Hi!
Welcome to my Income Report for February.
I’ve been sharing my monthly income reports for over two years now, showing you the ups and downs as they happen.
Why do I do share these?
- It gives me the kick up the bum I need to do thorough analysis each month to make sure I’m working on the right things
- It shows new bloggers what’s possible a few years down the road – without reading income reports from others I would have had no idea how profitable this type of business could be
Want to see how much money I made in February?
Let’s go…
February Income Report
In February my sites made $54,384.
My expenses were $18,705.
That leaves $35,871 of profit.
I definitely can’t complain about those numbers.
BUT –
In January, I made $58,535 profit.
So that’s a 39% drop, month on month.
Yikes!
I can’t ignore that.
I said that writing these income reports gives me the kick up the bum to do some analysis…
So instead of saying “Oh that’s not great” and moving on, I’ll do the analysis at the same time as I write this email.
So stick around if you’re interested in my thought processes behind diagnosing the issue of a massive revenue drop…
What happened?
My travel blog accounts for over 90% of my income.
Travel is a mega seasonal niche.
January is the peak season for me because it’s when everyone is sick of being at home in the cold and is busy planning their adventures for the rest of the year.
February is not only less popular in terms of interest, but of course, it’s also 10% shorter in terms of days.
So I’ll assign 10% of the drop to seasonality and another 10% to King Numa Pompilius.
There’s obviously something else going on.
So my next step is to look at if it’s a traffic drop as well as an income drop (because traffic and income aren’t perfectly correlated)
Traffic or income?
For my travel site, I can see that traffic was down 37% compared to January.
Revenue per pageview was flat.
So it’s a traffic problem.
Cool.
Next, I’ll take a look at the channels to see which lost clicks.
Here we go…
(Dark Blue is Feb, Light Blue is Jan)
Oooh – Organic Social is the problem child!
The cause of my revenue loss is a drop in Facebook traffic.
Further digging shows a drop in reach with my Facebook posts.
Cool.
Now I know what I need to work on.
Let’s get some more Facebook traffic.
How I’m increasing my Facebook traffic in March
Facebook traffic is naturally pretty spiky.
50%+ fluctuations form one month to the next doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong per se, but there are some things I can improve…
1. I’ll do some analysis of which posts performed best in Jan, and make sure that we’re:
- Reposting those regularly
- Creating new posts about similar topics
2. I’ll review our top and bottom performing posts from Feb, and give some feedback to my VA about why each one hit or flopped.
3. I’ll make sure that we’re getting enough new posts live each week. I edit everything myself so I’m the backlog here.
My team use Niche Toolbox to scale our content production.
This is a set of tools that I had developed specifically to grow my Facebook traffic.
We’re adding new features all the time and we recently launched the Traffic Driving Image Post.
That makes Facebook posts like this in just a couple of clicks…
No faffing around with sourcing images and designing things yourself – it just does it.
And if you don’t like it, just click ‘regenerate’ and it does it better 🙂
If you’d like to use my toolset to create killer combos of blog articles and Facebook posts, then you can use Niche Toolbox here.
Inside Niche Toolbox, you’ll now also find my Niche Site Social Media Profit Plan ebook.
This will show you the exact strategy that bloggers who have pivoted away from SEO and are now focusing on Facebook are using.
If you don’t know where to start, this is perfect for you.
If you’d just like the ebook only, you can buy that here for $27.
Note: Paid AI tools and Facebook ads are completely optional with this strategy – they just make things grow faster.
You can absolutely get started on a tight budget if you prefer.
That’s all for today.
Thanks for sticking around as I walk myself through my strategy for March!
I appreciate you.
Love
– NSL
P.S. I know some of you will be interested in my $18,513 of expenses and how I managed to spend that much!
Almost all of that went on employees and freelancers.
(Thank you to anyone who took the time to apply for the Sponsorships Manager role and I’m sorry that I couldn’t reply to everyone individually. The position has now been filled)
I do also use several free and paid tools and services.
Everything I use is listed here for you – nichesitelady.com/resources​
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