Spring is here! Finally. This felt like the longest winter of all time. And it’s still kind of lingering with temperatures still hitting the 30s at night. The days are starting to get warm enough for me to consider getting back to some of the DIY projects I have been putting on the back burner. Which means fresh content for the website and more things to discuss in future income reports!

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

But for now, let’s do a deep dive into how March went for us, shall we?

MARCH RECAP

In March we did this crazy thing. We decided to pre-sell and launch our first course: YouTube Made Simple Foundations. That took up a bunch of our time, which meant that I didn’t end up writing much new content for website. We will be working on the course and supporting our students in our private Facebook group, which is also new for both of us. But now that the launch is over, I expect that I will have more time to write new blog posts.

We posted 17 new videos on YouTube this month, which was quite a bit. In addition to our standard three videos during the week, we have been publishing bonus videos on the weekends. I also did one impromptu live video to test out YouTube’s new browser streaming function, which I absolutely love because it is so easy to use. I want to start doing more lives going forward. It’s just such an easy way to produce content and actually connect with our subscribers in real time.

INCOME

• Blog Ad Revenue: $98
• YouTube: $2,229
• Affiliate Income: $250
• Sponsored Posts: $0
• Products & Courses: $3,200

Our income numbers include revenue earned in the month of March 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.

We had our biggest month yet on YouTube where we broke $2,000 in ad revenue. We also launched our course which generated quite a healthy sum. Our course is not always open so we don’t expect to see this kind of revenue boost every month. Bummer.

Total Income: $5,777

EXPENSES

• Adobe CC: $30
• Epidemic Sound: $15
• ConvertKit: $49
• Teachable: $99
• Leadpages: $25
• TastyPins: $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 launched our course last month and so we upgraded our Teachable account so that we could process payments without any additional fee. We haven’t decided whether we are going to keep this plan so stay tuned for an updated on that next month. 

Total Expenses: $218

Net Profit: $5,500

INCOME ANALYSIS

In March we topped our previous personal best monthly income which was last month. The boost came from several places. Our YouTube channel is still booming from a few videos that took off in January, we launched our first course, and we installed Google auto ads.

I’m not going to lie, Google’s auto ads are pretty invasive. They are everywhere on the website now. But we are sticking with them for a couple of reasons. First, the extra revenue they bring in is just awesome–particularly in light of how small our traffic is. The website completely pays for itself with these ads and we haven’t noticed any dip in traffic.

Second, we would rather build an audience on the site with ads and slowly cut back on ads than to build an audience on a site with no ads only to get complaints when  add ads later on. That’s the same principle that we used as we grew our YouTube channel. Monetize from day one.

Third, we don’t plan to stay with Ad Sense forever. Our super lofty goal is to hit 100,000 monthly page views by the end of the year (which is feeling a little crazy now that it is April). If we stay on track for that, we will also be able to apply for ad networks with higher revenue per ad. That means we will be able to cut back on the ads some while still increasing our revenue.

TRAFFIC REPORT

• Page Views: 13,717
• Unique Visitors: 4,711
• New Visitors: 96%

We launched our blog at the end of October 2017, so this is only our fifth full month of blogging. All in all, we are thrilled with the amount of traffic we are getting so far–especially in light of how little content we currently have on the blog. Over the next few months we will be working on putting out more content on the blog and doing a better job of creating companion blog posts for the YouTube videos we make.

We had a bit of a hiccup with the behind the scenes tech stuff of the blog that cause us to lose several days of analytics tracking. Our actually numbers were definitely higher. Can I just say that I hate the technical aspects of managing a website? That is the very first thing I would love to be able to outsource once we reach a point where we can hire help.

We posted five new blog posts in March, which feels pretty darned awesome! I am still trying to find my sea legs with this whole blogging thing. I want to write relevant content but I also want to stay true to my voice, which is hard to do when you are writing list posts. I am starting to realize that blogging is one of those things that you just have to learn by doing.

The writing part of it has scared me off of blogging for years (even though I love to write). The only solution for that is to write anyway so that I can learn what works and what doesn’t. For April, I am going to try to give myself permission to just write about anything and see what happens. Unlike YouTube, I can pull down a few blog posts without it having much impact on the entire website. I’ll report back on how this new strategy of mine works in next month’s report.

EMAIL & SOCIAL MEDIA STATISTICS

• Total email subscribers: 1,942
• New email subscribers: 427
• YouTube: 32,344
• Instagram: 3900
• Twitter: 670

We are still riding that YouTube high that started last month. Not only was our revenue higher, but our total number of new subscribers was also higher than usual. Looking at our analytics, we can already tell that the traffic on our booming videos are slowing down, which is perfectly normal.

While it would be awesome if our channel were to keep growing (and earning) at this level, we are really comfortable with where the channel is and are okay with more moderate growth. Ideally, we are hoping to see the channel settle down around at least $1,000 a month and 2,000 new subscribers a month.

If we can maintain that while only spending 10 hours or less on the channel a week, we will be thrilled. As our subscriber numbers grow, the channel revenue will also grow. Meanwhile, we can focus on building momentum on our other platforms.

Growth on our email list slowed way down because our primary lead magnet, our free budget spreadsheet, has been down due to the switch from Thrive Themes to Lead Pages. Getting that back up and running is at the top of my priority list for April.

All in all, we are really happy with how March went. We are also prepared to see that number drop substantially in our April report because we won’t have any course income and our YouTube channel will likely drop to normal traffic levels. Still, hitting our first $5,000+ revenue month gives me high hopes for our goal of hitting $10,000 in monthly revenue within the next two years.