Income Report: How I Made $75,000 Blogging in Year 2

January 8, 2018

Kate Kordsmeier

Blogging, Income Reports

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  1. Sarah Newman says:

    This is so fascinating! Love seeing the behind the scenes breakdown of all this data. Congrats on your growth and cheers to exceeding all your goals for 2018!! 😀

  2. Love to see all your insights, congrats on a great 2017!

  3. Wow!! You did absolutely incredible this year! I love how detailed you were in the post about everything you did and what worked for you. What a great idea to hire a business manager! I have always struggled with pitching to brands… it just doesn’t feel quite right. Where did you find your business manager and are there others out there? (It seems like they did an awesome job for you this year!!) Looking forward to next month’s report 🙂

    • Many thanks, London. I’m glad you found value in the details… I can definitely be a bit OCD when it comes to this stuff 😉 I’ll be answering your question in my next income report, so stay tuned!

  4. Kelsey Ogletree says:

    Congrats, Kate! This is really impressive and your hard, hard work really shows. Keep up the great work. You’re inspiring to me!

  5. Thanks so much for posting this – it is incredibly helpful and motivating! I especially appreciate the insight that investment in your business helps you grow faster – I have struggled with that. Here’s my question: How did you go about finding all the people that you have hired to help you?

    • Thanks, Micaela. It’s super vulnerable to post something like this, so I’m glad you found value in it. I’ll be answering your question in my next income report, so stay tuned 🙂

  6. abra says:

    Wow! You had an awesome year. Thank you so much for sharing all of the details. Reading this was both encouraging and helpful while maybe slightly overwhelming 🙂 But what part of blogging doesn’t feel overwhelming?? I just listened to you on the Chopped Podcast as well, excellent episode!
    Would you mind sharing who designed your media kit? It is GORGEOUS! and super smart.
    Thanks, Kate! I know you will absolutely crush your 2018 goals!

  7. Viola says:

    This was quite interesting to read – thank you for presenting it.

    I am not interested in starting a blog myself, nor much in the general topic of blogging as a business or as a career, but nonetheless it’s great learn a little bit about the nuts and bolts of the process, and about what professional bloggers are dealing with behind the scenes and strategizing about, as they create and manage their sites.

    I noted that your daily traffic was generally pretty consistent all year (around 2000 give or take, increasing just slightly as the year went on), but your monthly income jumped dramatically in the second half of the year (and was pretty variable month-to-month).

    [I think you said you increased the number of sponsored posts during the year – was this the reason for the large increase in income, and the variability of it?]

    I was surprised by how much (relatively) you spent on a virtual assistant. What kind of things do you have the virtual assistant do? How much do you pay that person per hour? Is it the same person who works for you all the time, or do you use some kind of agency and use whomever they have available when you need something done?

    I don’t know how much virtual assistants make — my impression was that they are generally people who don’t live in the US and generally are therefore paid pretty low hourly rates, such as maybe $5 an hour or something?? – but even if you paid a virtual assistant your $38/hour wage (the one that you earned from your 925 hours of work last year), that would equate to the assistant working almost 7 hours a week for 50 weeks, and that is a lot of time across the span of a year to employ someone else when your own weekly working time averaged out to only 18.5 hours a week for 50 weeks.
    I realize that an administrative assistant can be much better at doing certain things, and also might have a higher tolerance for doing exacting or repetitive work, but if you took back some or most of the work that your virtual assistant did for you last year, you could apply that expense to your income, making it more like $50,000 a year pure profit, and if the assistant was paid $38 an hour (which, actually, I would highly doubt, since that is a very high hourly rate! But I’m just assuming that figure in my calculations for the sake of argument here!), absorbing the assistant’s 6.6 hours a week would increase your working hours from 18.5 to about 25 hours a week (over 50 weeks) which is still just “part-time” on your behalf.

    If you had said that you already spent 45 or 50 hours a week on your blog, then I would understand paying another person to work 7 (or 14 or 21 or however much your virtual assistant works each week) hours a week alongside you.
    But working just 18.5 hours a week on the blog (925 hours per year averaged out over 50 weeks), if it’s your only job, and if you don’t have a lot of other responsibilities…
    (I must confess that I have no idea about your personal life and non-blog professional activities – this is only like the 3rd page I’ve even seen of your website tonight! But your blog “feels” like you probably are relatively young without a lot of dependents or other time-heavy commitments. I have looked at about 30 health-based blogs in the last 2 days, so I don’t know who was who really, but I think you were the person who was barefoot, with slightly dirty bottoms-of-feet in one of the photos, 😉 , in front of a big shelving system/pantry and in front of a fridge, and the provisions looked like they were for maybe one or two adults)
    …anyway, if you don’t have a lot of other responsibilities, 18.5 hours per week across the year seems like a pretty light work schedule, and you might be able to get quicker/better at doing some of the contracted-out jobs that you were paying other people a lot of money to do for you last year, and recapture that in your total income.

