Our fourth blog monthly income report brings us another month of profit! We are incredibly grateful for the positive growth and want to thank you for following our journey and reading/watching along the way.
If you’re interested in our previous travel blog/vlog income month reports you can check them out here:
This section is the same as last month and for people who are seeing our blog income reports for the first time. If you’ve already read a previous blog income report then scroll down to April 2020 Income Report.
From January 2020:
Back in November 2018, Taylor and I decided to take the blog more seriously and started to treat it like a business. We invested in a blogging course, called Elite Blog Academy which helped us take several actionable items to keep us accountable on growing Mathers on the Map. Since then, our blog is starting to generate momentum and I think it’s a good time to share our first ever blog income report broken down into 3 main buckets: ad revenue income, affiliate income, and course sales.
Why am I writing an income report?
The goal of this income report is not to brag in any way shape or form. In fact, I think you’ll quickly learn that there isn’t much to brag about at the moment.
The amount of time Taylor and I dedicate to the blog compared to the income generated at is a terrible rate of return. Hopefully one day that will change as we continue to grow.
You may be wondering why I am sharing this with you. Well, I spend a lot of time reading other successful blogs and one of the things I find so interesting are others” income reports. I love the idea of looking back and seeing the growth over the course of a given time frame and seeing the historical track record of a blog’s growth. This intrigued me to one day start doing this for Mathers on the Map. I hope over the course of the next few years we will have a bit of a track record documenting our journey along the way, hopefully inspiring others.
At the end of the day we want to make a full-time income from doing something we love and it would be amazing if our blog could be one of the main tools to create that income. We also hope that these income reports will inspire you to tackle your dreams no matter how big.
If you’re interested in getting our income reports sent right to your email, consider subscribing to our email list. We’ll also send you 3 travel tips that we wish we knew when we started traveling.
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April 2020 Income Report
Like the three prior reports, I am breaking this income report into 3 main buckets, ad revenue, affiliate income, and course sales. I also am going to compare this month’s to the previous month to track our growth throughout the year. I’ll provide a brief high-level overview and then provide a detailed explanation below.
Compared to March, we saw a gain of revenue by $78.39 and we decreased our expenses from $139.98 to $71.98 bringing our total profit to $242.38 for the month!
Blog Traffic March vs April
As you probably can assume, our blog’s income is reflective of how much traffic we get on our blog and YouTube channel. Here’s a comparison from March to April.
Blog Traffic March
Blog Traffic April
In the month of February we had 10,412 users. In March we had a decrease of 25% totaling 7,808 users. In the month of April we had ANOTHER decrease of 50%.
Clearly, the COVID-19 global pandemic is impacting the travel industry tremendously. Since a majority of our content is travel related we are seeing a significant hit but I think the steep decline has finally leveled out.
We hope things will start to turn around in an upward direction in the near future. We wish all of the best for those affected by this disease, as well as the impacts on small business owners.
Income Streams
Like I mentioned earlier I am breaking the income report into 3 main buckets, ad revenue, affiliate income, and course sales.
1. Ad Revenue - $11.17 (Decrease of $50.41 from February)
Unfortunately, we saw a decrease of $50.41 in the month of April compared to March for our blog’s ad revenue. This is due to two reasons.
1. The Corona Virus' impact on the travel industry
The big one, of course, is the Corona Virus since we had a 63% decrease in our monthly users from our peak in February.
Also many travel-related company’s marketing budgets completely went out the window which dropped the overall EMPV (Earnings per one thousand views) significantly.
In February we saw an EMPV of $12.06! Now in April, we see an average EMPV of about $3.50.
2. Brute Force Bot's on our Blog!
Second, we ran into an issue with Ezoic identifying non-human traffic on the “backend” of our site trying to “brute-force” their way into the admin. Due to this, we shut down the Ezoic Ads half-way through the month and had to turn back on Google Adsense until we get this resolved. This hurts because Ezoic has a better EMPV than Google Adsense, luckily we do not rely 100% off this revenue to fund our adventures.
