Passive Income Report August 2017

THIS POST MAY CONTAIN AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE READ MY DISCLOSURE FOR MORE INFO

Welcome to my last income report!

Every month I publish a detailed report with all the numbers of my blog.

In this report I include the earnings and expenses, I talk about my personal experience and what new things I have been trying during this month. In addition, I share what my future targets are and if the previous ones have been achieved or not. Why doing this?

It helps me to keep track of my personal finances

In any moment of time, I can look back at my reports and see what steps and results I got from specific strategies, like a log book.

It increases trusting

I also want to show you that I am a real person who started blogging from the first step. I believe this can help beginners and people who are not decided yet to start their own blogs. I’ve received many comments and emails from other bloggers who like my income reports and apparently they are learning a lot.

It boosts my motivation

Sharing my results will put me on that kind of uncomfortable position in which I need to demonstrate that I can go one step further instead of getting lazy and rely on excuses. My finances are open to everybody!

I know that every month I say the same, but it’s the truth. All earnings here reported are coming from Passive Income sources. I am not including any kind of outsourcing because the intention is to show you how far I can go with only passive income sources.

This is my 23rd month reporting my accounts and I simply love it! I can’t believe I started blogging almost two years ago, it just feels great =)

You can have a look to some of my previous monthly income reports:

• Income Report October 2015 – $75.91
• Income Report June 2016 – $374.83
• Income Report October 2016 – $803.73
• Income Report May 2017 – $895.19

Important Things Going On in August

I’m writing this income report with some delay (it’s nearly the middle of September!) because some of the income wasn’t verified until a few days ago. One of my affiliate managers was affected by Irma and couldn’t pull the earnings from the last month (do not worry, she is all right 🙂 ).

1. I finished my second course Start a Money Making Blog

Over the last month, I’ve been working in this course discontinuously but now it’s finished and live!

The Start a Money Making Blog course is a 5-day email course that I offer for FREE to whoever wants to sign up.

How it works is easy, you enroll in the course and every day you’ll receive a lesson via email. Some of them include printables and worksheets to help you out progress through the course.

Here is a snapshot of what you’ll receive if you subscribe.

• Day 1: Why you should start blogging. You will learn why blogging is a great option to work from home.
• Day 2: Create A Money-Making Blog. Five steps to follow (in less than 10 minutes) and you will have your blog up and running.
• Day 3: How to make money blogging. This is the day that you will learn the five best ways to monetize your blog.
• Day 4: How to grow your traffic and followers. I will share my methods to grow your audience and followers in social media.
• Day 5: Blogging tips that will help you be successful. My favorite lesson! I’ll share all the tricks that made my blog being so successful.
• Bonus Day: Special gift for you. I will include a special gift for you once you complete the course. I can’t share what it is yet, otherwise, it will not be a surprise 🙂

In this course, I include all the things I’ve done from my first day blogging until today. It includes tips and tricks that will help you get traffic and income in almost no time.

2. I started an amazing Facebook course

While Pinterest is working very well for my blog, I heard great things from Facebook. That’s why this month I started focusing on Facebook.

I’ve done a lot of research and finally, I got the course from Britanny Ann. In this course, I’m learning a lot about how to make my last blog posts go viral and it’s already working!

If you are curious about the course, the name is Strategies Worth Sharing.

3. Income report Record

This month I beat my previous income record (in terms of income and profit). This is great because it means my blog is growing and I’m getting the results I’m looking for.

I just can believe yet that I’m making nearly a full-time income blogging from home. It still feels like a dream.

More things going on in July:

• I traveled to Tunisia (Yai! I finally traveled to a country in Africa). This trip was because of work. I had a great time and I enjoyed a lot the food there.
• I deleted nearly 300 cold subscribers from my email list using Convertkit, some of them became warmed up subscribers.
• I started a secret project. Shhhh! If I tell you what it is, it wouldn’t be a secret.

Content Creation

In August I published 8 posts (including the July income report). This month I’ve been focused in long posts, between 1,500-2,000 words. I’ve come to realize that it’s better to publish less often but more in-depth posts than short and less useful articles.

Since this month, I aim to write 2 new blog posts every week and tt seems working well for me (I went from 2 posts per month to 8).

I’ve also spent some quality time in creating the material of my online course.

Here is the list this the posts I published during the last month:

• How To Make $1000 A Month In Your Free Time
• How I Tripled My Affiliate Income In 4 Months
• How I Went From 0 To 250 Daily Page Views (In Just 1 Month)
• Passive Income Report July 2017
• Everything You Need To Know About Monetizing Your Blog
• 15 Practical Ways To Start Building An Emergency Fund
• 5 Smart Home Gadgets That Will Save You $2,117.50 Every Year
• How I Made $876.41 From My Email List With Under 1,000 Subscribers

The post about how I tripled my affiliate income in 4 months has been one of the favorite posts this month and it seems to be helpful for other people. The reason why I wrote it, it’s because I’ve realized that many people are still struggling with affiliate income (as I used to do). I want to show that making money from affiliate marketing is possible.

And now… let’s start with the interesting part. I know you are here to check out my numbers 🙂

Income Report

The total gross income for my blog this month is detailed below

• Paid surveys affiliates – $955.77
• Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing – $225.20
• Bluehost (check my tutorial on how to start a blog) – $130.00
• Google AdSense – $67.25
• SmartAsset – $51.86
• Monumetric – $28.88
• Tailwind – $26.50
• Content Samurai – $22.00
• PadSquad mobile ads – $5.21
• Grammarly – $1.00
• Other blog income – $4.24

For the paid surveys, the networks I use are FlexOffers, ShareASale and iGain

Total Income: $1,517.91

Expenses

This month, expenses are coming back to normal after last month. In July I made a lot of investments, that’s why in August I was able to slow it down.

