August 2015 Monthly Online Income Report – $740

August was my best month yet for earning income and I’m excited to share what I’ve been up to! You might have noticed that I renamed this to my monthly online income report. Originally these monthly posts started off as solely blog income report, but now that I am moving towards a freelance career, it makes more sense to change the title.

This is my sixth online income report to share! This report only includes income I received from the month of August. I don’t include any money that is pending. If the money isn’t in my bank account, it doesn’t make it in this report.

My journey to blogging and making money from my blog has been a slow, but steady one. I started blogging almost a year ago, but didn’t get serious about my blog until January of this year. I made the smart decision to stop treating this blog like a hobby and turn it into a business.

If you are thinking about starting a blog, this tutorial will help you start a blog today. You’ll also get a FREE domain name for a year! I was able to quit my job and blog full time, all within my first year of blogging. I am really glad I took a chance and started a blog! I invested around $140 to start my blog using Bluehost, and I made $13,000 in 6 months of blogging. That’s the best return of investment ever!

Along with getting hosting for your blog, you’ll also need a theme. While you can get them for free through WordPress, I prefer these:

• Restored 316 Themes
• Genesis Framework Package
• Code + Coconut Themes

In March, I had my first online income report! Since then, I have been slowly making money each month.

• April 2015 online income report $40.00
• May 2015 online income report $61.40
• June 2015 online income report $66.10
• July 2015 online income report $515

So what’s different this month versus previous months? While it’s been months in the making, I recently announced on this blog that I plan to transition from full time employee to full time freelancer.

A couple of months ago I started freelancing in addition to my full time job. Since I made money freelancing in July and in August, I decided I would document and post everything on this blog.

Online Income Report

• $705 Freelance Income

• $35 Affiliate Income

• $0 Google Adsense (Even though I haven’t met the $100 threshold yet, I managed to make $41.46 in 1 month. This is so exciting!)

Grand Total: $740

This amount is the grand total and before I deduct taxes. Right now I am putting away 30% of each paycheck I earn. I still have to meet with an accountant to go over the best way to operate, but for now I feel like 30% is a solid amount to save.

If you want to keep track of your online income (which I highly recommend) check out Freshbooks! It’s what I’ve used to track business income, expenses, invoice clients, and more. Click here to learn more about Freshbooks.

Affiliate Income

Rakuten: Hello, free money! This is my fave company I use when I shop online. I start here before shopping any online sites. It’s free cashback on every purchase and the money gets deposited into my PayPal account. It’s really hard to turn down free money. I’ve made almost $750 since signing up, which is crazy.

Ibotta is another free cell phone app. You use it after you go grocery shopping and use your receipt. It’s basically a rebate app, so you can earn anywhere from 50 cents to $5 off everything you buy.

My favorite part about this app is that it’s not always brand specific, like a lot of coupons are. So you’ll be able to scan “any brand of bread” for 50 cents off, etc. If you do coupon – you can STILL use Ibotta and get a rebate. For the diehard couponers out there, this will often result in getting an item for FREE. Crazy, right?

If you want to grab the Ibotta app and start making money off your grocery receipts, click here to get started. You will receive a cash bonus of $10 when you scan your first item! 

This is how I earned my freelance income:

My freelance income is fairly diverse because I got to work with different clients on different projects. Here’s what I worked on with my new freelance business:

• Pinterest management
• Pin design
• Pinterest consulting

These are all services I recently added to my ‘Hire Me’ page.

I absolutely love this aspect to being in the online space.

I am a really visual person, and I love connecting with bloggers and companies who need help with creating photos for new blog posts or updating old photos for previously published content.

I did a lot of digging and even wrote a post about all the different job boards I found.

The job boards I searched included a huge array of career fields, so I think it’s possible to find almost any job online these days. Eventually I found a group specific to my career niche that matches clients with professionals.

Get excited because I FINALLY hit the sacred $100 threshold Google Adsense requires to be paid.

Even though I will be receiving a check for $104.14 for August, I am not counting it until next month’s online income report because I haven’t actually received the payment. So for now, I count this as zero income.

Here’s a breakdown of my expenses:

• $5 Google apps

• $19 Apps like PicMonkey, Board Booster, etc. (2019 Update: Instead of Board Booster, I exclusively use Tailwind). 

• $120 Coaching

Total Expenses: $144

Last month I wrote about how annoyed I was to pay for Google apps, as many readers mentioned they use it for free.

I have an upgraded plan so my email address matches my domain name. This means I can add something like advertise@my domain name for companies interested in advertising on my blog instead of it filtering in with client emails.

I have small expenses with monthly service subscriptions and apps that are vital to my business. What I don’t have listed in these expenses is Tailwind, which I purchased a couple months ago. I already paid for this for an entire year, so I don’t count it in my monthly expenses.

By the way, Tailwind is completely changing the way traffic comes to my blog from Pinterest. If you want to increase your pageviews, sign up with Tailwind!

Finally, to help ease the transition to freelancing full time, I started working a business coach. 

I wanted help on how to ramp up my freelance career (while still working full time) and what steps I needed to land jobs. This has been worth every penny and I landed a client within a couple days of our first meeting!

I don’t really see my expenses increasing anytime soon. I’m on a DIY budget for now and need to do the majority of work myself. I do like to keep Fiverr in my back pocket for one-off jobs, like technical help, since tasks are $5.

If you are thinking about starting a blog, this tutorial will help you start a blog today. You’ll also get a FREE domain name for a year! I was able to quit my job and blog full time, all within my first year of blogging. I am really glad I took a chance and started a blog! I invested around $140 to start my blog using Bluehost, and I made $13,000 in 6 months of blogging. That’s the best return of investment ever!

I am really excited to see where September takes me. I have four weeks remaining at my full time job, so I won’t be limited with my freelance work. Right now I simply don’t have enough time working full time, freelancing, blogging and prepare to move across the country.

Have you ever thought about leaving your day job and becoming a freelancer?