Honest Blog Income Report December 2021
We are now well into January, and it’s time to share the blog income report for December. If you’re reading our Income Report Series for the first time, welcome, and thank you for joining us!
Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. And you will be among the first to receive our latest income reports, blogging tips, and Costa Rica living videos.
Each month in this blog income report, I break down what’s been happening behind the scenes of our new blogging business. This series discusses YouTube channel growth, social media accounts, email list, website analytics, and other metrics essential to any blogging business.
I also give a detailed overview of our blogging finances, including revenue streams and expenses. If this sounds interesting to you, please read on.
Social Media
Developing a solid social media presence within your content marketing strategy is crucial for today’s creators. As a blogger, driving traffic from your social networks is one of the best ways to reach your audience.
Once you have implemented a solid social sharing strategy, it only takes one good piece of content to grow your blog quickly. Oh, I forgot to mention the best part about social media promotion. It’s free! This is why I think it’s so important to include these metrics in our blog income report.
YouTube
We launched our YouTube channel in late February 2021. This was a few months before our blog was live. Our channel is ten months old, and we publish new video content every Wednesday.
Let’s kick off this report with our YouTube metrics. In December, we finished with a total of 410 subscribers. We grew by an average of 1 new subscriber per day, for a total of 32 subscribers this month. This is a 60% growth rate from November.
Our lifetime video views are now at 14,689, growing by 1,905 views. December’s video view growth rate is 51% from last month, and we have started to bounce back from November’s slump.
We settled in with 154 watch hours. Which is up this month but still shy of 2 hours from our all-time high in October. Since we publish new content monthly, our watch hours should multiply at a compounding rate. So, ideally, each month should be a record-breaking month.
Video impressions are climbing back from November’s long fall. We received over 22,000 impressions. This is similar to the progress we saw in September but still a far cry from October’s outstanding performance.
Our click-through rate is a respectable 4%. We’ve been able to hold firm at the 4–5% range for the past eight months.
Our average view duration has fallen 10% from the previous month and now sits at 4 minutes and 50 seconds. Although this is a decrease this month, we still hold our viewer’s attention longer than the last five months before November.
So, December was a pretty educational month for our YouTube channel. First, we decided to spend most of the month celebrating the holidays in the States with family and friends. Then, because we genuinely wanted to enjoy our vacation, we decided it would be best not to work. So we chose to run our entire blogging business on autopilot this month.
We scheduled a few pieces of content to publish on various days and times (including videos) and crossed our fingers. In the end, it was nice to see that we maintained our Youtube metrics from last month. We saw some notable growth.
Let’s run through our Instagram for our blog income report for December. We ended the month with 1,016 followers, up 18 from last month (total growth rate of 1.8%). However, we only posted on IG 5 times this month. As a result of our light presents on this social media, we only drove four visits to our website.
What is my concussion? Probably the same as yours. You have to play to win, and we haven’t shown up for a while now.
Our lack of posting on this social platform resulted in very little traffic driven to our blog from Instagram. Check out the chart below to see how our post frequency is related to website traffic throughout last year.
Stay up to date by following our Instagram page here.
Again, I do not have much news to report on our Facebook metrics this month.
Our reach is slightly down, and followers and page likes remain the same. We posted six times and received 31 engagements with those posts.
You can like our Facebook page to read our latest blog posts and watch the newest Youtube videos.
We will be developing a strategy for this social media in the early months of 2022.
Join our three followers on Pinterest here. ????
Email List
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “the money is on the list.” Email is one of the most potent tools for bloggers to communicate directly with their audience. We can not stress enough the importance of building a solid email list early in your business.
Click Here to learn 11 Easy Ways To Earn Money With Your Email List.
We finished this month with a total of 266 email subscribers. That’s an increase of 24 subs. In addition, we only had eight unsubscribes this month, which is much better than in November.
We had seven different automated email campaigns running this month, sending out a total of 1,730 emails. From all those emails we sent out, our open rate was 30%, totaling just over 500 open emails. Our click-through rate (people who clicked a link embedded in an email) dropped from 5% to 1.85%, equalling 32 clicks. Zero subscribers marked us as spam from over 1,700 emails we sent in December.
Manage and Grow your email list with ConvertKit here.
Here are my thoughts on this month’s email list performance.
New email list subscribers have continued to fall, but this is expected. In late September, we participated in a campaign with the Genius Bloggers ToolKit. This campaign helped us generate high email list subscription results.
The benefits from this campaign have lasted longer than I expected. And since these new subscribers are our target audience, we have a shallow unsubscribe rate.