So basically this month I only paid the fixed expenses.

I pay a VPS (Virtual Private Server) because I have a few other websites running and if something goes viral I want to be ready for it.

• VPS: $64.50
• Convertkit: $29.99

This month, I should have sent articles to my proofreader but I didn’t. So I guess expenses in September will be much higher.

Total Expenses: $94.99

The total net balance of my account for this month is below.

Net Total Balance: $1,517.91 – $94.99 = $1,423.42

• Previous month: $1,040.24
• Difference: – $383.18 (+36.84%)

Wohooo! August has been the best month so far since I started blogging (in total income and net total balance). It seems that my blog is jumping to the “next level”, if I can keep income around $1,500/month and keep expenses low, it will be amazing!

Be aware that I put a 40% aside to pay taxes and the money that goes to my savings is less than the reported above.

Money saved for taxes (40% of $1,517.91) = $607.16

This is my 23rd month reporting my accounts and it seems to keep growing little by little which makes me so happy. Obviously, it’s nothing to compare with other famous bloggers, but for a starter like me, it’s considered an important milestone. I am having more than $1,400 profit and this is something I’ve never expected to happen.

Imagine what would you do with an extra $1,420 extra per month?

The graph below shows my income and expenses since I started my blog in October 2015. It seems incredible that I’ve been on this for nearly two years!

The graph below shows the balance or profit which is calculated as:

Balance = Income – Expenses

August is the 12th month I am donating a part of my income to children with health issues and learning disabilities.

Since September 2016, every month I’m sharing how much money Passive Income Wise is giving to help these families.

I calculate it as the 10%(Total Income – Tax Money – Expenses)

Income Donated This Month: 10%($815.75) = $81.57

Total Income Donated Accumulated = $786.93

Nice! One step closer to build a school in China!

Traffic and Metrics

After a few months, I am back reporting my traffic and metrics. And I do it because of you.

I received emails, comments, and even a phone call just asking to continue reporting my traffic.

Since I started using Tailwind (Pinterest pin scheduler) my traffic has increased a lot. A few months ago I barely received a few hundreds of visits, and now thousands!

Related post: How I Went from 0 to 250 daily page views (in just 1 month) using Tailwind

I went from 19k to 20k sessions. I’m really looking for reaching 25k sessions so I can apply to Mediavine ads.

The traffic sources are mainly coming from Pinterest (69%) and Direct (22%). A few months ago I didn’t receive any traffic from Pinterest and this month it’s my main source of traffic thanks to Tailwind and the pin scheduler tool (and also some manual pinning).

If you want to try Tailwind for free you can do it following this link (and get a $15 discount). It offers auto scheduler for 100 free pins at optimised times depending on your audience.

Organic traffic is building up month after month. I already have some long tail keywords ranking in positions 2-3 in Google.

The most visited posts during July were:

It seems that people from Pinterest like tips to make/save money, 7 out of 10 of the most visited posts are related to these categories. The favourite posts are the How to Pay Off your Debt in 7 Steps, which is a mini-guide on how to pay off your debt in less than a year and the post with my favourite 7 online survey sites to make extra money. This last one has received many clicks from the Pinterest smart feed and I’m so glad it did because it already helped many people to make some extra cash.

Social Media

Twitter. If you don’t want to miss any of my new tweets follow Passive Income Wise on Twitter

• Followers:  16,712

Pinterest. Check out my new Pins by following Passive Income Wise on Pinterest

• Followers: 3,628 (+111)

Email List.

• Subscriptions: 888 (+69) I deleted 254 cold subscribers and I got 323 new subscribers.

July goals and results

Below are the goals I set up for July, let’s see if I achieved them.

• Write 2 new blog posts every week. PASS
• Get 20,000 sessions. PASS
• Keep the $1,000/month income. PASS
• Create new thumbnails and pins for my old posts. PASS
• Work with Convertkit and write new email autoresponder. PASS
• Send at least 1 broadcast email every week. PASS

Wow! I’m so impressed with myself. Even though this month my targets were not so greedy, I was able to pass all of them.

The most difficult one is writing 2 new blog posts every week. For a long time I’ve been used to publish one article a week and now I’ve duplicated it.

Goals for September

As a future work for September 2017 here are my goals:

• Keep writing 2 new blog posts every week.
• Get 25,000 sessions.
• Keep the $1,500/month income.
• Create new thumbnails and pins for my old posts (and add a new pin every day).
• Keep adding new emails to my Convertkit sequences.
• Send at least 1 broadcast email every week.
• Get 300 new email subscribers.
• Finish at least one new course.
• Send articles to my proofreader and update changes to my old posts.

This month is going to be very challenging, my targets are very high and I will need to work hard towards them.

That’s everything for this past August.

Did you like my August Income Report? Are you interested in earning income online?

If you are thinking about starting your own blog, I created a tutorial-guide that will help you start your own blog for cheap, You need very little investment, starting at only $2.95 per month (this deal is only through my link) for blog hosting. Additionally, you will get a free blog domain (valued at $12-15) through my Bluehost link, only if your purchase is for at least 12 months of blog hosting. My recommendation is for you to be self-hosted. This is important if you want to monetize your blog because your website will look more professional.