Honest Blog Income Report – September 2021
Welcome to our blog income report for September 2021. In these travel blog income reports, I share our blogging metrics, income, expenses, and any blogging tips we discovered in the month prior.
What’s Covered In this Series?
Each month in our blog income report for September, I break down what’s been going on behind the scenes of our blog. I discuss our YouTube channel, social media accounts, email list, and Google Analytics. I also give a detailed overview of our revenue, expenses, and more. So let’s get into it the blog income report for September.
YouTube
We launched our Youtube channel in February of 2021. Since then, we have released one new video every Wednesday. We continue to experience consistent growth on our track with a slight upward trend.
In September, we grew by 41 subscribers to 303 subs. Our total views sit just under 9,000, so we are up over 2,000 from August. In addition, we gained over 150 watch time hours and are now sitting just over 550 lifetime hours.
Our click-through rate has improved this month and is now at 4.3%. However, the average view duration of our videos is down 9 seconds from August. We currently sit at 3 minutes and 59 seconds of average view time per video. In addition, we put out 5 videos this month, which helped drive 9 impressions to our website.
Let’s talk about our monetization requirements for YouTube. First, we need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours within the past 365 days. If our current growth rate continues, we will reach 1,000 subscribers by February 2022 and 4,000 watch hours by September 2022.
Our Instagram grew by 94 followers and to a total of 967 followers. This month, we posted 27 times, driving 60 clicks between our website and the YouTube channel.
We have shown slight growth with our Facebook page. We have gained 7 new followers with a new total of 53. We are up 5 page likes with a total of 50 page likes. We posted 20 times to our account, which drove 43 impressions to our website.
This has been a good month for growing our email list. First, we ran an affiliate campaign to promote the Genius Blogger’s Toolkit, which paid off in more ways than one. Not only did we generate a decent affiliate marketing income, but we significantly grew our email list.
How did this happen? One of our blogging products was included in this year’s toolkit. So every time someone downloads our product from the tool, they, in turn, subscribe to our email list.
So, our email list has grown by 111 subscribers, and we now have 131 subscribers. We sent 663 emails this month, most of which have been through our welcome series and toolkit promotion. The average open rate is 37%, which translates to 246 emails opened. We received a total of 9 actions within those opened emails.
Click Here to learn 11 Easy Ways To Earn Money With Your Email List.
Websites Key Performace Indicators
Moving on in this blogging journey, let’s discuss our blog’s key performance indicators. Our blog is now 2 months old, and in September, we published 20 articles. In addition, we scheduled new content to post twice a week. Our latest blog posts go up every Monday and Thursday.
SEMRush shows that our blog now ranks for 34 different keywords. Of those keywords, 2 are on the first page of Google (top 10), and the highest-ranking keyword is #4. In addition, we received 24 sessions of organic.
SEMRush is a fantastic tool for SEO, content marketing, competitor research,
PPC and social media marketing are one platform.
You can learn more about SEMRush here.
Our domain authority is 3 of 100, and our Alexa score is about 93,000. These are pretty good ranks considering that our blog has been live for less than 2 months.
Google Search Console
We can see all of our blog 2021 traffic within Google Seach Console. In September, we received 13,916 impressions and 97 clicks on our site. In addition, there have been 2,639 page views and 1,118 sessions from 937 users.
Our organic blog traffic, the people who find us through Google, is 94 sessions.
On average, those viewers stay on our website for about 2 minutes and 40 seconds. They’re probably sticking around to read an article and jumping around a couple different pages. That’s the type of traffic we want to see.
Income Report
All right. So, on to the exciting stuff. How do those numbers help us make money blogging?
Gross Income
Let’s get started with Affiliate Networks. I mentioned a couple other times we worked with Ultimate Bundles to advertise the Genius Blogger’s Toolkit.
We earned affiliate income in a commission from every sale generated from our leads. These leads are tracked through the affiliate links in our content. Our total commission for the campaign was $646.
Income from Advertising Networks was almost non-existent this month. As a result, we’re only working with Google AdSense, earning 26 cents this month. But after our organic traffic has grown, we’ll eventually qualify for more profitable advertising networks.
Moving on to our Product Sales. We had 1 new monthly subscriber to the Blogging Money Update, generating $29.99. In addition, there were 2 subscribers in August that generated $59.98.
