Monthly Blogging Income Report: February 2020 - BforBloggers

2019 is gone!.

Welcome, 2020. I remember when I wrote this income report back in 2019. Feels like yesterday.

Here’s another monthly blogging income report of BforBloggers, where I’ll share a bit about what happened in 2019 and how the blog did in January 2020.

This is a detailed report which shows how BforBloggers has grown over last year, and what progress I made in February 2020. It includes blog traffic and revenue stats and a few more updates.

I’ve also included a short report of 2019 as a whole, combining all the stats. For me, 2019 was a ride!. A fantastic year that taught me a lot and helped me achieve my first milestone.

Before beginning with the numbers, here’s a moment of delight I would like to share with you:

IMAGE——

I finally bought a new car after postponing the plan for 4 long months. A Hyundai Venue 1.0L turbo petrol.

Though I planned to buy The Green Forest color, at the time of booking I was really impressed with the Denim blue.

I wrote a letter to my subscribers regarding the same, You can join here if you haven’t subscribed to my email list.

While planning to buy my first car, I learned a TON. It was a completely different type of education that you can not learn from the theory; it requires a lot of talking, pondering, research, and communication.

The whole cycle deserves an article on its own, so here I’ll write about it in a nutshell:

I started researching the finance aspect. How to and from where to get credit, and what are the requirements were some of the important points that I needed to know all about.

Someone with no credit history doesn’t get credit unless he’s paid a few advance taxes. So, I thought, why not pay the full price?

In the meantime, I joined a few discussions on Reddit, where I got to know about how terrible this decision could be. Form both a personal and business point of view. I booked an appointment with a CA to discuss my tax returns and my decision to pay the full price of the car. He wasn’t very happy about it too.

My CA said the best thing I could do is wait until my credit history gets build. It takes at least 5-6 months to create a credit history.

Thankfully, I was using ICICI pay later before I got my credit card, which helped me get a credit report sooner than I anticipated.

Fortunately, I saved a lot of money here. Had I bought the car in cash, I would have paid a lot of money in tax.

I also started investing in ELSS mutual funds and PPF. I also started my NPS account, which I believe everyone should as soon as they can.

Starting an NPS along with PPF from a young age will help you make a strong corpus of evenly distributed and accumulated wealth over time. Both of these schemes are tax-saving schemes that require a recurring and long-term investment.

You can not withdraw any funds from PPF before 15 years. In the case of NPS, you can withdraw 25% once you’ve regularly invested for 3 years.

ELSS funds also have a lock-in period of 3 years. There are many other schemes you can use to save more taxes, such as tax saver FDs which require a 5 year lock-in period. No matter where you invest, just make sure you do.

Also, don’t forget to pay advance taxes. It reduces the load and makes it easy to manage the finance at the end of the year. I missed that opportunity this year, but I’ll make sure I do it from 2020.

January 2019: I book Hyundai Venue and send the quotation to the bank. Here’s when I get another bump, I’m not 21 yet.

I need to be at least 21 to get a car loan, under normal conditions. I read a few more discussions on banking policies and terms and conditions for another week.

One thing was sure, I knew these terms and conditions are malleable. You can talk to your branch manager, and get to an agreement on mutual consideration. If you’re in India, the best banks to get this done are ICICI and HDFC.

In my case, I had to give down 55% or about ₹6,25,000 ($8,500). Well, I believe next time, when I have to get credit for something, this record would get me a low interest, which will save a handful of money.

Now, let’s talk about BforBloggers’ numbers.

Traffic

The analytics report lacks the data before February

That’s because I moved BforBloggers from HTTP to HTTPS, and I had to create a new analytics profile.

So, a total of 85,077 people visited BforBloggers resulting in generating 97,415 sessions and 138,188 page views. The bounce rate was 74.74%, and the average session duration increased to 01:19.

Income

I crossed $10,000 mark in December 2019, but it included the annual bonuses, so the real cross came this February 2020, when I crossed it with sales in a single month.

