I usually like to start these monthly onine income reports off on a personal note that talks a bit about the happenings in our lives over the past month. This month it’s a bit harder to do that because, well, we’re sad. July is Joseph and my birthday month and we had a wonderful birthday celebration week. My mom also retired from her job this month, so it was a month filled with wonderful things.

Then a few days ago someone close to us passed away without warning and we are still working our way through living with that loss. So while July was a great month in so many ways, it was also a hard month all at the same time.

Okay, now let’s talk about how July went for One Big Happy Life. And if you want to read all about the journey from the beginning, you can check out all of our income reports to date.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RY2nd_wQrs[/embedyt]

INCOME

• YouTube: $4,200
• Blog Ad Revenue: $40
• Affiliate Income: $420
• Sponsored Posts: $1,350

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.

July now holds the new record for our best revenue month. It’s really reassuring to see our numbers climb even at a time of year that is known for its online traffic slumps. We had a nice spike on YouTube that gave us a good revenue boost on our YouTube ad income. Though YouTube is pretty unpredictable, we’ve been doing a good job of growing our views and subscribers, which makes it that much easier for our videos to do well in the algorithm.

Auto ads were off for the entire month and I did not go through to manually insert ads on the blog. But I also noticed that there isn’t much of a difference in traffic when auto ads are on compared to them being off. I’ve decided to turn the auto ads back on and leave them there until our traffic grows enough for us to be accepted into Mediavine.

We are still working on some things behind the scenes that we can’t really talk about yet, but that should boost our income quite a bit in the next few months. Stay tuned for more details about this in future online income reports.

TOTAL REVENUE: $6,010

EXPENSES

• Adobe CC: $30
• Epidemic Sound: $30
• Convert Kit: $49
• Teachable: $40
• Leadpages: $25
• Equipment: $4,600

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 Epidemic Sound subscription did increase this month because we added a new channel to the One Big Happy Life fold! Our daughter Alexis decided to start a channel of her own so we added it to our music subscription.

Now let’s jump on in to that big old elephant in the room. Yes, we bought $4,500 worth of new camera gear this month. We’ll be writing a whole new blog post about our new camera gear. We’ve already started using it and are thrilled with them.

I wrote a post recently about spending for the life you want where I talked about receiving my first DSLR five years ago. That is the camera that we started our channel with. While it was great in the beginning, we really wanted to up our video quality. Our new camera gear creates amazing photos and videos all in 4K. We expect that we won’t need to upgrade this gear again for at least another 3-4 years, though we will probably buy a few more lenses. We also might buy one more vlogging camera in light of Alexis’s new channel.

Total Expenses: $4,774

NET REVENUE: $1,236

INCOME ANALYSIS

With July being our best revenue month so far, we are obviously thrilled with how well One Big Happy Life is doing, especially on YouTube. We had our most successful video to date this month, which caused the huge spike in ad revenue we saw this month.

Still, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, YouTube is incredibly unpredictable. You never know what will hit and what won’t. At least not with any certainty when you rely entirely on the algorithm like we do.

Another thing that this month makes abundantly clear is that expenses can quickly wipe out profits. We made massive equipment purchases this month. Though we expect that investment into OBH to pay off in the long run, it does make our net revenue number much lower.

When you factor in the taxes we have to pay on that, we only made a few hundred dollars in actual profit this month. We are comfortable with this for two reasons. First, we strongly believe that it is important for us to reinvest in the business to help it grow over time.  This is a big one. The general theory is that reinvesting in the business helps it to grow faster. That has definitely held true for OBH in the past year and a half of its existence. Second, we are in a position where we don’t have to rely on profits from OBH to support our family. Of course our ultimate goal is to grow OBH to the point where it is our family’s main source of income.

Still, I’m happy to say that we don’t have any expenses that will be quite this large going forward, which means our profits should be much higher than they were this month.

TRAFFIC REPORT

• Page Views: 14,773
• Sessions: 7,031 
• New Visitors: 5,294 

We launched our blog at the end of October 2017, so this is only our ninth full month of blogging. At the beginner of the year we set a goal of reaching 100,000 page views this year. Since the year is more than halfway over at this point, I’m thinking that we probably won’t make that goal. It’s a bit disappointing but it’s not surprising because we have not prioritized growing the blog.

At the beginning of the year, we were expecting our YouTube channel to have slow and steady growth. Basically, we were expecting to put it on autopilot while we focused on other things. But we’ve seen such explosive growth this year that we’ve actually started putting more time into it instead of less. We’re spending more time answering comments, pitching blog deals, responding to emails, etc. And we’re also making more than three videos a week on average. That means that I haven’t had the extra time to put the same level of intensity into the blog and it shows.

We only added four new articles to the blog over the past month. It’s great that we’re managing at least one a week, but we want to produce more than that. To help jump start our progress we will be doing a 31 day blogging challenge in August. I’m hoping to see a significant boost in our page views after this challenge because we will be doubling the number of posts on the blog in just one month.

EMAIL AND SOCIAL MEDIA STATISTICS

• Email: 3080 (+400)
• YouTube (OBH): 71,400 (+17,537)
• YouTube (Being Alexis):
• Instagram: 8,563 (+1,438)
• Twitter: 2,195 (+718)
• Pinterest: 791 (+68)

We had a massively successful video on YouTube this month and it also gave us a gigantic boost in subscribers. Just last month we updated our YouTube subscriber goal for the year to 100,000. It felt like a near impossibility when we set it but here we are one month later having already progressed of the way to our new target.

As always, with YouTube what goes up must come down. We’ve already started to see the dip on the back end of our analytics which means our revenue and new subscriber numbers will also fall. As long as our average number of new subscribers stays above 200 a day, we will hit our goal this year.

You might also have noticed that we added a second YouTube metric this month: Being Alexis. We are really excited (and nervous) about this new channel. It opens up a whole bunch of possibilities in terms of topics, audience, and growth of OBH as a parent company. But it also means that we’re going to have to devote even more time to making videos. Of course the ultimate goal is for Alexis to take over most of the day to day running of the new channel. We’ll be including the stats (and hopefully the revenue soon) for that new channel going forward.

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