Income Report October 2016

 October Blog Income Report

Welcome to the October 2016 income report for Start a Mom Blog! I’m Mr. Mom Blogger, John, and I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to intro another great month in the world of online business.

Every month we publish our income reports so that we can share with you all what is working, and what isn’t. We want to be completely transparent with you, because as beginning bloggers, there is just so much to learn! And we are still learning with you. So if we can share a mistake we’ve made with you and save you from making it yourself. That’s a win in our book.

And one of the lessons that I took away from the month of October is my view on the world of online course creation. I’d like to share some thoughts with you, and would love to hear your opinion!

 Why Now is an Amazing Time to Blog

The world we live in today is just incredible. The ability to develop a thought, put it on paper, and distribute it globally for everyone’s benefit has become instant, and free. It has changed the game, and will continue to do so at a break-neck pace.

The world of online course creation is one of the most recent renaissance moments, and one that I am constantly amazed by. I firmly believe it is here to stay.

As you go back in time and think about education, we started as apprentices. Paired up with a skilled mentor, we would learn the trade that we had decided to pursue for our lifetime. This learning style existed for thousands of years.

As we industrialized, standardized schooling and university systems were created, and things began to change. Prices grew year over year, the course offerings and the funnels that lead us to an eventual degree became extremely standardized. It became the only accepted form of education for professionals.

 Riches are in the Niches

And now enter the world of online teaching. It is beginning to democratize education by lowering prices, increasing availability, and creating bite-sized learning opportunities that are laser-focused to serve exactly the desire of the consumer.

And let’s think about outcomes here. With the current university system, you complete all your homework and pass your tests to receive a diploma that shows competence. You still haven’t done anything in the real world to prove you can turn that education into any value!

With online courses, the outcomes are very different. By the end of a course, you may have created an entirely new product or business (like in the Blog by Number course for moms), or will have identified entirely actionable steps to take to conquer the next goal for your venture. The courses of today truly enable you to move the needle.

For these reasons, I am so happy that my wife created her course to help other moms get out there and taste online entrepreneurship. It’s been another great month, and we are so grateful for everyone’s support and kind words along the way. You all truly bring smiles to our faces every time we read a nice email or comment on what we do for you!

Hello, Suzi here…

Hi there mom friends! I am beyond blessed to even be able to write these reports! Truly! It may just be my hormones acting up, but gosh, I am so thankful that the early morning hours, nap times and all the hard work is working. Thank you!

I am a little bit in shock right now. And I am floored! I didn’t push my course heavily in the month of October, I was offline for a few days during Hurricane Matthew, and again for a few days during a blogging conference I attended. And even though all of these things happened the blog income did amazing.

 I am beyond blessed and shocked.

It truly is an amazing time that we live in where moms like me and you can stay home with our little ones and make money online. And it’s not scammy or shady. It’s real. It’s sustainable and it’s honest hard work. And I love what John wrote in the intro!

I am very proud of the work I’m doing. I’m offering up every free minute that I have to make my little business grow. I am working on this blog instead of sleeping in, or watching TV, or spending way too much browsing what to put in my Amazon cart and then delete later. I am reading, and learning and soaking in amazing advice from people like Mariah Coz, Pat Flynn and of course, my wonderful husband John!

So let’s get into the numbers and how all this hard work is paying off!

THE NUMBERS

*This post contains affiliate links.

INCOME

• Blog by Number ebook – $467
• Blog by Number course – $1750.36
• Stock Images – $250
• Siteground – $2,875
• How I made $40k blogging – $89.82
• How I Went From 17K to 350K+ Monthly Page Views in 9 Months – $20
• Building a Framework – $40
• Collaboration on ebook with WhatMommyDoes – $144
• Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing – $388
• Divi Theme – $79
• Amazon Affiliate – $87.63

Total October Income: $6,190.81

EXPENSES

• Convertkit– $89.00
• SendOwl– $15.00
• Tailwind – $15.00
• Teachable – $49
• Affiliate Payouts – $27

Total October Expenses: $195

TRAFFIC TOTALS

New Subscribers: 2,543
Total Subscribers: 4,980
Page Views: 51,443

We use Convertkit to grow our email list. It’s simple to use and super effective. More than half of our ebook sales come from our email subscribers! The automatic drip campaigns that we set up in Convertkit brings in amazing passive income!

WHAT WORKED?

The Blog by Number Course:

My course has been selling itself which is amazing. I have not yet opened up the affiliate side of it because it’s been doing so well and I’m very happy with the current growth. I also spend about half of my time in my email inbox helping my students and answering questions. I love the 1:1 interaction I have with my team and love to hear their wins and pain points. It’s like opening letters every day from dear friends who I can help with my advice. It’s truly a rewarding experience!

This Post:

I had a blogging friend of mine share her secrets to how she makes over $1,000 off Amazon Affiliate program through her smallish blog. Her post has been getting so much love and for good reason! So I am so excited to say that she and I are working on an ebook to expand on this topic. She is diving super deep into how she makes money through Amazon’s program and sharing it all! The Amazon Affiliate ebook is available now! If you want to increase your affiliate earnings, her book is a must read! It’s super gorgeous too.

And just on a side note, this type of collaboration between two moms would not have been possible a few years ago! This is so amazing. I met Carolina because she and I are in the same small mastermind Facebook group. She posted one night and shared about her success with Amazon. I immediately begged her to allow me to post it on my site. And because her audience is not bloggers, she was happy to share it.

