Income Report July 2017 (Traffic And Metrics) - Passive Income Wise (2024)

THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE READ MY DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO

Since 2015, every month I publish a detailed report with all the accounts for my online businesses. On them I include the earnings and expenses, I tell a little bit about my personal experience and what new things I have been trying during this period of time. I explain as well what my future targets are and if the previous ones have been achieved or not. Why doing this?

1. It helps me to keep track of my personal finances.In any moment of time, I can look back at my reports and see what steps and results I got from determined strategies, like a log book.
2. Increase trusting.I also want to show you that I am a real person starting from the first step. There are many amazing bloggers out there reporting their incomes of thousands of dollars, but I found very little bloggers reporting low amounts of money like me. I think this can help to starters and to people who are not decided yet to start their own online business.
3. Motivation. Writing here my results will put me on that kind of uncomfortable position in which I need to demonstrate that I can go one step further instead of getting lazy and rely on excuses. My finances are open to everybody!

I know that every month I say the same, but it’s the truth. All earnings here reported are coming from Passive Income sources. I am not including any kind of outsourcing because the intention is you show you how far I can go with only passive income sources.

This is my 22nd month reporting my accounts and I simply love it! I can’t believe I started blogging more than one year ago, it just feels great =)

You can have a look to some of my previous monthly income reports:

• Income Report November 2015 – $117.61
• Income Report May 2016 – $346.96
• Income Report September 2016 – $660.22
• Income Report April 2017 – $832.98

IMPORTANT THINGS GOING ON INJULY

I’m writing this income report with some delay (it’s nearly the middle of August!) because some of the income wasn’t verified until yesterday. One of my affiliate managers was on holidays and couldn’t pull the earnings from the last month.

1. I changed from Mail Poet to Convertkit

This month I switched from Mailpoet (which is free) to Convertkit. I was getting 40 subscribers a month before switching.

The day I switched to Convertkit I finished the free 10-day email course.

The results: I went from 40 subscribers a month to 259 (and increasing). Here is a screenshot:

I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner. I’m so happy!!

The plan I got is up to 1,000 subscribers at $29/month, but I think that really soon I’ll need to upgrade (I’m getting so many subscribers).

I’ve been trying A/B testing for my opt-ins and found some of them having a 0.1% conversion rate while others are at around 1.5%-2%.

I’ll keep experimenting, but I’ve found that when your opt-in is completely related to the article, then the conversion rate is much higher. That’s why at the moment I have 15 different opt-ins running on the site (for different categories).

I’ve also found that if you include a freebie (for example a printable or free course), the conversion rate increases too. So I created 5 different printables and a free “Smart Saving Money 10day email course“. These ones are getting many subscribers.

2. I finished my first course Smart Money Saving

Over the last 2 months, I’ve been working is this course discontinuously but now it’s finished and live!

The Smart Money Saving course is a 10-day email course that I offer for FREE to whoever wants to sign up.

How it works is easy, you enrol to the course and every day you’ll receive a lesson via email. Some of them include printables and worksheets to help you out progress through the course.

Here is a snapshot of the printables that you’ll receive if you subscribe.

3. I subscribed to Haute Chocolate stock photos.

If you wonder where my Pinterest images are coming from, most of the times are from Haute Chocolate.

For a while, I’ve been using the photos that they provide for free but I’ve run out of them and I needed more professional stock photos.

I’ve subscribed for the 3 months plan at $99. The best thing is that you don’t need to renew because they allow you to download all the photos and use them even after cancel your subscription.

I’m not sure if I will cancel or not because every month they keep adding new stock images.

Here are some examples of my pins using their stock photos.

4. I’ve hired a proofreader

Yes, I actually have somebody working for me! And she is simply amazing.

After all the struggle with my language and my poor English, I’ve decided to hire a proofreader/copy editor. She actually also reviews my style and provides valuable inputs.Now it’s so much easier.

I used to review 4 to 5 times each blog post before publishing and still, I did have plenty of grammar issues. The thing is that I’m not English native speaker (it’s my second language) and even though I’m trying my best, I still have so much to learn.

Now that I have a proofreader, I just focus on writing and let my words flow. It takes nearly half of my time now writing and that’s why from next month I’m planning to publish two posts every week (that’s double than what I used to do).

More things going on in July:

• We travelled to Punta Umbria (Spain). We relaxed for a few days on the beach, which to be honest, we really needed it.
• We also went to Durdle Door beach at the south of the UK and we did camping in our own tent. It was a great experience.

Content Creation

In July I published 2posts (including the May income report).This month I’ve been focused in long posts, between 1,500-2,000 words. I’ve come to realize that it’s better to publish less often but more in-depthposts than short and less useful articles.

I’ve also spent some quality time in creating the material of my online course.

Here is the list this the posts I published during the last month:

• Passive Income Report June 2017
• Why You Should Build an Emergency Fund for your Family

The post about why you should build an emergency fund has been one of the favourite posts this month and it seems to be helpful for other people.The reason why I wrote it, it’s becauseI’ve realised that many people don’t have an emergency fund and I think is something that everybody should have.

