November 2014 Traffic and Income Report

November 2014 Traffic & Income Report

(*asterisk denotes affiliate link)

Let’s jump right into the numbers…

Income

• Ad Thrive – $982
• Framework eBook – $870
• Bluehost Affiliate* – $800
• Ultimate Bundles Affiliate – $655
• Sponsored Posts (2) – $535
• Amazon Associates – $425
• Silhouette America Affiliate* – $288
• StudioPress Affiliate* – $140
• Evernote Essentials Affiliate* – $125
• Media Temple* – $80
• Restored 316 Themes Affiliate* – $20

Total Income: $4,920

Expenses

• Mailchimp* – $150
• SendOwl Affiliate Payouts – $101
• Synthesis Hosting – $67
• Fizzle.co* – $35
• Gumroad Transaction Fees – $28
• Paypal Transaction Fees – $18
• SendOwl* – $15
• Zapier – $15
• Crashplan – $14
• Viral Tag – $12
• Adobe Creative Cloud – $11
• Stripe Transaction Fees – $8

Total Expenses: $474

Net Profit: $4,446

Income Analysis

In November we had a few new sources of income. You’ll notice this was the first month reporting affiliate payouts. Thank you everyone who signed up for the affiliate program! If you want to learn a little about how we setup our program see the October income report. I will say that we were a little disappointed with the volume of affiliate sales of the eBook. Don’t get me wrong, we are incredibly grateful to the handful of people who promoted the book, we were just hoping for more people. We’re currently brainstorming ideas for ramping up the number and effectiveness of our affiliate partners.

What’s interesting to me is that in October we sold $2,428 worth of the eBook simply by announcing that we were going to phase out pay what you want pricing. By contrast, this month we sold $870 worth of the eBook and that included the rollout of our affiliate program! The sense of urgency we created in October was incredibly powerful. Obviously it’s not something can or want to recreate all the time.

Abby also participated in two new affiliate programs in November. 1) Ultimate Bundles and 2) Silhouette America. Speaking of creating a sense of urgency, Ultimate Bundles has mastered that sales technique. They periodically offer a ridiculously large bundle of eBooks around a particular topic. The bundle is only available for 5 days and then it disappears forever. The sense of urgency combined with an amazing sales page really drove some sales. We’ll most likely participate in an Ultimate Bundle sometime in the future, maybe 2 or 3 times per year.

Three Legs of Blog Income

Our September blog income came from three categories:

1. Product sales – $870 (18%)
2. Ad revenue – $982 (20%)
3. Affiliate income – $3,068 (62%)

Our three legged stool is way out of balance! Abby and I know that the future of her blog is increasing product sales so it’s a bit discouraging to see her eBook as only 18% of the monthly income. I still find it remarkable that people keep buying the eBook and it all happens automatically, but when I compare it with affiliate income I realize what we need to do… Create more products! I think products are the best way to grow your audience, increase your authority, and help people. Not only that, but planning and successfully launching a product is incredibly satisfying, much more so than generating affiliate income or ad revenue could ever be, and I didn’t even write the book!

Traffic Report

Email Subscriber Statistics

• 777 New Subscribers
• 12,239 Total Subscribers

It’s easy to forget about email list growth. It’s been on autopilot for almost a year and we’ve been happy with the results. But you can see from the chart below that growth is starting to slow down. This is something Abby and I will revisit at the beginning of 2015. We’ve sold more eBooks through email than all other sources combined so it would be foolish not to try and improve our email signup numbers.

RPM

RPM is a metric to track revenue per thousand pageviews. This is a measure of the overall effectiveness of the blog.

and to recap our income…

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