December Online Income Report
Here is my December online income report. This is my tenth online income report to share!
December was my second full month freelancing full time. I quit my job in early October to pursue blogging full time. For the past couple of months, I have been working for myself and it’s great!
I launched this blog in January of 2015. Fortunately, I made the smart decision to stop treating this blog like a hobby and turn it into a business pretty quickly!
If you are thinking about starting a blog, this tutorial will help you start a blog today. In addition, you’ll also receive a FREE domain name.
I was able to quit my job and blog full time, all within my first year of blogging.
The main investment I made in myself and financially was starting blog using Bluehost, and I’ve made $13,000 in just 6 months of blogging. That’s the best return of investment ever!
Comparing my December online income report to previous reports
In last month’s online income report, although I was pleased with my income, it was a little lower than I would have liked.
I’m still learning the ins and outs of freelance income and not having a set pay schedule.
Even though I hustled hard in November, I didn’t see some of that income until December.
Here’s a recap of my online income reports from 2015:
- March 2015 online income report $61.83
- 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
- August 2015 online income report $740
- September 2015 online income report $1530.94
- October 2015 online income report $3634.28
- November 2015 online income report $2007.31
I’m pleased to report that my income in December was my best one yet! Talk about ending the year on a high note.
Here is the breakdown of my December online income report
- $368.99 Ad Income
- $285 Affiliate Income
- $3,585 Freelancing
Grand Total: $4,238.99
This amount is the grand total and before I deduct taxes. Right now I am putting away 30% of each paycheck I receive.
Ad Income
Both of these payments are from income earned in October and November, as I just missed the $100 minimum requirement for both companies in October. Here are my payments:
- $175.63 Google Adsense
- $193.36 Media.net
As I have mentioned in my last couple of online income reports, Media.net has been consistently performing better than Adsense.
Affiliate Income
I had a serious chat with myself about my lack of focus when it comes to affiliate income.
Essentially, this is passive income.
I am missing out on potential income earning opportunities.
After I went back through my website, I added affiliate links to products and services I consistently write about.
I’m not sure why I didn’t do this from the start?
Pinterest Consulting
My freelancing work with providing Pinterest services has been really busy.
While I have room for one or maybe two more clients, I am pretty much at my limit.
This is a great position to be in!
Everyone kept saying things slow down this time of year, but I had clients reaching out to me to get a jump on the new year.
Niche Consulting
I also provide freelance services related to my career niche that I had done prior to quitting my job.
It isn’t related to this blog at all and I like having income from two totally different sources. All work is done online, which is awesome.
Overall, my online income can be broken down as follows:
- 9% Ad income
- 7% Affiliate income
- 84% Freelance income
One of my goals in the upcoming year is to make these three areas a little more equal.
I want to start increasing my passive income and work less.
Ha, that’s easy to write, but I have to accomplish a lot more for that to start happening! #2016Goals
Hours Worked
I didn’t track my hours in December. However, I spent the first three weeks working daily.
I took off last week of December, which was glorious amazing perfect because I was getting pretty tired from working every day.
This month I am going to start tracking my hours worked, have specific office hours and learn the art of a work-life balance #2016goals
Monthly Expenses
These are my typical expenses:
- $5 Google Apps
- $130 Coaching sessions
- $47 VA work, including some work from Fiverr. This includes a mix of small tasks and help with my book cover.
- $7.64 GoDaddy Bookkeeping
- $8.63 PayPal fees
- $49 ConvertKit
Irregular expenses:
- $204.97 I’m going to #FinCon16!
- $43.18 Plane ticket to get me to FinCon (I used a voucher that was set to expire)
- $102.35 Registered my blog as a business.
Total December Expenses: $597.77
With it being the end of the year, I definitely made some of these purchases with taxes and expenses in mind.
I knew I would be purchasing many of these things in January and decided to pull the trigger early.
GoDaddy Bookkeeping
This month I signed up with GoDaddy Bookkeeping to start tracking my expenses. Initially, I was tracking all of my income and expenses using a basic spreadsheet. But I needed a better system.
I like this program because it’s online. Plus, it tells me how much my quarterly taxes will be.
Clearly, I need to stay organized and track all my expenses.
Newsletter / emails
About a month ago, I also blew by the 2,000 limit for emails with MailChimp.
