I thought it would be interesting to share what a year has changed in terms of traffic and income for this blog – that’s now 18 months old). Last year’s income report wasn’t bad at all.
The world is still dealing with we know which virus, but travel has returned so the past year I’ve been splitting my energy between all my blogs and a newly opened clothing store that I started purely for the sake of experiment (but we made a profit in just 6 months and according to Shopify the store was in top 7% of businesses started at the same time- stay tuned for more tips on how to open a store in my career section).
What changed in my business plan and life situation since last year?
First of all, we had another baby! Baby Holden made his appearance in February in Mexico, so we’ve been quite busy. I worked a bit as usual, but he’s been home until he was 7 months old so work time was limited.
As travel somehow returned I tried to travel as much as I could. We did a road trip to Pacific North West first. Then we went to French Polynesia with the kids twice… which wasn’t a plan, but they decided to lock down and it turned into a giant mess. The second trip was successful though, but we haven’t worked at all in a traditional sense during these few weeks.
In fact, in the entire month of November I worked for a few days, as I was traveling without much internet for 2 weeks, then had a deviated septum surgery so couldn’t do much for a week, and then Dylan was home with a cold so yeah… I only really worked the last few days which I spent on editing photos and redesigning my other two websites. My assistant was also on her annual leave for half of the month.
That said, I also had to focus on my travel blog to keep it running while hoping one day the world will get back to normal.
Basically, I haven’t paid much attention to Black Friday or Cyber Monday, which I must admit, was quite relaxing.
I still haven’t created a separate Instagram or TikTok for this blog. I see no need for it and I still continue to post travel + lifestyle content on my main Instagram account, but I’m not pushing the content from this blog at all.
I definitely feel like I could have done more to improve my websites, but I guess we always could do more. I did switch to an entirely passive income model without any projects and having to worry about them at all and working whenever I want.
I updated my guides on blogging as well, so you guys can benefit in case you want to start your own blog and business.
Let’s take a look at the stats for November 2021…
TRAFFIC:
Pageviews: 73,109 (2020: 67,151)
Sessions: 42,279 (2020: 27,091)
Users: 36,615 (2020: 22,150)
Traffic Sources:
Organic: 88.5% (2020: 81.9%)
Social: 4.3% (2020: 8.6%)
Direct: 6.3% (2020: 8.8%)
Referral: 0.9% (2020: 0.7%)
INCOME:
- Mediavine – income from ads: $1568.76 (2020: $890.40)
- average RPM (pageviews) of $36.38 (improved since last year)
- added a two videos to the site #AlmostNone
- Affiliate income (Amazon, Awin, ShareAsale, RewardStyle, various other small programs): $8214.22 (2020 $7123.53)
- I’ll not be separating income into different programs, because there are too many. There might be slightly more once all transations have been cleared.
- It’s lower than it could have been, because I know for a fact quite a few of my retailers once again ran out of stock #shortages, so people couldn’t order more.
- Social Media & Related Projects (Instagram & Photography Service via this blog): $0 (2020: $4800)
- Projects I’ve been hired for based on this blog only and on purpose it was $0. I’ve been feeling like crap, didn’t feel the urge to do anyting extracurricular.
- I still have never done a sponsored blog post on this blog. While I could, but I’m not chasing them either as I believe reviews are better and more trustworty when they’re non-sponsored.
- Shop income from the blog: hard to say, but about $500
- It’s an approximate amount I calculated when buyers tell me they purchased my shop products, because of my blog. Not every buyer leaves a note or sends a message, so it might have been more.
- My main sales funnel for the store is definitely Facebook marketing, so I don’t pay that much attention to it.
TOTAL PROFIT: $10,287.61 (2020: $13,813.93)
EXPENSES:
Freelance Writers: $0
Agathon (hosting): $26 (*I do pay $80 per month, but all my 3 sites are hosted there, so this is 1/3 of the price)
Canva (graphics for Pinterest): $5 (it’s $9.95 total, but split between lifestyle and food blogs)
Cloudflare (web security): $7 ($21.32 total split between 3 blogs)
VA: $0 – my current VA has been away and worked mostly on my travel blog
Samples: $80 – I did purchase some samples of products to review.
Expenses I got rid of:
- Mailchimp – I could be making more with newsletter subscribers, but I haven’t gotten around to it.
- Ahref (SEO toold) – I have about a giant list of ideas for content creation and I used it for research, so got rid of it to lower the costs.
- Pinterest VA & Tailwind – I stopped paying so much attention to Pinterest. Due to changes setting it became harder and harder to achieve good conversion from the platform.
- SEO Outreach – I let things be for the time being.
TOTAL EXPENSES: $118 (2020: $1338.25)
PROFIT: 10169.61(2020: $12,475.68)
*Please note this “profit” does not take into account the taxes I will have to pay on it.
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