Income Report for August 2021
The following income report is for the blog that I run at AboutSocialAnxiety.com. I’m sharing it here to show my progress in figuring out how to make a blog/website successful!
August STATS:
Note: The numbers in parentheses are from last month. I’m retrieving these numbers from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Semrush, Convertkit, and my social media platforms.
Pageviews: 34,595 (32,821)
Sessions: 28,983 (27,008)
Users: 25,661 (24,486)
Organic Sessions (Google): 8284 (8884)
Social Sessions: 11,146 (10425)
Mailing List Subscribers: 5874 (5743)
Social Media
Pinterest Followers: 6k (5.6k)
Facebook Followers: 5.7k (5.7k)
Facebook group members: 621 (587)
Twitter Followers: 3.4k (3.4k)
Instagram Followers: 910 (851)
Tik Tok Followers: 247k (245k)
Total Social Media Followers: 263k (263k)
Posts published: 2 (6)
Google Search Console stats
Google Search Console total impressions: 286k (308k)
Google Search Console total clicks: 6.83k (6.71k)
Average Click through rate: 2.4% (2.2%)
Average Position: 25.4 (25.6)
SEMRUSH stats
Organic search: 4.3k (5.4k)
Backlinks: 6.5k (4.5k)
Organic keywords: 3118 (3180)
MOZ Domain Authority: 26 (22)
My domain authority has gone up again! I’m thinking that I attribute this to getting more specific with my articles so that they are more tightly focused on my niche (who knows?).
August BLOG INCOME REPORT:
Advertising
Mediavine: $784.24 ($550.77)
Pageview RPM: $27.06 ($20.39)
As you can see, my earnings from Mediavine have continued to go up. They’ve basically doubled in the last couple months. I attribute this to learning about how to adjust my settings from the forum inside of Income School. I mentioned last report that I signed up for Project 24 through Income School and finally feel like I’ve found where I can excel. My goal right now for this income stream (ads) is $1000 and I feel like it’s within reach!
Affiliates
Note: I’m reporting everything in US Dollars.
Amazon US: $55.25 ($50.49)
Amazon CANADA: $5.31 ($0)
Amazon UK: $18.12 ($13.47)
Amazon OVERALL: $78.68 ($63.96)
I’m getting very close to a $100 month from Amazon! This has been painfully slow to grow, but I’m starting to understand some things better. One thing that is working is to recommend an Audible subscription, which is something that I use and like myself.
Betterhelp: $0 and 5 conversions ($0 and 5 conversions)
I think I’m going to start reporting conversions for Betterhelp so I can better understand what is happening with this affiliate. As I understand it, a conversion is when someone signs up for the service through a free trial. But I only receive a commission if they continue after that week.
ShareASale: 0 (0)
Awin: $35.11 ($24.03)
Clickbank: $0 ($0)
Rakuten: $0 ($0)
Social Pro Now: $37.85 ($229.75)
CJ Affiliate: 0
(This is a new affiliate that I have added)
Affiliates Overall: $151.64 ($317.74)
This is a little disappointing, but I know that when there are no Betterhelp sales that my affiliate earnings will be relatively low. Some things that I am doing this month are completing the affiliate marketing course by Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents and using the Pretty Links plugin to clean up my affiliate links. I also started a free trial of the Lasso plugin, but I found that I wasn’t quite ready to make use of all of it’s features. At $29 a month, I couldn’t justify it right now.
Products
Products overall: $268 ($377)
Teachable Products
My Teachable sales are dropping and I attribute that to fewer signups to my email list. I attribute fewer signups to my email list to the fact I’ve been focusing on affiliates and now my blog posts don’t really feature signing up to my email list. It’s always a delicate balancing act! I need to get back to focusing on this too.
Total Teachable Revenue: $262 ($377)
Social Anxiety Masterclass: 2 sold (2 sold)
Not that the price varies for the Masterclass depending on when it is purchased in the welcome funnel. Early birds get the worm (lower price)!
Art Therapy-Inspired Coloring Bundle: 0 sold (0 sold)
CBT + Mindfulness Workbook Tripwire: 10 sold (6 sold)
CBT Workbook: 0 sold (0 sold)
Mindfulness Workbook: 0 sold (1 sold)
Social Skills Workbook: 0 sold (0 sold)
Social Skills Workbook (Tripwire at $7 each): 2 sold (9 sold)
Self Confidence Journal: 0 sold (0 sold)
Etsy Products
I feel like I learned some things from the gratitude worksheet but that it’s not aligned anymore with really narrowing down on my niche. I’m not sure exactly what I will do about that. I do understand though that the sales were coming from Pinterest, so when that pin pops is when I make sales. I think the big takeaway for me is that people were responding to something that I created and filled out myself. People like REAL.
Total Etsy Revenue: $6 ($0)
Sunburst Gratitude Worksheet: 1 sold (0 sold)
Rainbow Set of 12 Gratitude Worksheets: 0 sold (0 sold)
Total income: $1203.88 ($1245.51)
Income per subscriber: $0.20 ($0.21)
Income per thousand pageviews: $35.40 ($38.90)
Onward and upward!
Monthly expenses:
Email (Convertkit): $79
: $13.60 (use and discount code KSDISC to save 20%)
Teachable: $39
Canva: $12.82
WordPress Support from iMark Interactive: $27
Conversion AI: $109
This is a robot writer (I know, I know). I’m actually using it to help with my “day job” (I write for Verywell.com). I’ve cancelled it a couple times now but keep coming back to it. It’s kind of like a crutch for writer’s block if you can’t afford to hire writers. For my blog, I’ve used it mostly to generate ideas, create email subject lines and Pinterest descriptions, and occasionally to help write posts.
Link Whisper: $57
This plugin is awesome and totally worthwhile! If you have a couple hundred posts on your site like me, I totally recommend it to help with internal linking which is important for Google SEO. I use it mostly to add inbound links and it’s a huge timesaver. For example, if you just wrote a new post and want to link to it from older posts, it is awesome for doing this quickly.
Total expenses: $337.42 ($186.31)
Net blog income: $866.46 ($1059.20)
Thoughts about this month’s income report:
My only comment here is that I considered this to be a “bad month” before I started tallying up the numbers. Aside from the bump in Mediavine earnings, I felt like everything else was pretty low. So it’s really interesting to me that on a “bad month” I can now count on about $1200. Me two years ago would have thought that was amazing for sure.
Did I Meet my Goals for August?
Similar to July, I had no goals for August other than to keep plugging along with writing posts according to Project 24 specs.
I’ve had some success with some of those posts I wrote already, and I can see that the long-tail keywords are going to make a big difference for niching down my site.
Goals for September:
- In September I just wanted to get caught up on things. However, I’m also completing the Affiliate course I mentioned from Michelle above.
Back Burner Goals:
These continue to be the same.
- Affiliate launch for Audible audiobook subscription
- Work on finishing Stupid Simple SEO
- Add to my Etsy Shop
- Run Facebook Ads
- Create more Products
- Focus on Instagram profile (improving)
- Add an affiliate program in Teachable
- Work through Income School Project 24
- Hundredaire Challenge (from Faith Mariah)
Do you want to learn to start your own blog? I’ve put together my ultimate guide to starting a blog in this post.
Past Income Reports
- April 2021 Income Report ($617.20)
- May 2021 Income Report ($1061.32)
- June 2021 Income Report ($1544.62)
- July 2021 Income Report ($1245.51)