August 2015 Traffic and Income Report
It’s income report day already?! Where did THAT month go? 🙂 With being up to our ears in a kitchen renovation this month, it was a slightly lighter month on the business end of things, but we were still able to make some significant and helpful changes with the way we handle email… in more ways than one!
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Donnie will get into that more since he spearheaded those projects, so I will just let him have at it!
Income
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.
- Framework eBook and course – $6,765
- Bluehost – $4,845 –> How to Start a Blog
- Paperless Home eBook – $1,370
- AdThrive – $1,178
- Simplify eBook – $1,020
- Sponsored Posts – $1,000
- Reset and Thrive Bundle – $273
- Amazon Associates – $247
- Genesis Framework – $231
- Restored 316 – $94
- ConvertKit – $84
- PicMonkey – $28
- Fizzle.co – $27
Total Income: $17,162
Expenses
- Framework Affiliate Payouts – $738
- Assistant – $270
- ConvertKit – $259 –> We We Switched from MailChimp to ConvertKit
- MailChimp – $180
- Gumroad Transaction Fees – $159
- PayPal Transaction Fees – $127
- Stripe Transaction Fees – $123
- Instapage – $79
- Synthesis Hosting – $67
- Zapier – $50
- Creative Market – $35
- Wistia – $25
- SendOwl – $24
- CloudFlare – $20
- Co-working Space – $15
- Crashplan – $14
- Adobe Creative Cloud – $11
- Media Temple – $10
- CoSchedule – $8
- Fizzle.co – $0 (usually $35)
August 2015 Net Profit: $14,948
August Happenings
ConvertKit
This income report is the last time you’ll see MailChimp in the expenses category. Don’t get me wrong, we loved MailChimp, and their free account is still a great place to start your email marketing. But after going through multiple product launches and getting into more advanced email marketing, we started to find some pretty frustrating limitations with MailChimp. You can read all about why we made the switch to ConvertKit:
—> Why We Switched from MailChimp to ConvertKit for Email Marketing
As you grow your blog, email marketing becomes more and more important. For me, it’s the best and perhaps only way to automate the sales and marketing process for books, eBooks, courses, and other products. Because of the ease of use of ConvertKit, we were able to add 5,609 subscribers in August. This blows any of our previous records out of the water by double if not triple. There’s been a lot of buzz in the Building a Framework private Facebook group surrounding ConvertKit. ConvertKit has made email marketing fun for me again. Read about why we switched.
Intercom.io
In August we finally decided to get Abby some email help. Keeping up with her inbox was becoming overwhelming for her. A few weeks ago I signed up for the Intercom.io Acquire Package. It’s not cheap at $49/month, but it creates a joint email/customer support inbox where responses can be assigned to various team members. We looked at options from FreshDesk, HelpScout, and Groove, but ultimately decided that Intercom.io was the best solution for managing email as team. That brings me to some other exciting news…!
Brittany
Meet my little sister Brittany! (And by little I mean that she’s less than 3 years younger than me and fully an adult… 🙂 )
Britty is definitely the cooler and much more fashionable sister, and is incredibly smart, sweet, and all around wonderful. For the past several months, she has been working behind the scenes as our virtual assistant, mostly scheduling social media and helping me run tests on my various media outlets to see what works best. This month, we’ve expanded her role into helping us with email as well.
As hard as it was for the “control freak” side of me to start letting others into my inbox to help answer emails, if you’ve ever tried to email me, my response to you probably started with, “I apologize for the delay in my response! I am so behind on email!” and that wasn’t the way I wanted to be interacting with people. It was getting to the point where I could either blog or answer emails; there just wasn’t enough time in the day to do both. And since I hated that I wasn’t able to help people in a timely manner more than I hated not being able to control my entire inbox by myself, it was time to make a change. So now if you email me, you may hear from either Brittany or Donnie or myself, but you should have a response in a much shorter time period. Yay! My hope is that we will be able to help more people and help them better this way than we were when it was just me trying to do everything.
(PS…We tried to make the transition from my Gmail to Intercom.io as smooth as possible, but if somehow your email got lost in the shuffle, I apologize! Thank you for your patience through this switch!)
Just a Girl and Her Blog on Hack the Entrepreneur
Earlier this week Abby had the opportunity to be on the Hack the Entrepreneur podcast with Jon Nastor to talk about our story, our business, and how we make this whole blogging thing “work.” You can listen to her full interview here.
Three Legs of Blog Income
- Affiliate Income – $5,929
- Ad Revenue – $1,178
- Product Sales –$9,146
RPM
RPM is a metric to track revenue per thousand pageviews. This is a measure of the overall effectiveness of a blog and is a handy benchmark for comparing blogs even if they have vastly different traffic numbers. I first learned about this metric from Bjork of Pinch of Yum.
