Blogging Income and Expenditure – January 2015

Happy February! I can’t believe we’re into the second month of the year so far. January was tough, after the long Christmas break it was hard to find my blogging rhythm again. But I learned a few things so I’m ready to share them with you!

Blog Income

Income for January

Shall we start with income. It was DOWN {insert sad face here}. 

I sort of expected it to be, to be honest, but it was still a shock when it happened! You see December is the best month of the year to be a blogger. Because it’s Holiday Season so people are buying through your affiliate links, and it’s the last month of the year so advertisers are paying the highest CPMs for ads because they need to spend their budgets, or risk having them cut the following year.

January of course is a whole other story. People don’t have a lot of spare cash after spending big over Christmas, and advertisers are starting out the year spending as little as possible while they decide how they want to spend their budget for the year ahead.

Result? Lot’s of bloggers weeping! Well me anyway, you may have fared better!

Lucky for me I sold a few more copies of my Google Analytics book – and got some AMAZING feedback. I’m so glad this book is helping so many other bloggers understand their analytics and use that data to help grow their blog traffic and income.

I’ll talk more about income in a little bit. But first let’s look at expenses. 

Expenses for January

My lights on expenses include subscriptions to the following services that I use to run my blog:

• Free Agent bookkeeping software
• Viraltag
• Board Booster
• Coschedule
• Digital Ocean Hosting
• DPD: Digital Product Delivery

My training expenses includes my monthly subscription to BC Prime. If you are looking to grow your blog in 2015 I highly recommend it. Once you sign up make sure you start with the 21 Day SEO course which will blow your mind and make keyword research so much easier – oh and that course retails separately for $99 so you are saving a lot of money by taking it through your membership instead!

What did I spend the rest of the money on for training in January? That is a very good question, and I don’t know the answer {gasp} I know, I need to start writing down what I’m actually spending my money on. But all I can say is if I can’t remember what it was it’s not worth me telling you about it!

Miscellaneous this month was some video creation software because I want to spend time this year making videos to promote content. I’m not going to tell you what it is though because I haven’t used it enough to decide whether I would recommend it or not. Maybe by next month!

And I’m happy to be paying out more affiliate commissions for my Google Analytics book. I love that people  are telling their friends about it and making some money themselves. (If you already bought the book and want to join the affiliate programme the signup link is on the last page).

Traffic for January

I had an AWESOME month for traffic in December thanks to my Holiday posts, and especially my Breakfast Casserole collection. I was expecting it to crash in January but luckily my One whole month of school lunch recipes post went semi-viral on Facebook so they didn’t fall too much.

Don’t forget that I use PadSquad for mobile traffic and they count pageviews as the number of screens someone has to scroll through to read a blog post. As my posts are quite long I generate a lot of pageviews per visit. They are “legit” pageviews, but I’m being open about that because I do not have as much traffic as someone who might generate one million desktop pageviews. 

If you’re trying to compare your traffic/income ratio to mine use the unique pageviews number from the table which is still compatible no matter how people view your site.

RPM for January

Each month I’ll include my RPM, which stands for page revenue per thousand impressions. This will show me how effectively I’m monetising my blog. (Note: I am using unique pageviews to generate my RPM because my actual pageviews number fluctuates depending on how long each post is – it’s a Pad Squad thing!)

As the months go by the figure should increase, so I’ll put previous month’s RPM in brackets.

YIKES! That’s a big drop. And all thanks to those advertisers keeping their money firmly in their pockets.

You can find out more about what RPM is and how to calculate it by reading this post on RPM here.

Why advertising income is not reliable

When I walked away from December with 1800 dollars in my pocket (knowing I’d have to share some with the tax man) I felt confident I could actually replace my JOB income with income from my blog instead. And that was an amazing feeling.

Then I came down to earth with a bump in January.

You see I realised pretty quickly last year that I didn’t want to work with brands to bring in an income. Far too many brands and PR companies expect bloggers to work for free, or in exchange for gift baskets that don’t pay the mortgage. And even when you find a company that is willing to pay what you’re worth for a sponsored post you still have deadlines.

I love to blog because I can fit it around my family. My kiddos have been sick on and off for the past 6 weeks and that makes it tough to stick to someone else’s deadlines. I just don’t like the pressure! 

So I thought I’d focus on advertising as my main income stream, because then it’s all about me writing AWESOME content that people want to read, and rocking the pageviews. 

But as you’ve seen from my numbers. Advertising income fluctuates wildly between the end and start of the year. So December’s figures weren’t ‘typical’ which means I need a LOT more traffic to sustain that kind of advertising income during the rest of the year. 

I saw a 3% drop in advert impressions on my mobile site between December and January, and a 71% drop in income! Scary right?

So advertising isn’t reliable, and I don’t want to do brand work, so what’s left? Products.

My little analytics book is doing well, but it’s not going to help me retire in four years so I started thinking about other ideas.

Then I stumbled across a group of bloggers who are marketing Essential Oils on their blogs, and some of them within a few months are already making the income I need to pay the bills.

I almost walked away because to me essential oils have always sounded a bit mumbo jumbo. But my business head was really interested in the opportunity so I decided to buy a kit and see what I thought.

Oh my goodness. I was hooked the minute I opened a bottle of Peppermint Oil and breathed it in!

Those oils are already helping me improve the wellbeing of my family, and I want to shout about them from the rooftops. So as of January I’m a Young Living Wellness Advocate. You’ve probably already seen a post or two on the blog and you will see many more in the coming weeks and months. The Super Mommy Club has always been about making mom’s life easier with recipes and kid’s activities, and now I can help moms improve their family’s wellness too.

I’m going to start talking about my oil explorations a bit more in these income reports as the months go by. But in the meantime if you’re interested in finding out more about them and whether they would be a good income stream for your blog check out this post and then send me an email with any questions.

Super Mommy Club follower numbers

These are the social media properties I’m focusing on for 2015. I was very happy with my newsletter growth which comes from a pop up that appears on desktop views. I’ve always been leery of popups but they seem to be working. I’m planning a blog post explaining my strategy so look out for that in the coming week or so.

Performance against targets

Shall we finish up by reviewing my performance against my targets?

I shared my goals for 2015 in December’s Income . I set myself some pretty stretching targets and here’s how my blog performed against them. Pageviews didn’t quite hit the mark, but income (I wanted to increase it by $200 a month) was way off the mark. 

I’m happy that my social media growth is almost where I want it to be, and I love that I’m 43% ahead of target for newsletter subscribers, because they are so much more valuable than social media ones to us bloggers.

What are your blogging goals for February?

My goals for February are to continue to write AWESOME content to keep increasing my pageviews, but I’m also spending some time learning more about essential oils and the best way to share my stories with my readers to show them how they can improve their wellness too.

How was your January? What are your blogging goals for February?

If you want me to drop you an email when I publish next month’s report, or if when I share any blogging related posts you can add your email address to our mailing list.