October 2014 Traffic and Income Report

Happy Thanksgiving! What better day to publish a blogging income report. Today I’m particularly thankful for my wife Abby. She is the hardest working, most tenacious, dedicated, and focused person I have ever met. There isn’t even a close second. At the same time she is sensitive, caring, and an amazing wife and mom. What are you thankful for today?

Before we jump into the income report you need to read this post by Lindsay from Pinch of Yum. Go there now. This income report will still be here when you’re done.

15 Ways to Avoid Blogger Burnout

I forwarded the article to Abby and she agreed with everything Lindsay said. As a husband it’s my job to support and encourage Abby. I don’t always do a great job at this but Lindsay’s article helped me understand the bloggers mindset and some of the daily struggles. The article is definitely worth a read.

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October 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 – $2,428
Ad Thrive – $1,085
Bluehost Affiliate* – $880
Amazon Associates – $315
Sponsored Posts (1) – $200
Media Temple* – $160
Evernote Essentials Affiliate* – $151
StudioPress Affiliate* – $63
Restored 316 Themes Affiliate* – $48

Total Income: $5,330

Expenses

Gumroad Transaction Fees – $189
Mailchimp* – $150
Synthesis Hosting – $67
Fizzle.co* – $35
Domain Registration – $15
Zapier – $15
Crashplan – $14
Viral Tag – $12
Adobe Creative Cloud – $11

Total Expenses: $508

Net Profit: $4,822

If you would like to start a blog, make sure you check out our ultimate guide!

Income Analysis

Well that’s certainly a jump in eBook sales! Last month we barely broke $700 in sales. The reason for the increase? In October we announced that we were moving away from the Pay What You Want Pricing and to a fixed price of $24. In case you’re wondering, most of our sales occurred before the price was fixed, not after. From the chart below I’m sure you can figure out what day we moved to a fixed price.

Moving to a fixed price allowed Abby to make a few announcements to her email list as well as social media. This “buzz” always seems to drive new sales. Next month we’ll have more data to evaluate if moving to a fixed was a good business decision. I’m not so sure right now…

Speaking of the eBook…

We now have an affiliate program!

Head over to affiliate page to check out the program. We are offering 40% for every affiliate sale. I would love for you to check out the affiliate page, sign up, and go through the on-boarding process. Let me know how we can improve the process. Please leave your comments below.

After considering a few different solutions, we ultimately decided to use SendOwl to manage our affiliate program. Other services had more options but I just couldn’t take some of the ugly interfaces out there.

Unfortunately Gumroad doesn’t have a built in affiliate management system so they are going to lose some sales. Right now our affiliate partners direct traffic through their unique links to justagirlandherblog.com/framework. This new anding page uses SendOwl. The original landing page (justagirlandherblog.com/book) still uses Gumroad. They are identical otherwise.

Take a look at the payment processing on the new landing page. What do you think? We setup the system to allow for direct credit card processing (with Stripe) and a PayPal option. So far people seem to appreciate the PayPal option.

For those considering SendOwl, take a look at the beautiful dashboard:

And here’s eJunkie (don’t stare too long or your eyes will bleed):

Yes, eJunkie is a more powerful option, but so far I haven’t found anything that I wish SendOwl could do. SendOwl allows payment processing through a few different options, it integrates with Mailchimp, and provides our affiliate partners with an easy to use dashboard. If you sign up as an affiliate I’d definitely like to hear your feedback on SendOwl.

Three Legs of Blog Income

Our September blog income came from three categories:

Product sales – $2,428 (46%)
Ad revenue – $1,085 (20%)
Affiliate income – $1,817 (34%)

Traffic Report

October was our best month ever for blog traffic. It’s encouraging to look back and see the steady increases over the past year:

There have been a few milestones along the way. When Abby’s blog turned a year old (January 2014) for some reason Google finally started to pay attention. We saw an immediate increase in traffic from Google. I think the Google Bots decided that Abby was posting consistently for a year and that she wasn’t going anywhere so they decided to send some love her way. This was big for us. It was about this time that Abby approached me about helping her make a little money from her blog.

This October was another big jump in traffic. It wasn’t because of any new posts but rather some big-time bloggers decided to feature some of her older posts. This should serve as a lesson… Even if a post doesn’t do well immediately, it doesn’t mean it was a dud. Sometimes a post may do nothing in the first week, then a few months later the thing blows up! This is true of Abby’s article about making labels in Microsoft Word. Abby doesn’t particularly like this post. It didn’t do particularly well the week she posted it. But then for some reason a few months later the thing absolutely blew up! It has 262 comments and 137,000 pins. We never would’ve guessed the post would do that well. Just keep publishing! You never know what will take off (even months later).