The downside is I kept putting off importing new emails because I didn’t want to pay for an email list.
I wasn’t happy with Mailchimp and after much research, I went with ConvertKit.
Literally out of EVERY expense, this was the most nerve racking decision.
While it wasn’t so much about which company to work with, it was more about how I need to get better at writing newsletters. And sending them out.
As of right now, I think I’ve sent out a total of three newsletters ever and it’s just something I need to get better at doing.
I knew it was the right time to invest in my blog, however.
I’ll be writing more about this in the future to discuss why I selected them, how it’s worked out, etc. Expenses aside, I am really, really excited to use ConvertKit!
Pre-paid services
As I have prepaid for some services annually, I don’t include them in my monthly report. This includes:
- Tailwind – this is my favorite Pinterest scheduler I use for pinning my content and other blogger’s content. I spend around four hours a month scheduling my posts for Pinterest and this has been a major timesaver.
- Bluehost – I’m renewed through 2018! If you are thinking about starting a blog, Bluehost is great for hosting and purchasing a domain.
December traffic and page views
Along with December being my best month to date for earning online income, I had my best month yet for traffic and page views!
Here are some of my page views from 2015:
- January 1,076
- July 3,691
- August 17,314
- September 40,407
- November 54,339
My goal for December was to reach 60,000 page views.
I’m excited to share that I crossed a new threshold and had over 159,000 page views in December. Yup, I came thisclose to tripling my page views.
If you had asked me in January if I could get to 100,000 page views in one month, I would have laughed.
Even though I’ve been working so hard on this blog, I still can’t believe I crossed over 100,000 page views in one month. This makes me so happy!
If you are new to blogging and feel like giving up, anything is possible. Stick with it and keep going!
Blogging goals
In a future blog post, I’ll be reviewing if I achieved my 2015 goals and what my plans are for 2016.
Thanks for sticking with me and reading this blog. I appreciate it! Cheers to this being my first post of 2016 and the year ahead of us!
Hey Kristin, I want to know whether Pinterest and Facebook still provide a large volume of traffic in 2020. I think we shouldn’t completely rely on social media networks totally and we should also focus on Google SEO. Am I correct?
Amazing! I’ve just started my blog and don’t have audience yet. If I don’t promote my blog over Facebook, nobody bothers to see if lol.
It takes time to build an audience! That’s GREAT you are getting traffic from Facebook, keep it up. If you haven’t already, start using Pinterest as well. That’s my BEST way to get traffic 🙂
I just hit the point where I’m ready to get super serious about my blog and going through all your income reports has been such a big help! Thank you so much! I’ve pulled my site offline for the month of June and I’m so excited to say that I’ll be launching it seriously on the 30th and your posts have given me so much confidence in doing that! I’m so happy for everything you’ve accomplished and thank you for sharing these. 🙂
Oh my gosh, this makes my heart so happy! You can totally do this – email me if you have any questions 🙂
I am really glad I have found your site. It is motivational to find someone just starting out and doing so well. I am a part time blogger that has struggled to make it a high priority on my list even though I love doing it. I also purchased the EBA course but have procrastinated since 2014. Thanks for the boot in the butt.
Hey Desiree! You totally got this. At least with EBA you can go back thru the course anytime and pick sections to work on – that’s what I do 🙂 It was really hard for me to focus on blogging while working the day job, but it was worth it now that I do this full time. It’s crazy really, I never thought this could happen! Reach out to me if you have Q’s!
Congrats on your success. You have posted some impressive numbers and accomplishing it in such a short time is amazing. I will have to look into Media Net. I have been using affiliate links but ads may be a good idea to also pursue.
Thanks Tommy! Media net has been a great way to earn income. I can’t speak highly enough about their ads. Make sure you customize them.You can do this for free and model the colors and fonts after your site – this is the BEST advantage to using them over Adsense.
Do you have a post explaining how you get affiliate links? I have been blogging for over 5 years and have just now decided to monetize my blog this past December. I have already activated Ad Sense and I hear a lot of other bloggers mention affiliate links but I’m not sure how to go about that.
Hi Stormie! You are welcome to email me – that is a great idea on a post though. If you read through my blog reports, you’ll see how Media is my preferred ad network over Adsense, but affiliate income is the way to go!!
