How I Made $2,592 in October 2022 [Blog Income Report of a Low Income Month]

Welcome to my October 2022 blog income report where I share my earnings, expenses and current projects as a business owner.

It’s been a while since I published a monthly income report. In fact, it’s been years.

The main reason I stopped is that things became repetitive. I was having $5K months and earning in 4 different ways from my blogging business and the reports started looking the same. Also, I focused on serving my audience better through online courses.

The course business became my main focus lately as I was finalizing my product suite, launching, selling and learning more about all that from experts.

I left the blogging business behind for a while, and at some point that became noticeable in the numbers. I wasn’t earning $5K a month anymore, although I was still living a pretty good life. And most importantly, I kept working on the projects I was passionate about.

Creative freedom is one of my favorite things in the world and I’m grateful for my business because it allows me to have it. I still remember the not so good old days when I was freelance writing. Once I replaced that with full-time blogging, I was happier than ever.

But after that the desire to build a course business came and I followed the intuitive nudges. That’s a different and often more serious kind of business model, you aren’t that behind the scenes anymore. You create video content for your programs, launch your products and show up on all platforms to sell actively. You charge what you’re worth and make sure you have strong boundaries (in terms of who is a good fit for a program and who isn’t, when doors open and close, how to handle refunds, etc.)

So I entered a whole new world in the online business industry and that took me away from what was already making me money. But recently I was inspired to come back to it, to find the balance between the two.

So now I work 5 hours every weekday and make sure both sides of the business (blogging and courses) get equal attention.

With that being said, I’m also writing this today to share behind the scenes of a low income month.

Maybe it’s not low for you, and maybe others think it’s nothing and only call someone a real entrepreneur or an expert in their niche if they are earning 5 figures a month.

But the reality is different. The reality is that we will all face low income months and they can continue for longer than we’d like. They can happen unexpectedly. They can come back when we are so comfortable with the new income level we’ve reached.

And in the middle of the frustration, feeling like an imposter, and working on my money mindset, I felt like publishing my income report.

The goal is full transparency. The goal is to show you that any number is okay when you’re in business.

The goal is to show up even when things don’t look good and when I’m not excited about the numbers.

So here we go. Let’s dive into all the numbers of my business for last month.

Blog Income Report

I earned a total of $2,592 in October 2022 from my blogging and course business.

Please keep in mind that’s gross income. A lot of it goes for fees I pay to other platforms, transaction fees, paying my own taxes (close to 30% of my income), insurance and pension. You can see all income reports here.

Earnings from each income stream:

Sponsorships

Sponsored content – $1,945

*My income from sponsored content is earned through online marketplaces for bloggers and advertisers as well as networking with brands via email. I teach all about turning blog sponsorships into a recurring income stream in my course The Blog Sponsorship Boss.

Display Advertising

Mediavine  – $528

Affiliate Marketing 

Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing [course] – $42

Total Affiliate Income: $42

Products

Bold Business School – $77 [from monthly payment plans]

Total Sales: $77

TOTAL (Gross Income): $2,592

Business Expenses

TOTAL: $246

A note on business expenses

These can be as low or as high as you want them to be.

Next month, for example, mine will be over 4 figures as I’m making some annual payments. I also use the best of the best tools in my industry.

But you don’t need all of these and you certainly don’t need them in the beginning.

Extra investments include programs, coaching, hiring help, etc. You can scale thanks to the right business expenses. But to this day, mine are pretty low.

Blog Traffic

october 2022 blog income report - traffic numbers

Pageviews: 29,239
Sessions: 22,776
Users: 20,075

Things have changed a lot in terms of blog traffic too. Some time ago I was getting 100K page views/month. That’s another side effect of leaving the blogging business behind for a while.

But this also shows the power of ranking your content in search engines. You can just leave it like that and it will keep bringing new visitors to your site, which can then mean more ad revenue, email subscribers, sales, etc. 

Read also: How I Got 103,231 Page Views and Made $4,305 from My Blog Last Month

Email List

october 2022 blog income report - email list growth

New Subscribers: 74
Cancellations: 69
Net new subscribers: 5

The report you see is from ConvertKit – the email marketing tool I use and recommend.

Here’s an explanation for those numbers.

Many cancellations/unsubscribes don’t mean anything bad. And in this case it’s mostly because I welcomed many new people to my list thanks to my courses.

They enrolled in some programs from bundles I participated in, they don’t know me, and they must have been signed up to the email lists of all other creators too. So once they start receiving many emails from different people, such as welcome sequences or weekly newsletters, they prefer to unsubscribe.

The number of new subscribers that join my list monthly is lower than a year ago for a few reasons.

