Setting Goals Based on September’s Blog Income
Welcome to my September 2019 Blog Income Report. The reason I am including these income reports here at About Social Anxiety is because one of the topics that I want to write about is how to work from home.
(Just as an aside, I do already make my living from home, but not from this blog. If you would like to learn more about what I do, you can read that story here).
(And if you’d like to read my August Income Report you can find that here.)
While I advocate overcoming social anxiety and not letting it hold you back from pursuing a career that you want, I think that for some people, working from home can be a good thing. Particularly for those living with chronic illness, whether it is physical or mental, working from home offers a level of freedom that you won’t find at a normal job.
Let me say that I’m not writing this post to tell you I have all the answers. Far from it! I’m still figuring out how to build this as a business. But, I want to have a record of how I did it, so that if you find this down the road, it might help you do it too.
And if you’re wondering how to get started: I highly recommend taking courses to learn about running an online business. It will save you wasted time and frustration. The course that I am taking right now is called Elite Blog Academy.
Without further ado, here are my September numbers!
September STATS:
Note: The numbers in parentheses are from last month, so that you can easily compare my progresss (or lack thereof)!
Pageviews: 14,566 (18,150)
Sessions: 11,751 (14,940)
Users: 10,397 (13,398)
Mailing List Subscribers: 905 (724)
Pinterest Followers: 694 (601)
Pinterest monthly viewers: 630k (686k)
Facebook Followers: 4961 (4942)
Twitter Followers: 3069 (3057)
Instagram Followers: 122 (113)
Posts published: 8 (20)
SEMRUSH stats
Organic search: 522 (435)
Backlinks: 363 (319)
Organic keywords: 1167 (1068)
September BLOG INCOME REPORT:
Big changes coming here! As of October 1st, I decided to go ahead with my application for Monumetric. If you’re reading this now, you might even notice the ads on my site changing. I don’t yet know how this will affect my income from advertising, but I’m hoping that it moves things in a positive direction.
I made this decision after reading a special report that indicated one of the best things you can do to increase your income is to get with a managed ads network as soon as you can. While I had hoped to have enough traffic for Mediavine (you need 25,000 monthly sessions), after a bit of a dismal September, I decided that I might as well go with what is right in front of me: Monumetric!
Advertising (Media.net): $6.83 (11.13)
Advertising (Infolinks): $5.61 ($5.30)
Amazon: $3.16 ($7.71)
Products: $43 for ($39)
I sold 9 workbook bundles this month through my tripwire offer that you will see if you sign up to my newsletter.
Total income: $58.60 ($63.14)
Monthly expenses:
Email (Convertkit): $29
Tailwind: $14.99
: $13.60 (use and discount code KSDISC to save 20%)
Total expenses: $57.59
Net blog income: $1.01 ($5.55)
Not nearly good enough!
Thoughts about this month:
I’m actually quite shocked looking back to see that many numbers went down in September and overall growth was slow except for my email list. Interestingly, my income did not fluctuate that much, because the majority of it comes from my Tripwire, which is tied to how many email signups I get. I think that means I am on the right track! If I depended soley on traffic to my website to generate income, I would have likely taken a loss this month.
However, there’s clearly a traffic problem that I need to address in October. I think I need to be more diligent about certain things that I’ve let slide such as applying to Pinterest group boards and posting for backlinks. These are things I’ve added to my weekly blogging task list in Trello.
I think I’ve finally come up with a system that works for me! I have a board in Trello that lists the days of the week (Monday through Friday) and certain tasks that I need to do each day. This ensures that I’m on track with all of the different stuff that needs to get done. Have you tried Trello? I’d love to hear in the comments what you use to keep you on track.
Goals for October:
I decided to add a goals section to this income report! It only makes sense that if I am looking back on what worked and didn’t work, I should also be planning for the future.
I did not reach my September goal of having 1000 subscribers by the end of September, but I am very confident that I will be there by the end of October. I realized though, that goals shouldn’t be numbers that I can’t control: they should be tasks that I am working on.
So, beyond the usual tasks of writing posts, posting to social media, and sending newsletters, my main goal for October is to choose a product for my seed launch and write the sales emails. I think once I hit 1000 subscribers I will be kept very busy by this whole process, so I’m not planning too much else for October.
If I have extra time, I hope to work through some of the training courses that I’ve accumulated but have not had time to complete. I purchased the Genius Blogger’s Toolkit a couple of days ago and so I have my work cut out for me!
My plan is try and make sure I use at least 3 to 4 of the best courses, to ensure I’ve maxmized my value without overloading myself.
Other Income Reports
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