Hello again!
I hope you’ve had a good September.
I’ve had a busy month of travelling, visiting Spain, Gibraltar, Greece and Turkey.
While I’m away, I’m always busy taking photos and videos and posting on social media.
So last month, I only managed to spend 10 days doing what I would call ‘real work’.
Still, my sites brought in just shy of $50k, which I’m pretty happy with.
The expenses have been rising though!
So read on if you’re interested to see where the income came from, and what I had to spend to make that much…
95% of my income comes from my travel blog.
The other sites have either been abandoned (thanks to Google) or are still new and not yet monetised.
So, let’s look at how my travel blog is faring and how it makes money…
In September, my blog had 743,528 page views.
That’s around half of what it was pre-HCU.
However, that’s not too important.
I’ve been focusing on making money without people ever needing to visit the site.
Examples of this are when they open an email and click an affiliate link, watch a video on YouTube and I get ad revenue or interact with my Facebook page and I get paid from the bonus program.
Here are my income streams:
- Display ads (with Raptive) – $27,982
- Sponsored campaigns – $12,500
- Affiliates – $6,555
- Facebook bonus – $569
- YouTube Ads – $429
- Misc – $263
Display advertising is still the biggest income stream and that directly correlates with website traffic.
Here’s where the website traffic came from:
- Organic search – 46%
- Organic social – 17%
- Paid social – 15%
- Email – 13%
- Direct – 6%
- Other – 3%
Sponsored campaigns are growing nicely.
These can include all kinds of content such as blog posts, social media, video content, email features, etc.
Each brand is different in what they want, so I’ll usually create something that’s bespoke to them.
I only work with brands that perfectly fit the niche with products that I use myself.
YouTube is the channel that takes up the most time for the lowest monetary return. But, it’s good for brand awareness so I’ll keep doing one or two videos each month.
I’m less than 50 videos in. I would like to hope that by the time I’ve got to 100 videos, I’ll have built enough skills that I can make videos that I’m pleased with and that make an ROI from YouTube.
Now, let’s look at everything I spent…
My total expenses for September for the travel blog were $20,903.
That leaves a profit of just under $30k for the month.
I had replies to my income report last month because I didn’t include my expenses.
Sorry! I agree, that’s super important.
So here’s exactly where the money went…
Expenses:
- Staff/freelancers – $13,245
- Facebook ads – $6,778
- Email software – Kit – $613
- Hosting – BigScoots – $109
- Facebook tool – Strevio – $79
- Affiliate tool – Geniuslink – $28
- Productivity tool – ChatGPT – $24
- Article writing tool – Hypertxt – $20
- News writing tool – GhostCraft – $17.50
- Domain – $4
- Speed Plugin – WP Rocket – $3
- Theme – GeneratePress – $0 (I bought the lifetime deal at Black Friday a couple of years ago)
My biggest expense is my team – they keep things moving while I’m sipping cocktails and I’m incredibly grateful to have them.
While we do sometimes use AI to help with article production, everything is heavily edited by a writer, an editor and then also by me. It’s a real team effort.
I use Facebook ads for various purposes including growing the page and building my email list.
Last month I spent $4,885 on driving traffic directly to my website from Facebook.
That generated $6,045 from display ads (ad arbitrage), plus several thousand email signups.
When it comes to the other expenses, I keep everything as lean as possible.
I sometimes use other tools not listed here, but only as and when I need them, not every single month.
I hope you found that to be interesting.
My goal is never to brag – I just like to show what’s possible with a no-SEO strategy, and what’s working well as I test new blogging techniques.
I test a ton of tools as well. Most of them I don’t end up using, but when I find one that’s a keeper, I’ll let you know.
I’m focused on two things:
1. Growing traffic without Google
2. Making money without traffic
So if you’d like to learn more about these, then stick around because I email every Tuesday without fail.
– NSL