October Blog Income Report – $5,902.13 Earned
In spite of this month being my biggest month yet, I kind of felt like I was in a productivity slump for a lot of it. There were a lot of days where I just didn’t feel like working on the blogs. I don’t feel like I got as much done as I could have or should have. Whether or not that was the reality, that was my feeling.
In fact, the reality is that I published more articles this month than I ever have, earned more money, and took on more projects than I normally do. It’s interesting how your brain can tell you one thing but, the reality is completely different.
Each new month brings around renewed energy for me so I’m going to celebrate my wins and try and make November even more awesome than October!
📰NEW THIS MONTH📰
- Switched back to ConvertKit – My personal finance site has a huge mailing list. As of writing this income report, my total subscribers are just over 6,500. The first of the year is also the biggest income producer for that blog due to new years and, while I love SendFox for smaller sites, the way it automatically decides which subscribers are not active doesn’t work for me. With ConvertKit, you can manually “clean” your list when you want to but SendFox basically forces it on you. My goal is to make sure that this site makes enough sales each month to, at a minimum, cover the ConvertKit fee which will be about $100 a month at the current subscriber level.
- Hired a 3rd VA – I hired my first US-based assistant to help with sensitive tasks like paying writers and VA’s, reconciling my bank account with my accounting software (YNAB) and she will also be helping with evaluating and hiring new writers this month. She’s part-time, just a few hours a week but she is a big help!
🗠 October 2020 BASIC STATS 🗠
15 “Active Sites”– More or less this means a site that I am actively doing keyword research for and having writers write content for. Not every “active” site gets new content every month.
- 76 Posts Published
- 76,078 Words Published
- $257.40 in Product Sales
💰 October 2020 Income for My Sites 💰
- Niche Site Project 1: $2,930.53 👍
- Niche Site Project 2: $314.20 👍
- Niche Site Project 3: $2,083.32 👍
- Niche Site Project 4: $377.61 👍
- Niche Site Project 5: $12.10 🔻
- Niche Site Project 6: $4.96 👍
- Niche Site Project 7: $0
- Niche Site Project 8: $27.96👍
- Niche Site Project 9: $17.83 🔻
- Niche Site Project 10: $0
- Printable Site: $14 🔻 (for products not related to NSP1)
- This Site: $119.62 👍
Total Gross Revenue for October 2020: $5,902.13
- Gross Revenue for September: $5,031.22
- Gross Revenue for August: $4,832.62
- Gross Revenue for July: $4,235.34
Keep in mind that this is income earned, not received, in the month of October.
💸 October Blogging Expenses💸
- Virtual Assistant – $414.40
- Pinterest VA – $315.60
- Graphic Design – $75.00
- Domain Names – $169.93
- Hosting – $111.90
- Pin Template Starter Kit – $15.00 (but this link has 10 free!)
- Canva – $38.85
- GeniusLink – $5.00
- Keysearch – $11.90
- Manage WP – $29.57
- Microsoft – $6.99
- MiloTree – $9.00
- Copyscape – $20.00
- Link Whisper – $77.00
- Screaming Frog – $200.63
- PicMonkey – $12.99
- SendOwl – $24.00
- Shopify – $29
- Zapier – $24.99
- Education – $441.91
- HP Instant Ink – $5.46
- PO Box – $59.00
- Other Lifetime Software – $292.53
Total Expenses: $2,375.65
Net Blogging Income for October – $3,526.48
- September Net Income: $1,638.59
- August Net Income: $3,077.84
- July Net Income: $2,909.54
October Content Expenses
Content expenses are up from last month which was $1,353.13. I’d like to increase this in the near future. This value includes the expenses for both my writers and my editors. If one expense were to go away, so would the other and they are both part of “Content” creation.
- Upwork – $1,551.15
Net Income after content investment: $1,975.33
- September Net Income after Content: $285.46
- August Net Income after Content: $1,606.39
- July Net Income after Content: $1,546.65
October 2020 Blog Income Screenshots
Here are the screenshots from my biggest income producers during the month of October.
ThriveCart
Traffic Reports
NSP1 🐹 – 2.28% Decrease in Sessions!
This site is continuing to decrease in traffic but, income is still increasing. I am starting to wonder if the niche has some seasonality to it. It kind of makes sense for this pet to be of more interest during summer months.
I’m going to have to take a deep look at it at some point, but I don’t have time right now. This month, however, I have made a checklist to go through all of the posts for all of the sites to optimize for SEO. The underperforming posts on this site are first up.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| August | 10 | 305 | 17,711 | 124,192 | $2,673.41 |
| September | 13 | 319 | 17,426 | 107,849 | $2,841.81 |
| October | 9 | 328 | 10,879 | 107,816 | $2,930.53 |
View the detailed profile for this site here.
NSP 2 💲 – 2.20% Increase in Sessions
Before I started with Project24 I had hired a bunch of articles for this site but never published them. I finally had my editing team work through them and was able to get most of them published this month.
These articles don’t have the right search analysis, they mostly don’t have the “right” format either but, they are gaining absolutely zero traffic sitting unpublished.
