It’s time for the monthly income report.
Each month “The Wife” crunches the numbers on our earnings while I, “The Husband”, puts together a recap of what happened in our online business. A dangerous combo!
As a reminder, this is why we do the income reports:
- Accountability. These will allow us to finally keep track of our total online revenue – something that I’ve been horrible at but seeing improvement. You can go here for all of our previous blog income reports.
- Progress. Now that we have it documented, we’ll be be able to chart our progress as our income increases. (thankfully it has)
- Truth. To show people that you really can make money online and in a non-scammy way.
- Transparency: We want others to see how we do it so that others can do it, too.
What went down in March
Another month, more amazing stuff going on in the Rose household. Where to begin?
Last month, I found myself rocking the mic for my first ever paid keynote talk. Sure, I’ve presented at a few conferences before, but I never had the lucent title as keynote speaker and got paid to do it.
Shortly after that talk, I flew out to San Diego to represent Wisebread.com and got paid twice as much as I did for my keynote.
While I was there I got to meet two San Diego bloggers, Chelsea from SomedayIllLearn.com and Nicole from Funthusiast.com.
Speaking is something that I absolutely love, although I have to admit, I am crazy freaking nervous prior to getting on stage. Once I’m on the stage and the adrenaline starts to kick in, I have a blast.
I have another paid talk coming up in May that will be my third paid speaking gig of the year.
House Of Rose Gets a Facelift
If you follow Mandy’s blog you’ll notice that she has a tendency to redecorate our house often. I think she’s now applying that to her blog design now, too.
Ahem.
House of Rose just got a major facelift which features an amazing feature box. Note: I know husbands aren’t supposed to do this, but I told her that she needed a feature box on her last redesign. She didn’t agree with me then, but look what she has now.
#toldyouso
In addition to the feature box, she created her first lead magnet PDF guide titled The Imperfect Perfect You.
Collecting email addresses is something that I feel every blogger should do. Not collecting email addresses is the biggest mistake I made for the first two years of blogging.
Does the feature box really work?
When I added the new feature box to my blog and offered my lead magnet, The Money Dominating Toolkit, my email subs jumped fairly significantly.
I thought mine did pretty good until I peaked at her email subscriber numbers after adding the feature box:
It’s leveled out some since I took this screenshot but she’s still consistently getting 20+ email subscribers per day.
That is what I call a feature box success!
Here’s a look at the numbers March….
Income Breakdown
Good Financial Cents
- Adsense: $1,260.81
- Adspeed: $1,607.94
- Commission Junction: $1,391.50
- Link Offers: $115.00
- Media Net: $600.00
- Personal Capital: $500.00
- Linkshare (Scottrade): $1,575.00
- Podcast Sponsor (90 Day): 2,333.33
- YNAB: $6.00
- Total: $9,389.58
Dollars and Roses
- GoDaddy: $0
- AWeber: $21.90
- ShareASale (Thesis Theme and Genesis Theme): $0
- Blogging Your Passion: $37.00
- Total: $58.90
Other Niche Sites
- Adsense: $128.28
- Media Net: $83.90
- Main Niche Site Revenue: $14,246.98
- Direct Advertising: $93.75
- Total: $14,552.91
House of Rose Blog
- BlogHer Ads: $339.47
- Direct Advertising: $100.00
- Adsense: $114.95
- Lijit Media: $67.15
- BlueHost: $930.00
- Capital One: $270.00
- Total: $1,821.57
Freelance Writing
- Equifax: $200.00
- Other: $150.00
- Total: $350.00
Consulting
- Consulting Fees: $400.00
- Total: $400.00
Speaking
- Speaking Fees: $3,000.00
- Total: $3,000.00
Total Revenue for March: $29,572.96
Revenue Last Month: $18,553.10
- Difference: +11,019.86
- March 2013: $20,204.01
New High – We’ll Take It
Wow. Didn’t see that coming.
After adding everything up and I had to add it up a second (and a third time) to make sure I didn’t enter in a wrong number.
Do to my speaker fees, a nice month from our main niche site, and my podcast sponsor on the GF¢ podcast, we passed our previous record from our December 2013 income report.
We’re always thankful for every opportunity that God provides for us and we’re humbled that our online business continues to thrive. It’s also important to remember that we’ve been blogging for almost 6 years and most of our income growth has happened in the past 3 years.
Hard work does pay off. If you truly love something and believe in yourself, good things will happen.
Time for consulting: Can I pick your brain?
You may have noticed that a new revenue stream has been added to the income report under “consulting fees”. Here’s how that came about….
One of the questions that I absolutely despise getting from anyone is the following – “Hey Jeff, do you have some time that I could pick your brain?”
Why do I hate it so much? Because in my experience, a lot of people who want to pick my brain will never do anything with the information.
A couple years after I started my blog, I got several calls from financial advisors all over the country wanting to know how I did what I did. Since I loved blogging, I was happy to jump on a call with them and talk for up to an hour letting them know what they would need to replicate what I’ve done.
After several calls like this, I realized that almost none of these advisors took any action with the information I had given them. I quickly realized that these “brain pickers” were becoming “time suckers”.
Since my day is even more busier than when I first started blogging with my growing financial planning practice, producing content for all of our blogs, making sure I reserve enough time for the family, I have to protect my time. Because of that, I started to charge for consulting. I talk about this on our post where I show you how to set up a canned G-mail response.
For anyone that wants to “pick my brain”, I just send them the canned response that let’s them know my rates. I initially tested my rate at $100 and people didn’t balk. I’ve since raised my rate to $200 per hour and I’ve one person pay and another one interested.
