August 2016 Traffic and Income Report

This post has so many great ideas for how to make more sales of your next digital product! Click through to read more!
May 2015 Income Report | JustAGirlAndHerBlog.com

It’s income report time again! Each month Donnie crunches the numbers and reveals how much we’ve made from this little blog of ours and how we’ve made it. But why would we share an income report on an organization and decorating blog? Well, being able to generate an income from our blog has literally changed our lives. Donnie was able to move out of the corporate world and work from home. We get to run a business together, which has always been a dream of ours. And we get to spend tons of time with our boys, which is our favorite perk.

Since blogging has made such a big impact for us, we are super passionate about helping others reach their blogging goals and dreams as well, and we hope that these income reports will do just that.

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Here’s Donnie…

Our biggest takeaway from August: Urgency and bundling can help boost product launch sales.

Donnie

In August we re-launched Simplify: 35+ Printables to Help You Organize Your Life as well as The Intentional Life Planner. Instead of launching Simplify in January as we’ve done in the past, we decided to launch them both together in August because the products are very complimentary to one another.

In the past we had separate sales pages for each product, but we felt that was a little confusing and more difficult to manage. Both products help you get organized and plan so to us it made sense use a single landing page.

Even with a unified landing page, it was a challenge to make things as clear as possible. After a few pictures and brief intro the product we had three buttons: 1) combo, 2) only Simplify, 3) only the planner.

simplify-buttons

Lumping three buttons together like that isn’t exactly pretty, but we wanted to make it clear from the beginning that there are two different products here that could be purchased separately, or together at a discount.

This year we tried to create a bit of urgency by offering a discount on the combo for a limited period of time. Instead of the $24 you see now for the combo, for the first week we offered the combo for $20. That’s a pretty good deal when you consider that we sold each separately for $14. We kept the deal open for 7 days. This gave us time to send a few emails announcing the launch as well as a few emails when time was running out to purchase the combo at a discount.

It’s one thing to talk about urgency and it’s another thing to see something visual that shows urgency. We embedded a MotionMail timer on the landing page indicating the end of the discount.

I think a little bit of urgency and an upcoming price increase helps people to make a decision instead of waiting. We also like the idea of raising prices over time and rewarding the early purchasers. As a consumer, I get frustrated if I’m one of the early ones to buy a digital product only to see the price drop a few weeks or months later.

Looking at the Gumroad chart below you can clearly see that many people were excited to buy the very first day of launch. That’s exactly what we’ve experienced in the past with product launches. But you can also see that even more people made a purchase the day before the price increase. I was surprised by this. I’m guessing that if we didn’t have any sense of urgency and a price increase, we never would’ve seen that second peak and our sales would’ve been significantly lower.

simplify-and-planner-sales-in-gumroad

During our launch week I was really curious to see how many people would purchase the bundle as opposed to buying one of the individual products. During launch week we sold 44 copies of only Simplify, 21 copies of only the planner, and 569 sales of the combo. The combo accounted for almost 90% of the sales during launch week with the time-sensitive discount.

After launch week and for the remainder of August, the combo accounted for 75% of sales. That’s still a significant portion of the sales, but not as dramatic as during the launch with the significant discount.

I was hoping that even after the launch that the combo would account for 90%+ of the sales. If that was the case it would make a strong argument to simplify the landing page even further and only offer the combo. If there are too many decisions to make and everyone is making the same decision, then it makes sense to eliminate the other options.

What do you think? Are the three options overwhelming? Does it make sense to only offer the combo? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

August 2016 Blog Income

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.

We’ve been publishing monthly income reports since February of 2014. You can click here to see a running tally of past income reports. As you read this report, it’s important to remember that this income didn’t happen overnight. It’s been a long process and a lot of work! Our blog income our first year was very minimal, and we didn’t publish the first income report until we had been blogging for a little over a year. Abby blogged for many months before we earned our first dollar.

We strive to make these reports as accurate as possible, but our business accounting does not match these numbers exactly. These reports count income which was earned during the month, but not necessarily paid out to us within that month. With many affiliate programs there is sometimes a significant delay between earning a commission and actual payment to us. We hope you find the reports helpful!

Total Income: $44,940

Expenses

  • Affiliate Payouts – $1,919
  • Paid Advertising – $1,654
  • Gumroad Transaction Fees – $980
  • Assistant – $833
  • Training / Coaching – $597
  • ConvertKit – $561 –> Why We Switched from MailChimp to ConvertKit, The Best Email Marketing Services
  • Design Work – $475
  • Autopilot – $450
  • Stripe Transaction Fees – $228
  • PayPal Transaction Fees – $167
  • Instapage – $69
  • Synthesis Hosting – $67
  • Adobe Creative Cloud – $53
  • Crowdcast.io – $49
  • Zapier – $49
  • Meet Edgar – $49
  • Flywheel Hosting – $40
  • Typeform – $35
  • Wistia – $25
  • SendOwl – $24
  • CloudFlare – $20
  • Board Booster – $20
  • Google Apps – $15
  • BackBlaze – $10
  • Motion Mail Timer – $10
  • Backupify – $3
  • Fizzle.co – $0 (usually $35)
Total Expenses: $8,402

August 2016 Net Profit: $36,538

august-2016-blog-income

august-2016-pageviews
august-2016-email-subscribers
august-2016-blog-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.

