Hello summer! It’s the end of the month, which means it’s time for another monthly traffic and income report. I swear it feels like no time at all between these things. Things have gotten a lot busier here at the One Big Happy Life house over the past few weeks. We had visitors in town for the week after Father’s Day and we did a number of fun staycation activities, some of which we’ve written about on the blog. But that also meant that we haven’t been able to keep our normal schedule which has thrown us off a bit.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAtbqWeFELQ[/embedyt]

Alexis is out of school for the summer and is working for One Big Happy Life as its first intern, which is pretty exciting. I’m ecstatic to have the help, since I really want to focus on growing our website traffic over the next year. She will be helping me with just about everything from making Pinterest pins and posting them to scoping out places for us to go take awesome pictures of our Instagram. It will be really nice to have some extra help.

Now let’s take a look at how our June went.

And if you want to read all about the journey from the beginning, you can check out all of our income reports to date.

JUNE RECAP

This month really has just flown by in a blur. I barely remember what happened in it, if I’m being perfectly honest. This is the first month where I’ve felt like we’ve reached our capacity. We are doing as much work as we possibly can with the hours that we have. And since we work full time jobs with two kids to take care of, that means we don’t have a ton of time.

For the first time in a while, we found ourselves struggling to get all of the video content we wanted to create shot and out the door. I think there are a few reasons behind that.

First, we still were finishing up the course. Creating a course, especially a video-intensive course like YouTube Made Simple Foundations, is pretty darned challenging. I underestimated just how much time it would going to take for us to do it.  I’m so glad that it is done and plan to open it up again soon for new students.

INCOME

• Blog Ad Revenue: $47
• YouTube: $2,914
• Affiliate Income: $350  
• Sponsored Posts: $450
• Products & Courses: $0
• Freelancing: $1,500

Our income numbers include revenue earned in the month of June even if we don’t actually get paid until some time in the future. Since the whole point of these income reports is to assess our progress from month to month, it makes sense to track the actual income we earned in the month rather than income receive from work done in prior months.

This is technically our second highest revenue month to date (our March 2018 income report being the best) I really do see June as our personal best. March was an awesome month, for sure, but a massive chunk of our revenue boost came from our course launch. While our goal is to ultimately offer more courses and products, I like that our revenue is increasing even without those things. The more income streams the better!

 

TOTAL REVENUE: $5,263

EXPENSES

• Adobe CC: $30
• Epidemic Sound: $15
• ConvertKit: $49
• Teachable: $40
• Leadpages: $25
• Travel Blogging Course: $400
• Equipment: $1,500

Our expenses include any costs we incur in that month. Some of our expenses are paid for yearly, like our blog hosting that we paid in January.

The first five expenses on our list this month stay relatively constant from month to month. Our email list is a month or two away from crossing over 3,000, which will then cause that monthly fee to increase when it happens.

The bottom two expenses, the course and the equipment cost, are pretty infrequent but very necessary parts of owning a business. While it’s really tempting to take all of that revenue and add it right into our personal bank accounts, if we want our business to grow we recognize that we are going to have to reinvest money into it.

This month I purchased a course to help me learn more about the travel blogging side of things. We want travel to be a major component of OBH and really have no idea how to do it. So we turned to a traveling family who is extremely successful in this space so that we could learn from them. There’s still so much for us to learn when it comes to building a successful business so I’m sure there will be other course expenses from time to time.

We’ve talked about our current YouTube gear before and while we still love all of those things, as One Big Happy Life grows and as our skills grow, we find ourselves wanting to up our content game even more. So we’ve decided to make a number of large purchases in June and July from our YouTube setup wish list. We’ll be doing a full post with our updated gear guide once we have all of our new things (some of which are currently on back order or have yet to be officially released). But this month we upgraded our external storage drive and purchased a new camera stand to help with our overhead videos.

