February 2015 Traffic and Income Report (2024)

Oh hey there! It’s income report time again! (Where did THAT month go?!) If youhave no idea what I’m talking about, for the past year or so, my smart and oh-so-talented hubby has been putting together income reports for this little blog of mine. He used to post them over on his blog, but we made the decision to bring them all over to Just a Girl and Her Blog in 2015 in hopes that the larger platform would make it possible to help more people who are asking the age-old question, “How do you make money from blogging?!”

If we’re being honest, I actually thought I may get some hate mail after last month’s income report. I know talking about money isn’t always the most comfortable thing in the world. But I should have known that since you are the most delightful readers in the history of everything, you wouldall be so incredibly supportive, and I was surprised at the overwhelming number of people who gave positive feedback about it during myreader survey— thank you!

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And now you’re thinking, “Abby, stop with the chatter and hop to it!” I hear ya!Here is Donnie with the February 2015 traffic and income numbers…

Income

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.

• Bluehost* – $5,345 —> How to Start a Blog
• Framework eBook – $2,256
• AdThrive – $1,241
• Simplify eBook – $990
• Amazon Associates – $493
• Evernote Essentials* – $306
• StudioPress* – $280
• Restored 316* – $147
• Media Temple* – $80

Total Income: $11,138

Expenses

• Haven Conference Ticket – $307
• Gumroad Transaction Fees – $168
• Mailchimp* – $155
• Affiliate Payouts – $144
• Virtual Assistant – $158
• Synthesis Hosting – $67
• PayPal Transaction Fees – $29
• SendOwl* – $15
• Zapier* – $15
• Crashplan – $14
• Domain Registration – $13
• ViralTag – $12
• Adobe Creative Cloud – $11
• CoSchedule* – $10
• Stripe Transaction Fees – $5
• Fizzle.co* – $0(Usually $35)

Total Expenses: $816

February2015 Net Profit: $10,322

Income Analysis

Our income went down slightly from January, but February was still the second highest month ever for the blog!Abby’s two eBooks continue to do well (Thank you!) but the big deal for us in February was the amount of Bluehost commissions we generated. Let me talk a little about why that happened…

Bluehost

Abby receivesemails every week asking herhow to start or grow a blog, so when it was time for herto write her eBook on blogging, we made sure to providehosting reviews and blog setup instructions. We also created a How to Start a Blog page where people could ask technical questions in the comments section. After implementing these two things we started to see some Bluehost commissions. For the first few months it was $500-$1,000/month.

This past month Abby recorded her first ever video for JustAGirlAndHerBlog.com! Here’s the link to Abby’s YouTube channel. We have big plans for video later this springso we thought we’d start by making a screencast of Abby walking through the Bluehost and and WordPress setup process. I think there are a lot of people who would much prefer to follow a video screencast than read step by step instructions. It makes the setup process seem less intimidating.

It’s so fun for Abby and I to get new emails from Bluehost*. If someone registers their free domain when signing up, we get tosee the url! We’ve seen some awesome domain names the past few weeks, and it gets us excited to see what all these new bloggers will accomplish!

I still get the sense that people want to have everything all planned out and just perfect before they start.So many people tell us that they want to start a blog but they are waiting for things to settle down at work or waiting until their kids are a little older. Trust me when I say this: there is no perfect time! The people that are successful at this blogging thing are the people that just do it. They decide they’re going forit and they get started — that very day!

I always smile when I think about the timeAbby told me she wanted to start a blog. We were eating dinner at Red Lobster (we had a babysitter for the kids!) in late December of 2012. We were going over our goals for the year and Abby sheepishly told me she wanted to start a blog. She seemed almost nervous to tell me. I had no idea what Abby wanted to write about but I instantly knew it was a great idea! Sheneeded a creative outlet. By making it a goal for 2013 I thought Abby was thinking “at some point this year I’ll get around to starting a blog.” No! If my memory serves me correctly, I think she hadme register her domain name and set up WordPress that very night. She wasn’t waiting around for anything or anyone. She knew that she could learn as she wentand that the most important thing was to startconsistently publishing posts. No excuses.