First, it depends not traffic. Fewer visitors on the blog means fewer people will see my opt-in forms and have the chance to sign up.

Second, I completely updated my email marketing strategy as I want to only have the right people on my list, not just everyone. So I removed old opt-in forms that were on more general topics (such as making money, business, financial independence). Now I only have freebies related to building a blogging and a course business as that’s what I wanna teach. This attracts a more specific audience.

A lot more is happening behind the scenes though, such as automated emails for course students, new sequences, tagging and segmentation so I can email people based on their interest, utilizing feedback forms better, providing extra value inside sequences, etc.

And now, let me share what I was working on last month.

Business Updates

Finalizing Bold Business School

All content inside my signature program for course creators, Bold Business School, is now published.

Business Audit

As I talked about in the last episode of the podcast, I did a business audit that revealed some pretty interesting things. You can see the exact questions here.

I wanted to re-evaluate everything, stop doing what wasn’t working and make changes to my email list.

That exercise helped a lot and I took some decisions based on the data. I highly recommend you do the same for your business and repeat once a quarter.

Behind The Scenes Launches

Thanks to the business audit, I came up with a new idea and immediately put it into action. I felt exhausted from launching often and prepping everything from scratch and wanted to still introduce people from my audience to the right programs for them but also simplify it.

That resulted in doing what I call a behind the scenes launch. It’s for an existing evergreen product that’s always open for enrollment. It doesn’t involve social media or a completely new email launch sequence. It also happens only inside emails.

The important part was to decide who to send the emails to. So once I picked up the course, I created a new segment inside my email marketing provider and added only those who joined my list after the official promo of that course over a year ago. So that was quite many people.

But then I removed those who joined my list in the last month as it’s too early to promote to them. I also removed a few other groups of people based on tagging so I only send the offer to those interested and who haven’t heard about it.

I’ll continue doing this every now and then and it requires much less effort than an official launch.

Email Marketing

I spent many hours inside ConvertKit, making changes to opt-in forms, sequences, tags and rules. It was fun.

I’ve been using it for years and things were messy. There was too much going on so now I removed what was no longer necessary or in alignment with my current business vision and audience, and updated everything else.

Blog Updates

On the blog, you can see changes in the design of the main pages and what’s on the menu.

I created 2 success paths I can take any visitor on depending on whether they want to build a blogging business or become a course creator. The homepage is designed with that in mind.

Then, I created 2 separate pages with my best resources on the topic and these are now in the menu.

Cleaning up my WordPress site

Every now and then, it’s time to clean up your website. This is more technical and time-consuming but can boost the site’s performance and make it load faster.

Here’s what I did:

  • Removed old themes (except for the default one in WordPress) and unused plugins;
  • Used a lightweight plugin [WP Revisions Control] to limit the number of revisions stored for each post type;
  • Deleted media files that aren’t used. Installed the Media Cleaner plugin for that and then removed it. I found over 600 visuals such as old logos, graphics I’ve used for blog design, Pins, photos of me from old About pages, and images that aren’t used anymore as now I have access to stock photos;
  • Deleted old categories, tags and pages;
  • As I’m using the Elementor page builder, I also went through and deleted unused layouts and saved templates;
  • Removed blog content on any topic I don’t wanna be associated with anymore;
  • Content audit – now I’m going through all my blog posts (there are thousands!) and decide what can be removed, updated or left as it is.

New Content

Here are my favorite articles published on Let’s Reach Success last month:

My Plan for November

My main promotion in November will for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And while every year I share the best deals of my favorite tools online and the ones I’ve invested in, this year I’ll also do something interesting related to my programs. Stay tuned.

I’ll continue the content audit as that can take several months due to the countless articles on my site.

I’ll be working on improving my affiliate program. Join here if you’re interested.

I’ll plan the next launch of Bold Business School and will keep growing the waitlist. Sign up here if you’re interested in building a course business.

And I’ll keep working on my vision and plan for 2023.

Thanks for reading this far. Hope this blog income report was helpful.

Learn how I made $2,592 from my blogging business last month while working from home, and why that was considered a low income month.
About The Author

Lidiya Kesarovska

I'm a blogger, author, course creator and the founder of Let's Reach Success and it's my mission to share my knowledge in lifestyle design, blogging, business and personal development with you so you can manifest all your desires and serve your purpose as a business owner.
I've been named one of the top 10 course creators and experts to watch in 2021 by Yahoo! Finance, have written for TIME magazine, have been featured on Thrive Global, Disrupt Magazine, and more, and quoted on publications like Entrepreneur, Fit Small Business and Fundera.
After turning my blog into a full-time online business, I now teach others how to do the same because financial freedom doesn’t need to be just a dream.
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