Behind The Screen: October 2019 Income Report

I’m not sure if these kinds of posts are still interesting anymore or not, but I’m at time where I feel like I’m lacking in direction. It’s not surprising; I spent two years focusing on how I would make it through my MSc and never really thought about what I would do after. Thankfully I have my blog and my fitness qualifications to fall back on while I figure that out…

The last income report I shared was back in April 2016 (for which I had my reasons) but right now I think I need to really see how far I have come in order to figure where I want to go next!

October 2019 Overview

Google Analytics

• Advertising Income (Earned): £14.97
• Advertising Income (Paid): £63.78
• Affiliate Income (Earned): ~£15
• Affiliate Income (Paid): N/A
• Collaborative & Sponsored Posts: £645
• Other Work & Consulting: N/A
• Costs / Outgoings: £166.45
• Total October Page Views: 7,803
• Total October Sessions: 6,219

Costs and outgoings were quite high this month for a number of reasons. Firstly, this included my monthly Tailwind subscription and the costs I pay monthly for having someone create my Pinterest pins for all my blog posts. I also purchased an Ultimate Bundle of blogging resources, paid the second half of an invoice for the Stretch & Recovery Guide Pdf and purchased a service where some links etc were sorted out on my blog.

In October, I completed and posted a big collaboration with Bioglan – the Stretch & Recovery Guide. The expenses for this collaboration came out in September when I met with Anna, my photographer, to shoot all the imagery.

Social Media Stats

• FB page likes – 1,014
• IG followers – 4,790
• Pinterest followers – 3,800
• Twitter followers – 4482
• BlogLovin’ followers – 420

October 2019 vs October 2017

Users 5,180 vs 2,355  (+120%) 
Page Views 7,803 vs 3,766 (+107%) 

What Worked Well Last Month

October was the first full month I had off after completing my MSc and handing in my dissertation. I decided to focus on creating content comment for the blog after a very successful September considering I had so much else on! I published 9 blog posts of which 3 were old posts that I revived with new images and new content.

After 7.5 years of blogging I have a lot of posts on the blog that have never been updated so I’ve focused my energy in 2019 on figuring out which posts should be deleted, which ones should be updated and which I can amalgamate. For October, I focused my content around what I was doing on a day to day basis; cycling, running and exercises recovery.

New Things I’ve Tried Recently

• Working on cornerstone content like this post on How To Start A blog from Scratch
• Started a mailing list
• Created freebies as opt ins for said mailing list
• Putting effort into Pinterest, using Tailwind (get your free trial of 100 scheduled pins here)
• Hosted a giveaway on Instagram as part of a collaboration, to help build my new mailing list

What I Will Work On November 2019 

• I purchased an ahrefs 7 day trial
• I joined the Ezoic Advertising Platform
• I upgraded the Smush plugin on a 30 day trial to reduce the image sizes on my blog in order to improve page speed
• Reshooting imagery to revive old content
• Work on a content schedule for the month

Plans For The Future 

We’re not that far away from 2020, and while I will be spending sometime figuring out what’s next for me post Masters Studies, I’ll also be having a think about where I want to take the blog next. Here are some ideas of what I might like do in 2020:

• Create a team of 3-4 contributors including a recipe contributor
  • I’ve got quite a few recipes on the blog, most of which are from the early days. I’m slowly working on reshooting them and optimising them SEO wise but for 2020 I’d love to have regular new recipes (at least one per month) and a team of contributors who can represent the KISE at events and share with us what they took away.
• Hit 25k sessions per month
  • I’m currently close to hitting 10k sessions per month after a lot of consistent effort and work so my next goal is to hit 25k sessions. I’m gonna continue to work on SEO and creating valuable content. I think I will also nail down my purpose and my niche to ensure I stay on track with content.
• Improve layout of Homepage
  • I plan of updating my Wordpress theme after nearly two years. In that time, I have learnt so much about what I want from my site and the Homepage is probably one of the most important pages. I need it to be a clear introduction to myself, the blog and my best content.
• Create a consistent monthly passive income which covers blog expenses
  • Who doesn’t want to create a passive income stream somehow or another? As easy as many people make affiliate marketing sound, it’s not al all. It takes a lot of work to set everything up, build trust and create content that people want which in turn will lead to the generation of affiliate income. I’ve not really joined many affiliate programmes over the past few years as most of the time, they’re just not worth the effort.
• Complete content / SEO audit
• Create quarterly content plans

Spending some time to have a deep dive into my analytics for October was super useful and insightful for me. While I have the time, I’m gonna put as much energy into building this platform and community as I can. Feel free to reach out with your feedback via the contact me page or the comments section below! I’m open ears 😛

So… anything I’ve missed that you’d be interested to know?! 

Elle