Speaking of hosting, over the years I’ve done a tremendous amount of research and testing of various hosting options and I can say without hesitation, in my mind Bluehost is the very best place to purchase your first hosting plan. I get this question all the time so I thought I’d mention it again here but as of today here are my hosting recommendations:

1. Bluehost*- Affordable, reliable, and great customer service. The best choice for a new blog. I recommend Bluehost without hesitation.
2. MediaTemple*- A good intermediate choice once you start getting traffic over 3,000 visitors/day. They now have managed WordPress hosting for $20/month which is a good deal. There is room to grow with MediaTemple.
3. Synthesis*-If you get lots of traffic and run the Genesis Framework, Synthesis is the way to go. It’s managed. There are zero settings for you to mess with. You tell their support team what to do and they do it. The incredible speed and service comes at a price.The professional plan is $97/month. (We pay $67/ month because we locked in that price during a promotion they had last year.) Synthesis is owned by StudioPress, the same company that makes the Genesis Framework (this site runs on Genesis).
4. WPEngine*-This is another advanced option for those with lots of traffic but don’t run the Genesis Framework.

Hosting is a big decision when you are starting a blog. It’s really the first decision you make and one of the only things you need to spend money on when you are just starting.Hopefully you’ll find those recommendations helpful!

Framework and Simplify eBooks

I love seeing Abby’s two books continue to do well! It means that she’s been able to reach more people — either helping them start and grow their blog with Framework, or helping them organize their lives and get some sanity back with Simplify. Thank you for continuingto purchase these two books month after month.

Amazon Associates

Recently I was asked what strategies we useto earn a few hundred dollars in Amazon Associate commissions each month. The majority of the income is from my two posts on going paperless where I recommend various scanners. These aren’t cheap items, so when someone purchases one through our Amazon links, we get a higher commission than if they bought something like the Tape ‘n Drape Abby recommends in another post. That being said, we only recommend the scanners because we own one, use it every day, and stand behind it 100%. You can see how I go about making my recommendationsin these posts:

Organizing Your Life: How to Go Paperless and Add Hours to Your Week
The Ultimate Guide to Going Paperless

One of the benefits of using Amazon links is that people buy all sorts of other things on Amazon once they click over. Even if they end up purchasing a product we didn’t link to, we get credit for any purchases made when people visit Amazon via any of our affiliate links.

If you’re a new blogger, this is one of the easiest ways to start earning a few dollars. Just make sure you only link to products you have experience with and can confidently recommend. Don’t force an Amazon link into a post just to try to make money– people are smart and will see right through that. But if you’re able to makean honest, natural recommendation, by all means, use an affiliate link; write with the goal of helping others with your recommendations, not yourself.

Three Legs of Blog Income

1. Affiliate Income– $6,651
2. Ad Revenue – $1,241
3. Product Sales– $3,246

When I started including the “Three Legs of Blog Income” section in these income reports, the idea was to monitor the three distinct categories of income on this blog. At the time, I thought a “healthy” blog income would be somewhatevenly split between these three categories. I wanted to make sure we didn’t rely too much onone category while neglecting another.

After keeping track of this for some time now, I think my idea of equally balanced income between these three categories is unattainable. Idon’t see ad revenue ever catching up to our own product sales or affiliate income. Since we fully trust our ad managers and believe they are doing everything in their power to keep our ads as optimized as possible, I expect ad revenue to continue to grow with our traffic. Other than making sure our ads are optimized, though, there’s no special strategy for drastically increasing this number.

Looking at the balance above makes me want to work really hard on increasing product sales by helping Abby create useful things for her audience. Without a doubt, creating and selling your own productis the most satisfying way of earning income from a blog. So while we’re excited about the increased Bluehost* commissions lately, we’re even more excited about our upcoming products. At the end of the year when we look back, I’m hoping product sales will have surpassed our affiliate income.

