Blog Income and Expenses, February 2016

Better late than ever, here is my monthly blogging income report! I kept going in February, investing and working on the blog to make it better for 2016.  I did redesigns on all three blogs, thankfully already paid for in January. Reach Financial Independence is ready if you’d like to check it out! Last month, I made $4,550 but only netted $1,640.41 as a result of buying content and the redesigns. I have a long way to go to net six figures, my goal for the year.

Blog Expenses

February was cheaper, but not cheap compared to last year, when my only expense were my VA, a Godaddy domain and Hostgator hosting.

$300 my 20 hour a week VA

$257 for a super early bird FinCon ticket! FinCon is the Financial Blogger Conference. I finally took the plunge, I hate big crowds like the good introvert that I am, but many bloggers have convinced me so… San Diego, here I come!

$499 For a course on taking blogging to the next level. More on that later!

I am using Tailwind for my pins, which is paid for the year ($120, use the link to get a free month) and it saves a ton of time managing Pinterest.

Total spent: $1,056

Another more expensive than usual month, but less than January.

Blog income

• Reach Financial Independence $875 (lowest in a long long time but the redesign took a toll on pageviews)
• Make Money Your Way $1,525
• Savvy Scot $1,870

Freelancing for other sites and non blogging ventures: $4,010.

I had a little free time this month, so my goal was to find enough freelancing work to pay for FinCon. The international flight from Guatemala isn’t cheap, around $700, add $800 for accommodation (which I’ll try to hack, that’s a TON of money for four days), $250 for the conference, $250 for extras, food and local transportation, you’re looking at $2,000. So I sent two pitches and landed two clients, a 100% success I was pretty happy about, then one came directly, and it made me $4,010 this month. FinCon is paid for. I like that approach better than “hey, let’s go to FinCon and hope it pays for itself in the next 12 months”. I think it will, or I wouldn’t spend the money, but it is nice to earn it upfront.

 

• Total blog income for February 2016: $8,280
• Net income: $7,224

A great month overall, and thank goodness for hustling, which made up for the low RFI income.

I set the bar quite high this year, after making about $70,000 in 2014 and $60,000 in 2015 (with less than half the work), to make $100,000 after expenses in 2016. That translates to about $10,000 a month as I want to invest a lot in content and delegating tasks, like I did this month.

I should have made $16,666 net, I am $7,802 behind haha.

But it is OK.

In January, it felt like I was getting ready for this year. I worked hard on the design makeovers, pushing social media, making lists of where to get published for more exposure (and got into HuffPost!). So I am not too worried about being so much behind on my goal, it’s more, I think I won’t reap what I am sawing until the end of Q2.

Many days I thought “why work, if I made $60,000 last year doing almost nothing? Maybe it won’t work and I’ll just make the same again, wasting money in all these expenses”. That’s about the worst mindset you can have. I don’t want to do it for the money. I want to do it for the satisfaction of achieving that goal. So I can have something to work towards. So I increase the core value of the blogs. So they reach more people. It just takes a ton of hard work.

As usual, 10% of that income will go to finance an education project in my village, I am in the red at the moment as the project costs about $800 a month which is well over 10% but it is going well!

 

What are your blogging goals this month?