August 2015 RPM: $40.71
So to recap…
Gross Income: $17,162
Net Income: $14,948
Click here to see a running tally of all past income reports.
The other day I was trying to explain to someone exactly what Donnie and I “do for a living,” and as I was listing out all of the different areas we work on with the blog, I again had a “pinch me” moment as I realized all of the incredible and fun things we get to do for our “job.” None of this would be possible without you guys, and we are always so, so thankful for your amazing support. You are always so awesome and encouraging, and we are so grateful to you for that! Hope you’re having a wonderful week!
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
- 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
- July 2014 – $2,659
- 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.
Thank you so much for sharing your stats every month. So insightful and helpful. Love your blog!
Welcome to the spotlight Brittany! I’m sure your family really appreciates all the help you are to them. I look forward to hearing/seeing more about you! It helps me learn how and when to do things/achieve things…like when its time to get an assistant!
Thank you so much for sharing this, Abby and Donnie!!
Your posts are incredibly inspiring. I’ve been blogging for a year now, off and on, but I’m making a plan to turn things around and be more consistent with it. I will flat out admit – I want what you guys are doing!!!!! I would love more than anything to have my blog be our FT income!! I know it takes hard HARD work though. Thanks for being such an awesome motivation!!
Abby and I use to analyze income reports a few years ago and think the same thing! You can get there! It’s just little progress each day that eventually adds up. Thanks for reading!
Congrats on yet another great month! That’s so awesome that you added Brittany to the team. I sent you an email earlier in the week about joining your Pinterest group board and was really impressed when I received an email back with an invite just a few hours later. And then even MORE impressed when I saw it was Brittany and that you had an Assistant on board now 🙂 I’m a control freak too and it was very nice to see that you had given away a little bit of the reigns in order to make your business overall run much more efficiently. A great lesson to me to keep in mind in the coming months as I try to grow my own blog!! Keep up the great work you two!
Wow, this is so inspiring! You are doing such a great job of monetizing.
I just bought your framework ebook, and I loved it. I’ve put a few tips into practice already, so thank you!
Always so inspiring. And, how fun that you get to work with your sister now! I appreciate how open and honest you are with all of us–it’s very helpful.
Congratulations on another successful month!!
What an inspiring post, makes me want to work harder on my blog by seeing such income reports I love ur blog name..
So appreciative of this transparency and your passion for inspiring and advising others. Wondering if you’ve considered selling your ebooks on Amazon as well. Will be interested in finding out if that adds another level of income boost!
Cheers,
Kat~
These are impressive numbers. I love reading income reports from other bloggers. Yours is really in-depth.
New bloggers may see this and think ‘impossible’ but over time, with work, and of course systems that work, it is possible.
Seeing you and your family work together on this ‘blog thing’ excuse me Business 🙂 is very heart warming.
I love the financials you’re putting out! I’m an accountant by day and recently started my own blog. I’m still trying to get advertising up and running, and trying to understand how the income portion works so this was really interesting. Thank you! =)
Congratulations on a wonderful August! Thank you so much for all you share with your readers. I have been blogging for a while but didn’t know what I was doing or where I wanted my blog to go. Thanks to the post you share with your readers I know now I want to be able to blog full time. I never knew that you could do this for a living until I found your blog! I love writing and teaching and with my blog I hope to be able to do both.
Thank you so much for sharing your Income and Traffic Reports with us. It is very inspiring to see where you were a year ago and where you are today, and to see how you got to where you are today! Thanks so much! You and your blog are a blessing!
Thank you so much for your encouraging words, Sherry! You totally made my day! I’m so excited to see where you take your blog! Have a wonderful week!
~Abby =)
You guys make me smile. What a team! I am embarking my 2 years of blogging and sometimes the work is overwhelming. Often, I feel like giving up. Every time I do, all it takes is a friendly post from what I fondly call: an “Abby reminder” to keep me going. Thank you for guiding all of us bloggers. You’re truly an inspiration!
Now you’re making ME smile! Thank you so much for your sweet words, Robin! I’m so glad the reports are helpful!
~Abby =)
Thank you so much for sharing your stats every month. I love reading income reports from your blog, really in-depth. So insightful and helpful. Love your blog!
Wow… truly inspiring. Congratulations Abby!
Great Achievement, abby.. congratulations.
Very inspiring post, Great job!
very inspirational post, Income Report awesome GreatJob…
Your success is really inspirational for every one.
You’re too sweet. Thank you, Ashish!
~Abby =)
Congratulation Brave girl!
Amazing and Congratulations…