Can you believe that it’s already July? This year is half over and while part of me feels incredibly accomplished… there’s a part of me that knows that I still have so much to do! I was never one to fully buy into the “summer slump” when it came to blogging. And though my numbers are down from last month, I’m not too concerned.
That said, I’m going to follow the same format as I did last month. You can read my past income reports (though only last month’s included traffic) and I’m also going to review/recap my traffic from the beginning of the year to the end of this month.
Income and Expenses for June
June saw my first payment from Mediavine and payments from my usual two sources (Clever Girls and SoFab). I also got a tiny royalty payment from Amazon for my Kindle book. Expenses were significantly down from last month, which was good because I didn’t make as much as I did in May.
Income Earned
INCOME SOURCE
AMOUNT EARNED
Network Niche
$150
Mediavine
$64.81
Izea
$153
TapInfluence
$45
Clever Girls
$225
SoFab/Collective Bias
$265
Amazon Royalties
$10
Total Income Earned: $1012.81
This was the first time in a long time that I’ve had two months, back to back, where I’ve earned over $1k. I think that was one of my blog goals this year- to consistently make $1k a month. I knew that I couldn’t rely on just one source for that, so I do need to work on diversifying those income streams.
The bulk of my online income still comes from sponsored work. I want to start adding in more products of my own and eventually I will be joining a network marketing company or two. We’ll see what we see.
I should also add that my Mediavine payment only reflects two weeks of earnings.
Expenses
EXPENSE NAME
AMOUNT SPENT
ConvertKit
$29
FEA
$30
Microsoft Office
$6.99
Adobe Creative Cloud
$53.99
Lynda
$34.99
Buffer
$10
Sticky Blogging SEO
$59
Blogging Concentrated Stack
$27
Stock Unlimited
$9
Total Expenses: $261.97
The good news is that I spent half of what I did last month. However, I also know that I can cut down further on my monthly expenses. I will be paying for Canva for Work starting this month and I may stop paying for Buffer. I’m also debating if the Lynda membership is worth it.
I am a firm believer in the on-going education of a blogger/online business owner. Lynda does offer a relatively affordable way to take courses.
However, I haven’t taken a course since I started paying for it. I’m going to set aside some time this month to explore the course offerings and make my decision by the end of the month.
This month there are a few courses being released that I have my eye on.
But, I just bought the Blogging Concentrated Stack and I have countless eBooks and courses that I need to go through. I’m going to take a hard look at what I already have in my resources and then determine if I really do need to take that course.
Monthly Gross: $750.84
After expenses, I made $50 less than I did in May. Not too bad, right?
Traffic Report
The numbers person in me is disappointed by the summer slump because well, it hit me hard.
I’m down a little over 11k pageviews from last month. And yet, I still managed to break $1k in income.
I know I shouldn’t focus so much on pageviews but I can’t help it. My pageviews directly affect my ad money and since networks and companies still care about pageviews? I still care about pageviews. I’m going to work on strategies that will be realistic enough to maintain so I can hopefully meet my end of the year goal for 100k monthly pageviews.
Recap for January through June
I rebranded at the beginning of the year and things finally started to come together by the end of June. I finally found a layout that I like and a color scheme that fits.
Aside from a big spike in February, my pageviews have held mostly steady. Which is good, I suppose. But I want to see them climbing up. I know that being consistent will help so I’m also trying to create a reasonable posting schedule. So far, my editorial calendar has me at Tuesday through Saturday with Sunday and Monday off.
And eventually, I’d like to cut down from that too.
Goals for July
I already have quite a bit of sponsored work lined up for July (though it won’t pay out until August or September).
And that’s great.
I also know that I’ll get my first full monthly payment from Mediavine this month.
Still, I’d like to keep my expenses down if at all possible and really start setting aside more of my blog money. My goals for this month will mostly remain the same as they did for last month:
Diversify income stream
Work on my email list + send a consistent newsletter
Maintain a reasonable Pinterest strategy
Work on SEO
Continue with my content audit + updating old posts
I also plan on signing up for a network marketing company this month. It’s still a relatively new company and I’m excited to begin with that!
What are you working on for this month?
The post June 2016 Income and Traffic Report + Goals for July appeared first on Kori at Home.