July 2014 Traffic and Income Report
July was a difficult month. I mentally prepared myself for the income crash (it happened) after our record June earnings, but it was difficult on a personal/family level. Abby had a major surgery on July 21st that has been 10 years in the making. I don’t want to get into all the details, but you can read about it here and here. She’s been incredibly brave and the surgery was a success. A month later, she’s doing great!
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July 2014 Traffic and Income Report
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.
Let’s get right into the numbers…
Income
- Framework eBook – $1,168
- Bluehost Affiliate* – $450
- Google Adsense – $518
- Sovrn Ad Network – $158
- Amazon Associates – $98
- MediaTemple Affiliate* – $80
- Evernote Essentials Affiliate* – $78 (residual income from one post)
- Restored 316 Themes Affiliate* – $57
- StudioPress Affiliate* – $42
- Namecheap Affiliate* – $10
Total Income: $2,659
Expenses
- Gumroad Transaction Fees – $88
- Mailchimp* – $75
- Synthesis Hosting – $67
- Fizzle.co* – $35
- PO Box – $23
- Fedex Printing – $22
- Zapier – $15
- Viral Tag – $12
- Adobe Creative Cloud – $11
Total Expenses: $348
Net Profit: $2,311
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Income Analysis
July was our second best income month for Abby’s blog, but it was still somewhat deflating. We knew eBook sales wouldn’t continue at the same pace as launch week back in June, but look at this chart from Gumroad:
That’s data from launch day (June 10th) through the end of July. Talk about a long, skinny tail! I’m hoping the last half of July will be the worst we see for eBook sales. We did zero promotion in July and still had over $1k in sales. Things are trending up (slightly) in August.
It’s also somewhat discouraging that the average price paid is trending downwards. The average price paid in July was $9.72. That’s down slightly from June. Read these two posts if you want to learn more about launching an eBook and Pay What You Want (PWYW) Pricing.
We’re happy with the continued affiliate commissions (Bluehost, Studiopress, and Restored 316) stemming from mentions in the eBook and Abby’s How to Start a Blog and Blogger Resources pages. I need to get better at tracking the source of conversions but we have a Mailchimp auto-responder setup to email purchasers of the book 3 and 14 days after purchase. These emails ask questions, check in, and direct people to those two pages on Abby’s blog.
Despite the reduced sales in July, it still amazes me that all of this is automatic. There is nothing to ship, no invoices to create, and Abby isn’t strictly trading her time for money. It’s all automatic! Even the follow-up email sequence. We really didn’t do ANYTHING with this book in July and sales still rolled in.
Affiliate Program for eBook
Thank you to those who have reached out to me regarding an affiliate program. This is coming! We are going to launch with a limited number of bloggers (around 25?) and once everything is up and running we’ll open it up to more people.
Three Legs of Blog Income
Our July blog income came from three categories:
- Product sales – $1,168 (44%)
- Ad revenue – $676 (25%)
- Affiliate income – $815 (31%)
Moving forward we should be looking at 1/3 split between product sales, ad revenue, and affiliate income.
Traffic Report
July was filled with guest-posters while Abby was at a conference and recovering from her surgery. Traffic dipped slightly but not nearly as much as I anticipated.
Email Subscriber Statistics
- 890 New Subscribers
- 7,220 Existing Subscribers
- 8,110 Total Subscribers
RPM
RPM is a metric to track revenue per thousand pageviews. Bjork of Food Blogger Pro explains:
RPM shows you how much you make from every 1,000 page views on your blog. It’s commonly used to measure the performance of your ads, but I like to use it to measure the overall effectiveness of a site’s income generation.
Previously I stated that my goal was to consistently break $10 RPM. Well two months in a row we’ve been above $10! Let’s see how long we can keep that up!
and to recap our income…
Net Income: $2,311
You can see our other income reports here:
- December 2016- $41,700
- November 2016 – $40,124
- October 2016 – $51,803
- September 2016 – $33,659
- August 2016 – $44,940
- July 2016 – $34,721
- June 2016 – $32,913
- May 2016- $37,967
- April 2016 – $48,900
- March 2016 – $40,358
- February 2016 – $36,234
- January 2016 – $34,662
- December 2015- $20,441
- November 2015 – $23,663
- October 2015 – $17,639
- September 2015 – $18,225
- August 2015 – $17,162
- July 2015 – $18,334
- June 2015 – $26,041
- May 2015 – $10,593
- April 2015 – $13,322
- March 2015 – $13,887
- February 2015 – $11,138
- January 2015 – $13,991
- December 2014 – $5,841
- November 2014 – $4,920
- October 2014 – $5,330
- September 2014 – $3,396
- August 2014 – $3,254
- June 2014 – $6,956
- May 2014 – $1,620
- April 2014 – $894
- March 2014 – $1,010
- February 2014 – $2,446
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This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.