May was a mix of exciting and sad for us here at One Big Happy Life. On a personal level, we lost our nanny unexpectedly, which left us scrambling to make new child care arrangements. Even though we were able to figure that part out and it’s actually working out really well, there’s still a lingering sense of loss. Life changes can be challenging no matter what but it can be particularly hard when the changes are unexpected.
Speaking of unexpected changes, the month of May brought us a number of pleasant surprises too. Like the realization that our daughter could graduate a year early from high school, which means she will be heading into her senior year next yer.
We got to work with a new brand in May which lead to a healthy lifestyle change and unexpected growth on our YouTube channel. We were also approached about a potential long-term partnership with another company starting next month and are in the midst of creating the content for that, which is pretty exciting.
And we’ve been selected to be speakers at FinCon 2018! We are beyond thrilled to have gone from attendee to speaker in just one year.
If you want to read all about the journey from the beginning, you can check out all of our income reports to date.
Now let’s take a look at how our May went.
MAY RECAP
May was an incredibly busy month for us. We have a number of sponsored posts in the works which always take more time than our typical videos. Normally we can just focus on the content and providing as much value as possible to our audience. But when you work with brands, they usually also have specific talking points that they want you to work in which can make it a lot harder for the video to flow naturally.
There was one video in particular that we had the hardest time shooting. Every time we would plan to shoot the video (which had to be shot at night) something would come up and we’d end up having to put it off until the following weekend. In the end, it took us much longer for us to get the video to the brand than we’d expected and threw our whole production calendar off. This was a first for us.
It’s seems our YouTube channel is now big enough that we are able to snag more brand deals that mesh well with our channel message and audience, which is exciting. But we also decided that we don’t want to do more than two sponsored videos a month.
INCOME
- Blog Ad Revenue: $29
- YouTube: $1,807
- Affiliate Income: $360
- Sponsored Posts: $950
- Products & Courses: $0
Our income numbers include revenue earned in the month of May 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.
In the earlier part of the month our YouTube income continued to drop as predicted as the semi-viral videos we had in January continue to settle down. It looked like our income was about to settle right around $1,500 (which is where we would hoping our new income floor would be) but then we had a few more videos do very well towards the end of the month. We’re pretty confident that June is going to be a strong month for us.
Total Income: $3,146
EXPENSES
- Adobe CC: $30
- Epidemic Sound: $15
- ConvertKit: $49
- Teachable: $40
- Leadpages: $25
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.
We are expecting these expenses to stay pretty constant throughout the rest of the year, though we are considering making some one-time purchases for equipment. Sony is coming out with a new RX100 and we are itching to get our hands on it.
Total Expenses: $160
Net Profit: $2,986
INCOME ANALYSIS
Our income numbers are held strong this month and we are really happy with how One Big Happy Life is doing. And it seems that we have found a new video topic area that fits with our channel and also gets lots of views. So far those views have also translated into views for our other videos too. If the trend continues, we’re expecting our channel to grow at an even faster rate from here on out.
Our blog income decreased this month because we turned off Google adsense auto ads. We published a sponsored blog post in May that stipulated that no ads could be posted within the post. Auto ads places ads throughout the blog automatically so I thought that the only option was to turn it all off by removing the code from my site header. Today I did some research and learned how to remove the ads from specific pages on the site. So as of June 9, 2018, auto ads are back up. That means we can expect to see a nice boost from blog revenue next month.
Our course is still closed so that we can finish creating the final modules. After that, we may reopen it to the people on the mailing list. We’ve also been reevaluating the price point. So many people want to take our course but they can’t swing the price. We are considering offering the course at a lower price but then changing the current hour-long weekly live Q&As to 30 minute monthly Q&As.
TRAFFIC REPORT
- Page Views: 12,585
- Unique Visitors: 4,447
- New Visitors: 85%
- Acquisition: 46% Social, 34% Organic Search
We launched our blog at the end of October 2017, so this is only our seventh 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 May. 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. We have our sights set 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: 2,443 (+347)
- YouTube: 41,800 (+3,600)
- Instagram: 5,700 (+1,800)
- Twitter: 880 (+120)
- Pinterest: 658 (+108)
Our main email freebie–a free excel budget–is back up, which really helped our email growth this month. We’ve also added a free 7 day intro to YouTube email course that is doing really well.
May was an insanely productive month for us video-wise. We published 19 videos which averages out to being more than four videos a week! That’s pretty crazy. We’ve also seen an explosion in views and subscribers that will likely make June a pretty good month growth-wise.
That’s it for this month’s income and traffic report! How was your month?
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