New Posts from Just a Girl and Her Blog

Action step for the month

Use urgency in your next launch; whether a paid product, free course, etc.. to incentivize people to take early action by offering a limited time discount or something extra for free.


Abby

Thank you so much for following along with our journey!

You can see our other income reports here:

Blogging Tips, Tools, and Resources

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Happy blogging, friends!

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.

20 Comments

  1. suzi whitford says:

    Abby & Donnie,

    Thank you for sharing! I like the sales page and I agree, it was super confusing before trying to figure out the two products!

    I would suggest also adding an image of each product above the buy button. And then an image of both above the combo button. Having that visualization helps a lot! The picture at the end of the sales page with both binders helps me realize there are two products.

    I launched my course this month and I had the same issue. How do I show that you can get my ebook for $18, but for $47 you can get the ebook + the course?! So I added a lot of visuals to my page – so far it’s going well and my ‘bundle’ is converting much higher than just the ebook alone. So I’m seeing the same results as you!

    Thanks so much for sharing! Keep it up!

    xo
    Suzi

    PS – I’m slowly growing my confidence to publish my income report – eeeeeek!!!

  2. Smart way to increase sales on the day before the price rise! I’m definitely writing that one down for future reference! I take that you finally took the leap and decided to remove ads from the site and that’s why they’re no longer included in the income section? 🙂 Congrats on yet another successful month, guys! You deserve it!

    1. justagirlabby says:

      Hi, Rydi! You are correct. We did remove all ads from our site. We are happy with our decision right now. We’ll see how it goes! 🙂 Hope you’re having a great week!

      ~Abby =)

  3. Sarah @ The Teacher's Wife says:

    I’m still floored every time I read these posts, but they definitely inspire me to keep on working, even when it seems like growth is so slow. I’m so glad your launch was so successful – they are beautiful products! 🙂

    1. justagirlabby says:

      Aw, you’re too sweet, Sarah! So glad they’re helpful for you! <3 Hope you're having an awesome weekend!

      ~Abby =)

  4. Liz-singlemomconquers says:

    Thank you for sharing this. I like the strategies you used with your product. As a new blogger, it’s comforting to see that it took several months before any money was made. I’m not to that point yet, I just want to put my passion out there.

    1. justagirlabby says:

      So glad it was helpful for you! Hope you’re having a great weekend!

      ~Abby =)

  5. Hi Abby,
    I have been trying to sign up for your email list – but nothing happens? maybe something has gone wrong since you changed email service provider?
    Thanks for a great and inspirational website!
    All the best – all the way from Denmark :o)
    Stine

    1. Donnie Lawson says:

      Sorry about that! Can you send us an email abby (at) justagirlandherblog.com and I’ll look into it.

  6. Monica @ Redefining Mom says:

    Thank you for sharing Abby & Donnie! I’m a Book Boss student and I’ll be launching my first book on 9/29! These income reports are extremely motivating. Also, I love the idea of removing ads from your site. It’s something I’ve been considering for a while too!

    1. justagirlabby says:

      Yay! Less than 2 weeks… how exciting! So glad they’re helpful for you, Monica!

      ~Abby =)

  7. Heather Alexander says:

    I love having the choice. I LOVE your designs and I really get a lot out of the simplify binder, because that’s what I use for our home binder. But as far as the planner I actually use the bullet journaling method, so for me, the planner isn’t something I will use.

    Congrats on another fantastic month!
    God bless!

  8. Donnie, can you share how you track or graph the RPM. I need to do that or ROI but I’m not at all a tracker.

    1. Donnie Lawson says:

      Sure Rachel! I keep track of everything manually in a Google Spreadsheet. I then use Infogr.am to make the little charts.

  9. Bharat Ratna says:

    Wow. Abby really inspiring. Thanks for the earning stats

    1. justagirlabby says:

      So glad it was helpful for you!

      ~Abby =)

  10. Jane Northey says:

    Thanks Abby for this income report. It is really motivating. I found out about your blog by chance. I read an article that featured successful blogs, and one of them was your website. I just started my own blog and hoping for the best. Congratulations on your successful month. It’s fun reading your income reports!

    🙂
    Jane Northey

    1. justagirlabby says:

      Thanks so much, Jane! Happy Friday!

      ~Abby =)

  11. Hello my favorite new Mentors! Curious, how many of your expenses are monthly versus how many are one time improvement or investment expenses. I’ve noticed that as your income grew, so has your expenses. While this scares many people, it is totally normal for a growing business to invest in new growth. Perhaps showing which expenses are mandatory to keep things afloat and which ones are choices to improve and expand would be helpful? Thanks 🙂

  12. Vinod Juneja says:

    Wow you generate so many money there. I hope i will reach level as you now.

Comments are closed.