If you’ve arrived here from my Working while travelling around Australia post, welcome.
As promised, here is our October 2021 income report, but before we get into that; you may be wondering why on earth we’d be sharing how much money we make?
Like many Aussies and Kiwis, I was brought up to not talk about how much money we make. I’m not really sure why that’s the case, maybe it comes off as being boastful, or maybe it’s due to shame at how much we’re not making?
Either way, it’s pretty much ingrained in our culture to keep our income to ourselves.
But I would see some bloggers (mainly Americans) sharing their income reports and I found it sooo enlightening, encouraging and inspiring!
Reading other peoples income reports opened my eyes to the many different ways that you can earn money online. And it helped me realise that you don’t have to have a super popular website or thousands of followers on social media to make a half decent income.
How much we earn from blogging
Currently we have:
Blog 1: BenAndMichelle.com
Blog 2: RVObsession.com
Blog 3: CampervanAU.com
All amounts are in US dollars
October 2021
Ad Income:
Blog 1 & 2 are monetized with Mediavine; they’re a premium ad agency that pays you to put ads on your site. Just like Google Adsense, but way, waaaay better.
Blog 1: $986
Blog 2: $1,549
Blog 3: $0
We achieved the above income with 45k pageviews for Blog 1, and 44k pageviews for Blog 2.
Affiliate income:
Affiliate marketing is where you link to a product on your website using an affiliate link.
If someone clicks on the link, and then purchases that product, you will make a small commission for that sale.
Blog 1: $7
Blog 2: $131
Blog 3: $45
Total Income: $2,718
Expenses:
Hosting, paid plugins, online tools – $108 Some things, like hosting with Wealthy Affiliate, are paid annually and the cost is shared by the 3 blogs
Training, education – $0 (although I usually average a couple of hundred per month on this)
Outsourcing – writers, VA – $1400 I’ve employed some help with writing posts for RVObsession. It’s expensive but so far the quality looks to be really good and it means that my time is freed up for other projects.
Total Expenses: $1,508
Total October: USD $1,210 approx. AUD $1,660
So there we have it. Keep in mind, this is gross profit, so doesn’t take into account tax or anything like that.
Is it more, or less what you thought it would be?
Does reading that make you excited that you could do the same, or does it make you think that blogging is just not worth your time and effort?
I have to admit though, this is a pretty bad month. For all of 2021 we’ve been averaging about $3k profit for the blogging business.
I hope this is helpful to you, especially if you’re a new blogger. It may help to put things into perspective for you.
Michelle xx
BTW – I started making money online by being a Virtual Assistant. I think it’s a great way to start out making money while travelling, here’s how I got started.
This post includes affiliate links. We only recommend products we use ourselves and believe in. You can read more in our Affiliate Disclosure.
Resources we use and recommend:
Wealthy Affiliate – the hosting platform that I love and happily recommend ConvertKit – email autoresponder that allows me to send emails like this one
Courses we use and recommend:
Pinteresting strategies – excellent for beginners who want to use Pinterest to drive traffic to their blog
Easy On Page SEO – another beginner course that is an excellent foundation in good SEO practices
Stupid Simple SEO – for a deep dive into SEO. Only once you’ve set up your blog and done a few posts… otherwise you could get a bit overwhelmed.
Six-Figure Blogger – for advanced bloggers ready to get into digital products