Since I published her post on the 21st of August it has received over 20K shares! That is amazing. It really goes to show how valuable the information is. And just imagine how amazing the ebook is!

We chatted on Facebook and she started working on the ebook. Only midway through our collaboration did we even speak on the phone with each other. Can you imagine working with another person and never having heard their voice? The trust and support between mom bloggers can truly be something very special. I am thankful for the wonderful friendship and business partnership I have with Carolina.

So as you form your friendships with other bloggers online, always keep in mind how you can both help each other. It’s much more productive to see other bloggers as your coworkers, and not your competition. 

If you’re trying to increase your blog’s affiliate income, remember the following quote. And check out Carolina’s amazing ebook “Amazon Affiliates”.

“The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.” – David Ogilvy

WHAT DIDN’T WORK?

Videos:

I keep trying my best to do Facebook Live videos and to add videos to my YouTube channel – but it’s not growing very fast at all. I get much more love from Pinterest and directly from my email list. I’ll need to relook at my video strategy in the following months.

TRACKING OUR GOALS

My hubby and I are both engineers, so we love numbers and data. Below is the goal for my blog for July 2017. I’m on track! 🙂

Do you have goals for your blog? How do you measure your progress? Does it help?

LIFE HAPPENS

So I was able to grow my blog despite having to prep and bunker down for a hurricane, take a few days off for a conference and on top of that, pottytrain my toddler. It was a hectic month.

If you’re a blogging mom or want to start a blog please don’t give up. Everyone’s journey looks different. You may be discouraged because you’ve only made $3.87 through your Amazon affiliate account. Or you’ve always wanted to start a blog, but you just don’t have any time.

Blogging is a journey. If you allow yourself to learn and take your time, you will grow. It’s when you try to do too much at one time that you burn out and give up. Have one focus per week. One big goal you want to accomplish and focus on that.

Examples of weekly goals I’ve had in the past for my blog:

1. Grow my email list
2. Create a freebie for my top 5 most popular posts
3. Create a second pin image for my top 10 posts
4. Draft the outline of my course
5. Learn everything I can about SEO
6. Do a Facebook Live video about my most recent post
7. Put affiliate links in my top posts
8. Create an infographic to advertise my course
9. Finish my income reports and get caught up
10. Improve my ebook and course
11. Do market research for future blog topics

These are things I’ve done in the past that helped my blog grow. Download the list below!

PUBLISHED POSTS

How to SemiLoop Your Pins with Tailwind (even if you know nothing about marketing with Pinterest) – this post deep dives into the strategy I use on Pinterest to get traffic to my blog. It covers a few of the super important basics of Pinterest, so if you don’t know those, then check it out. And then the second half of the post goes step by step into my Pinterest Tailwind strategy. In the comments you’ll see that people have paid up to $50 to learn about this type of strategy. 🙂

Income Report July 2016 – in July I made $1,779 with my blog. This income was still before I even knew I wanted to launch a course. I was so happy with how well Blog by Number was doing that I didn’t even consider branching out more. I’m so glad my hubby pushed me to put in the time and effort to create the course that’s doing so well now.

DIY Post-It Note Photo Background – my dearest mom came up to visit me for two nights. While she was here I asked if she could take a new updated headshot of me and the girls. I wanted to somehow bring in my love for post-it notes into the image. So I figured I could make the entire background a colorful collage of notes. I really like how it turned out – let me know what you think!

The Home Play Office – Blog Vision Board 2.0 – since starting this blog I’ve always had my vision board in my toddler’s playroom. While she plays and builds puzzles, I solve the world’s mommy blogging problems on the wall. Hehe! Seeing my long term goals and post ideas all in one space is fantastic! Mommy brain sometimes gets the best of me and I have a hard time focusing. So having a one stop wall in my home where I can collect my thoughts again helps a lot!

As moms our time is already so limited, we can’t waste that 1 hour of free time we have trying to figure out what we need to do. Planning needs to happen while you’re cleaning or cooking or driving in the car. Then action needs to happen when you have that quiet time to actually get work done. 

How To Make Passive Income by Blogging – this post is a little golden nugget! It goes into step by step detail on how to create amazing collage pins on Pinterest that increase your affiliate income. It’s a little gem I discovered while going through the Amazon Affiliates ebook.

FINAL ADVICE

What are the best things I can tell you so you can replicate this success?

• Just start! Start your blog and start writing. My blogging course for moms is a fantastic place to start. If you have a rough plan of where you want to go, you’ll get there sooner if you start and test things out. As a beginning blogger you have the luxury of testing and trying new things without ‘messing up’ in front of a large audience.

If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. – Tony Robbins

• Build your email list from day one. On your popular posts, add awesome optins for your readers. Things that they would love and that are completely focused on them.
• Start thinking about a product you can offer. Start with an ebook. When that does well, move on to create a beginners course. Eventually, you can turn that into your signature course and offer a membership site or consulting.
• Again, what is working for me is building my emails list and my products. I focus half of my time replying to emails and building up my students. The other half of the time I’m improving my products. And somewhere in between that I manage to post a few times on my blog 🙂

All you need is a thousand true fans.

You don’t need millions of page views or need to be blogging every.single.day. You just need to build up a community of 1,000 true fans.

Think about it.

If you have 1,000 people that love your stuff and your products, and each person gives you $100 throughout the year, that is $100,000 a year – more than enough for you to live happily ever after working from home 🙂

Here is a little video explaining the theory, it’s great!

1000 true fans from Anna Do on Vimeo.

Hope that helps! Email me anytime with questions or if you need help!

xoxo, Suzi