Top Posts of February 2015

1.Our Secret Weapon For Saving Money: The 2015 Budget Binder
2.10 Simple Habits that Will Help You Stay Organized
3.How to Make Pretty Labels in Microsoft Word + FREE Printable
4.Our Home Binder: A Tour {with FREE printables!}
5.How I Organized My Whole Life

Traffic Report

We’re down nearly 200,000 pageviews from last month. January traffic was so far outside our normal range we knew it couldn’t last. Our goal with the the over half million pageviews last monthwas to convert some of those new visitors to regular readers. I think we’ve done that! So while our traffic is down significantly from last month, the trend is still up. Slow and steady growth.

Email Subscriber Statistics

• 2,503New Subscribers
• 19,797Total Subscribers

I think that one of the big reasons our email list continues to grow is because of the two challenges we currently offer– the “7 Days to a More Organized Life” challenge and the “7 Days to Start a Blog” challenge. Both of these challenges are a free week-long email mini course that readers can use to get themselves motivated to make changes and work toward their goals. The longer I blog, the more I learn about how important it is to add value for your readers! If growing your email list is something you’re currently working on (and it should be!), ask yourself what helpful information you can give away for free, either as a one-time PDF or in email mini-course format. Your readers will thank you!

RPM

RPM is a metric to track revenue per thousand pageviews. This is a measure of theoveralleffectiveness of a blog and is a handy benchmark for comparing blogs even if they have vastly different traffic numbers. I first learned about this metric from Bjork fromPinch of Yum.

February 2015 RPM: $30.52

This is the highest RPM we’ve seen on a non-launch month. Our highest RPM month was last June when Abby launched Framework*. While I don’t think an RPM of $30 is sustainable, maybe I should increasemy expectation of $15 RPM being the benchmark for a good month.

and to recap…

Gross Income: $11,138
Net Income: $10,322
Pageviews: 364,986

Click here to see a running tally of all past income reports.

7 Days to Start a Blog Challenge

And speaking of that blogging challenge… we were SO delighted to see *hundreds* of you make the leap and start your blogs this past month! You guys are AWESOME! Because of the amount of positive feedback we’ve gotten about the blog challenge, we have decided to run it for just a little while longer.

So if you’ve ever wanted someone to walk you through each step of the “setting up your blog” process, then this is the challenge for you, my friend! Ouremail course will give you the toolsyou need to set up the technical end of your blog, put the most essential elements into place, and help you start creating amazing content and building relationships with other bloggers in your niche right away. Sign up below and I’ll walk you through it. Let’s do this!

Thank you again for all of the support and encouragement you’ve given us over the last month as we’ve taken on this blogging thing full time. We truly would not be here without you and are so grateful for all you do for us. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! <3

You can see our other income reports here:

• December 2016- $41,700
• November 2016 – $40,124
• October 2016 – $51,803
• September 2016 – $33,659
• August 2016 – $44,940
• July 2016 – $34,721
• June 2016 – $32,913
• May 2016- $37,967
• April 2016 – $48,900
• March 2016 – $40,358
• February 2016 – $36,234
• January 2016 – $34,662
• December 2015- $20,441
• November 2015 – $23,663
• October 2015 – $17,639
• September 2015 – $18,225
• August 2015 – $17,162
• July 2015 – $18,334
• June 2015 – $26,041
• May 2015 – $10,593
• April 2015 – $13,322
• March 2015 – $13,887
• January 2015 – $13,991
• December 2014 – $5,841
• November 2014 – $4,920
• October 2014 – $5,330
• September 2014 – $3,396
• August 2014 – $3,254
• July 2014 – $2,659
• June 2014 – $6,956
• May 2014 – $1,620
• April 2014 – $894
• March 2014 – $1,010
• February 2014 – $2,446

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.