Honest Blog Income Report – August 2021
Welcome to our very first blog income report! We started a new blog last month and will share our income progress.
What’s covered?
Each month I break down what’s been happening behind the scenes of our new blogging business.
In these reports, I discuss the growth of our YouTube channel, social media accounts, email list, website analytics, and other essential metrics.
I also give a detailed overview of our blogging finances, including revenue streams and expenses. So let’s get into it.
YouTube
- At the end of the month, we have 258 subscribers. That’s a gain of 41 subscribers.
- Lifetime views are just under 6,934. For the month, we had 1,319 views.
- Lifetime watch hours are at 404. For the month, we have 94 hours.
- Impressions for the month are at 16,600.
- The monthly click-through rate is 3.8%.
- The average view duration this month is 00:04:15
- The number of videos we put out this month is 4.
- The age of our channel is 6 months old.
We average get between 31 and 44 new subscribers each month. That’s staying pretty consistent with a slight upward trend over the life of our channel. Our monthly views are showing some growth as well.
We had a record growth from Jun – July of about 400 views. July and August views held pretty consistently to each other, with august topping at 1,319 total for the month.
We need at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours to monetize with YouTube within the past 365 days. We are currently 742 subscribers and 3,596 watch hours away from our goal.
- We have 866 followers.
- We made 22 posts this month.
- Impressions this month, 3,666
- Total interactions are, 323
- Linkinbio views, 30
- Linkinbio action clicks, 20
Instagram is our most prominent social media after YouTube. Our 22 posts this month have driven 20 sessions to our blog through Linkin.bio clicks.
- Total Followers, 43
- Post this month, 8
- Post engagement, 110
Our Facebook presence is pretty stagnant right now. This is because we have not focused on devolving this social media besides creating our profile.
Email list growth
Our email list has grown to 20 subscribers in August. That’s a growth of 14 subscribers from July. Most of our subscribers have come from our blog launch in August.
Throughout the month, we sent a total of 14 emails. Those emails had an open rate of 53%. Out of that 53%, the click-through rate was 33%.
Let’s break those numbers down a bit further. We have 20 email list subscribers, and we sent out 14 emails.
About 7 of those emails were opened. From those 7 emails, 2 subscribers took action. That action led them to our website or a product funnel.
Website Traffic
At this point, it’s been 18 since the start of our blog. Within those 18 days, we have published 11 blog posts and have received 800 page views.
Our page views consist of 136 different users and 226 sessions. That tells me that some of those users have returned for multiple sessions. The average session duration is about 3 minutes.
So, when someone is on one of our pages, they stay for about three minutes. The bounce rate is at 22%. Our traffic has come from direct organic email, referrals, and social media.
Direct traffic means people going to the search bar and typing, BloggingMoneyLife.com, or going to our website “directly.”
Organic traffic is the people who found us through a Google search. That’s at 20.
Email traffic comes from the email lists that I mentioned earlier. Our email list has driven 20 views to our website.
Referral traffic is our backlinks from other websites to ours. We show to have 6 views from referrals. Those are probably coming from Miss Millennia Magazine. That’s another blog run by Jas.
Social traffic. 22 people have come to our website from social media outlets.
And this is how it breaks down. 2 of those came from the Instagram LinkedIn bio, and 11 of those people came from YouTube.
Income Report
How do those metrics translate into dollars? Well, have five different ways that we generate income.
- Affiliate marketing networks. We are not on any affiliate network yet, so we’re not bringing in any affiliate income.
- Advertising networks. The only ad network we’re on at the moment is Google AdSense. And all that has generated us $0.02 in ad revenue.
- Sponsored posts networks. We have not applied for any supported post networks yet.
- Partnerships are a great way to make money with a blog. But as of now, we haven’t developed any partnerships.
- Products. Our 3 products existed for some time before we launched our blog. So they have had some time to build momentum and earn income.
Our products
Blogging Money Formula is a course that Jas put together to help bloggers grow their blogs into an income stream.
We have a total of 2 sales for that Blogging Money Formula course. One of those two sales has come from a paid-in-full purchase. This purchase was for $350, and our income is $350.
We also offer a payment program in four payments of $99. We sold one of these and earned an additional $99.
Our 2nd product, Blogging Money Update, is an email subscription that we offer. This email bosts a list of sponsored posts opportunities sent to our subscribers three times a week.
They offer opportunities ranging anywhere from $60 to $6,000. We charge $30 a month for this list of sponsored post opportunities. Through Blogging Money Life, we made 2 sales this month at $30 apiece, earning $60 in income.
We also offer a sponsored post-pricing toolkit for sale. We have two different versions. One for $30 and one for $64 comes with an email template. We made 2 sales this month for a total of $130.
In summary, our total product sales this month are at $639
Expenses
Here’s a list of our reoccurring expenses. These are expenses that I will be showing up for every month for the life of our blog.
- Morning Fame is a product to help us measure our YouTube analytics. It costs $9.90 each month.
- Epidemic Sound is where we get the sound effects and music we use for our YouTube videos. We pay $15 a month for this tool.
- Later is an Instagram management tool that we use. It costs about $21 a month.
- SiteGround is our hosting provider. We pay about $5 a month for our hosting.
- Canva is a graphic design tool. We pay $10 a month for it.
- MailerLite is our email management tool. We use a free version.
- Grammarly is a content editing tool. We pay about $12 a month for that.
- SteamYard is a live video broadcasting tool. We pay $25 a month through that.
Our total reoccurring expenses for August are just about $100. With that said, we must bring in at least $100 monthly to break even.
And on top of those reoccurring expenses, we also had about $600 in one-time expenses. Most of these additional expenses involve the start-up costs of launching our blog.
Profit and Loss summary
Our total monthly gross for August is $636. Our total monthly expenses for August are about $705.
We expect to see $100 worth of expenses waiting for us next month as a reoccurring expense. And we had almost $600 of one-time expenses that won’t be there next month.
All in all, our monthly net for August is -$68. That looks really good and seems promising for a profit in September.
And if we continue with our product sales the way we’re going now, we can hope for another $600 of income next month. With that $600, less the reoccurring expenses of $100, we could see a profit of $500 in September. We’ll just have to wait and see how everything turns out.
To see August’s numbers in further detail, watch our blogging income report video here.
What’s next?
Thanks for reading our first Blog Income Report. Each month I strive to improve our blogging metrics and the structure of our income report.
Check out our second Blog Income Report here.
