Welcome savvy people! Today we have a very different type of article, one that we have never done before. Today marks the first month that we are sharing our blog income. We have been nervous about doing this but feel it’s a good time to start. When we first started our blogging journey we were extremely inspired and motivated by other bloggers. It’s very special to be able to share our journey with you guys along the way.
Blogging has completely changed our lives! Well, at least mine (Kelan). Since leaving my job in May after only making around $50 on our blog I have been working from home full-time and it is everything I imagined it would be. To sum up the experience in one word: “FREEDOM”.
I set my own work schedule, work without a shirt on 50% of the time, and eat leftovers from the fridge (I love leftovers). The best part is I don’t have to answer to anyone anymore, commute to work, or get the Monday morning blues. I actually LOVE Mondays now.
One of my favorite aspects of working from home is I can literally work anywhere there is an internet signal.
Life before blogging
Anyone who actually knows me knows my mind thinks a little different than most people. After switching my major five times in college and trying a handful of careers, I have finally found myself coming full circle back to entrepreneurship. I seem to always have to learn things the “hard way” but I would not change that for anything.
Lifes greatest lessons are learned from the mistakes you make. Failure is just another chance to learn.
After being an insurance salesman and a seasonal UPS driver I finally found myself in a law enforcement career, something I always dreamed of. I landed a job as a Jail Deputy at our local county jail. From the time I was a teenager, I always wanted to be a police officer and this was the first step in making this happen. After working at the jail for two and a half years, I fell into a deep depression and the job I once admired was completely changing my life and who I was. I was miserable waiting to go to work every day and thought the cycle would never end. Luckily I was wrong and Brittany landed a full-time job as a teacher and I was finally free, well kinda…
Before leaving my job as a Jail Deputy I made sure I had another job lined up. I worked at our local college as an office manager/book keeper for a little over a year. It was a great job that gave me confidence that I could succeed at running my own business.
During that time as an office manager, I started two businesses (Shopify store and our blog). I also went back to school to become a certified Home Inspector. I knew my next step in life was jumping into entrepreneurship head first. This is the only career that I knew would give me the freedom and happiness I wanted out of life. No 9-5 was ever going to work for me.
I saw the most potential in our blog and quit my job in May to run our site full-time. What an incredible decision it has been. A few months later I have started making a decent income all from the comfort of our home and on my own terms. The only thing I regret is not doing it sooner!
Don’t get caught in the rat race working a 9-5 job you hate. You can take complete control over your life and live the way YOU want to live. With all that I went through I have found my ultimate passion in life is helping others discover their true happiness.
Reason for sharing our blog income
Now some of you might be thinking “he must be nuts sharing his income publicly online”. Well, you’re probably right. Even though I LOVE talking about money being this open and transparent is nerve-racking. I am totally putting myself out there to get judged. Guess what, I really don’t care =).
The ONE lesson I have learned in the short time of being a full-time entrepreneur is that you MUST stop caring what others think. Life is way too short to have others hold you back from going after your dreams. These income reports are going to keep us motivated and hopefully, they help you do the same.
If you are interested in starting your own blog check out our step by step tutorial.
Main reasons to share our blog income report:
- We want to switch from sharing our blog traffic to blogging income.
- It will help us set goals and achieve them.
- We want to be as transparent with our readers as possible.
- To show that making a full-time income from blogging is possible.
- To provide an overall summary of what we have accomplished and been working on each month.
How we made $1,928 in August 2017
Sponsored Posts: $400
Affiliate Sales: $562
Sidebar, Banner, Footer Ads: $262
Freelance Work: $625
E-commerce Sales: $79
Blog Coaching: $0
We are excited to finally be seeing a significant amount of money from our blog. We are by no means satisfied though, we have big dreams for our site. One thing that has really help boost our blogging income is picking up freelance gigs. The first week I quit my job I landed a part-time digital marketing job from Upwork. Landing this long-term freelance gig happened because of our blog. I basically used our site as an example of the work I was capable of.
Top affiliate companies
- Bluehost
- Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
- ConvertKit
- Pinecone Research
- Harris Poll Online
- Rakuten
- Swagbucks
- $5 Meal Plan
Course worth taking
1. Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. This was the first course we ever decided to take. Honestly, this course should be one of the very first things you purchase when starting your blog. Michelle put her heart and soul into this course to help new bloggers learn the in’s and out’s of monetizing a blog.
One of the best parts of this course is the lifetime membership. We refer back to this course month after month to review and implement more tactics to increase our blog income.
You’ll learn absolutely everything you need to know about affiliate marketing from Michelle Schroeder-Gardner a full-time RVing Millionaire blogger.