I’m not interested in being a full-time consultant, but it is nice people respecting my time and willing to pay for my expertise.
It’s also a reminder that if you have experience in something, anything, people will pay for that knowledge. In fact, my online products created nowadays are based on just that.
If you’re not sure if you should be charging for your time, check out this short read my Jon Acuff here.
What’s Next For Us?
Right now we’re in the beginning stages of creating a course together. It won’t be geared towards blogging but rather more towards marriage and finance.
This is an idea that I’ve had for quite some time now and I’m excited that we’re finally at a point that we invest time into it.
Stay tuned!
love reading these, and congrats on the record high!
Thanks Anna!
Wow! What a great month! Congrats and I always look forward to seeing how you guys itemize it all down! Great job. Inspires me to keep pluggin’ away! 🙂
Hey you two,
congrats on all your achievments! I’m always happy to see other blogger succeed and share their success with us “small” people.
I’m putting in lots of work into my own blog and an upcoming ecommerce project right now – hope to second your success soon 🙂
Congrats! I always look forward to these monthly reports of yours.
Guys,
This income report is out of bounds! Just shows what hard work and consistent action can accomplish.
I love seeing the breakdown like this! It gives clarity to what you are doing and awesome insight.
I have stopped by over the last few months and maybe I haven’t looked hard enough, but do you talk about what your Main Niche Sites are?
I know that is where a lot of your revenue is coming from, so I’m interested to know what that is and where it’s coming from.
Maybe it’s listed someplace and I haven’t read about it yet?
Thanks!
Laura
@ Laura
I haven’t revealed the niche site yet because of the highly competitive niche that’s it in. Too much competition out there! 🙂
I have promised to reveal it at some point next year to give me some time to build more baclinks to the site to make it more of an authority site.
Ok, gotcha! Yes, I can totally see why you’d want to hold off!
I wasn’t sure if it was listed someplace and I just missed it because I’m sort of new here. 🙂
Thanks for the follow up and I can’t wait to hear more about it when the time is right for you guys! It’s clear it’s been a great investment and business so far!
Inspired! That’s all I got to say after reading this report. Actually, it is the AdSense earnings in the first case that really caught my attention. You see, I have a network of some niche blogs. But the AdSense earning shown at the very beginning is what impressed me. My AdSense earning is even less than half of that.
Will definitely try to pump up my efforts and start taking AdSense more seriously. Time to devote more time towards some blogs ignored by me for some time now.
And yes, congrats for surpassing last time’s stats! 🙂
I found the link to this article on Kingged.
Arun
@ Arun My Adsense actually used to be much higher but I also started focusing more on affiliates and other ad networks to diversify. But Adsense is definitely super easy to install on any blog!
Hello Jeff,
This income report is out standing. May you have worked very hard. So, you deserve this handsome earning. I am not clear about speaking fees. Can you please make it clear to me? I am just curious to know as you earned $3,000 via speaking.
These are basically opportunities where I get paid to talk at some conference or event.
Well done! Great to hear that you can make good money with blogging if you’re interesting in putting in lots of time, energy and creativity. cheers karen xx
Thanks for sharing! And, kuddos for not letting folks pick your brain for free anymore! Good stuff.
Well done, Jeff! Well done!
Inspiring to see your continued success. And nice work on starting to add a consulting fee. I have appreciated your advice, it is definitely worth it’s weight in Gold!
I just started something similar, as I am piloting a financial coaching service, and have helped two successful clients thus far. I had the same issue. I’d create a budget plan, post it on my site, and then followed up only to find they didn’t do much of what was planned because they got it for free. People seem to care more and their ears perk up when they have some skin in the game (aka their hard-earned money).
I hope to launch this official service after a few more pilot clients and getting everything ironed out, including some materials you suggested for me in the past. Then I plan on scaling the service with video, lesson plans, etc.
And nice work on the niche site. I know you can’t reveal it, but did you basically follow Pat Flynn’s niche site guide? I wanted to build something, but the time/effort component was always a bit daunting to me, considering my day job / commute / young family. Maybe I should hold off until I have a bit more time to build something?
@ Jacob
Sounds cool on the coaching service you’re building. Definitely build it with the notion of being able to scale it so you’re not trading hours for dollars.
Regarding the niche site, I did follow Pat’s strategy but made some tweaks that my VA suggested. We’ve also produced several videos for YouTube and used social media a ton. Another big help is all my blogging connections where I’ve been able to get some pretty decent links back to the site.
Basically, the goal is to create an “authority site” not so much a niche site.
It definitely takes work to make a niche site stand out more than previously.
Good call. Authority takes some work, but with your connections and expertise, seems like a winning formula. Well done.
And yes, definitely trying to build my business with scalability in mind, similar to Steve Chou style.
Hi Jeff, congratulations! Your numbers are very nice. Man, your niche site rocks 🙂
Great job guys! Props! Love the box on house of blog makes me want to sign up.
Way to go! I never really added up all of my mini blog income streams like this, but looking at this post I’ve identified a few areas I could work on. Thanks for sharing!
I always enjoy these reports! You did totally amazing this month, wow! And it’s encouraging for my impatient self to know that it took you several years of blogging to get to this sort of income. Most of the time I’m okay with where I’m at, but then I start getting antsy and want to earn more NOW! 🙂
I’m curious though what you do to earn so much through Commission Junction. Is that something you divulge? I do some affiliate linking but have not had much success with any CJ programs.