August 2017 Income Report

I wasn’t sure what to expect for August income. The last time I saw a big break in income was in May, which was followed by a dip in income for June. So, seeing as how July shaped up to be a “big break” month, I didn’t want to go into August with high expectations. Lucky for me, my income did climb this past month, though not by a huge margin. Incredibly, my blog generated over $2,000 in August.

While it’s incredibly surreal to type that sentence and realize that I made thousands of dollars online, what’s even more shocking is that I didn’t publish a single blog post during August. That money came entirely through passive income. To be fair, I did schedule pins on Pinterest about once a week using Tailwind to make sure my 50-60 daily queue was full, but other than that, my blog really took a back seat for personal reasons this month.

Yes, this month was really stressful in my personal life and I just didn’t have the headspace to work on my blog at all. I think part of it is still burnout, and part of it is that I just don’t have the time that I had in the spring to work. I’m hoping to come up with a less demanding September schedule for blogging that will allow me to be productive while staying sane!

Why I Publish Income Reports

I noticed that I never really explained why I publish income reports and what my plans are for them in the future. I wrote a little about the kind of blogger I want to be in my first income report, but I never truly shared why I published these reports.

The truth is that income reports have a really bad reputation. They can offer inflated numbers with little to no explanation of how the blogger got there. A lot of readers get frustrated with this. Other readers take it as an opportunity to dig through the site and find the posts or topics referenced in the income report. I am in the latter half.

I don’t expect everyone to reveal all their strategies. Sometimes I have to dig into someone’s blog to understand why and how they made income. And I’m ok with that.

Personally, my plan is to continue these income reports until I reach the point where I earn a six-figure “salary” from my blog (I suppose around $8,300+ per month consistently).

At that point, I’ll either stop publishing them entirely or share them privately to my email list as I recently discovered another blogger is doing (This is smart, I signed up for her list!). I don’t think anyone wants to be publishing their income online forever, and I think that having an end-point in mind allows me to focus on this goal and share the journey along the way.

While I do hope that you find these reports useful, they are more of a journal to me at this point, where I can reflect on the past month and organize my thoughts for a productive month ahead. I’m not trying to sell you anything, and I’m happy to answer any questions you have!

Income

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s jump into the income now!

My income went up across the board except for ShopStyle which I don’t even use anymore. I removed the Amazon widget from my sticky sidebar and left the AdSense rectangle alone there so that’s why my AdSense income went up so much.

RewardStyle was really interesting this month. On the 23rd, I had my highest commission day ever, totaling $301.78. Then, for the rest of the month, my earnings were pretty much flat-lined! It was the craziest thing. I’m guessing people were preparing to go away for Labor Day weekend and therefore stopped shopping online?

You can see in this graph how my income dropped towards the end of the month:

So the last quarter of the month was pretty bad. We’re only a few days into September but I’m really hoping and praying sales remain consistent this month!

Traffic

Traffic went up slightly in August to 34,198. Ironically, the last week of August was a very high-traffic week, so I’m so confused as to where the sales were!

Expenses

I wouldn’t have been able to earn this kind of income without my three magic tools: a domain from Namecheap, my hosting from A2, and the awesome Pinterest scheduler Tailwind to promote my posts!

I had an additional expense this month which was forming an LLC. This cost me about $100 and it’s so worth it once your blog starts making money. I can now officially say that I am a true business owner! 🙂

Plans for the Month Ahead

For those who don’t know, I have three blogs (including this one). One is an interior design blog which is my main source of income, and the other is a travel blog.

The idea was always that my interior design blog would be monetized from the start and optimized to earn money, while the travel blog would be more of a passion project. It’s much harder to earn money with a travel blog than most other niches.

However, now that I seem to be getting the hang of things, I want to try to incorporate some of the marketing tactics I’ve learned over the past year, and slowly start to monetize my travel blog. Blog Ambitious will likely be monetized more intentionally down the road too, but for now, it’s purely informational.

Hoping you had a profitable August as I did!