Blog Income Report: January
I must say that I have always been terrible with money: I could spend all of my salaries in one day without thinking what I will eat tomorrow morning, I never really had any savings and never kept track on my earnings and expenses.
Last year after divorce I returned back to Moscow, and I must say that at some point I felt really depressed because of financial insecurity. I already had some occasional earnings with this blog, but it was far from what I can call stable income. In the act of despair, I went to astrologist and spent my last 100 USD on the session with her. My question number one was whether my pitiable financial state will improve in the nearest future. The answer which I got from her surprised me and opened my eyes. She told me that I will not get stable income until I learn how to value the money that I receive. She said that all money that we get have to be respected and it doesn’t matter whether it is 1$ or 10000$. So she advised me to start to keep track of all my earnings and which is more important all my expenses, analyze them daily and think all the time how can I increase the first one and decrease the second by avoiding unnecessary spendings. Since then I decided to make monthly blog income reports and the result after one year is really astonishing. From occasional couple of hundreds of dollars that I usually spent on unnecessary new outfits and other nonsense, I started to get stable income which is constantly growing. This was really helpful for since I just started to establish my own interior business here in Moscow and sometimes was struggling to find new clients.
So here are my pretty figures for January:
- Ads – 180$
- Affiliates – 78$
- Sponsored posts – 670$
- L’Essenziale boutique sales – 994$
- E-design – 200$
- Total income : 2122 $
Of course, I am still far from earning five figures, which some bloggers certainly do, but at the same time, I am very happy to see constant growth and improvement. Now I’d like to talk a little bit more about these branches of income:
1.Selling actual goods
As you can see the biggest part of my income consists of selling physical products in my online shop, which is located on the subdomain of my blog. I personally see it as one of the best ways of monetizing an interior design blog. Some of my favourite blogs, like Consort Design, own their online shop, where they sell home decor and lifestyle goods, which reflect their brand and are often used in their interior design projects. If you want to go this way, my personal advice is not to invest in keeping physical goods in stock. I collaborate with my artists and crafters based on “made to order” basis, so they only make the products after I get the payment from clients. It is really hard to predict what will sell next, so I perceive investing in purchasing actual goods or even supplies as a potential loss.
2. Selling online services
Another way of monetizing your interior design blog is to create and promote your own stuff. In my case, this is e-design services that I provide. I am still working on how to get more online clients. One of the strategies that I started to use is including a call to action at the end of the posts about my interior design projects. Another idea was to make a cute banner and placing it in the most visible place: after doing it I could see a significant increase in a number of people visiting my e-design page.
3. Affiliates.
When I was looking for information for affiliate programs, I found that mostly interior design bloggers work with Amazon, and big online stores, such as One Kings Lane, for example. My answer to this – unless you have tons of traffic, your income from these affiliate programs will be close to zero. The best way to succeed with affiliates is to provide to your readers’ resources that they are looking for. I will explain. I often write reviews about new or popular interior design software and applications. Naturally, my articles are usually on the top of the Google list for such search terms as “interior design software”. Lately, I’ve started a collaboration with several software developers to work as their affiliate partner. I only recommend those programs that I personally tried and loved. My readers come to my blog to read about interior design software, find all necessary information and then purchase software through me and I get a little commission from every sale.
4. Sponsored posts.
At the moment it is one of the biggest shares from monetizing my blog, but in the nearest future, I want to decrease it and make points #1 and #2 as my biggest source of income. I will explain why. If you are focusing on brand sponsorships you are mainly promoting other people’s products instead of your own. Consequently, you are growing somebody’s else brand instead of your own.
At the end of this post I wanted to share my statistics for the past month:
Pageviews: 32K
Unique visitors: 17K
The 3 most popular posts written in January were:
- How To Achieve Goals In Your Interior Design Business
- KLC School of Design – Project 5
- The Best Daily Planners for Interior Designers for 2016
I think it’s been a great start of the year and I look forward to what blogging will bring me in 2016. If you have any questions about the information I shared above, please do ask me in the comments section below.
