May 2015 Traffic and Income Report

May 2015 Net Profit: $9,281

Income Analysis

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

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.

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