypal work just fine.

Expenses

750 Words – $5
Dreamhost – $11.95
Design Cuts – $29
Hostgator – $49.90
Adobe Creative Suite – $49.99
BoardBooster – $5
17 Hats – $29
Squarespace – $12
Total: $191.84

Traffic & Social Media

You know what’s silly? Until recently, I thought I needed tens of thousands of page views a day, or even a month, to make a decent income. But I’ve come to find, through interacting with other bloggers, that my seemingly small amount of traffic is actually enough to start monetizing quite a bit more. I mean, I work hard on this blog. Hours and hours go into my posts, social media and maintenance, why shouldn’t I deserve to get paid if it’s possible? So I’m switching my mindset and working on monetizing more while building more traffic instead of waiting for more traffic.

AileenBarker.com
Pageviews: 5,189
Users: 3,550
Bounce Rate: 86.11%
New vs Returning: 85% / 15%
Pages per Session: 1.28
Average Session Duration: 51 seconds

Facebook: 298
Twitter: 446
Pinterest: 712
Instagram: 651

MissTightwad.com
Pageviews: 628
Pages per Session: 1.48
Users: 381
Bounce Rate: 81.8%
New vs Returning: 85.8% / 14.2%
Average Session Duration: 57 seconds

Youtube: 1,201
Facebook: 173
Twitter: 69

Goals for November

Increase traffic

I’d like to hit 7,000 page views in November for this blog. My plan of action is more social media marketing. I have plenty of great content, I just need to get it out there more.

Social Media Marketing Plan

I’m going to lay out a social media marketing plan for the month and see how it goes. I usually just do what I can, but I think if I set daily goals for number of posts, etc. I will be able to grow my reach and traffic much more quickly.

Make at least $300 in November

If I get a big design project this will be easy, if I don’t this will be pretty hard using other methods. But my goal is to make at least $300 in November. I think this is a reasonable goal to start out with.

Bring down expenses to $150

October was pretty expensive considering the minimal income. I should be able to easily do this by unsubscribing from 17Hats and watching spending. Unless I have a design project come up that needs me to purchase fonts/design elements/etc. it shouldn’t be too hard to stay under $150.

How to Blog Post

One great way a lot of people make referral income is teaching others how to do things, like blog. I’ve been meaning to write a “how to start a blog” post for literally over a year. Think of all that missed income!

Do you earn an online income? I’d love to hear about your experiences below!