Passive Income Report December 2016

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

Since October 2015, every month I publish a detailed report with all the accounts for my online businesses. On them I include the earnings and expenses, I tell a little bit about my personal experience and what new things I have been trying during this period of time.

I explain as well what my future targets are and if the previous ones have been achieved or not. Why doing this?

1. 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 determined strategies, like a log book.
2. Increase trusting. I also want to show you that I am a real person starting from the first step. There are many amazing bloggers out there reporting their incomes of thousands of dollars, but I found very little bloggers reporting low amounts of money like me. I think this can help to starters and to people who are not decided yet to start their own online business.
3. Motivation. Writing here 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 you show you how far I can go with only passive income sources.

This is my 15th month reporting my accounts and I simply love it! I can’t believe I started blogging more than one year 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 March 2016 – $376.70
• Income Report May 2016 – $346.96
• Income Report October 2016 – $803.73

IMPORTANT THINGS GOING ON IN DECEMBER

December has been a family month. We have been to Spain for a week to spend part of the holidays with my family. The rest of the holidays were in the UK, where we live.

Here is a picture of how our little house looked like during Christmas (they have been stolen from my wife’s Instagram)

Focus On Pinterest

On December I spent quite a few time on Pinterest. I heard that many bloggers use it to promote their articles.

This month I wanted to give more importance to Pinterest and see if I can generate traffic out of it. I already had an account but I’ve never promoted it very well.

What I did is to join as many boards as I could on topics related to my website. Then I shared some of my content and other blogs content on these boards.

The most important here is to create Pinterest friendly pins, this is vertical pins with some colored text. You can visit my Pinterest profile here, so you know what I’m talking about.

My New Traffic Strategy: Tailwind

Tailwind is basically a Pinterest pin scheduler. It allows you to schedule your pins at specific times and in different boards. It saves me a lot of time and I can do bulk schedule in less than 30 minutes.

I already used the free trial which allows you to schedule up to 100 pins, but I wanted more. So this month I paid the membership for Tailwind and it has been a total success. My traffic has increased by x4, you will see it below in the traffic section. More than 57% of my traffic is coming from Pinterest now.

If you want to start using Tailwind you can get 2 free months when paying for 12 months by using my link.

Extra Effort On Twitter

This month I promoted my Twitter as well. I put extra effort on this and it paid very well.

My blog got thousands of new followers and visits from Twitter.

10% Earnings Donation To Children With Disabilities

In September I made an important decision, a decision which will change the life of many people. From September onwards I’m putting a 10% of my monthly earnings aside.

This money will be donated every month to different charities. I want to help children with life-threatening, terminal illness or learning disabilities.

With this blog, I want to be successful but also I want to make a difference in other people lives.

But, why?

My wife has a little dream since she was a child, she wanted to build schools in China (from where she is from) for children with problems and learning disabilities.

The first time she told me, I felt so touch that I made a promise to myself, a promise that I will never forget: if one day I make enough money to build a school, I will do it.

So, why to wait until that day? I can start helping from today.

That’s why from today I promise myself and I make it public to you that a 10% of the money earned with any of my websites will be destinated to support people who really need it.

So the more I grow my online business the more I will help children facing problems.

What do you think, do you like the idea?

CONTENT CREATION

Passive Income Wise

This month I created a lot of new images for my Pinterest boards and also for Twitter and Facebook.

I didn’t write any new post in December. As I said before, I like to spend time with my family during Christmas and I minimised the time I spent blogging.

However, I updated some of my old posts. I included extra information to provide more value and improved readability

It is always good to spend some time reviewing old material.

