September 2016 Online Income Report

I have to tell you something:

Blogging is quite the adventure.

There is always something to do, a change to make, a post to write, social media posts to schedule, comments and emails to answer.  The “one more thing to do” remains constant.

But what changes?

How I respond to it; how you respond to it.

I can work 40 hours in a month, doing absolutely everything that needs to be done, or I can focus only on the most important tasks and work 20 hours in a month – and still make the same amount of money.

I found this to be true over and over again, and that’s exactly why I’m sharing it with you.

Life is short.  Don’t spend all your time working on things that don’t actually need to be worked on.  Focus only on the most important things; all the rest will fall into place.

Now, onto the income report:

September Income: $2,635.30

Diversification:

• Advertising: $679.45
• Affiliates: $1,955.85
• Swagbucks: $200 (not included in income, as this is earned in points, then cashed out for Sam’s Club and Amazon.com gift cards)  Want to learn how I make so much with Swagbucks?  Learn how here.

I’ve noticed a distinct downward trend in advertising earnings – even with increasing page views – which is leading me to depend less and less on those banner ads.  I diversified them a bit more, but overall I’m focusing more and more on promoting affiliate offers that I KNOW my readers will love.

“Hey there!
Are you wanting to start a blog?  I wanted to let you know that you can start a blog for less than $5/month. My blog has made me more than $70,000 in the last 3 years!  Visit the Start a Blog page and get started today!”

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)
• MeetEdgar: I started using MeetEdgar in August and am LOVING the set-it-and-forget-it-ness of the tool.  I can literally queue up content for months, which takes yet another task off my plate.  So freeing!
• Fiverr: $11  I needed some graphic design work done, and I was able to get it done very cheaply thanks to Fiverr.
• Facebook Ads: $54.97
• Google Drive Storage: $1.99 I store TONS of images, spreadsheet, and posts on Google drive, and therefore needed more room.  $1.99 month gets me more storage than I’ll probably ever use.  Well worth it.

In a normal month, I would spend MUCH more money on advertising, but we ended up having to renovate a bathroom in our old house in preparation for tenants, and that took up so much time.

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

Quick note:  I’m super excited to announce that The Genius Bloggers Toolkit will be available at a HUGE discount starting 10/26 (and for one week only!).  This is one of my favorite resources!  Stay tuned (or sign up to be notified!) for more info!

Last Month’s Goals….

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

(SUCCESS) 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.

This is a work in progress, but it’s working.  I’ll call that a win!

(SUCCESS) 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.

I have to tell you that I’m LOVING getResponse for it’s flexibility, customization, and ease of use.  Highly recommend it!

(SUCCESS) Start Removing Display Advertising: As I said above.

In The Next Month I’m….

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

Build my email list to 10,000:  I have just north of 6,000 emails as of now, but 10,000 is a milestone I’ve been wanting to hit for quite some time.  Increasing signups is  complicated process that involves landing pages, list segments, forms, social media promotion, and of course opt-in incentives!  Thankfully, getResponse makes this easy!

Increase engagement on my Facebook page:  I’ve been sharing a variety of different things on the Facebook page, wanting to see what resonates with my followers, so that I can share more of that!  Facebook engagements rates for every brand tend to a very low percentage of their followers, but there is always room for improvement!

Continue to promote my 30 Days to A Debt Free Christmas Challenge.  The feedback from this course so far has been awesome, so I want as many people as possible to get in on this!  (Haven’t sign up?  Do it here – it’s free!)

Finish The Essential Blogging Toolkit: A free resource for beginning or advanced bloggers that provides helpful and practical guidelines for establishing and building a blog that will start making money quickly, and continue making money for years.

Want in on The Essential Blogging Tookit?  Sign below and be the first to know!

(Ok, full disclosure: this next part I’ve been leaving in my Online Income Reports because it’s true, and it’s a good remind for myself)

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!

Need help getting started?

• Learn how to start a blog with my easy tutorial.
• Get my recommended blogging tools
• Read my older income reports

This post may contain affiliate links.  See my disclosures for more information.

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