February Blog Income ReportI’m not sure what the connection is between these income reports and the weather but I’m not a big fan of the trend we’ve got going. Last month I wrote up the income report while I was off work due to 8 inches of snow on the ground. As I’m typing this, forecasters are calling for 5-8 inches of freezing rain and snow again. Let’s hope this is a fluke and I’m not saying the same thing at the beginning of April!

The weather aside, if you recall last month I passed the $2,000 income milestone from this blog and set my goal for this month at $2,500. With the deadline of July 4th looming large on the horizon and the goal of $5,000 per month still far off, I needed to continue the growth trends from the previous months. So, how did I do?

Income

Here’s a look at February’s income, broken out by source. I’ve once again included the figures from last month in the parentheses for easy comparison.

Scratch Back: $0.00 ($130)
Private Advertising: $210 ($310)
Sponsored Reviews: $100 ($621)
Affiliate Sales: $91 ($0.00)
Theme Sales: $1,425 ($1,050)
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Total: $1,826 ($2,111)

As you can see, I feel just under $700 short of meeting my February goal of $2,500.

Expenses

While the income figures weren’t quite where I wanted them this month, the good news is that I also had less expenses this month.

Advertising: $250 ($500)
Affiliate Payments: $100 ($0.00)
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Total: $350 ($500)

So, when all is said and done, I had profit of $1,476 this month which is just $135.75 off last month’s pace. A few people have asked whether my goal of $5,000 a month is based on income or net profit and to be honest, I hadn’t thought about that until recently. Right now I’m going to operate under the premise that I’m aiming to hit $5,000 a month in income rather than profit. However, if I start spending significantly more in monthly expenses, I’ll probably revisit this one.

Analysis

Every month as I write this post I try to take a step back and analyze the results I’ve seen. Obviously this month I didn’t hit my goal and for only the second time during this experiment, the income numbers went down. When looking at the sources of income that dropped off (Scratchback, Private Advertising, and Sponsored Reviews) the only one that really surprised me was Scratchback. If you recall, a big chunk of last month’s Sponsored Review income was from a single review which I knew would be hard to duplicate.

But, just because I didn’t hit $2,500, doesn’t mean all the news was bad. Affiliate sales were up this month and I have a few ideas on ways to continue to improve that figure. Also, sales of the Blogging Experiment theme were up once again. As you can see in the expense report, we will be paying out $100 in affiliate commissions which means our affiliates brought in 4 sales or $200 net profit that wouldn’t have come in otherwise.

Up Next

With all that analysis in mind, I’m once again setting my goal at $2,500 for the month. March is two days longer and as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m going to be taking the next few days to spend some serious time coming up with a plan of action which will obviously include new ways to generate more revenue. It will definitely be a challenge but I’m confident I’ll get there.

And last but certainly not least, the winner of the Affiliate Challenge was Kyle Eslick of HackWordPress and Slickmania. Congrats Kyle and I’ll be contacting you shortly to hash out the details.

(image source: sehgal asad)

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