Blog Income and Expenses, March 2016

Welcome to my monthly income report! March was frustrating, because I thought I would reap a bit of what I sawed in January and February, but many things happened in real life, I spent many days offline, on planes and taking care of personal matters, and the blogs pretty much went back to auto-pilot. I still made it to Business Insider, HuffPost and a few more, which helped my domain authority quite a bit, with RFI’s being at 49 as of now, so I’m happy with that.

Blog Expenses

Back to a normal month, where my only expenses are my VA, a Godaddy domain and Hostgator hosting. Since the investments I made in blog design, ebook, etc. are long term ones, I didn’t see much of an impact just yet, and didn’t have time to research more avenues where my cash would be well spent.

$300 my 20 hour a week VA

$5 for an ebook cover on Fiverr

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: $305

I am planning on investing more on the blogs during Q2, but don’t know where to as of now.

Blog income

• Reach Financial Independence $1,595
• Make Money Your Way $1,340
• Savvy Scot $2,110

Freelancing for other sites and non blogging ventures: $770.

As a result of having less time, I scaled back on writing and only made $770, compared to $4,000 last month. I was really motivated to make more last month to cover the cost of going to a financial bloggers conference in San Diego in September, and having no goal this month made me take it easy.

• Total blog income for March 2016: $5,815
• Net income: $5,515

An average month that was expected due to less hustling but still a bit of a downer considering the investments of January and February. Blogging is hard work!

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 $25,000 net so far, I am $10,620 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! I am adding more computers and more English classes for the kids.

What are your blogging goals this month?