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Blog Income Report – January 2015

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Want to know a little secret to making money with your blog that I discovered back in 2008?

The secret is to light a fire under your own butt by putting your ass on the line in front of everyone.

What I’m referring to here is the process of doing monthly blog income reports where you report your blog progress, revealing your statistics and your income.

I did my very first blog income report way back in April 2008 when I decided to focus my energy on growing my blog income.

Prior to April 2008, I had only made around $5 – $10/month from my blogging efforts, but after I started doing regular blog income reports, my blogging income started growing quickly and reached several thousand dollars per month within 6 months.

I discovered that there are a few reasons for this…

Why Doing a Monthly Blog Income Report is a Good Idea

When I started doing a monthly income report, I noticed a few things started to change for me as a Blogger.

#1 – Social Pressure Improves Performance

Firstly, just the fact of knowing that the “whole world” is watching makes it more likely that you’ll make money with your Blog because it activates our Ego’s innate desire to NOT look stupid or like a failure in front of other people.

Meaning, when we know that people are watching and paying attention to our numbers, we perform much better than if nobody is watching.

This is why professional athletes perform at such incredible levels of athleticism when being watched by their fans.

#2 – Whatever You Focus on Improves

Your conscious and subconsciou minds are absolutely amazing at manifesting whatever you are focusing on in your life.

If you FOCUS your mind on improving your blogging stats and increasing your income, then that is what your mind will deliver.

You’ll start to attract people, circumstances, events and resources to help you grow those things you are focusing on.

If you’re not tracking your statistics and your numbers with any real accuracy, they most likely will NOT improve.

So by committing to doing a monthly blog income report, you’re telling your mind what you want it to focus on improving.

#3 – Your Blog Subscribers Follow Your Journey

Another thing I discovered back in 2008 when I was doing my monthly income reports was that my readers were really enjoying following my progress over time.

Each month they started to look forward to getting my income reports and seeing how I’m progressing along.

It can be very inspiring to see someone starting out with small statistics and small numbers and growing them over time.

This is also why I decided to start my Blog Income Report NOW, when my Blog is pretty much brand new.

When Is The Best Time to Start a Blog Income Report?

One of the things that I discovered as a Blogger is that most people out there are too afraid or just unwilling to start doing Blog Income Reports until AFTER their blog is already pretty successful, making $500 or $1,000 or $5,000 per month or more.

It’s pretty EASY to do a Blog income report when you’re already making $5,000/month, because then you have something to brag about.

The challenge with this approach is that it paints an unrealistic picture for the beginner blogger who is just getting started, because they don’t get to see bloggers building up their income from $0 (or less) to their first $1,000 month for example.

All they see is someone who is already successful, which gives them this false impression that all you have to do is start a Blog and 5 minutes later you’ll be making tens of thousands of dollars per month.

It doesn’t work that way.

To build a successful business of ANY kind – online OR offline – takes time!

My primary business, the software company I run, I’ve been building that business full time for over 6 years now!

Blogging is not much different.

Although you can build an online income using a Blog faster than a traditional brick-and-mortar business or even a traditional home based business, it still does take some time.

In a survey done by ProBlogger, he found that over 80% of bloggers make less than $500/month with their Blogs.

A further 7% made between $500 – $999/month from their blogs, 9% made $1000 – $9999 and 4% made over $10,000 / month from their blogs.

Of course, these are numbers reported by his readership, and there’s no way to verify if people answered honestly.  Also, I would venture a guess that those people who made less than $100 with their blogs didn’t ALL respond to the survey as most people tend to not want to share their stats until they are already succeeding, so that 63% might be much higher.

The reason I share this graph is NOT to depress people or to point out that most people don’t make money with their Blogs.

The reason I share these stats is to point out that the MAJORITY of ALL bloggers around the world are trying to figure out how to get to the point where their blog is making at least $500/month.

So, while all those bloggers out there who share their blog income reports AFTER they’re already making $2,000/month or $5,000+/month are a source of inspiration, they can also be a source of frustration for the beginner blogger who isn’t making any money at all.

Whenever I get involved in a business of any type and I see ultra successful people in that line of business, what I always try to figure out is HOW they got to that point, and WHAT they did to get there.

Yes it’s cool to see someone making a million dollars a year with their Blog, but how the HECK did they make their first $100?  or their first $500? or their first $1000?

THAT information can be a lot more useful and inspiring than how someone went from $25,000/month to $35,000/month.

That is why I have decided to share my Blog Income Reports right from the launch of this new Blog.

I hope that by sharing my journey of growing my income from ZERO to wherever this journey takes me, I can help to inspire other beginning bloggers out there.

Why I Started a New Blog

As I’ve mentioned earlier in this post, I’ve been a blogger for almost 9 years now and I’ve ran many different blogs during that time.

I’ve had many different niche-specific blogs that I’ve tested out various strategies with, and I had my main blog which has moved through several different domains over the last 8+ years.