A low spam rate is always reassuring. The last thing we want to do is send out annoying content to our subscribers. This metric tells me that our personalities are shown through our emails.
Our open rate has fallen a bit under 2% this month. I am contributing this to people being preoccupied during the holiday season.
Website Traffic
Okay, let’s move on to website analytics. Blogging Money Life was launched in August 2021, and we are now five months old.
We published three articles this month, which brings our total number of articles on our website to 33.
SEMrush shows that we rank for 394 organic keywords within the U.S. This is an excellent number for the size and age of our blog.
We’re showing up for six keywords on the first page (within the first ten articles from a Google search). In addition, we rank #1 for one of those keyword terms populated by Google’s search engine.
Our U.S. organic traffic sits at 129 views this month.
SEMrush has given us an authority score of 21 out of 100, improving last month.
You can learn more about what SEMRush can do for you here.
Moz domain authority has stayed at 7 out of 100.
Our Alexa rank has shown some improvement. We now rank #116,506 websites in the U.S.
Recent changes made in May 2021 to the Googles algorithm have affected the overall Alexa ranking. However, our rank should improve once we finish changing our WordPress theme to something more Google-friendly.
Alexa has also ranked us as #705 of all websites in Costa Rica. If you are unfamiliar with our blog content, I can fill you in.
My wife, Jasmine, and I moved to Costa Rica indefinitely in August 2021. Our blog has a section about living abroad in Costa Rica. This section helped drive our Alexa sore from Costa Rica up.
We had 834 new visitors and 78 returning visitors to our blog this month, up about 15% from November.
We’ve seen a longer average session duration this month. The average time spent on a single page on our site is 1 minute and 32 seconds.
Organic traffic continues to grow and is up to over 25%. We ended the month with a new record of 636 organic visits.
My thoughts on this data. So, overall, I’m impressed with the growth and performance of our website this month. I was primarily considering that we ran our blog on autopilot for most of the month.
It’s true that with good content and optimized SEO, a blog can continue to grow on its own. This has reinforced the belief that we have started our online business on a solid foundation.
December’s Blog Income Report
All right. Now that we have wrapped up YouTube, social media, and website analytics, let’s talk about December’s income.
Affiliate marketing networks. We recently signed up as an affiliate for ConvertKit. We now have five referrals pending in our account. These referrals are from signups that we helped generate from the affiliate links in our content.
Hopefully, we will have a reasonable conversation rate so that some of those referrals turn into sales for ConvertKit. ConvertKit is a great email management platform Jas uses with her other blog. They have an excellent affiliate program, and we will receive 30% of any sale generated through our affiliate link.
Advertising networks. We’re still working with the same ad network. With Google AdSense, we earned $25.16 this month. This is significant earnings from this network, considering our traffic is still pretty low.
Digital products sales. We retained two people in the 2nd month of our four-month payment plan for our Blogging Money Formula program. We should receive $198/month from those signups for two more months.
We gained three new Blogging Money Update subscribers, each paying $29.99/ month. Five returning subscribers earned us $149.95. And 8 subscribers have been with us from the beginning and grandfathered in at a lower price.
We also sold one Sponsored Post Pricing Tool Kit for $27.00
So our total product sales are $568.83.
Another method we will soon use to monetize is working with Sponsored Posts.
Click here for a free list of 150 Influencer Networks With Paid Sponsorships.
December Expenses
Our total reoccurring expenses are identical to last month and come in at S72.71.
Morningfame is a YouTube analytics tool we use, and it costs about $10 a month. This is a must-have for any YouTubers out there. Not only does it generate weekly analytics reports, but its keyword research tool makes ranking on YouTube easy.
We didn’t have any single-time fees this month. But we have a regular personnel expense of $66.66 paid to our transcriber. She does terrific work creating the subtitles for our YouTube videos.
Profit and Loss
It all boils down to this, our profit and loss summary. So did we make any money blogging in December? If so, how much?
Well, you can see for yourself in the chart below. December’s gross income was $593.99. Subtract expenses of $139.37 and estimated taxes of $100.02, which leaves us with a profit of $354.60 for our 5th month of blogging.
And since we were not actively working on the blog this month, our earners are entirely passive income.
Thank you for such detailed information. This article is really helpful for anyone like me who is looking to create an income from a blog or any social media channel! It will take a bit to go through it and put your tips into practice, but I am sure I will benefit from it! Thank you again. Claudia x
Thank you some much for your comment!