Traffic and Income Report – February 2016 – $3,177

Trevor here, making my monthly appearance to present the February 2016 income report.

If you haven’t read one of our income reports before, you may be scratching your head. This is where we embrace our inner Jerry Maguire… no… not “You had me at hello”, the other one… “Show me the MONEY!” As always, the food will return shortly. If the idea of sharing income and learning how to make a living online isn’t interesting to you, then please have a bowl of Jalapeno Popper Mac and Cheese and a new recipe will be coming tomorrow!

Here’s a brief introduction to these traffic and income reports…

If you’ve stopped by our about us page, you know that Jennifer and I started this blog sixteen months ago with the hopes of it earning an income for Jennifer. I’ve since quit my job and we’re taking a calculated risk that we can make this blog both of our full-time jobs.

Without income reports like this, we never would have known it was even possible to take that leap. Our hope is that, for those interested, these reports can help to show what worked for us, the mistakes we made and that it is possible to make an income online doing something that you love if you work hard and stick with it.

None of these reports on their own tell the story of how to create, grow and monetize a blog. Think of each one as a chapter in a book that continues to be written. To get the full picture, I suggest looking at our traffic and income reports page where you can click into individual reports, like this one, to see the slow steady growth and get the details.

Okay, enough with the backstory, let’s get on to the report…

I’ve added a new Social Media section to The Breakdown to look how our primary social media channels are growing. They are each so unique, it will be fun to watch them grow and explore what’s working on different platforms. Social media is important for gaining our audience in a variety of places, but it is also something that brands look at when choosing strategic partnerships.

The numbers themselves only get you so far though. You need to be making sure that you’re engaging with your fans/followers on every network to keep engagement high. The engagement metric is something that brands are more and more focused on because they want to know that not only do people follow you, but that you’ve built up trust with your audience and your tribe.

Things have started leveling out in February. Our RPM (Revenue per Mille or 1,000 pageviews) is back on the rise and we’re hoping that this month represents our lowest earnings for the rest of the year. We’ll need it to if we want to hit our goals that we set in January’s income report.

Even though traffic was down a pretty significant twenty seven percent, we still feel really good about where things are at. I’ve got a far more complex spreadsheet than I’d like to admit that gives us projections about where we should be based on growth that we’ve been seeing. If we remove the crazy spiked numbers of November, December and January we’re still 30K pageviews ahead of where we thought we would be back in October. Meaning, if you told us we’d have the traffic we did this month in October, we would have been THRILLED! Popping corks, dancing around the apartment THRILLED!

Which brings me to what I want to talk about in today’s income report. Perspective.

Perspective is one of those things that if you lose, you can find yourself never satisfied, happy or fulfilled. I’m sure you’ve watched some news story, read an article about some super successful, rich probably, somebody that’s completely unhappy. Cue the judgmental, “I can’t believe that, if I were them I’d be the happiest person on earth!”.

Truth is, they probably thought the same thing at some point but somewhere along the way, they lost perspective.

So, how do you grab ahold of perspective and maintain it as you grow, become more successful and reach new heights?

Write it Down

Write down in detail when you hit milestones and what those “little victories” are and mean to you. Journal it, email it to yourself, make a video, it doesn’t matter. Just get it down “on paper” so you can take yourself back to that moment regardless of where you’re at.

Set Goals

Set goals. This year, three years out and five years out. Goals that make you work but are realistic. Goals that you’ll be truly happy if you could reach. When you get ahead of schedule and things slow down, it will be clear that you’re still way ahead of the game.

Didn’t hit your goals? Take a look back at your little victories and realize while you might not be to your final destination, you’ve come a long way.

Help Out

Help someone out that is in the position where you once were. We’ve all felt that… “If someone would just help me out a bit, I could really make things happen”. Be that person for someone. It will instantly remind you how lucky you are to be where you are and how far you’ve come.

Enjoy Today

Regardless of where you are in your journey, always enjoy where you are today. If you do that every day, then tomorrow will be just as great!

If you haven’t started an email list, you should. And if you have an email list, make sure you’re doing something VERY important.

You most likely have an autoresponder set-up (if not you should) telling people “Thanks for Signing Up” or maybe they get something like an e-book for signing up. BUT, are you taking full advantage of this moment in time?

When someone signs up for your email list, it’s them saying to you, “I trust you, I value what you’re providing and I want to hear more from you.” Don’t just leave that with, “Great, thanks!”

You have their attention, maybe more than you ever will, so you need to do something very important…

Ask how you can help them.

For us, that manifests itself as us asking, “Reply to this and tell me something you wish you had a great, easy recipe for.”

You might be saying to yourself, yeah but who is actually going to respond to that. Well, I’m here to tell you, a lot of people. On any given day we get 10-20% of our subscribers responding to us with their requests.

The result is two-fold.

1. We start a dialog and our subscriber knows that we actually spent some time answering their email and we’re real people over here trying to help them out.
2. We just got a bunch of free market research about what the people that are most interested in our site (they just gave us their email after all) want to see on it.
3. Okay, I know I said two, but there’s three. When something they requested actually makes it onto the blog they feel pretty darn good as you can imagine.
4. Gah! Dangit, four. When you’re sitting there trying to come up with your next piece of content and you’re racking your brain to think of something original, you can just open up your “Requests” folder and all of your brainstorming has been done for you.

So, make sure you’re making the most out of that moment in time and ask your subscribers how you can help.

That’s it for February’s income report!

As always, if you have questions leave a comment below, I read and answer each and every one!