January Blog Traffic & Income Report

Welcome to another income report on the blog! This month’s report is a little late, because I’ve just come back from a holiday in Dubai – more on that later.

January was another record-breaking month for me. I truly didn’t expect to make as much as I did, because you often hear that December & November are the money-making months in blogging. Well, as I discovered, this isn’t always the case! 

Here’s a breakdown of my earnings:

 

Affiliate Marketing– $8,718.41

Display Ads & YouTube – $1,925.31

Own Products– $412.5

Sponsored Content – $320

Total Income: $11,376.22

Expenses: $1,709*

*Taxes and PayPal/Stripe fees are not yet included in this figure.

My expenses include things like office rent, hosting (Pressable), Tailwind, email provider, and paid advertising. This month, I also bought the Genesis Framework with WordPress themes from Studio Press, which was pretty expensive at $499.

 Income After Expenses: $9,667.22

Disclaimer: There is no guarantee and no warranty that following the strategies, techniques, and ideas on this income report will produce the same results for you.  The level of success you reach by following these strategies and tips is entirely dependent upon your skills, abilities, personal circumstances, and the time you devote to increasing your earning potential.

 

Now, Let’s Talk About Traffic!

 

 

Pageviews: 135,301 (down 19% from last month)

Sessions: 100,300

Users: 89,933

Email Subscribers: 2236 (+218 from last month)

 

I knew that my traffic was going to tank in January because December was such a good month for traffic, but in reality, I wasn’t hit too hard: just 20%. Furthermore, my display advertising earnings weren’t completely terrible either.

In January, I earned $1,661.81 from display advertising, which is a LOT higher than the $442.62 that I made from ads in January 2019. Increased traffic isn’t the only reason: I also increased the number of ads shown to my readers. If you’re looking to bump up your ad earnings quickly, this is a surefire way to do it, no matter what ads platform you use.

 

What Worked In January 

 

Switching Hosting To Pressable

If you’ve been reading my income reports, you will know that for 2-3 months now, something has not been right with my hosting. While everything had been smooth previously, my theme had undergone some updates that completely blew things out of the water.

At one point, I wasn’t even able to publish a blog post. Personally, I think my hosting issues came down to two things: 1) any updates that Divi had done and 2) I had outgrown my plan and had “too much traffic” for it.

Since then, I’ve decided to switch to Pressable – it’s a premium hosting service that currently costs me $45/month – expensive, but totally worth it. Pressable improved the speed of my website a lot, which even led me to gain about 40% in Google traffic. That’s HUGE!

While I still recommend Bluehost to new bloggers, when you start reaching the 100,000 pageviews /month mark, you’ve probably outgrown your hosting, if you’ve started out with an affordable host. At that point, you should probably look into premium hosting, like Pressable, WP Engine, or others.

Note: DON’T change your hosting if you’re in the middle of a busy period for your blog, like launching a new product, etc. There’s a plethora of things that could go wrong with switching hosts. That’s exactly why I decided to wait until my busy period (November-December) was over before switching over.

 

Taking A Holiday

 

While I technically didn’t take a holiday in January (I was away for the first week of February), the holiday was still on my mind and pushed me to finish projects that I had started before going on holiday.

Taking holidays at least once a quarter is something that I’m looking forward to doing more this year. Many entrepreneurs and coaches teach that the best way to structure your year (if you’re in charge of your own hours) is to break the year into quarters (about 90 days or a little less), and do a week-long holiday between them.

This way, you can come up with specific goals for each quarter. There’s enough time to focus on a particular area in your business, but not enough time for you to get sloppy. In my experience, this model works much better than setting annual goals – often, you can over- or underestimate what you can achieve in a year, so I’m a big fan of also having Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 tasks and goals.

Personally, I’ve also found the aspect of taking a week-long holiday to be extremely important. As an online entrepreneur, it’s tough to completely switch off from work, even when you’re on holiday. If you leave your hometown or your country, it’s much easier to get into a peaceful state.

I took my laptop with me on holiday to Dubai just in case I got bored and wanted to do some work, but in the end, I didn’t do anything. I just rested and spent time with my mom, which was amazing.