I earned $11,441.32 online in September, before expenses.
If you haven’t read the story behind my blog or why I publish income reports, please start here.
The crazy part – it was my first month of trying to make money with my business. Before September I had focused on creating great content and other parts of my business.
After looking at my growing website traffic, I started asking myself – are there ways to continue to add value to my website visitors and help support my business at the same time?
It turns out the answer was yes. I learned a lot about earning affiliate income, which is just earning commissions from products and services already mentioned on my website. Katie wrote some new articles that people had been asking. We changed some links to use referral links instead and BOOM! We went from $0 to $11,441.32 in one month.
I couldn’t believe it when I hit the SUM on my spreadsheet. (I hadn’t updated my FreshBooks yet). I periodically checked the affiliate reports during the month and saw I was making money. But I never added it all up.
I also kicked myself. Had I focused on making money on the blog sooner…well, let’s not go there. I estimate I probably could have made over $50,000 during the first half of 2016. And that’s a very conservative estimate.
The center of this success was my blog.
Product Income – $1,426.30
- Book sales
Affiliate Income – $10,015.02
- Amazon Associates
- Betterment
- Bluehost (click here for my tutorial on how to make money blogging)
- Cardpool
- GotoMeeting
- Lead Pages
- Long Tail Platinum
- Optin Monster
- Social Warfare
- SumoMe
- Survey Companies
- Theme Forest
- Udemy
Total: $11,441.32
The above breakdown doesn’t include expenses yet. Hey, it’s my first time publishing a report. I was so excited I just wanted to get it out there without having to figure out all my credit card charges and expenses.
Alright, enough celebration. Back to the guitar. When I was out of town, my band mates signed me up to learn this freaking hard song (Ties That Bind by Alter Bridge). Financial freedom – the kind you can get from owning your own business – lets me spend as many hours as I want to play guitar instead of working.
What would you do with financial freedom?
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