Monthly Income Report – August 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 third 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.
Latest Going-On in August
In last month’s report, I mention that I will begin experimenting with some paid advertising to help grow my blog.
With a small budget of just $25.00 I decided to run a Facebook Ad campaign. I ran Page Post Engagement Ad (Boost) on my most popular blog post – “How to Start a Blog in 30 Minutes”.
With this test I set my target audience (Custom Audience in Facebook) to only target people in my local region and between the ages of 18 to 65.
The main goal of this campaign is just to collect data and see what sticks. At this stage, I really don’t know who my actual audience is but hopefully after running this campaign I have better understanding of they are.
I know most “Marketing Guru” will tell me you should know your target audience, I do and don’t but with the data it will either confirm or tell me otherwise. I will let the data speak for itself.
I have set the ad campaign to run for 7 days.
During the campaign I did not touch any of the ad settings. I let it run to completion.
The reason for this is you need to give it enough time to collect data so you can analyse and then make a judgement call after.
The Results
To my surprise the results was not what I expected, apparently it attracted more engagement from women than men. Yay, I can attract women online! Lol.
Now before you go jumping to any conclusion on the results, the amount of data collected is still too small of a sample to really make any real judgement. Ideally if I had the budget I would run it for a month.
However in saying, analysing the data it appears there is quite alot more women who were interested in starting a blog as oppose to men.
From an engagement perspective I received
- 15 new likes for the posts
- 2 post comments
- 19 clicks to my website
- 6 Facebook page like
What is exciting about this is even though it didn’t result in any additional revenue, it allowed me to learn a little more about my audience, on what they like, how old were they and their interest.
Next campaign I want to try to capture the email address of the user to grow my list, I made a small mistake by not having a proper opt-in form to do this.
Plus with these results, I have decided to continue to invest $25 each month on Facebook Ads to help grow my blog.
Fun Run Completed
In other news I ran a 14km fun run which became a not so fun run as I tripped over 2km into run and grazed my legged quite badly. The worse part was I still had 12 more km to run.
However I continue and managed to complete the run.
As you can see a bloody leg, I was in pain and I still clocked a sub 100 pace. Not bad, same pace as my last attempt which was over 10 years ago!
But one thing that the City2Surf taught me was despite what is happening around you, if you determine to do something and push through the pain barrier you can succeed.
Post Published
Like the previous month I successfully published four blog posts.
The first week I published my second Income Report.
Followed by 7 Best WordPress Plugins and Tools Every Blogger Must have
My favourite post of the month was talking and sharing about the one thing that has helped me changed my life – My Morning Routine. If you haven’t read this yet, I highly recommend it.
Lastly I talked about Authority Niche Websites versus Micro Niche Website – Which one is better?
Work by Numbers
- Posts – 4
- Images – 22
Visitor Statistics
This month visitor numbers are down again but I think it is probably the most accurate out of the three months as I found a way to remove referral spam using Kissmetrics Guide.
Most Popular Content
This month’s most popular post is still my guide on How to start a blog. Even if I removed the paid advertising traffic is still far the best performing.
Followed by – how to make money with niche sites.
Traffic
Facebook is still a clear winner, but this month I started to see some organic search traffic flowing to the blog.
Subscribers
Also this I had a 19% increase in Facebook likes.
Facebook- 80 (67)
Email – 5
Income Report
Affiliate Earnings
- Bluehost – $0.00
Expenses
- $26.00 Facebook Ads
Grand Total: -$26.00 (Previous $0.00)
Conclusion
Can you believe it, it has been two months since I started blogging consistently on this blog. During this period I have learnt a lot of things on what it really takes to become a Professional Blogger.
I have to admit, It is harder than I thought.
The one thing that stood out the most is, the amount of work and effort that is actually required to run a blog.
Some weeks I am spending nearly 16 hours working on my blog which includes research, writing, editing and creating graphics; and at the same time I also need to spend time to promote, market, outreach and maintain the blog in order to keep it running.
Though I haven’t made much money from it, it has been very fulfilling especially to see people reading my blog.
That’s a wrap.
Until next month