Honest Blog Income Report For January 2022

Are you looking for a good blog income report in 2022? Then, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to our travel blogging income report for January!

 If you’re here for the first time,  I’ve been doing these travel blog reports since my wife and I moved to Costa Rica and launched our blog, Blogging Money Life, in August. You can check out our original launch video for our blog below.

If you wonder, “how much do travel bloggers make?” we give you a complete breakdown in this blog’s monthly income report.

In this monthly blog income report, I cover our social media and YouTube channels’ metrics. I also discuss the growth of our email list and all the KPIs for our actual website,  and in the end, I do a full breakdown of our income and expenses for our blogging business.  

Before we start, here is a little more background on Jas and me. Jas is a very experienced blogger. She’s been blogging for over 10 years. She launched her blog, Miss Millennia Magazine, after graduating from college. 

Over the past 10 years, she has helped many new bloggers make money online by launching and monetizing their blogs with passive income strategies like affiliate marketing, digital products, and sponsored posts. Me on the other hand, I’m brand new to blogging. 

I started in August, so I’ve been going to it for about six months. I love analyzing data and consider myself more of a numbers guy. My background is mainly former military and building custom homes.

Jas and I decided to start Blogging Money Life as a project to work on as a couple and help new bloggers grow and monetize their online blogging businesses.  

All right, let’s get things kicked off. 

Social Media

YouTube

Our YouTube channels showed growth of 43 subscribers this month,  ending the month with a total of 453 subscribers. We finished this month with 2,789 views. That’s up 46% from December. 

Twenty-two percent of our total views came from external sources. Most likely our social media posts and blog posts. Watch hours are up by 86% this month, finishing at 284 hours. 

We received 37% more impressions this month, for a total of 30,744. Our click-through rate remained about the same at 4.1%. Our average view duration has gone up to 24% and sits at just under six minutes. Four videos were published this month, and our YouTube channel is 11 months old. 

Instagram

Instagram, we have 1,009 followers to date. That is a loss of seven followers this month. We finished the month with 10 posts. 

Those 10 posts reach 463 of our followers. In addition, our Linkin. Bio generated a total of 20 views to our website with a click-through rate of 39%. 

Facebook

We increased our followers and page likes this month. We published a total of 14 posts. 

Our reach has increased by 12%, and our post engagements have also increased slightly.  

Pinterest

Although we haven’t been focusing on Pinterest in January,  we posted 11 pins which generated 97 views, and we still have three followers. 

For February, we plan to develop a more robust social media strategy. Jasmine has another blog called Miss Millennia Magazine. In addition, she has a blog manager that works full-time on that blog. 

We have recruited her to help put together a social media strategy for Blogging Money Life. She will be using a tool called SocialBee to share our blog posts and YouTube content through our socials, including Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and perhaps Twitter. Check back in February to see how that extra effort on our socials has affected our overall blog traffic. 

Email List

Moving on to our email growth. If you’ve been blogging for a while,  you’ve probably heard the saying, “The money is on the list.”  Well, from the beginning of our blog, we focused on the growth of our email list.

Like most blogging metrics, it’s not easy to grow,  but we’ve been doing a pretty good job. So at the end of January, we finished with 267 email subscribers. 

We had 30 new subscribers and 19 unsubscribes. We ran 14 different email campaigns and sent out 3700 emails. The average open rate is 32%, which translates to just under 1200 open emails. The click-through rate within those emails is sitting at about 3%, which equals 112 links clicked. 

Our focus is primarily on growing our list, engaging the subscribers, and offering them good content. We also use it to promote our new blog posts when they publish twice a week. Once we get to about a thousand subscribers, we can talk about monetizing our email list. 

Website Traffic

Let’s talk about January’s website traffic.  

Our blog is now six months old, and we have 40 articles published. In January, we put out seven new blog posts. SEMrush is a fantastic tool we use to optimize our SEO and do keyword research, and it also helps us track some key performance indicators. 

