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June 18, 2015 By Donnie Lawson 6 Comments

May 2015 Traffic and Income Report

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Traffic and Income Report May 2015 | JustAGirlAndHerBlog.com
May 2015 Income Report | JustAGirlAndHerBlog.com

Hi, friends! Our income report is posting a little late this month due to some launch or something we had last week, 😉 but we're back with a full report!

In case you've just stumbled upon Just a Girl and Her Blog, each month my husband Donnie crunches the numbers and talks about what went well and what we could improve as far as the business end of this blog goes. We started doing the reports when we were just learning the ropes with monetizing and have grown from there, and our hope is that sharing them will be helpful for other people who are interested in turning their blog into a business.

How to Start a Blog

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Most of May was spent putting the final touches on the many different aspects of Building a Framework, and I'll let Donnie talk about the numbers and what that meant for our income...

Income

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

  • Bluehost - $3,570 --> How to Start a Blog
  • Framework eBook  - $2,347
  • Paperless Home eBook - $1,526
  • AdThrive - $1,345
  • Simplify eBook - $1,020
  • Amazon Associates - $259
  • Sponsored Posts - $250
  • Genesis Framework - $126
  • Restored 316 - $119
  • Evernote Essentials - $31
Total Income: $10,593

Expenses

  • MailChimp - $235
  • Gumroad Transaction Fees - $229
  • Affiliate Payouts - $226
  • eBook Cover and Graphics - $150
  • Virtual Assistant - $135
  • Synthesis Hosting - $67
  • PayPal Transaction Fees - $38
  • Wistia - $25
  • SendOwl - $24
  • Strip Transaction Fees - $22
  • Board Booster - $20
  • Co-Working Space - $15
  • Creative Market Graphic - $15
  • Tailwind - $15
  • Zapier - $15
  • Crashplan - $14
  • Rafflecopter - $13
  • Adobe Creative Cloud - $11
  • Google Apps - $10
  • Buffer App - $10
  • Vimeo - $10
  • CoSchedule - $8
  • Amazon Web Services - $5
  • Fizzle.co - $0 (usually $35)
Total Expenses: $1,312

May 2015 Net Profit: $9,281

Income Analysis

donnie

May felt like a little bit of a down month. The income total is still excellent and more than I ever made in my full-time corporate job, but nothing in the income column jumps off the page. May was sandwiched between the launch of The Paperless Home and the recent June launch of Building a Framework. I would say that more than 50% of our working effort was spent preparing for our June 10th launch.

It's interesting that our 10 income streams this month added up to a cumulative 10k + month. With about a week left in May, Abby and I were trying to guess what the total would be for the month. Both of us predicted significantly less income than what it turned out to be. It just goes to show that if you slowly and correctly build multiple income streams into your business, they really do add up to be significant and can smooth out the income during months when it feels like nothing special is happening.

This month has proven to me that the time Abby and I took working our 2015 monetization strategy is really paying off. We've slowly been building multiple revenue streams -- most of which would not have happened without our long term planning we did at the end of last year. It's a given that a content strategy is important for a blog, but it's easy to overlook monetization strategy.

Three Legs of Blog Income

  1. Affiliate Income – $4,355
  2. Ad Revenue – $1,345
  3. Product Sales –$4,893

Ad revenue continues to be a less and less important revenue stream. We certainly are not at the place where we can walk away from ads but we've been experimenting with less ads. At the time of this writing you can see that we no longer have a top banner ad. In June I'll be tracking to see how eliminating one of the more distracting ads affects our ad revenue. Will ad revenue go down but site engagement go up? Will revenue go down but average time on site go up? Those are my predictions. If it holds to be true, it could be the case that toning down the ad placements actually improves overall revenue. We have some good systems in place to sell our eBooks and affiliate products, but all of those systems depend on our visitors taking time to read the content and then subscribing to our email list. It remains to be seen if removing an ad or two can increase other conversions on the blog.

Top Posts of April 2015

  1. 10 Simple Habits that Will Help You Stay Organized
  2. How to Make Pretty Labels in Microsoft Word + FREE Printable
  3. Our Secret Weapon for Saving Money: The 2015 Budget Binder
  4. 25 Amazing Trash to Treasure Projects!
  5. Our Home Binder: A Tour {with FREE printables!}

Traffic Report

May 2015 Income Report | Just a Girl and Her Blog

Email Subscriber Statistics

  • 2,083 New Subscribers
  • 24,947 Total Subscribers

I've been experimenting with a new email service! It's too early to talk about it yet, but in the future I plan on a full comparison between our new service and MailChimp.

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.

May 2015 RPM: $28.03

I love tracking RPM and I'm always on the lookout for other bloggers who include both pageviews and gross revenue in their income reports. It's fun to see how we stack up RPM-wise with those who have way more and way less pageviews than us. If you read any other income reports that include both of these numbers, let me know about them in the comments.

So to recap…

Gross Income: $10,593
Net Income: $9,281
Pageviews: 377,863

Click here to see a running tally of all past income reports.

May 2015 Income Report | JustAGirlAndHerBlog.com

Over the past five months, thousands of you have signed up for our 7 Days to Start a Blog Challenge. Instead of constantly blogging about how to get a blog set up and successfully off the ground with a good design, brand, and content strategy, I wrote exclusive content for a free 7 day email course. The way the system worked before, you couldn't take the course more than once. No longer! If you sign up below (even if you've already been through the course) you'll receive 7 lessons (one per day) for the next 7 days. If you've been wanting to start your blog or just make sure you have a strong framework in place for your current blog, this is for you!!

Thank you as always for taking the time to visit the blog and check out our monthly reports! 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
  • August 2015 – $17,162
  • July 2015 – $18,334
  • June 2015 – $26,041
  • 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.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: blogging, income report, traffic and income report

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Previous Post: « Summer Home Tour 2015
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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Samantha @ The Harmonious Homemaker says

    June 18, 2015 at 8:21 am

    So helpful and inspiring! I love following these and I love your heart for helping other bloggers learn to make money online. Thanks so much for all you do!

    Reply
  2. Kristie Hill says

    June 18, 2015 at 11:34 am

    I'm like you Donny, I like tracking RPM. I actually wrote a post about RPM yesterday and mentioned your income report!

    Reply
  3. Ann @ The Clumsy Wife says

    June 18, 2015 at 12:48 pm

    Thanks for sharing these posts! It's inspiring and motivating as a blogger to see the behind the scenes. I'm sure it's hard to always be so open about your income, but it's encouraging to your readers so thanks!! 🙂

    Reply
  4. Georgia @ Silver Spiral Studio says

    June 18, 2015 at 11:48 pm

    Thanks for this post! Such an inspiration 🙂 Congratulations on your success!!

    Reply
  5. Our Home Of Many Blessings says

    July 03, 2015 at 9:48 am

    This is inspiring! I didnt realize you could make so much from blogging!Thank you for sharing.New follower!!

    Reply
  6. Mariana Cisowska says

    July 16, 2015 at 12:38 am

    I just started my blog, and not focusing on the monetizing at the moment at all, just having fun with it for the time being and creating content.

    While saying that, I have to say that these posts are so inspiring and motivating.
    Thanks so much Abbie and Donnie.

    Reply

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