Our third blog monthly income report brings us another month of profit! We are incredibly grateful to start seeing some positive progress toward the blogs success 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 March 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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March 2020 Income Report
Like the two 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 February, we saw a loss of revenue by $1.77 but our expenses remained the same. I’ll touch on this in more detail below.
Blog Traffic: February vs March
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 February to March.
In the month of February we had 10,412 users. In March we had a decrease of 25% totaling 7,808 users. This is likely due to the Covid-19 global pandemic impacting the travel industry. Since a majority of our content is travel related we are seeing a significant hit and will expect to see this trend to continue downward into April and May.
We are hoping other business owners are hanging in there during this time and finding ways to adapt to continue to provide value to their customers.
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 - $61.58 (Decrease of $68.27 from February)
Unfortunately, we saw a decrease of $68.27 in the month of March compared to February. We believe this is likely due to the Corona Virus since we had a 25% decrease in our monthly users. However, looking at our ad revenue I was hoping that this would stay consistent with the percentage drop in monthly users, but it actually dropped more than 50%.
The majority of our content is travel-related and a large chunk of our display ads are travel related. This in combination with a lower volume and a lower conversion rate dropped our EMPV (Earnings per one thousand views) significantly.
In February we saw an EMPV of $12.06! Now in March we see an average EMPV of $7.30 and only because of the strong first week in March before Covid-19 took over the world. Unless things change I am expecting our average EMPV to decrease down to roughly $3.50 or so.
If you read our previous income reports then you know we recently switched our ad platform from Google Adsense to Ezoic 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 - $173.59 (Increase of $45.53)
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 - $135.59
We saw an increase of $66.50 compared to February 2020, totaling $35.59 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 just surpassed on the 30th of March!) and 1,000 subscribers. We have 1 of the 2 requirements completed and on our way to 1,000 subscribers.
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 - $0 (No change from February)
During the month of March, we did not make any income from the course since we had no new members sign up. If you’re interested in how we travel for nearly free, you can check out the course below.
If you’re not sure what I am referring too, check out 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!
Want to learn how we saved over
on our past Scandinavian vacation?
Check out our e-course to learn how we accumulate over a million points and miles to redeem for free travel anywhere in the world.
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 (note these didn’t change from February):
- Adobe Premiere Pro – $19.99 – for video editing
- Clickfunnels – $97.99 – to maintain our travel hacking course
- Siteground – $10-12 our website hosting
- Pinterest Automation (Tailwind) – $10
In total we are spending about $139 in the month of March.
I am considering changing the software of the course from Clickfunnels to Teachable during this time since traveling has come to a screaming halt.
Total Income Generated
From the categories listed above, we earned a total revenue of $235.97 before taxes.
Income – Expenses: $235.97 – $139.98 = $95.99
So as you can see we have another profitable month. We were expecting to see continued growth but we we’re knocked down a bit by the impacts of Covid-19.
If you made it this far, please let us know if there’s 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