Total Expenses: $2,060

NET REVENUE: $3,203

INCOME ANALYSIS

Our income numbers got a nice boost this month. We are feeling pretty confident about OBH’s rate of growth this year. Still, it’s worth noting just how much volatility there is in our various income streams from month to month. YouTube has been instrumental in the growth and we believe that all bloggers and online businesses need to get on it ASAP. That’s why we created our free 7 day YouTube quick start email course.

When you add it all up, it looks like OBH is on track to make a full-time income (well, revenue at least) this year, there is really no telling how things will shake out. Though we’ve had fairly good look with sponsored posts so far, it’s possible that we may have several months where we don’t do one at all. And of course we’re completely subject to the whims of the YouTube algorithm.

Our blog income increased a bit this month month because we turned on Google ad-sense auto ads. I had them on for a while but I honestly hated just how clutter they made the site look, so I turned them off again. I’ve decided that I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and install my ads manually so that I maintain full control over the way the site looks.

I do think that ads will always play a role in our monetization strategy, but I don’t want them to be so invasive that it takes away from the overall user experience.

Lastly on the income front, you’ll notice that we added a brand new category of income stream: freelancing. I would love to freelance on a regular basis, and in fact have taken this freelance course that was incredible, but I feel like I need to get the hang of creating content for my own site before I start focusing on guest posting or getting paid to write elsewhere. Still, when a new opportunity dropped into our lap with a company that we know and love, I couldn’t say no.

Our hope is that this is not a one time deal and that we are instead forming a longer term partnership with this company. But so far, we’ve submitted the deliverables for June and are waiting to get their feedback. I’ll have more to say about this next month after the content has gone live. Meanwhile, we have a few other freelance opportunities that are in the works so we are hoping this category will see another boost in the next few months.

TRAFFIC REPORT

• Page Views: 13,721
• Unique Visitors: 5,494
• New Visitors: 85%
• Acquisition: 48% Social, 33% Organic Search, 11% Direct

We launched our blog at the end of October 2017, so this is only our eighth full month of blogging. I created several new pins for existing posts on the site and published four new posts this month.

We published four new posts on the blog in June. This number is still pretty low and is something that we will continue to work on. Ideally, we’d like to see at least eight new posts a month. We would love to be able to set aside a month to churn out one blog post a day. I have my eye on August so stay tuned for more details on that in future income reports.

We set a goal of reaching 100,000 page views a month this year. I’m not sure how realistic that is now, but we are going to continue to work at it.  We’ve have some new opportunities come up that will have us making content outside of our own platforms. This will most likely make it even harder for us to increase how many posts we are able to make for our own blog. But we’re going to try!

EMAIL & SOCIAL MEDIA STATISTICS

• Total email subscribers: 2,678 (+323)
• YouTube: 52,863 (+11,063)
• Instagram: 7,125 (+1,425)
• Twitter: 1,477 (+597)
• Pinterest: 723 (+65)

Okay, so let’s stop for a minute and do a little happy dance because we hit our subscriber goal for the year! 50,000 subscribers!!! When Joseph first suggested that we should make that our goal for the year, we had just hit 20,000 subscribers.

At the time 50K seemed like such an insanely lofty goal, considering that it had taken us a year to reach 20,000. And yet now, here we are, at 52,000+ and growing strong. So that means it’s time for us to set a newer, even loftier goal for the latter half of 2018.

Our new goal for the year is to hit 100,000 subscribers.

That number seems so large to me that I almost can’t breathe when I look at it. But if we’re not doing it scared then we’re not doing it right. From now on I will be counting down to our goal in each monthly income report.

We published 16 new videos in June, which is a bit of a drop from may but still above average for us. We aim to publish at least three videos a week, twelve videos a month, so we definitely hit that.

This month we’ve even started to talk about creating a new channel that is solely focused on product reviews. There are so many things that we purchase that we’d like to talk about but there isn’t really a space for that on One Big Happy Life. Of course there is that pesky matter of actually finding the time to shoot and edit videos for said channel, so we shall see. If OBH’s income trajectory holds, we will probably consider hiring a virtual assistant to take some things off of our plate and free up more time for us to create.

That’s it for this month’s income and traffic report! How was your month?