Normally, I would just continue to blog on my main blog, but this time around I decided to do something different.

Prior to the release of the Kalatu Brand Station, I was selected as one of the closed-beta testers of the platform, and after giving it some thought I decided to start a brand new Blog, on a brand new domain, using the Kalatu Brand Station platform.

I did this so that I could have a fresh start on a new domain and just kind of hit the “reset” button on my Blogging career.

See, in truth, although I have been a blogger since 2006, and the majority of my blogging success happened in 2008-2009, in the last 3 years I made the mistake of allowing my Blog to essentially DIE!

I did VERY LITTLE blogging on my Blog in 2012, 2013 and 2014.

In fact, on this new Blog, using the Kalatu Brand Station system, I have written more blog posts in the last 30 days than I did in all of 2014 on my other blogs!

I basically stopped focusing on my Blog from 2012-2014 and so just like with any other business that you neglect and ignore for 3 years, my blogging income dwindled down to nothing.

Now you might be wondering, why would someone who has been blogging for so long let their blog and their blogging income die like that?

Well, firstly one reason is because I was focusing my energy on increasing my income outside of my blog.  See, blogging has NEVER really been a full time thing for me.  I have always ran other businesses and Blogging has always just been something I do on a part-time basis for fun!

I’ve been a six-figure income earner for many years now, but I’ve never put a concentrated effort into building a six or seven figure income from blogging, which is what I intend to do now.

Secondly, I have to admit that I bought into the short-sighted thinking that most people in our industry have had for the last few years, thinking that blogging might be dead.

It wasn’t until all the research I did last year, and the leaders that I plugged into with Empower Network and the statistics that they shared with me there, that I realized that Blogging is NOT dead, and in fact it is more powerful than EVER before!

So at the start of this year I decided to start over, with a new blog, on a new domain, and to build it up again just like I did before.

And, my intention is to share my blog income and stats as I build up my blog from scratch, so that my readers can learn from my journey as well.

So, now that I’ve explained what I’m doing and why, here is my blog income and stats report for January 2015.

Blog Content Report – January 2015

In January I wrote 31 blog posts in 31 days.

Here is a listing of all the blog posts I wrote this month:

I started the month off by doing the 21 Day Blogging Challenge because I wanted to develop the habit of daily blogging.

After the first 21 days were completed, I had pretty much established the habit of daily blogging, so I just continued to write one new blog post per day.

If you want to jump-start your blogging career, I highly recommend doing the 21 Day Blogging Challenge.

Blog Traffic Report – January 2015

I’m a huge believer in tracking your blogging stats.

In this first month of running this new blog, here are some of my stats for the month:

  • Total Users: 1,222
  • Total Sessions: 2,205
  • Total Pageviews: 3,172
  • Avg Session Duration: 1 minute 23 seconds

Blog Traffic Sources Report

As far as where my traffic came from, here are my blog traffic source stats for January 2015:

  • Direct Traffic – 1,526 sessions – 69%
  • Social Traffic – 458 sessions – 21%
  • Referral Traffic – 122 sessions – 5.5%
  • Organic Search Traffic – 99 sessions – 4.5%

As this report clearly shows, the majority of my traffic came from direct traffic, which mostly represents me sending out an email blast to my email list using Aweber.

Unfortunately, my once active email list of approximately 10,000 subscribers has gone very stale after I more or less neglected my Blog from 2012 to the end of 2014.

So, only a small percentage of my email subscribers actually still even open my emails as most of them have forgotten who I am, or the email address they registered with years ago is not something they check anymore.

I’ve had to start rebuilding the TRUST I once had with my list, by focusing on creating the most valuable content that I can on my Blog.

And even though my list has mostly gone stale,  I was still able to generate over 1,500 visitor sessions to my Blog by emailing my list.

My next biggest traffic source was social media, which is mostly coming from Facebook and then the rest of my traffic came from direct referrals and a little bit of organic search.

The interesting statistic that I’ll be keeping an eye on is the Organic Search traffic, which I expect to become a much larger source of traffic for me over time.

Considering that this is pretty much a brand new blog, on a brand new domain I just registered a little bit over a 1 month ago, the fact that I’ve already gotten almost 100 user sessions from organic traffic is pretty impressive though.

Blog Income Report – January 2015

Now as far as my actual income and expenses for the month of January, before I share my numbers I just want to mention two things real quick.

Firstly, I’m still working on putting together a much more accurate system of tracking all of my numbers so these numbers I’m reporting here are not going to be 100% accurate and they have not been audited by my accountant or anything like that.

These are just my numbers that I’ve started tracking in a spreadsheet.

They should be pretty accurate, but there are certain income streams that I may have missed.

There might also be some small expenses that I forgot to include as well.

If I do find anything missing, I’ll come back and edit this post to improve accuracy and I’m hoping that my spreadsheet becomes more and more accurate as more time goes by.