Here’s a break down of my income:

Convertkit: $168 (recurring)
Hosting: $827 (Siteground: 450, WPX: 140, Cloudways: 62, Hostgator: 175)
ProwritingAid: $120
Crowdfire: $40
Interact: $126.01 (recurring)
GetResponse $74.12 (recurring)
Podcast affiliates: $1429.27
CleanTalk: $81.53
Affiliate earnings: $7900 (Approx.) including vetted partnerships

Total income: $10,600.

I’ll focus on optimizing for conversions more this year. For instance, by increasing my sales for Siteground by simply 5, I can make $100-$125 per referral.

I haven’t been paid by a few affiliate programs such as Astra, GeneratePress and Advanced Ads, and a few others. I requested them to increase my payout threshold to at least $200 to save on PayPal fees per transaction. I’ve also increased the same in Impact Radius as it has a $20 fixed fee for every payout processed.

Expenses

BforBloggers Team: $2100 (in 2019)
Developers: $800 (up until 3rd quarter of 2020)
ConvertKit: $990
WPX: $249
Canva Pro:$119
Gsuite: $12/month
Grammarly premium: $139.95
Subscribers: $29/month

Total expenses: $4530.95 (approx $800 in January and February 2020)

I recruited a few talents, including Nik and Mohit, who write blog posts when I’m busy with other stuff. Check this page if you would like to write for BforBloggers too.

I started using a bunch of tools and services as I progressed through months, here a few of the important ones:

Do note, I don’t have to pay for tools like Link Whisper, OptinMonster, Missinglettr, SocialSnap, and Unbounce. You can, too, ask a brand to let you use the tool for review purposes, and once you deliver sufficient sales for them, they’ll sponsor you completely. You don’t have to pay for tools you don’t need.

Always try to find ways to save money where you can.

I started using GetResponse in mid-July 2019 and then migrated to Aweber in September. I sincerely regret that decision. Aweber is nothing like GetResponse, and I immediately understood that. But due to the fact that I paid for three months in advance, I kept using Aweber till December.

That gave me a little bit of time to get my hands on other email marketing services like ConvertKit. Upon using ConvertKit for a short period of 5 days, I perceived this software as simply flawless. It has everything that I kept looking for in other email marketing services.

It took me close to 15 minutes to set up my sequences in place along with all the tags and segments for the main landing page optin form.

As I’ve already paid for 2020’s first quarter, I’ll migrate the complete list to ConvertKit once my Aweber plan expires.

I’ve paid for ConvertKit in advance, just like I’ll do for WPX and Canva Pro in March. These are the tools I feel are perfect for me at this time.

My hosting costs have increased by $150 this year since BforBloggers, it’s staging clone site along with 2 other sites exceeded the initial plan’s 10 GB space threshold. They’ve let me continue using the same plan until my next billing cycle, which is in March.

In terms of Smart Podcast Player (Now Fusebox) affiliate, my rank increased to top 3:

If you remember, I shared my affiliate rank was 5 in the last report. Note that I’ve been their affiliate since 2018, even before they officially published about it. Since it is a recurring service, each referral adds up in the total for next month.

I also crossed $50k in annuals sales:

Which also got me interviewed on their blog.

I’m currently trying Subscribers Push Notification, and it seems pretty modern and more feature-rich compared to PushEngage.

I’ve set up a welcome campaign, and it has an average click-through rate is 81.3%. So far, 1,516 people have subscribed to BforBloggers push notifications in the last 3 months.

I also upgraded my workspace to a more ergonomic setup adding:

A dell ultrasharp 4k 27″
A MacBook Pro 13″ (with Mac Keys and Trackpad)
A GreenSoul Pro chair, with the GreenSoul table and a footrest
iPad Air
Home mesh
And a printer

It is pretty clean and organized. Nothing to distract and break my flow.

*Check the new setup on the about page.

I keep an action figure in front of my eyes as it gives me the inspiration to work in the right direction with dedication and discipline. I’ll leave it to you guys to guess who it is.

That’s all for today. I hope 2019 went fantastic for you as well, and I would love to hear from you.

You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram for updates.

Let me know how your blog is performing and what you wish to emphasize more to grow this year.