If you read our previous income reports then you know we recently switched our ad platform from Google Adsense to Ezoic in January and highly recommend it if you meet their requirements. If you want to join Ezoic’s platform, considering using our referral link, it would be greatly appreciated!
2. Affiliate Income - $205.19 (Increase of $31.80)
The second way we make an income from Mathers on the Map is through our affiliate income. Affiliate income is a great way to make additional income from your blog, youtube channel or whatever other social platforms you use and it’s quite simple. For example, we recommend the products we use in our van build episodes on YouTube and insert our affiliate link in the description of the video. If someone clicks on the link, it brings them to the product page on Amazon.com and if they make a purchase within 24 hours of clicking our link, we earn a commission from that sale at no cost to the individual making the purchase. So, it’s a win-win for the reader and the content creator!
Amazon Affiliates - $167.39
THANK YOU FOR THOSE WHO CLICK OUR LINKS!!!! WE REALLY APPRECIATE IT!
We saw an increase of $31.80 compared to March 2020, totaling $167.39 for the month which is a result of our youtube channel gaining more traffic and more subscribers. Hopefully, this trend continues!
As our YouTube channel grows we can become eligible for monetization. The requirement is 4,000 watch hours in the last 12 months (which we surpassed on the 30th of March!) and 1,000 subscribers. At the time of this writing, we have 728 subscribers, almost there!
Thank you to everyone who subscribed to our channel and watching our videos, we really appreciate it! We’re hoping we can add another source of income through ads on our videos soon.
Clickfunnels Affiliates - $38.80
Clickfunnels is a drag and drop website builder specializing in marketing funnels helping entrepreneurs build successful businesses. We use Clickfunnels to build and manage our travel hacking course which you can learn more about below.
We also earn an affiliate income from Clickfunnels. Similar to Amazon, if someone clicks on our referral link and signs up for Clickfunnels through our link, we earn a commission. Again, it’s at no cost to the user clicking on our links and helps us out tremendously!
If you’re interested in learning more about Clickfunnels, I’d appreciate it if you check it out I recommend starting out with the One Funnel Away – 30-day challenge to kick start your business or if you want to become an affiliate of Clickfunnels, you can start here!.
Booking.com Affiliate - $0
We did not receive any affiliate income from booking.com this month which is why it’s not included. As you can see from the above, the majority of our affiliate income comes from Amazon’s affiliate program.
3. Course Sales - $97 (Increase of $97 from March)
Our third stream of income is from our online course sales. We sell a course that teaches people how to manage credit and use credit as a tool to gain millions of points and miles. The strategies taught in the course are the same strategies we implement to use points and miles to fund all of our travel adventures.
During the month of April, we made one course sale which was given as a discount from the standard price since we are in the works of migrating software providers. If you’re interested in how we travel for nearly free, you can check out the course below, reach out to us directly or stay tuned for when the courses’ sales page is finished.
If you’re not really understanding the “points and miles world”, then check our recent trip report: How we got a luxury Scandinavian vacation for FREE, savings us over $6,600 and enabled us to see the northern lights!
March 2020 Expenses
To keep Mathers on the Map growing we need to invest back into the business. To do so we have a few monthly expenses including:
- Adobe Premiere Pro – $19.99 – for video editing
- Teachable – $29.99 travel course host
- Siteground – $10-12 our website hosting
- Pinterest Automation (Tailwind) – $10
If you’re following our income reports, you may notice we reduced our expenses from $139 to $71.98! We switched hosts from click funnels to teachable to lower our hosting costs for the travel course. After a few months of thinking about making the switch, we finally pulled the trigger.
Total Income Generated
From the categories listed above, we earned a total revenue of $314.36 before taxes.
Revenue – Expenses: $314.36 – $71.98 = $95.99
So as you can see we have another profitable month even with the impacts of COVID-19.
If you made it this far, please let us know if there are any questions or comments you have about our blog income reports. If you have any feedback as well it would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks for reading!
Kevin