I just haven’t had time to go through all my bank statements, and my visa statements to make sure I didn’t forget about something.

Secondly, because I’m sharing income stats here, to comply with FTC regulations I want to advise you to check out my income disclaimer and please be aware that nothing I say on my Blog should be misconstrued as any sort of guarantee that you’ll make money online just because I make money online.  My results are NOT typical because I am not a typical person, and chances are that neither are you!

Okay, now that we got that out of the way, here are my stats:

Total Gross Income – $369.46

Total Expenses – $603.44

Net Income: -$299.98

As you can see, my net income for the month of January was in the negatives.

How often do you see bloggers out there putting out a Blog Income Report BEFORE they start making good money?  Not very often. 🙂

Most bloggers will ONLY start reporting their blog income reports AFTER they’re already making good money, and as I mentioned above, I believe that this creates a false sense of expectation for most new bloggers.

I can’t even count the number of times that I’ve seen a new blogger start blogging and if they don’t start making money in their first week or two, they think that they’re a failure!

That is why I have decided to be totally transparent on my Blog and show people what it REALLY takes to build a business online.

As you can see, in my first months as a blogger on this new blog I had a loss of $299.98 dollars.

Do I see this as “failure”?

Absolutely not!

Here’s why…

The truth is that in ANY kind of business that you start, you have to be willing to invest time, energy AND money in order to make money.

Trying to build an income without investing ANY money into any training or tools is a waste of your time.

Investing in the right TOOLS and the right TRAINING can significantly improve your chances of making money online, especially as a Blogger.

But you have to realize that the tools that you invest in may take some time to start producing an exponential result in your income.

For example, last month I invested $178.60 into Facebook traffic.

With that I generated 1,016 clicks to my eBook landing page, and 244 new subscribers to my email list.

That’s an average of just 18 cents per click, and 73 cents per email opt-in to my email list.

These are HIGHLY TARGETED leads and not just generic traffic either, so they represent my exact target market for this Blog.

That investment is represented in my expenses for this month, but the INCOME that I will generate from that traffic in the future is NOT yet represented.

Does that make sense?  Those people who are on that email list, will continue to receive my daily blog posts, and I will help them as much as I possibly can by providing value to them with my content.

Over time, some of those people may choose to join my team at Empower Network or to purchase other products using my affiliate links.

When that happens, I will make money from those commissions.

Some of the other tools you see listed there as well, such as AWeber, or Kalatu Brand Station or LeadPages, those are all tools that I am paying for right now, but I haven’t fully maximized the income from those tools.

Also, for the most part, the cost for most of these tools does NOT go up when I use them more.  Meaning most of these costs are fixed, but my income is not.

For example, the Kalatu Brand Station costs me $25/month regardless whether I’m making $0 from my Blog or $1 Million from my Blog.  The costs is fixed at just $25.

Cool eh?

So over time, you’ll see that as my income goes up, my profits will also go up because the majority of my expenses will remain fixed.

Also, as a Blogger who has already made money blogging in the past, I wasn’t shy with my expenses this month.

Meaning, I already know which tools and training I need to invest in, and I already know that I’ll make more money from my blog than my expenses, so I wasn’t afraid to invest in my business.

Not everyone who starts blogging will need to invest in all of these tools right off the bat.

For example, most people can get started with just the Kalatu Brand Station and the Empower Network Affiliate Program for under $50/month all-inclusive, and start generating an income with just those two things.

I could have done that as well, but because I want to grow my blog quickly, I’m making the investment in these additional tools and some traffic, and if that means that for the first while my net income goes into the negatives a bit, I’m totally 100% comfortable with that.

I track my income and my stats, but I don’t WORRY about having to spend money before I make money.

Even if I had to invest $10k or $20k into my online business before I started to see net profits, I wouldn’t worry about that at all.

This is how REAL entrepreneurship works.

My Blogging Goals for January

Here were some of my main goals for January:

  • Launch a new Blog with a new domain on Kalatu Brand Station – Check!
  • Participate in the 21 Day Blogging Challenge – Check!
  • Build the habit of daily blogging – Check!
  • Re-establish relationship with my email subscribers – Check!
  • Create a Flow-chart / Blogging Business Plan for my Blog – Check!
  • Setup a Facebook Traffic Generation Campaign for My eBook – Check!
  • Create a Tracking Sheet for My Income / Expenses – Check!

Overall it’s been an amazingly successful first month of getting back to Blogging for me.

I’m especially really excited about the fact that I’ve been able to develop the habit of daily blogging, as that really is 80% of the success formula for making money as a blogger.

Without building a habit of blogging on a consistent basis, it’s not very likely that you’ll make money as a blogger.

That’s why the 21 Day Blogging Challenge is such an awesome place to get started as a Blogger, regardless whether you’re brand new or if you’ve been inconsistently blogging for years.

If you enjoyed this report and would like to see me continue to produce more of these each month, let me know below by leaving a comment and/or sharing this post with others bloggers.

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