You are so inspiring, Kristin! I am thinking about starting my own blog for women going through divorce. Thank you for your enthusiasm and for showing me all the possibilities!
Yes, you should do it! That sounds like a great network for women 🙂
Wow Kristen, so glad to hear that this has taken off! Score 1 for the good gals (and guys)!
Yay, thanks Scott!!
Congratulations for your best month ever!
What is even more amazing is the jump in visits you’ve received this month! You are crushing the numbers =)
I updated your blog on my list of favourite bloggers and how much they make. You have jumped up many positions. Well done.
I’m already impatient to know what is happening in January!
Thanks Francisco!!!
Congrats on the page views and the increased income!
Thanks Shirria!
Whoohoo! Way to go — especially on the pageview. And you answered a question I’d been thinking about for awhile: What Media.net’s payout threshold was.
I’ve definitely seen an uptick in traffic since you started helping me. As I get more old posts all imaged-up, hopefully I can start hitting some of your more recent numbers. Obviously, 160k is a little ways down the road.
Now if I can just get myself to hunker down on Canva instead of goofing off watching TV or going out with Tim to play pool.
160K was completely unexpected and I expect things to calm down this month 🙂 We will crush it together this year with Pinterest!
Congrats on your best month ever! That is bad ass!!
I took your advice last month and got setup with media.net. I made a little tiny bit but its because I have adsense ads on my main portions of the blog that generate money.
Based on what I hear you saying, im thinking about swapping the two and putting the media.net ads where my current adsense ads to see how they perform.
Only then will I be able to get a clear picture on which one performs better. Im glad to see you are doing great with media.net.
Woohoo!! Media.net just came out of nowhere and has been amazing – who knew?! I wish I had known more about it sooner and read more case studies, but there just doesn’t seem to be a ton of info out there. I think I am going to do a post on the two with my numbers, just for reference for myself and if other people are curious. Totally nerdy 😉
Kristin, the first time I reached out to you early in 2015 was b/c I was inspired by your income reports and asked some questions. It is a blessing to watch your success. I’m thrilled for you. Ever thought of doing a class or e-course?! You have a lot to share I bet. Anyway, I am trying to follow in your footsteps over here! When the baby comes, I’ll be at home full time and am excited to have “more” time to blog!!!
Hi Kelly! We have both come so far in a year! I am so excited for your 2016 🙂
Congrat Kristin! Your 2015 income growth is great. You mentioned product sales in your pie chart, can we get a sneak peek of what product you’re creating?
Thanks Jen!! My guide comes out in a couple weeks for side hustling. I’m really excited to offer it as it’s all things that have helped me earn money over the years. I’ll be releasing my Pinterest Presence course in a few months too as it’s been a game changer for me!!
I’m so glad that I stumbled upon your lovely blog today and I thoroughly enjoyed reading your income report post (I find them fascinating), so thanks for sharing! I’ve definitely bookmarked your site! 😀
xoxo
Allison
http://www.wonderlass.com
Thanks Allison! I get nervous sharing them, so I’m glad you enjoyed it!!
Kristin your pageviews are INCREDIBLE and I need a book on how to replicate this!!!! I am so happy to be following along and just know you are going to be super successful in 2016!! This is your year, girl!!! Keep up the great work!!
Thanks Sarah!!
Wow! You have come such a far way in such a short amount of time that is awesome!
I have a question though, why did you register your blog as a business? I’ve been seeing this pop up a lot in various blogging groups (some say yes, others say no) and I am starting to wonder if this is something that legally has to be done or if people do it just as an added benefit (and what those are).
Hey! For me, registering as an S corp. is more beneficial for taxes than what I would pay as a freelancer. Plus I was worried about my personal finances and using my social security #, so I got the FEI number, etc. I want to separate everything 🙂 I’ll probably do a post on this, thanks!!
Yes, please do a post on this!!! I’m curious too!
I should!
Congrats on the income in December! You killed it!!
Thanks Chonce!
Congrats, Kristin! I’m so happy for you! 🙂
Thanks Kara!!
Kirstin, I have followed you all year and I am so motivated to follow in your footsteps. Thank you so much for sharing your journey and I can’t wait to see where you go from here in 2016.
Thanks Petrish!