In this metric here,  SEMrush tells us that five out of more than 400 keywords we are ranking for show up on the first page of Google. Our SEMrush authority score has gone up one point this month,  and we currently sit at 22 out of 100. There are presently 192 referring domains. That metric is up 19% from

last month. When relevant websites with a higher domain authority than yours link back to your website,  that helps build your own domain authority.  
Our Moz Domain Authority has stayed the same at seven.  
Our Alexa score has gone up 32% and now sits at 190,740. Our Alexa score in the United States ranks around 77,000, up 34% from December.  

Our Google Search impressions have gone down 4%, but we still show an increase in traffic,  which would cause me to look at our click-through rate and direct and referral traffic. So come, down to the click-through rate, it has indeed gone up 15%. 

It’s sitting just over 1.3. Ideally, we’d want our click-through rate to be about 2%. So, as we improve our SEO through keyword research and better headline tags,  I think we’ll see a better conversion rate through our Google impressions.  

Our user traffic has increased by 23% and sits at just over a thousand users for the month. It is crucial to have a lot of new users on your site, of which we have just over a thousand. The number of unique users on your website shows you how effective you are at marketing and driving traffic. 

Returning users, we’re sitting at 104. This tells us how sticky our website is. The content we provide can retain about 10% of our new audience. Total page views are at 3754, up 43%.

Comparing this metric to users gives you an idea of what type of engagement you have from your audience to your website. Total sessions or visits to our website are up 32%. We have a pretty lovely and average session duration of two minutes.  
Our pageviews per session are sitting at 2.84. On average, anyone who visits our website engages with about three pages. Anything over two is good. The bounce rate has increased by 28%. 

I changed that to red because the lower the bounce rate, the better. Anything this low is an incredible bounce rate. The bounce Rate is a great indicator to help measure your user engagement. 

It tells you the percentage of people who leave after only viewing one page. So looking at our bounce rate,  if only four and a half percent of people visiting our website leave after viewing one page, that means over 95% of the people on our website view at least two pages. 

Something that we do in nearly all of our blog posts that probably helps our bounce rate is that we add a video. So when you’re reading our blog post, you click on the video that counts as an engagement. And if we offer a video for nearly all of our blog posts, our users’ chances to engage more often are higher.  

Our direct traffic has increased by 48%, and organic traffic is up by 13%. Accounts for 68% of our total users. We are sitting at 23 referrals this month,  which accounts for 2% of our total traffic, which doesn’t seem like a lot considering how many websites are linking back to our blog.

Here you can see 618 backlinks from 192 referring sites. I’ll pause it here for a second if you want to look at our social media traffic.  
Now that we wrapped up all our metrics, check out January’s income report. You can see here that we’ve signed up for a few different affiliate networks. As our traffic picks up, I’ll be going into SEMrush to analyze which articles generate the most traffic. I’ll then go into those articles and add affiliate links. 

Hopefully, we’ll have some clicks on those links that convert to sales and generate some income. We are still working with Google AdSense as an advertising network. Our traffic is beginning to pick up. 

So relatively soon, I’ll look at other advertising networks with higher payouts and see what we qualify for. But as of now, we brought in $13.77 from Google AdSense.  

January’s Income

We have not yet done any sponsored posts or set up partnerships, and our products remain our primary income source. 

We have two subscribers on the third month of the four-month payment plan for Blogging Money Formula. Sixteen total subscribers to the Blogging Money Update. Two of which are new subscribers. 

January Expenses

We have eight reoccurring expenses that total out to $97.71. We didn’t have any one-time costs this month. The only personnel expense we paid out this month was for our transcriber.

Profit/ Loss

January’s Profit and Loss summary. Monthly gross income $565.61. Total monthly expenses $122.71. We estimate our taxes and hold $97.44 aside, which leaves us with a monthly net income of $345.46.

Thanks again so much for joining us. If you like this content we put out, go ahead and hit the like button. If you want to keep coming back for more, hit the subscribe button. 

If you liked our monetization tracker sheet,  you could download it for free here. I hope you join us back next month. I’ll see you later.