Income Report for October 2019
Wowzer, guys! October was a good month in terms of the income report. Before I dive in, let me remind you why I am including income reports on a blog about social anxiety.
It goes way way back to the year 2010, and I started following a guy named Pat Flynn. As the story goes, Pat built an internet empire after being laid off from his job and realizing that people were visiting a website he had built for himself to study for a particular exam related to his line of work.
I remember reading Pat’s story and being truly fascinated by what he had done. At the time, I’d been writing about social anxiety for three years for About.com. I dabbled a bit in trying to start my own website but it didn’t turn out very well.
Let’s just say Google banned me for life (True story – it wasn’t my fault but it happened. I can talk about it if you want).
So I’m not at all new to online business or the online world, but it wasn’t until 2017 (ten years after I started writing online) that I finally decided enough was enough – and this blog About Social Anxiety was born.
Let’s be clear: my primary goal with this site is to provide resources to people living with social anxiety.
I feel like social anxiety is truly different than many other mental health issues in that it can be so isolating.
And it’s my goal to help you see that your life can be different.
But—another goal I have here is to show you that if the 9 to 5 life is making your social anxiety worse, there are other options. I’m not making a full-time income from this blog yet, but I want to prove it can be done so that I can show you the way.
I do already work from home, though. If you’d like to do that too, be sure to sign up for my newsletter, as I’ve got a whole list of companies that hire people to work from home in my resource library.
Alright, all that aside, let’s get to the deets for October.
October STATS:
Note: The numbers in parentheses are from last month.
Pageviews: 16,441 (14,566)
For context: 50% of my traffic comes from social, 37% from organic search, 10% direct.
Sessions: 12,819 (11,751)
Users: 11,235 (10,397)
Mailing List Subscribers: 1034 (905)
Pinterest Followers: 763 (694)
Pinterest monthly viewers: 759k (630k)
Facebook Followers: 4962 (4961)
This month I started posting articles twice per day, which I think accounts for the drop-off/steady state. I need to get better at also sharing content from other pages, but find it hard to find enough good stuff to share that I can schedule in advance!
Twitter Followers: 3098 (3069)
Instagram Followers: 122 (122)
This might be the next social platform I focus on. I admit I’ve really done nothing to try and build my Instagram following.
Posts published: 9 (8)
SEMRUSH stats
Organic search: 484 (522)
I don’t like that this had slid backwards. I plan to focus more on SEO by writing one backlink article each week as suggested in Debbie Gartner’s e-books. I was doing this before but let it slide.
Backlinks: 490 (363)
Organic keywords: 1090 (1167)
Again, I don’t like that this is going backwards. SEO is a huge part of my strategy and my goal is to rank #1 for the term “social anxiety” someday (lofty goal I know).
October BLOG INCOME REPORT:
If you read my report from last month, you’ll know that I went ahead with Monumetric at the beginning of October. Unfortunately, this did not translate into increased earnings as you will see below. My hope is that it just takes time for things to adjust (who knows?). I still had a tiny bit of Media.net and Infolinks earnings before those ads were taken down.
Advertising
Media.net: $0.43 ($6.83)
Infolinks: $1.52 ($5.61)
Monumetric: $7.61
So, my Pageview RPM was $0.46 which I think is pretty low. I also think I need to do more to increase pageviews per visitor, which I am working on by adding related articles to the bottom of every post. Just an aside – I’ve found them very easy to deal with. I needed ads taken off of one of my sales pages and they were quick to respond.
Affiliates
Amazon: $8.19 ($3.16)
Interesting story about Amazon! I’d made barely anything from them near the end of the month. Then, I published a post listing 65 gifts for people with anxiety. That post went viral on Pinterest for a little while, resulting in a lot of Amazon clicks and a bunch of sales.
The funniest sale was for a Star Wars Storm Trooper Voice Changer Helmet. No, I did not recommend that product – someone bought it after clicking through one of my Amazon links for a different product.
Betterhelp: $600
This is new! I believe this resulted from me adding a disclaimer to my e-mails that included Betterhelp as a recommended resource (I could be wrong about that). I am absolutely thrilled that people were able to sign up for this service through my recommendation. I tried out the service myself and stand behind it. It’s not right for everyone, but for certain people I think it is perfect.
Products: $106 ($43)
This was a combination of my tripwire sales and the launch of the beta version of my Social Anxiety Masterclass on Teachable.
Total income: $723.75 ($58.60)
Monthly expenses:
(Note that I don’t include my training expenses in here for courses I’m taking. For example, I bought the Genius Blogger’s Toolkit this month but I won’t include it here. I consider that part of my education).
Email (Convertkit): $29
Tailwind: $14.99
: $13.60 (use and discount code KSDISC to save 20%)
Monumetric (one-time fee): $99
PLR product: $36
(I paid for a PLR coloring bundle, because let’s face it, you don’t want me designing your coloring pages, at least not the professional ones!)
Total expenses: $192.59 ($57.59)
Net blog income: $531.16 ($1.01)
Let’s do the math… that’s a 500 X increase. The blogging world changes quickly!
Thoughts about this month’s income report:
For the most part, all of the numbers went up in October. I’m not sure what to attribute that to really, because my output was pretty much the same as in September. The only difference I can think of is that I implemented a system to post regularly to my Facebook and Twitter pages where only have to spend one hour a week (and this way I don’t forget to do it).
But well my income went up quite a bit and that’s mostly due to the one affiliate. Will that continue in November? That remains to be seen.
Again, I still feel like I have a traffic problem overall. I’m noticing an increase in the past week due to things doing well on Pinterest, but I never know if that will sustain itself. As well, I know the holiday season is supposed to be higher in general.
My other big focus this month was on my “Baby Seed Launch” as it is known in Elite Blog Academy. This involved pre-selling my Social Anxiety Masterclass over the course of a week. This was quite stressful but I’m glad for the experience.
Goals for November:
I pretty much have just one goal: deliver the product to my customers that I’ve promised to them. I’m planning to release one module a week beginning mid November, so I should conceivably have all the work done by the end of the month. I’m hoping to take my kids away on a mini-vacation near the end of the month, so that’s my incentive to get things done!
In addition, I need to do all the usual blogging tasks: writing posts, social media, newsletters, etc. Beyond that, I won’t be taking on much else.
There you have it! I’m pretty much an open book on what I’m doing, because I’ve appreciated other people over the years doing the same. If you happen to be here reading, well then you get to see what has worked for me.
What’s your plan for November? I’d love to hear what stage you are at in your blogging journey.
Other Income Reports
- January 2020 Income Report
- December 2019 Income Report
- November 2019 Income Report
- September 2019 Income Report
- August 2019 Income Report
WANT TO REMEMBER THIS? SAVE OCTOBER 2019 BLOG INCOME REPORT TO YOUR FAVORITE PINTEREST BOARD!
