How to Read This Income Report
Every month, we will be sharing our blog’s income in posts like this one. We do this to motivate and inform you. If you’re ready to start a blog of your own, click here and follow the steps to get started.
These reports will include money earned and expenses from the given month. Some affiliate income gets adjusted due to returns, but usually by the end of the month, it’s been worked out. We also take the difference out of the next month’s affiliate income on the next report.
Also, the number you see in the title is our take-home amount after expenses. As opposed to the inflated, before expenses number that 98% of bloggers who do income reports post. Please also note that none of this money is taxed yet. We make monthly payments to the IRS based on our income and tax projections and recommend all bloggers making thousands per month do the same.
Important Happenings This Month
November is historically one of our biggest months. When a large portion of your income is reliant on affiliate/retail sales, the month with the biggest shopping days (Black Friday and Cyber Monday) of the year should be big.
To be honest, our projections were a big optimistic for this month. We wanted to Average $5,000/day every day from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. So $5,000 X 6 Days would have been $30k in profit.
I attribute not being able to hit those marks with the simple fact that we slightly misjudged our audience. Black Friday weekend is all about sales and deals. While people do like those, our audience is more concerned about finding the right outfits, seeing them on a real person and hearing about how they fit. Less about deals and more about product quality and achieving a specific look.
Aside from Black Friday stuff, our month started out slow with Zack recovering from an appendectomy that he had on Halloween night. We also spent a day mid-month in the ER after Sophie suffered a scary fall onto her precious little face. Thankfully both of those situations turned out as good as they could have.
Like last month, we pulled back on the sponsored stuff to focus on the retail content that we put out all month. We’d ideally like to pull in an average of about 2-3x what we did this month in those categories.
The Report
The links below are affiliate links. When you click them and make a purchase, we earn money. Thank you so much for all of your support!
LIFESTYLE BLOGGING REVENUE
- Sponsored Instagram posts – $300
- Retail affiliate income (Nordstrom, Shopbop, Macy’s and other affiliates. We love VigLink for beginners) – $64,011.88
- Amazon affiliate income – $2324.35
- Sponsored blog posts – $600
REVENUE EARNED FROM BLOGGING CONTENT
- HostGator (start a blog today!) – $1375
- Studiopress – $218.90
- PicMonkey – $0.00
- Aweber – $26.90
Total Revenue – $68,856.13
EXPENSES
- KnownHost – We started with HostGator, but outgrew them after a few years. $55
- Aweber– the best email service for creating, building and managing email lists! – $29
- Social Media Advertising – $32,685.75
- Giveaway prizes (this falls under our marketing budget) – $100
- PicMonkey – the best online image creation and editing software – $5.00
- Long Tail Pro – keyword research software that helps us show up better in Google. $25
- Optin Monster – create beautiful optin forms to collect email addresses – $9
- US Global Mail – online PO Box to use with our email service so we don’t have to use our personal address – $10
Total Expenses – $32,918.75
TOTAL PROFIT – $35,937.38
Overall a great month even though we fell below projections. We learned about our audience and the type of content they are looking for. We are SO excited to head into 2018 with some new strategies and ideas.
If you’re feeling motivated after reading this income report, head over here to get your blog started right away!