And now… let’s start with the interesting part. I know you are here to check out my numbers 🙂

Income Report

The total gross income for my blog this month is detailed below

Paid surveys affiliates: $1,262.44 The networks I use are FlexOffers, ShareASale and iGainGoogle AdSense: $73.22
Bluehost: $65.00 How to start a blog with WordPress and BluehostMonumetric:$29.36 Start with Monumetric for free if you have more than 80k page viewsOther advertisem*nts: $26.84
PadSquad mobile ads: $6.80
Amazon Associates: $5.48
Grammarly: $0.20

Total Income: $1,469.34

Expenses

This month, expenses are high compared to other months. The main reason is that I’ve decided to reinvest most of the money I earn through blogging.

I’ve purchased courses, stock images and I paid to my proofreader to review my latest posts.

I pay a VPS (Virtual Private Server) because I have a few other websites running and if something goes viral I want to be ready for it.

• Courses: $169.00
• Haute Chocolate Stock Pictures: $99.00
• Proofreading: $97.10
• VPS:$64.00

Total Expenses: $429.10

The initial investment for the hosting and domain name (for PIW) was done in Octoberand this one is already running for free.

Net Total Balance: $1,469.10– $429.10=$1,040.24

• Previous month: $1,052.31
• Difference:– $12.07 (-0.11%)

July has been the best month so far since I started (in total income). It seems that my blog is jumping to the “next level”, if I can keep income around $1,500/month and keep expenses low, it will be amazing!

Be aware that I put a 30% aside to pay taxes and the money that goes to my savings is less than the reported above.

Money saved for taxes (30% of $1,116.31) = $440.73

This is my 22nd month reporting my accounts and it seems to keep growing little by little which makes me so happy.Obviously, it’s nothing to compare with other famous bloggers, but for a starter like me,it’s considered an important milestone. I am having more than $1,000 profit and this is something I’ve never expected to happen.

Imagine what would you do with an extra $1,040 extra per month?

The graph below shows my income and expenses since I started my blog in October 2015. It seems incredible that I’ve been on this for nearly two years!

The graph below shows the balance or profit which is calculated as:

Balance = Income – Expenses

July is the 11th month I am donating a part of my income to children with health issues and learning disabilities.

Since September, every month I’m sharing how much money Passive Income Wise is giving to help these families.

I calculate it as the 10%(Total Income – Tax Money – Expenses)

Income Donated This Month: 10%($599.51) = $59.95

Total Income Donated Accumulated = $705.36

Nice! One step closer to build a school in China!

Traffic and Metrics

After a few months, I am back reporting my traffic and metrics. And I do it because of you.

I received emails, comments, and even a phone call just asking to continue reporting my traffic.

Since I started using Tailwind(Pinterest pin scheduler) my traffic has increased a lot. A few months I ago I barely received a few hundreds of visits, and now thousands!

Related post:How I Went from 0 to 250 daily page views (in just 1 month) using Tailwind

I went from 11k to more nearly 20k page views!That’s a 69% traffic increase.

The traffic sources are mainly coming from Pinterest (55%) and Direct (35%). A couple of months ago I didn’t receive any traffic from Pinterest and this month it’s my main source of traffic thanks to Tailwind and the pinscheduler tool.

If you want to try Tailwind for free you can do it following this link (and get a $15 discount).It offers auto scheduler for 100 free pins at optimised times depending on your audience.

Organic traffic is building up month after month. I already have some long tail keywords ranking in positions 2-3 in Google.

The most visited posts during July were:

It seems that people from Pinterest like tips to make/save money, 7out of 10 of the most visited posts are related to these categories. The favourite posts are the 7 free online survey sites to join for extra cash, which is a compilation of survey sites that I’ve used to make some extra money as a side hustle and the post about how to pay off your debt in 7 steps. This last one has received many clicks from the Pinterest smart feed and I’m so glad it did because it already helped many people with their debt.

Social Media

Twitter.If you don’t want to miss any of my new tweets followPassive Income Wise on Twitter

• Followers: 16,924

Pinterest. Check out my new Pins by following Passive Income Wise on Pinterest

• Followers: 3,517 (+34)

Email List.

• Subscriptions: 819 (+107)

July goals and results

Below are the goals I set up for July, let’s see if I achieved them.

• Write 5 to 10 new blog posts (2 of them should be related to the online course I’m working on). FAIL
• Change my email list from MailPoet to ConvertKit and do all the blog integration.PASS
• Get 10,000 sessions.PASS
• Join 5 new Pinterest boards. PARTIALPASS(I only joined 3 group boards)
• Keep the $1,000/month income.PASS
• Create new thumbnails and pins for my old posts.FAIL
• Create a new Autoresponder.PASS
• Buy new stock photos.PASS
• Send at least 1 broadcast email every week.PASS

Not so bad! However, for the next month, I want to see all green.

Goals for August

As a future work for August 2017 the followings are my targets:

• Write 2 new blogposts every week.
• Get 20,000 sessions.
• Keep the $1,000/month income.
• Create newthumbnails and pinsfor my old posts.
• Work with Convertkit and write new email autoresponder.
• Send at least1 broadcast email every week.

This month is going to be very challenging, my targets are very high and I will need to work hard towards them.Plus on top of that, I will be travelling to Tunisia in August and I will only spend 3weeks in my blog.

That’s everything for this past July.

Did you like my July Income Report?Are you interested in earning income online?

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