July 2016 Online Income Report

I have a confession to make: I have no idea what to put in the introduction to these blogging reports.

This is because, honestly, when I read an income report, I want to skip the intro (no matter how fun) and get right to the meat of the matter.

What is that blogger doing?
How are they doing it?
How much money do they make doing it?

After all, isn’t that the point of doing and income report?

Income: $5,641.56

Diversification:

Advertising: $626.23
Affiliates: $5,015.33

July was a higher month than normal for affiliates, thanks to Elite Blog Academy. Still, even though EBA made up 1/2 of my affiliate earnings, the remainder (what I would make in a normal month) is increasing very regularly.

Slowly but surely, I’ve been working on narrowing the affiliate programs I belong to down to just a handful that are a perfect fit for my audience. That, and more strategic affiliate link placement, posts, and emails have led me to increase my affiliate earnings by more than 5,000% in just the last year.

When I first started blogging more than 3 years ago, Ad networks were where all of the money was at. But now, websites are shifting away from display advertising since it pays less than ever before and is harmful to the reader’s experience, and finding other creative ways to make money, like with affiliates.

Overall, I want to reduce the number of ads on the website and instead increase my affiliate revenue by adding 2-3 more amazing affiliate offers that are exclusively for my readers and that are a perfect fit for their lives and budgets.

Expenses:

Equally important to income is expenses.

After all, if you’re spending everything you make on out of control expenses sort of defeats the purpose of blogging for extra money.

Plus, this gives me an opportunity to highlight some of my absolute favorite tools.

Here’s the breakdown:

BigStockPhoto.com: $59 This price gets me 7 royalty-free images per day, every day. A great price for a great service. Plus, you’re not required to accredit BigStockPhoto’s photos. (Affiliate link)
Jaaxy: $19 SEO planning and research tool. It’s invaluable in that it allows me to seek out low competition/highly searched keywords and watch my articles get more and more search engine traffic (affiliate link)
TaskBullet: $200 I restock my TaskBullet account every now and then so that my part-time assistant will continue doing some of the day-to-day aspect of running a blog for me.

In a normal month, I would spend MUCH more money on advertising, but since we were packing up the old house and buying a new house in July, I gave myself a pass.

I just let the articles, my Pinterest account, and search engines do the work for me, and obviously it worked pretty well!

In The Next Month I’m….

Over the next couple of months, I’ve set a few goals for myself:

Increase Affiliate Revenue: I’m honing my affiliate methodology, and my next task, specifically is to hone my email sequence for offering my email list a new offer. I believe that my email list has the power to make quite a bit of money as long as I choose products that are incredibly useful, affordable, and practical – and then promote them in the correct way.

Migrate To getResponse: I migrated my other blogs to getResponse earlier in the year, but was having a technical issue with this site. I believe I have a fix that won’t cost me any extra money, so I’ve set a goal of getting my email list moved from Mailchimp.

Start Removing Display Advertising: As I said above.

But above all, I’m try to do more by actually doing less.

I’ve outsourced mundane tasks that I hate. I’m putting systems in place that actually take work OFF of my plate rather than on it.

Mostly, I’m working smarter rather than harder.

In August, I passed a milestone: 3 years of blogging.

And I’m not going to lie and say it’s been easy, or that I’ve arrived, magically, now that I’ve been blogging for 3 years. But my priorities are changing, and even though blogging is still pretty high up there, I don’t have the patience to do things that don’t work.

I want to KNOW that the work I’m putting in will yield results, and I’m through with doing things I don’t actually like.

All told, though, I’m very happy with the direction the blog, my workload, the blog’s income, and my family/work balance are going.

Pretty short and sweet report today, but I just wanted to let you see what you CAN do if you start blogging today!