March 2015: Blog Net Income Report

Welcome to the March 2015 blog net income report! Below I will illustrate my total revenue for March 2015, as well as the detailed revenue streams. I will also show my total blog expenses for the month, and thus we will wind up with me March 2015 net income.

I have been watching many people around the blogosphere disclose their monthly online income, and quite honestly, I thought it would be a good idea to do the same. I am not disclosing any income from my day job as a Corporate Finance Manager. Instead, this will serve as a marker for the additional earnings I achieve as a result of my online endeavors and various side gigs.

Please understand that I am not disclosing this to make anyone jealous, only to serve as a very visual and tangible reminder that any of you reading this can achieve the same results…probably better even!

Category Explanations:

Advertising Sales: These are direct advertisements from various media companies. I have several sites which I own and have sectioned off that amount that I earn from those. I also place ads for clients of mine as well. These are other bloggers that I find advertising for, in which I keep a small percentage of the earnings for myself.

AdSense/Clickable Ads: These are the earnings I get from all of those banners you see spread throughout sites…they could be on the sidebar or even within the article itself. I actually keep the ads hidden and the only people that see them are the ones that find me through a search engine like Google or Yahoo. This way my more loyal readers aren’t bothered by the additional clutter and noise. This is an area I am always looking to increase.

Affiliate Earnings: These are the earnings you receive from selling other peoples (or your own) products on your website. Think of major players like Amazon Affiliates. If you put up their affiliate links people can buy items from Amazon from your site directly, which in turn earns you a portion of that revenue.

Misc Earnings: There will be always miscellaneous ways of earning income and racking up expenses! This misc. buckets is a collection of many items, some are recurring while others are one-off items. I might write an article for a major site and get paid $50 to do so. Or perhaps I help someone with organic link building. I also offer some minimal paid services for blog coaching and helping others start blogs…this earns me some additional income, but I haven’t widely publicized and advertised it to really grow that part of the business yet.

Summary and Conclusion

So I totaled just under $3k this month, not bad for additional side income. But since this is my very first monthly income report I have sent out I want to let you know that this is actually the lowest month I have had in 18 months. I could go back and show you my monthly income from previous months but I don’t think it’s very value added. I’d rather keep disclosing the months going forward, after all, it’s what we do in the future that counts…not the past.

I have found that blogging can be a very cyclical business. Advertiser and media companies get budgets on quarterly or even on a semi-annual basis. They tend to open the floodgates the minute they get funding, and then cap it off as their budget dwindles throughout the months. This obviously was a slower month for me! I can already see April picking up quite a bit, so hopefully I see an improvement. I did purchase a few additional sites already this month so I’m severely in the negative if you count the cost of those acquisitions. I am very disappointed that I achieve zero in affiliate earnings this month. I actually believe I have the targeted traffic necessary to earn some decent affiliate revenue…the trick is getting approved by the affiliates themselves. The big banks and credit card companies take forever to review and approve your websites, and often times they decline without explanation. I tend to earn $100 here and there from affiliate sales, but with all the effort I’ve been putting in to get approved by new affiliate companies I hope to increase this quite a bit over the year.

Lastly, many of you may have read my journey of increasing my net worth $400,000 in just 4 years that I shared last month. I was wondering if anyone was interested in seeing that data each month as well? Would you rather see just the income report, a combination of the income and net worth, or the two broken out into separate posts?

If you are interested in earning online income, and making $200,000 blogging, trust me it can be done! I’m telling you, the internet has opened up possibilities that used be non-existent. If I can start a website and earn money, then literally everyone else in the world can too! You just need to have a little patience, and a little persistence. If you’re inspired, I included a banner below for BlueHost, this was the Hosting company that I started with as well. They help you setup your site for free, and are one of the cheapest and more reliable hosting companies in the game!