I figured worse case scenario, I can throw them up to flush out the site a bit more and, in a few weeks or month, search console might show me some holes in this otherwise very saturated niche.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| August | 3 | 69 | 3,506 | 12,338 | $142.93 |
| September | 11 | 80 | 10,772 | 15,825 | $197.04 |
| October | 21 | 101 | 11,255 | 14,372 | $314.20 |
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 3 🏡 – 2.96% Decrease in Sessions
Much like NSP1 and NSP4, I do expect some seasonality in this niche. Overall though it’s doing nicely for me. I have no shortage of topic ideas for this site and expect to have it over 200 posts by the end of the year.
In spite of pageviews decreasing, income is up substantially. Earlier in October I reached out to Mediavine to ask why this site had such a huge disparity in RPMs compared to my other sites in similiar niches.
It turns out, I didn’t have video ads set to auto play. I followed their guidelines and adjusted some settings for this site and saw an immediate 25% increase in revenue. I also implemented a lot of the strategies and checked settings across my other three Mediavine sites as well.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| August | 20 | 102 | 25,567 | 97,785 | $1,515.42 |
| September | 16 | 118 | 21,823 | 94,542 | $1,577.76 |
| October | 26 | 144 | 29,678 | 89,495 | $2,083.32 |
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 4 🐾 – 0.87% Decrease in Sessions
The content on this site is one small segment of the content on NSP3. I need to be better about ordering posts for this site but, I’ve honestly been very happy with the traction for NSP2 that I haven’t put much effort into this one.
I’d like to get this site to 100 posts by the end of the year but we’ll see what happens.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| August | 10 | 55 | 13,091 | 16,095 | $314.77 |
| September | 5 | 60 | 5,291 | 15,323 | $320.80 |
| October | 3 | 63 | 2,652 | 15,486 | $377.61 |
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 5 🐘 – 2.85% Decrease in Sessions
I still need to take the time to sit down and do a full brand plan for this site. In the meantime, it isn’t getting much love and the traffic and income reflects that.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| August | 1 | 17 | 1222 | 1932 | $14.92 |
| September | 4 | 21 | 3813 | 1,872 | $13.51 |
| October | 1 | 22 | 926 | 1,777 | $12.10 |
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 6 🦔 – 17.51% Increase in Sessions
We saw another nice little jump for this site this month. We have just been letting the initial articles sit for the most part. I did add one new article to the site this month and will probably be ordering new content for it soon.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| August | 0 | 59 | 0 | 613 | $3.02 |
| September | 0 | 59 | 0 | 595 | $3.42 |
| October | 1 | 60 | 1,382 | 704 | $4.96 |
View the profile for this site here.
NSP 7 👶 – Not Forgotten
…but still not getting worked on
NSP 8 🧰 – 37.02% Increase in Sessions
This site got a nice little boost in income this month in spite of no new articles. We still have 15 articles we need to finish editing and get posted on the site which will be the goal for this month.
After that I’ll look at adding new content.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| August | 1 | 35 | 3579 | 534 | $5.48 |
| September | 0 | 35 | 0 | 1517 | $14.51 |
| October | 0 | 35 | 0 | 1658 | $27.96 |
View the profile for this site here.
🪑 NSP 9 – 10.20% Decrease in Sessions
While this site has the potential to be a broad niche, right now all of the posts on it relate to gardening so I am not surprised that we are seeing a decrease in sessions this time of year.
I still have about 20 or so posts to add to the site related to gardening before I decide on and research a new silo for it.
| Month | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews | Revenue |
| August | 7 | 41 | 10264 | 1393 | $16.46 |
| September | 7 | 48 | 8057 | 1713 | $22.20 |
| October | 6 | 54 | 8351 | 1465 | $17.83 |
View the profile for this site here.
New Project Stats
These sites are so new I normally wouldn’t post about them but, maybe you would like to get to know them a bit. None of them are running ads yet.
As you can see, they aren’t all getting equal attention as far as content goes either. Part of the reason for that is when I “launched” them I didn’t really have my keyword research done for them / their niche. That is something I hope to be able to do soon.
| Site Niche | Age (months) | # Posts Added | Total Posts | # Words Added | Pageviews |
| 🥬 Health & Fitness | 3 | 0 | 6 | 0 | 26* |
| 💐 Lifestyle | 3 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 27 |
| 🍯 Agriculture | 3 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 257* |
| 📏 Sewing | 4 | 6 | 19 | 6664 | 182* |
| 🌙 Lifestyle / Fitness | 5 | 2 | 6 | 2627 | 296 |
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MY NICHE SITE PROJECTS
Interested in reading about my niche site projects? Check out my Niche Site Project List to see my projects & their individual status.
RESOURCES I USE
I keep an up to date list of all of the tools and resources I use to manage my blogs, including how I create the awesome dashboards in my income reports, on my Tools and Resources page.
These are my top tools:
- ClickUp – It has easily helped me 10x my productivity.
- Big Scoots Hosting – (or, alternately, SiteGround)
- Tailwind for Pinterest
- ConvertKit for Email List
- Airtable for data tracking/spreadsheets when I first started (though I use ClickUp Exclusively now)
- Project24 the main course I took to learn how to blog, and my primary blog course recommendation.
- BloggerPlot for Analytics and Search Console Analysis in one place.
- Amalinks Pro for Amazon links and awesome tables.
- OnlineJobs.ph for my Virtual Assistants
- Pinteresting Strategies Course for Pinterest
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