Blog income report June 2017
It’s that time already – here’s my blog income report for June 2017.
As you’ll know if you read last month’s report, as I now have a part-time job, these reports are now the additional self-employed income I earn from this blog and my freelance clients.
I know many of you are probably starting out doing something on the side of your job-job, a ’side-hustles’ – so hopefully, you can relate to my set-up.
I still have big goals for this site, building my audience and developing different income streams so this will become a place to do that. I’ve added in a traffic report so I can record how my income increases alongside my traffic.
I hope that by sharing this, and the lessons I’m learning as I go, you can learn from what works for me, and what doesn’t.
Please note:
- To accurately show the financial reality of self-employment I only show what actually came in and out of my account. So it’s not necessarily reflective of the work I did that month. Amounts are rounded up to the nearest £.
june 2017 blog income
- Freelance copywriting and social media consulting: £0 (yep, really!)
- Social media planner: £6 (again, yes really!)
- Affiliate income: £0
- Interest: £2
Total income = £8
June 2017 blog expenses
- Merchant account fees £2
- Bank/service charges: £9
- Credit card interest: £13
- TSOhost domain renewal : £12
Education & training
- Melyssa Griffin – Blog To Business Hive: £37
- Melyssa Griffin – Pursuit HQ: £37
- Freelance To Freedom School: £29
- Dare to Grow, XO Sarah: £315
Advertising & promotion
- Buffer: £8
- Convertkit: £23
- BoardBooster: £12
- Coschedule: £12
Total expenses = £509
Net profit/loss = -£501
(Transferred to tax account = £0, paid myself = £0)
Another month in the red! Don’t worry, I have been doing some freelance work, I just haven’t invoiced for it yet. I transferred some money out of my savings account to cover the cost of Dare To Grow, XO Sarah’s growth course for bloggers. Again, I made an impulse purchase. I’m addicted to online courses!
So I did have to transfer some money out of my savings account to cover the cost of Dare To Grow, XO Sarah’s growth course for bloggers. Again, I made an impulse purchase. I’m addicted to online courses!
June 2017 traffic report
Even though I only posted four times this month, my traffic went up by 57%, from 586 pageviews in May to 918 – so I nearly reached my goal this month which was to get back up to 1000 pageviews. The number of users went up by a whopping 62%. There are two reasons I had this success without posting more.
Firstly, my quotes for single mothers post has been getting consistent traffic from Facebook this month – getting 220 page views over a couple of weeks. I can only think that it was posted in a group or on someone’s page and been shared. So if it was you that shared it, thank you!
The second reason is that my post about dating caused a spike in traffic last week and I’m hoping it will continue to bring in search engine traffic as it seems to have struck a chord!
June 2017 posts
- A letter to my daughter
- Blog income report May 2017
- Dating as a single mother: can you be bothered?
- How to support your single mother friend
What I learned
Be more realistic. I’ve been constantly striving to get two or three months ahead of myself in terms of scheduling content on this blog. But I never get there. Then I get discouraged. One thing I’ve already learned from the Dare to Grow course is to be more realistic about the time I have and set a schedule I can stick to. So now I’m aiming to be at least a week ahead and I have a process that means hopefully I can stick to that and even get a big further ahead if I’m diligent enough.
Get the most important things done first. I had a couple of days when I was super-efficient about getting my most important tasks done first before moving on to anything else. As a result, I was able to spend my evening relaxing (ie. watching Poldark) instead of tinkering with blog posts.
Facebook is working for me. Even though I haven’t been prioritising Facebook as a social media channel I’m consistently getting more traffic from it than from Twitter.
What’s next?
- Embed my blog process (and maybe write a blog post about it!)
- Reach 1500 pageviews in July.
- Get 100 new subscribers.
- Reduce my expenses. I reviewed my regular outgoings this month and have cut out foreign exchange fees by moving everything to my new Monzo card. But now I need to do a cull of courses/programmes I don’t need anymore.