#139 | How I made $77,000 in January

Hi!

Welcome to my January Income Report.

How’s your January been?

I actually love January.

With no travel plans I’ve been able to get my head down and get a lot of work done, which is weirdly refreshing.

My organic search traffic was 68% DOWN compared to last January. 😱

But my income was almost exactly the same as last Jan, coming in at $77,711 for the month. 🎉

How did I do that? And how much of it was profit?

Read on and I’ll tell you…

As always, it was my travel blog that brought in the lion’s share of my income, with $72,067.

Here’s where the blog traffic came from…

I ❤️ Facebook

A year ago, just 3% of my blog traffic came from organic social.

Now, organic social is 44% – which I’m super happy with!

Almost all of that is from Facebook.

Now that I have Niche Toolbox at my disposal, it’s so much easier to grow this channel!

I’m so grateful to my team for putting my dreams into reality by making it.

The developers are working hard to improve it all the time and are adding new features.

I’m also busy making my my roadmap that will show you exactly how to make money from Facebook, even if you’re new to it –

Of course, you’ll be the first to know when that’s ready.

Bye, Google 👋

I now have just 33% of my traffic coming from organic search.

This is a goal I’ve had for a while.

It means my business is Google-proof. Yay!

I haven’t written an SEO-optimised post for over a year.

It’s been so much fun to create content about whatever I like!

Email shakeup 📩

Another channel that I’m working on growing this year is email.

I started off by deleting 12,000 subscribers at the statt of the year. LOL.

These were people who hadn’t opened an email in 6 months and hadn’t responded to my efforts to get them to open.

However, I have already replaced them with 12,000 fresh new suscribers.

This has massively improved my open rates!

So, how did I get 12,000 new email subscribers in a month?

Well, a few different methods…

Half of them came from Facebook ads.

I simply offered a free printable in exchange for an email address.

I spent $1,211 and that brought in 6,426 subscribers.

They cost about 19 cents each.

Another 1,400 subscribers came from Manychat.

I just started using Manychat and I love it!

I’ll just make a post on Facebook or Instagram and include a call to action to get one of my existing lead magnets.

So I might say “Comment PLANNER and I’ll send you a copy of my planner”.

When people comment, Manychat sends them a DM which they reply to with their email address to claim the free thing.

Each time I’ve posted to social media I’ve gotten over 100 new email subscribers, which is incredible!

If you already have followers on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, this is a really effective way to get them on your email list.

Manychat is cheap too, it only costs $15/month and you can get an extra 30% OFF with this link.

I got another 2,000 subscribers from Creator Network.

When someone joins your email list, they will see a box that says:

“Thanks for subscribing! Check out these fellow creators with great content you might also be interested in.”

It looks like this.

It’s a great way to get email subscribers on autopilot and for free.

The rest of the subscribers came from the forms that I have dotted around my site offering free digital downloads.

My Income Streams

Now you know where the traffic came from,

The next thing for me to explain is how I actually made money from it.

Because website visitors, Facebook followers and email subscribers are worthless if we don’t monetise them, right?

So let’s take a look…

Display ads

I made 63% of my income from display ads with Raptive.

This was $45,550.

As I continue to diversify revenue streams as well as traffic sources, my goal is to have display ads account for less than half of my income.

To do that, I’m working on increasing the other sources, particularly that income sources that don’t require website traffic.

Brand sponsorships

Brand deals netted me $15,524 in January.

For the money, my team wrote an assortment of blog posts, social media posts and emails.

If you want to make money from sponsorships, here is everything you need to know about that.

I’m excited to really ramp this up this year.

Affiliates

I made $8,085 from affiliate marketing.

Some of these clicks come from the blog, some from email newsletters and some from Facebook.

As I grow the email list, I can make more from affiliates with no extra work.

Facebook Bonus

The Facebook bonus program made me $2,017.

Annoyingly, the report that tells me how much each post made is broken.

If anyone else had this issue and has found a fix, I’d love to know!

YouTube

I made $647 from YouTube in Jan.

I have about 50 videos on there.

You have to make 100 videos before you can be considered ‘good’ at YouTube, so they’re still very amateur!

My strategy is to make videos for YouTube search, rather than vlog-style content.

I want my videos to make money each month for years, rather than a quick flash for a few weeks and then nothing.

Is that the best? No idea.

But it’s what I’m doing.

Expenses

Of course, not everything was profit.

My expenses for the month were $19,147.

Most of that went to my team members. In previous emails I’ve described their roles.

I spent $4,533 on Facebook ads.

Some of that went on email signups, some on ad arbitrage and some was part of brand sponsorship deals.

The rest of my expenses was on little bits like hosting, plugins and tools.

You can see a full list of everything I use here.

I hope you found that interesting.

If there’s anything you’d like me to go into more detail on in future emails, please reply to let me know and I’ll add it to my list.

– NSL