In addition, we sold one payment plan course in august. The person who purchased our system opted for the four-month payment plan. They are on their second month of a $99/month payment.
That brings our total product sales to $188.97. Not bad for this little online business.
Another way great way that we will use to earn money blogging is through Sponsors’ Posts. For a free list of 150 Influencer Networks With Paid Sponsorship,s click here.
Expenses
We’ll start out by talking about our reoccurring monthly costs.
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. It shows you weekly analytics reports, and its keyword research tool makes ranking on YouTube easy.
Epidemic Sound is a tool we use for YouTube. It gives us royalty-free music that we use on our videos and costs about $15 a month.
Later in our Instagram management tool. We use that to schedule our Instagram posts; it costs about $21 a month.
Siteground is our hosting provider. They cost us about $5 a month.
Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design tool that we paid only $10 monthly. You can try Canva for fo30 days free here.
MailerLite is our email management tool. We use a free version of this tool, and you can too. Click here to learn more.
Grammarly is a content editing tool that we use for spelling and grammar. This tool costs us $12 a month.
So, our total reoccurring expenses this month are $72.71.
As for our Single-time expenses, we paid $18 to Siteground this month to purchase a domain name. The domain we purchased was BloggingIncomeReport.com. We bought that with the thought of it helping drive more traffic to our blog’s Blogging Income Report section.
In addition, we ran a Facebook ad that cost $50 to promote the Genius Blogger’s Toolkit.
Our total one-time expenses this month are $67.99.
We only had one Personnel expense this month.
We pay a transcriber about $10 an hour to transcribe our YouTube Videos. Then that transcription gets uploaded as captions to the video. We also take that exact transcription and turn it into a blog post. We paid our transcriber $45 in September.
Profit and Loss Summary
It all boils down to our profit and loss summary. Our blog’s gross income this month was $835.33. That revenue came from our affiliate campaign and a few product sales.
Monthly expenses were $185.70. Those expenses combined many reoccurring costs and a few one-time fees.
As a result, our total gross income minus expenses is $649.63.
We’re estimating that our taxes will be about $142.92, which leaves us with a monthly net income of $506.71. Not an inadequate net income for our second month of blogging.
If you like the Monetization Tracker we use, we give it away for free. Download it here.
Invest In Your Blog
One of the most important things we can do to ensure our blog’s earning potential is to continue learning.
After starting a blog, I’ve found that investing in quality training programs has always had the highest return on investment.
I have witnessed this firsthand with my wife and business partner Jasmine regarding blogging.
For Jas, blogging is more than just a side hustle. She has participated in many of the best blogging courses over the past 10 years.
Because of her continued education, she has developed skills that have allowed her to grow her lifestyle blog Miss Millennia Magazine. Her blog has generated the income that has allowed me to leave my day job. And for us to move to Costa Rica full-time.
If you know Jas, you know that she loves to help fellow bloggers earn money with their blogs. That’s why she created an in-depth program that does just that. It’s called Blogging Money Formula!
Blogging Money Formula is an online course that shows motivated bloggers how to go from making a few dollars to making consistent money with their blogs. In addition, she teaches you how to set up the foundation you need to make REAL income with your blog. The type of income necessary to make a difference for you and your family.
Through our program, Jas will teach you how to:
- Establish yourself as a professional blogger: I’ll show you everything your blog needs to be recognized as a professional blogger.
- Properly apply for sponsored posts so you get selected for more opportunities: I will show you how to apply for sponsored opportunities so that brands choose you more often!
- Get brands to reach out to you: I’ll show you what you need to set up on your blog so that brands reach out to you. And I’ll show you where to go to put yourself on their radar.
- Build long-term relationships with brands: You can get recurring business with brands instead of always pitching new ones.
- Write content that appeals to your audience and the brand: Great content does not need to be either-or!
- Drive traffic to your blog posts: Great results produce repeat customers, and I will show you how to make that happen.
Join Here
We covered a lot in September’s blog income report for 2021. If you have any questions, just leave them in the comment section. I’ll make sure to answer them.
Don’t forget to check out the Blogging Money Formula for further in-depth training on making money blogging. I’ve watched a lot go into this course and will take it for the first time.
What’s next?
Thank you for reading our second Blogging Income Report. Each month, I strive to improve as a blogger and how I report to you.
This was very informative. Your post has helped to clarify some of the blogging analytics i wasn’t clear on.