Honest Blog Income Report – November 2021
It’s finally December, and time to share our blog income report for November. Also, remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel for our latest income reports, blogging tips, and Costa Rica living videos.
Each month I break down blog metrics of what’s been happening behind the scenes of our new blogging business. 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 the blog income report for November.
Social Media
For today’s creators, developing a solid social media presence within your content marketing strategy is crucial. As a blogger, driving traffic from your social networks is one of the best ways to reach your audience.
Furthermore, utilizing an excellent social sharing strategy, only one piece of content going viral will expedient your readers and subscribers. Oh, I forgot to mention the best part about social media promotion. It’s free!
YouTube
We launched our YouTube channel in late February 2021, a few months before our blog. Our channel is now 9 months old and releases new video content every Wednesday.
Tell me about your metrics. Okay, in November, we finished with a total of 378 subscribers. But, unfortunately, that’s a gain of only 20 subscribers and a growth rate that has fallen 64% from October.
Our lifetime video views are now 12,784, growing by 1,258 views this month. However, November’s video view growth rate is down 48%, about half the growth we experienced in October.
We settled in with 112 watch hours — growth rate down 30%.
YouTube granted us 60% of the impressions we received the previous month, finishing with 16,945 total images.
Our click-through rate has fallen as well. Down 15% from 4.2% to 3.6%.
Despite all the metrics that have fallen, there is a silver lining. Our average view duration has grown by a whopping 36%. It is now sitting at an all-time high of 5 min and 20 seconds.
So, what is this data telling us? First, we have noticed a direct link between organic impressions and our traffic from social media. Typically, we immediately promote a video across our social media when we launch a video.
Using a promotion campaign in the launch process of our video has proven to boost YouTube’s algorithm for initial video impressions. Of course, the more images we receive, the more views we get and our subscribers. But consistency is key.
As any blogger knows, sometimes life outside the blogosphere gets busy. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to promote our new content this month. Because of this, most of the views we received were organic from YouTube. And unfortunately, small YouTube channels will not experience much organic growth without self-promoting.
Now, we’re not reaching our audience by looking at our impressions (down 40%) and click-through rate (down 15%). But, on the other hand, if you look at our average view duration, that’s gone up 36%.
This tells me that we are producing relevant content for our followers. However, our biggest problem this month was reaching our target audience. So how do we fix this? Promotion, promotion, promotion.
Let’s run through our Instagram. We ended the month with 998 followers, up 11 from last month (total growth rate of 1%). However, we only posted on IG 3 times this month. So, due to our limited activity on Instagram, we only drove three clicks to our website.
What is my conclusion? Probably the same as yours.
You have to play to win, and we didn’t even show up. Our lack of posts on this platform resulted in very little growth for our brand. So that means no traffic driven to our blog.
I’m starting to feel like a broken record. Not a lot has happened on Facebook this month.
Our reach was down significantly, and we lost a follower. On the other hand, our page likes have gone up by eight likes for some reason. We posted eight times; out of those eight posts, we got 22 engagements.
We have not yet put together a Pinterest strategy.
Email List
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve probably heard, “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 250 subscribers to our email list. That’s an increase of 48 subs. Unfortunately, we lost 31 subscribers this month to unsubscribe, but that’s okay. We want to make sure that the only people on our list are the ones who want to be there.
We ran 21 different email campaigns, sending out 3,998 emails. Out of all those emails we sent out, our open rate was 35%, totaling just under 1,400 open emails. Our click-through rate (people who followed a link embedded in an email) was 5%, which equals 190 clicks. And only three subscribers marked us as spam from nearly those 4,000 emails we sent out in November.
Manage and Grow your email list with ConvertKit here.
So, what does this data smell like? Well, to me, it smells like Thanksgiving Dinner, Yummy!
Out of 4,000 emails, only three people marked us as spam. In other words, the content of our emails is pretty good stuff.
The open rate is over 33%, which tells me we’re reaching the right audience. However, the click-through rate is 5%, which I would eventually like to see at 10%. A higher click-through rate can lead to a more significant conversion rate when selling through our emails.
Even though we did not actively grow our email list this month, we gained almost 50 subs. This residual growth is from a campaign we ran in September with the generous blogger’s tool kit. That campaign has been very successful and is reflected in our metrics month after month.
Website Traffic
Okay, let’s move on to our website traffic. We only published 1 article this month, down from our usual two weekly pieces. That brings our total number of articles on our website to 30. The age of our blog is four months old.
SEMrush shows that we rank for 392 organic keywords, which is enormous for our small blog and young age. That number has more than tripled where we were ranking for last month.
We’re showing up for 26 keywords on the first page (within the first ten articles on a Google search). In addition, 5 of our keywords are within the top three articles populated by Google’s search engine.
Our organic traffic sits under 200 views and is up by 153 sessions. SEMrush gave us an authority score of 20 out of 100.
You can learn more about SEMRush here.
Moz domain authority has grown to 7 out of 100.
Our Alexa rank has fallen by 100%. We believe this is due to the recent changes (May 2021) in the Googles algorithm. We will start changing over our WordPress theme in December, which should restore our rank.
I have to admit; we derailed our content strategy this month. We only published a couple of different types of content. But we still doubled our impressions and total clicks and grew organic traffic.
We had 714 new visitors, and 61 returning visitors read our blog content.
The average time our readers stay on a single page has fallen to 53 seconds. But it’s still pretty close to that 1-minute range. In addition, our bounce rate continues to fall, contributing to adding more internal and inbound links to our content. That means people find what they’re looking for when they go to our site.
Organic traffic continues to grow and is up to over 100 visits. However, to reinforce what I said earlier about our lack of promotion on social media, just look at the chart above. You will see that the traffic coming from our social media has fallen significantly.
My thoughts on this data. So, overall, I’m super impressed with the growth and performance of our website this month. Especially considering that we only published a single blog post and practically didn’t do any self-promotion for that content.
I have realized that our blog can grow on its own with good content and SEO. This has reinforced the idea that we have started our online business on a solid foundation.
November Income
All right. Now that we wrapped up our social media and website analytics, let’s talk about November’s income.
Affiliate marketing networks. We recently signed up as an affiliate for ConvertKit. and generated leads in November from our affiliate links.
Hopefully, we will have a reasonable conversation rate so that some of those leads turn into sales for December. ConvertKit has a pretty good affiliate program, and we should receive 30% of whatever sale we bring them.
Advertising networks. We’re still working with Google AdSense and have earned made $8.68. This revenue stream from last month is pretty remarkable. Our traffic is still pretty low, which is 100% passive income.
How were our Products sales? This was a good month regarding selling our products.
We signed up three people at $99/month in our four-month payment plan for our Blogging Money Formula program. So, we should get $300 monthly from those signups for the next four months.
We also gained six new Blogging Money Update subscribers, each paying $29.99 for $179.94. In addition, we had two returning subscribers who earned us $60. We also had two grandfathered subscribers who have been with us from the beginning and paid a lower price. So our total product sales are $570.91.
Another way great way that we will use to earn money blogging is through Sponsors’ Posts. Click here for a free list of 150 Influencer Networks With Paid Sponsorships.
November 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.
This month, we didn’t have any single-time fees. But we have a regular personnel expense of $55 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 this month? If so, how much?
Well, you can see for yourself in the chart below. November’s total monthly income was $579.59. Subtract expenses of $127.71 and estimated taxes of $99. That leaves us with a profit of $352.47 for our 4th month of blogging.
