September 2014 Traffic and Income Report

Wow time just flies by. It seems like it was just June, the beginning of summer, and Abby and I were launching her eBook. Now we’re well into fall and my oldest has started kindergarten.

My tendency is to over-estimate how much I can accomplish in a short period of time and underestimate how much I can accomplish over a long period of time. Online business is a lot like that… There are always things left on the to-do list at the end of the day. Everything takes longer than you anticipate and those preciously rare blocks of time to focus on the blog are over before they really start.

But the opposite is also true; it’s amazing how much you can accomplish over a long period of time. Books are written, sites are re-designed, launch plans are made, traffic is built, and growth happens. It’s not about how much you can accomplish today or tomorrow, it’s about how consistently you can work towards your goal. I think real progress is made with that long-term mindset.

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September 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

Bluehost Affiliate* – $800
Sponsored Posts (3) – $735
Framework eBook – $713
Google Adsense – $473
Ad Thrive – $275
Amazon Associates – $112
Sovrn Ad Network – $111
Evernote Essentials Affiliate* – $78 (residual income from one post)
StudioPress Affiliate* – $56
Rivit Ad Network $24
Restored 316 Themes Affiliate* – $19

Total Income: $3,396

Expenses

Mailchimp* – $120
KingSumo Giveaway – $99
Synthesis Hosting – $67
Gumroad Transaction Fees – $54
Fizzle.co* – $35
Domain Renewal – $15
Zapier – $15
Crashplan – $14
Viral Tag – $12
Adobe Creative Cloud – $11

Total Expenses: $442

Net Profit: $2,954

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Income Analysis

Last month I hinted that Abby and I decided to move away from managing our own ads. You can see that Ad Thrive shows up on our income report for the first time this month. Ad Thrive took over managing our ads with only a week or two left in September. In future months you won’t see Adsense or any of the ad networks we’ve worked with in the past, just Ad Thrive. I’ll touch on this more in the October income report but so far we’ve been happy with Ad Thrive! I can’t tell you how nice it is not to have to deal with all the various ad networks and constantly test and tweak things. This has been a welcome change for Abby and I.

Three Legs of Blog Income

Our September blog income came from three categories:

Product sales – $713 (21%)
Ad revenue – $883 (26%)
Affiliate income – $1,800 (53%)

I decided to include sponsored posts in affiliate income. Abby has some quarterly sponsored post gigs that pay well but only show up once per quarter. Such was the case this month.