October 2015 Traffic and Income Report

Every month I’m surprised when income report day rolls around. I mean, you’d think I’d have it down by now. But each month it comes along and surprises me– didn’t we just do one of these?! 🙂

If you’re new around here, each month my husband Donnie and I tally up what we’ve made from this little ol’ blog of ours and share it with the world in hopes that others who read it will be helped along their online business ventures as well.

I know that we’ve learned so much from other bloggers and entrepreneurs who have been willing to be transparent and share a little bit of what goes on behind the scenes, so hopefully our reports will be helpful for others too!

Here’s how things panned out in October…

Income

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

• Framework eBook and course – $7,140
• Bluehost – $3,610 –> How to Start a Blog
• AdThrive – $1,365
• Simplify eBook – $1,070
• Media Temple – $1,000
• Paperless Home eBook – $934
• Ultimate Bundles – $776
• Sponsored Posts – $500
• Genesis Framework – $371
• Amazon Associates – $323
• ConvertKit – $314
• Restored 316 – $75
• Sweet Life Planner Club – $60
• Fizzle.co – $53
• PicMonkey – $32
• Evernote Essentials – $16

Total Income: $17,639

Expenses

• Framework Affiliate Payouts – $1,120
• Assistant – $390
• Snap Conference Ticket – $360
• ConvertKit – $319 –> Why We Switched from MailChimp to ConvertKit
• Stripe Transaction Fees – $137
• Gumroad Transaction Fees – $136
• PayPal Transaction Fees – $130
• Synthesis Hosting – $67
• Instapage – $66
• Adobe Creative Cloud – $53
• Intercom.io – $49
• Wistia – $25
• PO Box – $25
• SendOwl – $24
• CloudFlare – $20
• Board Booster – $20
• Co-Working Space – $15
• Media Temple – $15
• Crashplan – $14
• Zapier – $9
• Backupify – $3
• Fizzle.co – $0 (usually $35)

October was largely dedicated to getting our latest product– The 2016 Intentional Life Planner— to launch. It may look like a simple little planner, but many, many, many hours of work went into designing, editing, revising, printing, photographing, and marketing.

One of the questions I get asked a lot about our product creation process is, “How do you find the time to create something extra on top of your regular posting schedule?” so I thought I would touch on that a little bit in this post because it’s certainly not that I’m Superwoman and can accomplish more than the average person! I’ve learned that extra time to create a product will never just appear– you have to make the time. So we have come up with a few different ways to “create time” as we’ve gone through our product creation process over and over.

Our first trick is that one or both of us usually do a getaway. Any time Donnie and I are working on a product, we always try to take a weekend away near the beginning of the process to try to hammer out as much of the initial content as possible. This gives us dedicated, interruption-free work time and helps us make good progress so we don’t feel like we’re scrambling to create all of the content. (Though sometimes we still end up scrambling a little!) So several weeks out from launch, I went away to a hotel for a weekend by myself to knock out the majority of the design work for the planner, which was a huge help.

After that, it’s all about putting writing/creating time on the schedule and sticking to it! I have to treat it like it’s a super important appointment that I can’t miss or it just won’t happen. It often helps if I stick to the same time each day or week. For example, I’ll commit to working on the product from 6-7 am every day no matter what. (So Donnie is in charge of the boys during that time and if they need anything, they know to go to him.) It might just be one little hour, but when I’m consistent over time, those one hour stints really add up.

Other ways we have made more time is to drop down our posting schedule from three to two times per week. We haven’t done this yet, but we could always utilize guest posters if we needed help staying consistent with our content. We’re fortunate that both sets of our parents are close by and have helped watch the Cs from time to time so we can get some extra work in. And also there’s two of us working on everything, so while I’m writing or designing, Donnie can be creating the landing page (we use Instapage for our landing pages) or setting up the products with our payment processors (we use Gumroad and SendOwl).

Not all of these strategies will work for everyone, but if you have a product in mind that would be helpful for your audience, I encourage you to find a way make the time. Selling our own products has been a major game changer for our business, and it’s one of the big reasons we’re able to both blog full time together.

If you’d like more insight into our product launching process, you can download our launch plan here.

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