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

INCOME REPORT

Google Adsense (from niche site 1): $118.53

• Previous Month: $90.78
• Difference: + $27.35

Monumetric Ads (from niche site 1): $133.04        Start with Monumetric for free if you have more than 80k page views

• Previous Month: $130.76
• Difference: + $2.28

PadSquad mobile ads (from niche sites 1 & 2): $211.89

• Previous Month: $162.71
• Difference: + $49.18

Paid surveys: $115.60     Read my post 7 Free Online Survey Sites To Join For Extra Cash

• Previous Month: $51.80
• Difference: – $3.30

The websites I use to generate this income are American Consumer Opinion, Swagbucks, TopCashBack, Vindale Research, Survey Downline and Qmee.

Consulting Work: $13.00

• Previous Month: $162.50
• Difference: – $149.50

Other Income:

• Bluehost: $0.00        How to start a blog with WordPress and Bluehost
• Content Samurai: $22.09        Read my Content Samurai review
• YouTube (from niche site 1): $0.41
• Amazon Affiliate Program: $19.18
• ShareASale Affiliate Program: $0.00        Click here to read my post about ShareASale
• Grammarly: $0.40        Click here to start using Grammarly for free
• Qmee: $1.93        Click here to read my post about Qmee
• Redbubble: $9.97        Design and sell T-Shirts
• Disqus (Ads in comments): $2.23
• Medianet: $0.45
• Tailwind: $0.50

EXPENSES

In February I needed to upgrade the hosting for my Niche Site 1. Before I was using a shared hosting with a limitation of 150 GB of transfer data, now I have my own VPS in where I have up to 5,000 GB and I can host an unlimited number of domains. 

• VPS (Host Niche Site 1): $61.50
• Consulting Work Expenses and Charges: $2.60
• Google AdWords: $71.20

The initial investment for the hosting and domain name (for PIW) was done in October and this one is already running for free.

Net Total Balance: $553.81 – $135.30 = $418.50

• Previous month: $731.92
• Difference: – $313.42 (-42.8%)

December has suffered a drop in earnings. The main reason is that I didn’t do much consultancy work as previous months. Also, I’ve been a little been disconnected from blogging during the holidays and I saw it coming.

I try to spend around $100 every month in plugins and other useful stuff to improve my blog performance. Next month I would like to purchase ThriveLeads.

The consulting work is coming from people who contact me to hire my services. It seems some readers like the way I do things. Great! This money helps to cover all some of our living expenses.

This is my 15th 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 around $400 profit and this is starting to be very exciting.

Imagine what would you do with an extra $418 extra per month?

The graph below shows my income and expenses since I started with my Niche Site 1 in February 2015. It seems incredible that I’ve been on this for more than one year!

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

Balance = Income – Expenses

December is the 4th month I am donating a part of my income to children with health issues and learning disabilities.

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

Income Donated This Month: 10%($418.50) = $41.85

Total Income Donated Accumulated = $231.50

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.

I will report the metrics only from this blog.

Passive Income Wise

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

The traffic sources are mainly coming from Pinterest (57%) and Reddit. Last month 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.

If you want to try Tailwind for free you can do it following this link. It offers auto scheduler for 100 free pins at optimised times depending on your audience.

The most visited posts during December are:

It seems that people from Pinterest like tips to make/save money, 5out of 10 of the most visited posts are related to these categories. The favorite post is my list of more than 25 ways of saving money every month, which is a compilation of tricks I use on a daily basis to save up to $800 every month.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I  only report social media related with PIW.

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

• Followers:  7,733 (+1,921)

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

• Followers: 2,323 (+159)

Facebook. Support Passive Income Wise Liking us on Facebook or with a Friend Request.

• Likes Page: 226 (+4)
• Friends: 1,621(+8)

Email List.

• Subscriptions: 312 (+75)

Now I am using a free plugin for my Opt-ins. Next month I want to try Thrive Leads which is a premium plugin which hopefully will help me to increase my email list.

That’s everything for this past December. I wanted to publish also my targets for the next month, but you know what? I keep it for myself for now. If for a couple of months I see that I achieve them I will share here with you 🙂

Did you like my December 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 $3.95 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.