Monthly Income Report – July 2016

Please note some of the links in this post may contain affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. As always any recommendations that I make are always based on my personal experiences with the product and I have not received any free products or anything else by these companies.

Welcome to my second monthly income report on How I Make a Living Online.

Each month I will publish my revenues, expenses, learnings, activities and various statistics on how I make a living online.

What Happened in July?

Winter is coming, no winter is here. July was a really cold month.

Waking up at the crack of dawn has been a real struggle even though my office is just in the next room. Thank goodness I have a heater!

I celebrated two major milestones in my life, another birthday and my 6th year anniversary from escaping the corporate world!

I celebrated with cake, a new pair of running shoes and hanging with my friends.

I also spent some time reviewing my goals I set early this year and writing a list of all my successes and things that needs improvement.

I find this exercise a great way to reflect and make the necessary adjustments for the remaining year.

I am often amazed on how much I have achieved in such a short period of time even though most of the time I feel I haven’t done enough.

Training for City2Surf

I have registered to participate in this year’s 2016 Sydney City2Surf fun run.

It is A 14km run from the heart of Sydney CBD to Bondi Beach.

I am not sure why I am doing this run again lol. I always get half way and think to myself why the f*** am I doing this. My poor legs!

I wonder if it is going to be any different this year!

However for the past 6 months I have been slowly getting my old legs into racing fitness.

Nothing too big. Even I have surprised myself on how consistent I have been with my training regime, 7-14km each week. In many ways this has helped with my blogging discipline.

One more week before the big run!

Post Published

This month I published a total of four blogs posts which is staying on track with my goal of publishing a blog post each week.

The first week I published my first ever Income Report – June 2016. To my surprise this was my most read blog post for July.

Following up with my longest post – 17 ways to Monetize a Blog which I contains over 1600 words.

I also shared a little about the Life of a Digital Nomad. What is it really like to live a life outside of the corporate world.

Lastly I wrote and talked a little about my brand new project – Building a Niche Empire.

Outreach / Promotion

In addition to writing blog posts I started to do some outreach for my blog.

In order to grow this blog, I need to grow my audience and the only way to do this is to promote it.

Like any online business, you need to drum up traffic to your website, this blog is no different.

The main activity at the moment has been simply building relationships with people on forums, other blogs and some social media groups.

It hasn’t had much impact but I am sure this will improve over time.

Next month (August) I will also start testing some paid advertising.

Analytics Issues

Before I start talking about the numbers, I noticed discrepancies and error from last months statistics.

So I did some digging around into the Google Analytics Reports.

It appears that last month’s results included a lot of “referral spam”, which caused some my numbers to be out of whack.

I had to clean up a lot of this referral spam. However it is still getting into my analytics.

This frustrates the crap out of me, why would any business choose such spammy tactics.

Anyway the reports should be more accurate this month.

Work by Numbers

• Posts – 4
• Images – 25

Visitors Statistics

Overall this month visitors numbers dipped from 7 visitors per day (210) to 4 visitors per day (140).

Most Popular Content

The most popular article has been my First Monthly Income Report followed by a How to choose a WordPress Theme

Traffic

Not much has changed, Facebook is still my number 1 traffic source.

Subscribers

To my surprised, my list started to grow. I had 5 fantastic subscribers to my emailing list.

Facebook – 67 (65)
Subscribers – 5 (0)

Income Report

I pretty much expected this result, as I haven’t really monetised this blog fully. The main goal at the moment is really about publishing articles and promoting the blog. Building my audience and to master blogging.

Affiliate Earnings

• Bluehost – $0.00 (How to Start a Blog)

Expenses

• $0.00

Earnings Total

• Affiliate Income – $0.00
• Expenses $0.00

Grand Total: $0.00 (-$130.00)

Conclusion

Though everything may look down from last month, from my perspective everything is going as planned.
Last month the unexpected win-fall of $130, was just a teaser of what is possible.

Even if the results are negative, I want to be as transparent as possible to everyone on what it really takes to start from zero, zero traffic, zero list and to build this blog into something big and wonderful.

You will see all the highs and lows from all my adventures with making a living online.

This is just the beginning and thanks again for taking your time out to join me on my journey of becoming a Professional Blogger.