Welcome to my online business income report! I love reading the income reports of other bloggers and wanted to start sharing mine as a way to be transparent, as well as motivate myself (and hopefully others!) to create a successful business. I’ll also be including my traffic and social media stats as well as goal tracking since those are pretty important parts of the business and it’ll help me keep track as we move forward.

Please note: Due to pregnancy + maternity leave I put my business (mostly) on hold for about a year between October 2014 – October 2015. This is me jumping back in with both feet! Just thought I should clarify.

JOURNEY TO $5,000/MONTH

Tracking my income is part of my goal to make $5,000 per month by October of 2016. I recently made that a goal and gave myself a year to achieve it. Join me on my journey!

What’s Included

I include all of my online business income and expenses from blogging, design, and any of my other business income streams. The only income I don’t report are my Jamberry commissions (due to their policy to not share earnings) as well as any extra income I make selling excess items which I do regularly to simplify and declutter. All other sources of income and the related expenses will be shared here.

NOVEMBER’S INCOME

As much as this is not enough to live off of, I’m looking on the bright side in that my income in November was more than 6 times what it was in October. Baby steps, right? It’s definitely not the most I’ve ever made, but like I mentioned before I’m working on some other income streams because right now my main source of income is design work which fluctuates like crazy and is pretty slow around the holidays.

I did throw out a deal for friends and family to design holiday cards. A few showed interest, but in November I only got one order. I’m thinking I’ll get one or two last minute orders. I also reactivated my Fiverr gigs. It’s not exactly going to pay the bills, but they are quick little ways to make a few bucks without a ton of revisions and editing so it’s a nice boost.

Income for November 2015

• How to Sell on Instagram Ecourse: $12
• Google Adsense: $2.28
• Youtube Ads: $8.23
• Amazon Affiliate: $4.16
• Fiverr: $32
• Design: $125
• Total: $183.67

Income Tracking

November: $183.67
October: $23.88
Difference: $159.79 (669% increase)
Total for 2015: $207.55

NOVEMBER’S EXPENSES

I’ve got to admit that my expenses were insane this month because of the Teachable bundle I purchased (under the Education category). It was a crazy good deal on several ecourses I wanted to take anyway. My thoughts were that it’s kind of slow around this time of year so I’ll spend my time increasing my knowledge so I can kick off next year with a bang. (Unfortunately this bundle is no longer available.)

The Printing and Shipping category is a bit higher than it should be. Unfortunately, my printer ended up making a mistake (slightly my fault too) so, while they credited me the amount on the cards I ordered, I ended up paying overnight shipping to make my client happy. Oh well. Small profit and happy client is still a win.

I got a sweet Black Friday deal on hosting through A Small Orange, a company I had been wanting to switch to from Hostgator anyway. So the monthly fee for Hostgator will be gone next month as long as I get cracking on transferring everything over. The $12.50 I spent on A Small Orange is for an entire year and included a free domain registration for a year. I told you it was a sweet deal!

Expenses for November 2015

• Printing + Shipping: $68.00
• Hostgator: $11.95
• Meet Edgar: $49
• Kindle Unlimited: $9.99
• Squarespace: $12
• Education: $348 (Ecourses)
• A Small Orange: $12.50
• Total: $511.44

TRAFFIC & SOCIAL MEDIA

I’m a little disappointed that my page views and traffic has gone down a little bit for this blog, but I haven’t been posting as much so I almost expected it. Since I’ve been working on improving the function of my blog as well as my social media strategy, I’ve taken a break from creating much content as I re-evaluate and figure out how much I really want to post. Fewer, better quality, posts is where it’s at so that’s what I’ll focus on after I finish tweaking and enhancing my current posts.

On the other hand, Miss Tightwad has been getting some more pageviews without me posting much. It’s kind of on the back burner as well while I try to do some maintenance and optimizing throughout my blogs.

AileenBarker.com

• Pageviews: 4,495 (down from 5,189)
• Users: 3,244 (down from 3,550)
• Bounce Rate: 88.27% (up from 86.11%)
• New vs Returning: 82.2% / 17.8% (previous 85% / 15%)
• Pages per Session: 1.18 (down from 1.28)
• Average Session Duration: 41 seconds (down from 51 seconds)
• Facebook: 298 (same!)
• Twitter: 462 (up from 446)
• Pinterest: 754 (up from 712)
• Instagram: 669 (up from 651)

MissTightwad.com

• Pageviews: 826 (up from 628)
• Pages per Session: 1.37 (down from 1.48)
• Users: 482 (up from 381)
• Bounce Rate: 86.38 (up from 81.8%)
• New vs Returning: (78.7 / 21.3%) (prevously 85.8% / 14.2%)
• Average Session Duration: 56 seconds (down from 57 seconds)
• Youtube: 1,248 (up from 1,201)
• Facebook: 173 (same!)
• Twitter: 73 (up from 69)

NOVEMBER GOAL REVIEW

First let me note that this section is full of fails. But as I kind of changed my direction and had a lot of successes in other areas in November I’m not too worried about it. I’ve been hard at work organizing and enhancing my blog content as well as working with new social media strategies. I’ll definitely be sharing my experiences in the next few months.

Increase traffic to 7,000 pageviews | FAIL. I was nowhere near this.

Social Media Marketing Plan | HALF FAIL. I don’t have a plan, per say, but I have been implementing some new strategies. I just need to polish them up and make an actual plan.

Make at least $300 in November | FAIL.

Bring down expenses to $150 | FAIL. I spent way more than that. However, if you take out the Teachable bundle I bought it’s pretty close.

How to Blog Post | FAIL. There are so many out there, I really want to be able to write this post in a way that is unique, helpful and clear. I’m going to hold off on this for a while.

DECEMBER GOALS

Finish Removing Irrelevant Posts | Since my focus for this blog will be on entrepreneurship, blogging, business, productivity and the like I wanted to remove any blog posts that aren’t relevant. But at the same time I have years and years of lifestyle blog posts so I’ve moved them to a new home where I’ll continue updating with lifestyle posts, but it won’t interfere with the focus of this blog.

If you read my 5 Ways to Make Your Existing Content Work for You post, you’ll notice that removing “bad” posts was one of the things I recommended.

Finish Enhancing Existing Content | In addition to removing tons and tons of posts, I want to make the posts that get to stick around much better. Epic even. That includes adding more detail, adding content upgrades, basically anything I can do to make that content even better.

Reader Survey | In planning for 2016 I want to get your insights and opinions. Keep an eye out for this in the coming weeks. I promise to keep it relatively short, but it would make my day if you would participate. I want to make sure I’m posting helping, relevant content that helps you!

Ecourse Planning | With 2016 coming up I have plans for at least a couple of ecourses on topics I have a ton of experience with. I have several ecourses in mind and want to work through them to see which I want to offer first and get to outlining. The goal is to launch it no later than February!

That’s all for this month! So excited to see what next month brings.

How was November for your blog or business?