August 2014 Monthly Income Report

Every month I share how profitable blogging really is. Some months have a positive income report, others reflect a negative income report.

August 2014 Monthly Income Report

With the final month of summer things started picking up a little bit but most bloggers understand that people spend more time away from their computers and anticipate traffic to be rather low. The end of the month led to finally spending more time in the office and focusing on building great content for the upcoming months. I would love to hear how you spent your summer and if you are a blogger if you were prepared for the “slow season” or just let the chips fall where they may? I have learned quite a bit from this summer that will help me to better prepare for next year and hopefully not see months where I take a loss and am able to keep things stabilized.

I also made some upgrades to my computer which meant there was quite a bit of time that I didn’t track because I had not installed RescueTime on the machine I rebuilt.

Time:

Hours logged for August 2014: 59 hours and 59 minutes. This is a few less hours tracked than the previous month but you can see the gap in time that I wasn’t tracking because of not having RescueTime installed on my upgraded computer. I spent quite a bit of time during August networking with other bloggers and learning to code with Treehouse.

You can see the jump at the end of the month where I finally was ready to get back into the groove. I am hoping to keep this momentum up and am excited about the content that I have coming up to share in the coming months.

 

Traffic:

Traffic for August was  low until I published the July Income Report near the end of the month. This was the only post that was published for the month of August but others were created in the final week and ready to go for September.

Income:

Media.Net: $0 (I had made some changes to the ad placements and this resulted in seeing no income from August)

Google Adsense: $0.75

Genesis Theme by StudioPress: $0

Business2Blogger: $0

Advowire: $42.18

Self-Hosted Ads: $0

Busybee’s Creation (Etsy Shop): $93.78

MacHighway: $0

MailChimp: $0

Hootsuite: $0

RescueTime: $0 (This is generating quite a bit of referrals but only for the free version)

Amazon: $0.39

Rich Mom University: $144 (Rich Mom University has closed enrollment until after the first of the year)

Online Edge Academy: $0

Total Income: $281.10

Expenses:

Web Hosting:

MacHighway: $9.95 (www.sarah-m-schultz.com) $5.95 (www.notthatcrunchy.com — Site Coming Soon!)

 Advertising & Promotional Tools:

Passionfruit: $9

CoSchedule: $4

MailChimp: $10

Maintenance & Daily Operations Tools:

Google Drive: $1.99

Evernote: $5.30

Education:

Treehouse: $25

Graphic Design Tools and Resources:

Adobe CC: $10.91

PixelScrapper: $10

Product Sales Tools:

Busybee’s Creation (Etsy Shop): $21.99

SendOwl: $15

Office Equipment & Supplies:

Other World Computer- computer parts $32.95

Networking:

Learn To Blog VIP Forum: $7.99

Total Expenses: $169.73

Net Profit: $111.37

This month I decided to cut some expenses like ViralTag, while it is a great service I found myself not really utilizing. I also joined a fantastic community, Learn to Blog VIP Forum, the monthly expense of that has already proven to well worth it.  For more information on tools and resources I use (including some that are free) check out the Resources page.

Thoughts for the future:

Even though I took it slow for the final month of summer, I was still able to see quite a bit of return on my time invested because of the final push of enrollment in the Rich Mom University. I have been very focused on broadening my skills so that I will be able to offer more products in the shop on Etsy as well as directly though this site. I am very focused on creating and scheduling content for the coming months so that I will not have months where the site is sitting stagnate. I know that this a serious negative impact on my traffic and it is very easy to remedy by working ahead and creating evergreen content that will be relevant for quite some time. I am also still on the fence about whether or not I should invest in hiring a virtual assistant to help with many of the basic tasks that just seem to be time consuming so that i am able to focus on more important tasks that will result in seeing an increase in revenue.