July 2022 Blog Income Report

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This month was a blur for sure. My team and I are working hard on developing a new editor hiring process and that has been challenging for a few reasons including:

• My assistant has a full-time job and has been swamped / not able to dedicate the time.
• Some of our great ideas for hiring turned out to be not so great
• We’re training my lead VA to help with sorting and testing applicants. This is much needed & she has picked it up very quickly but training and figuring out processes also takes a lot of time.

Our editing backlog is currently sitting at 211 posts as of 08/09/2022 when I started writing this and 220 as of 09/04/2022 when I finished writing this.

Spinning Content

One of the big things we’ve felt the repercussions of with this month is having let go the two long-term writers who were caught spinning content. I talked about that in last months report.

Our processes catch outright plagiarism pretty well and we have processes in place to routinely screen content for spinning.

Unfortunately, on the latest round of checks, two writers failed. This creates a burden on our processes because not only do we then lose a team member but also, this puts more load on our editors who now have to check all pending articles from that author for spinning as well.

We’re currently editing using a FIFO system (first in, first out) but we’re also at least two months behind. That means these writers caught this month, potentially had two months worth of content that was paid for and waiting to be edited.

Obviously catching these problems sooner means less impact on the team and reduces the financial impact for the business as well.

I know these are the struggles of growth but it’s still frustrating!

How Things Are Going

When I compare my year over year growth from 2019 forward, things are going pretty darn good!

• July 2019 – ~$149.08
• July 2020 – $4,235.34 (👍2741%)
• July 2021 – $13,911.27 (👍228.5%)
• July 2022 – $12,573.29 (🔻9.62%)

Do I wish income was up 228% this year over last year? Heck yes!

Am I glad its down only 9.62% vs last year? Yes, it could definitely be worse. This is also a reminder to focus on income producing sites whose income is not moving in the right direction consistently.

Growing a lot of sites does have its drawbacks and one of them is that it can be easy to let sites slip month over month. In fact, let’s look at how my top 5 sites from last year are doing compared to last year.

You can see that all sites, except NSP4, are doing worse this year than last. In fact, NSP2 is now #9 on the income list with several sites earning more than it.

Combining the income losses and we’re at over $4k in lost revenue from these sites from last year to this year.

That’s a big wakeup to not only continue to focus on building content but also establish procedures to update posts when traffic is dropping YOY. I already track the traffic data per post, so the next step will be figuring out a process.

Income Diversification

The ultimate goal is to have diversified income streams. Since I build sites that heavily focus on monetization via ads, that diversity comes from having multiple sites.

Here are last years values vs. this year by total income earned by the site. You can see here that we have some new major players on the scene now.

While most of the income is still coming from NSP3, NSP1, NSP9, and NSP4; NSP8, Digital rainbow, and NSP6 are now making a nice impact on the graph.

July 2022 Basic Stats

• 85 Articles Added
• 124,921 Words Published
• $58.50 in Product Sales

As I mentioned last month, production has been slow. This month we’re actually up 1 post over last month but, nowhere near the 250 posts we’d like to be at.

As soon as we get one or two editors hired we’ll start hiring writers again and work our way towards that goal.

We’re still sitting at 20 monetized sites this month. Let’s have a look.

💰 July 2022 Blogging Income 💰

• Niche Site Project 1: $3,309.41 🔻
• Niche Site Project 2: $212.50 👍
• Niche Site Project 3: $4,095.51 🔻
• Niche Site Project 4: $1,355.25 🔻
• Niche Site Project 5: $110.39 🔻
• Niche Site Project 6: $320.83 🔻
• Niche Site Project 8: $753.63 🔻
• Niche Site Project 9: $1,375.86 🔻
• Niche Site Project 10: $64.26 👍
• Project Alpine Ribbon: $53.70 👍
• Printable Site: $1.14 🔻 (for products not related to NSP1)
• This Site: $0 (turned ads off)
• Project Crazy Foxtail: $10.85 👍
• Project Crooked Knight: $15.72 👍
• Project Digital Rainbow: $613.72 👍
• Project Green Darling: $55.41 👍
• Project Infinite Tower: $14.48 👍
• Project Moon Rose: $51.26 🔻
• Project Orange Falcon: $51.68 👍
• Project Shiny Geyser: $9.73 👍
• Project Silent Candy: $87.99 🔻
• Project Sweet Meadow: $9.97 👍

Total Gross Revenue for July 2022: $12,573.29

• Gross Revenue for June 2022: $15,218.14
• Gross Revenue for May 2022: $16,242.96
• Gross Revenue for April 2022: $15,711.56
• Gross Revenue for March 2022: $15,163.01
• Gross Revenue for February 2022: $10,024.00
• Gross Revenue for January 2022: $10,371.08

Screenshot for Good Measure

I do think proof of income is important when doing a report like this but, I also don’t have the time to chase down multiple screenshots. Here is the biggest one. The rest of the income comes from Ezoic, Affiliates, and Product Sales.

💸 July Blogging Expenses💸

• Advertising & Marketing: $251.00
• Virtual Assistants: $2,026.55
• Education: $421.00
• Graphic Templates: $29.00
• Graphic Design: $249.00
• Office Supplies: $676.67 (new chair plus some one-time software)
• Materials for DIY/Craft Posts: $189.62
• Recurring Software: $812.70
• Domains & Hosting: $613.63
• Paypal Fees: $5.87
• Stripe Fees: $1.37
• Travel: $370.94

Total June Non-Content Expenses: $5,276.40

Net Blogging Income for July 2022: $7,296.89

July 2022 Content Expenses

Once the new editors are onboarded, I anticipate another round of hiring writers and this content expense to go up.

• Writers: $3,071.05
• Editors: $1,451.14

Total Content Costs: $4,522.19

Net Blogging Income

• Cash: $5,977.88
• Accrual: $1,333.58

This report is all based on accrual accounting but my business is actually run off of cash based accounting. Most of the income I report above won’t be received for several months but all of the expenses were paid this month.