What’s included:
- 6 modules, 30+ lessons on affiliate marketing
- What affiliate marketing is and how it works
- Why affiliate marketing is great
- The exact steps Michelle took to earn over $300,000 from a single blog post
- How to pick the right affiliate products to promote
- How to increase conversions
- How to build trust and not lose followers
- Required disclosures that you need to know about
- The one major tool you need for affiliate marketing
- Different strategies to use to promote your affiliate products
- How to use Pinterest to succeed at affiliate marketing
- In depth Pinterest marketing strategies
- PDF worksheets to easily plan out your business
- BONUS – Acess to Facebook Mastermind group
- BONUS – Weekly free group coaching sessions
- BONUS – Pinterest Strategies to drive hundreds of thousands of monthly views to your site
Social media review
If you don’t already know this blogging is 20% content creation and 80% marketing to the right people. We have taken our social media marketing very seriously since starting our blog full-time. Below is our monthly breakdown and review of ours social media growth. This is another great tool we use to analyze our efforts and make sure we are using our time most effectively to drive traffic to our site.
Be sure to join our FREE Facebook groups!
Every social media platform we grew from ZERO followers. It’s great to see month after month the hard work pay off. We made the switch from MailChimp to ConvertKit last month and boy are we happy with the results!
Facebook: 1,138 page likes (25% increase from 910)
Twitter: 9,624 followers (16% increase from 8,300)
Pinterest: 2,001 followers (13.2% increase from 1,768)
Instagram: 2,375 followers (1.4% increase from 2,343)
Email List: 1,069 subscribers (42.3% increase from 751)
Monthly Blog Goals
Without a doubt, this was our best month blogging yet. We drove over 37,000 page views. We were also able to capitalize on the traffic and start making money from it. We know this is just the start and we are very excited to see where we can take our site.
When you search “savvy couple” into google we are #1 so we must be doing something right =).
We would really like to start getting a sponsored post each and every month. They are the quickest and easiest way to make money blogging. We have actually turned down a bunch of offers as they don’t line up with what our savvy readers would get value from. We have said from the beginning that we will never sponsor or promote products or services we don’t fully believe in.
A big win we had this month was getting accepted into the Mediavine ad network. We plan on switching over to them from Google ads as soon as possible. We have heard bloggers more than triple their ad revenue after switching. Excited to see how this transition goes.
Next months blog goals:
- Exceed $2,000 in blog income
- Grow blog traffic to 45,000 monthly views
- Increase our Pinterest followers to 2,500
- Twitter following to 10,500
- Grow Facebook page to 1,400 likes
- Increase Instagram to 2,400 followers
- Grow email list to 1,500 subscribers
- Get a month ahead on blog posts
- Get interviewed on another blog/website
- Get a paid sponsored post
- Switch to Mediavine for ads
- Finish our FREE 7-day blogging email course
- Enjoy life each and every day to the fullest
Life goals & plans
It’s important to set life goals and plans along side your business. We have a few things in the upcoming month we are excited about.
Brittany is excited to be heading back to work as a 4th-grade teacher. It has been incredible working together and spending so much time with one another this summer #blessed. Since I left my job in May after the blog made around $50, money was a little tight over the summer. We are excited to both be back to work making dual incomes and working together to save and grow our net worth.
Since we run a fairly lean budget we should be able to live off of Brittany’s income alone. This is super exciting that most of what I make from the blog will be going straight to savings and investments. We are going after that FIRE life.
We will be camping this holiday weekend so be sure to follow us on Instagram to watch our adventures live =). Other than that we are just planning on getting back into a normal routine after our incredible summer together.
Resources
You can check out our entire recommendations page to see all of our favorite products and service we use. Here are our favorites from this month:
Rakuten: Save on all your online purchases. The simple and easy to use cashback program. Grab your free $10 credit here.
ibotta: Save money and earn cash on your grocery shopping. We earned over $40 this month alone! You can sign up today and earn your first $10 credit for free.
Pinecone Research: Your search for the highest paying survey company is over. Start making money while you watch TV. Pinecone makes taking online surveys a breeze.
Bluehost: If you’re looking to start a WordPress blog cheap, then choosing Bluehost for your hosting company is your answer. Bluehost has been one of the top web hosting companies since 2003 and you can start your own blog with them for just $2.49 a month! Another bonus is if you sign up using our link you will get your domain for free if you purchase a 12 month or longer blog hosting plan.
Old Traffic reports
- July 2017 Blog Traffic and Social Media Update
- June 2017 Blog Traffic and Social Media Update
- May 2017 Blog Traffic and Social Media Update