    If I am reading the charts correctly, it looks like the average viewing session was 1 minute long and the average pages viewed were only 1 and 1/3rd pages. To me, that sounds pretty low for an informational blog that is about a complex subject with many interlinked layers to it.
    It also looks like many of the visitors were first-time visitors and there weren’t that many repeats (424,000 unique users and 540,000 sessions, so repeat visitors were responsible for 116,000 sessions beyond their original sessions). [Again, though, I may have been interpreting that chart incorrectly.]

    What are all these people popping over very quickly to look at,
    are they even reading a whole page before they decide to leave (1 minute isn’t that long to spend when a page might have a substantial article or recipe on it that is several paragraphs long),
    why are they deciding to leave the website very quickly instead of perusing some other pages on the site first,
    are they hopping over here just to print something off,
    are they coming here and realizing it wasn’t what they expected,
    are how could you encourage people to stay here longer and to look around more extensively, get more involved in your topics and maybe sign up for various stuff you are offering?

    My next comment is not specific to your blog at all, just a general impression —
    and it is not meant to be a criticism, certainly not of you personally, because it is the way society is set up!

    For many, of course, blogging is not a charitable or volunteer activity, it’s a way to earn money, and people deserve to be paid for providing quality services to others.

    But it struck me with the information you provided here how much of professional bloggers’ time is bound up in counting clicks, chasing advertising, self-promotion across a wide variety of platforms, packaging the same information in a number of different vehicles, getting professional photos taken and “branding” oneself, selling products made by other people and arranging for commissions from that, getting contact details for readers then bombarding them with communications and promotions — as opposed to just “plain” writing, creating, teaching, advocating about an important topic.

    To be honest, the focus our world puts on salesmanship and earning commissions makes me feel cold and sad.

    In the UK, many nurses, schoolteachers, college lecturers, trained chefs, etc. do not make as much as $38,000 a year in a full-time job (with unpaid overtime). And the cost of living is higher there than in most of the US.

    To repeat, my cold/sad feelings are regarding “society”, certainly not you personally!
    You are being efficient and smart with your time by earning your living this way, and (as I think you wrote on this page or somewhere) at least you are focusing on a subject that you care passionately about, one that you believe can only be helpful and health-promoting to current and future visitors to your site.

    …I have to laugh when thinking what would happen if *I* were doing a food-type of blog and tallying up the income and expenses — I’d probably just have the “detox market, 80 cents” in the profit column, and $19,999 in the expense column for “groceries for recipe development”. 🙂

    I hope that you will reconsider your decision to stop creating your annual reports and just do monthly ones. I think the annual overview gives a lot of unique insights.

  8. Jen says:

    Thanks for sharing this, Kate! It’s so helpful and motivating to see what you’ve accomplished. Congrats on a great 2017 and here’s to an even better 2018!

  9. Adeola Chukwumah says:

    Thank you so much for sharing.
    Where do you find the folks to create your team to help with things that are not your strong suit.ie marketing, social media, editing, etc
    How do you get competitive rates?

    Thanks
    Adeola

  10. Tiffany says:

    Thank you so much for sharing your insight with us! I also have followed several of the bloggers who post income reports and have always had a deep respect for their willingness to share what works in the world of blogging. I hope that one day I am able to post the same kind of reports as well to help pave the way for new bloggers as you have done 😉

  11. Thanks for posting this informative and and very useful income report. There is alot of great information here and really useful to see charts and breakdowns to put things into context. Your blog is really lovely with heaps of useful information and congratulations on being consistent and sticking with it. By the way, I also heard you on the chopped podcast. Great interview and so nice to hear you in person.

  12. Yentl says:

    You’re a bad ass and I love your transparency! Keep up the great work. Can’t wait to see what 2018 has in store for you and R&R!

  13. Holly says:

    I have been a fan of yours and just listened to your podcast with Bjork on FBP. Great interview and thanks for sharing your time and knowledge with us! This post is especially helpful and motivating to see how bloggers are making money on their sites. So happy for your success!

  14. Hey Kate! I just listened to your interview with Bjork on the FBP podcast. This income report is so interesting and really inspirational. I’m not quite ready to pull the trigger to take my blog from a hobby to start blogging “as a business” (a phrase that I love!). It’s the dream, but I keep talking myself out of it from a place of fear. I am struggling with the ‘spend money to make money’ part and really enjoyed listening to the interview where you guys really touched on that. Hearing how other people have been able to make it happen through hard work and laser focus is so inspiring and helps to melt down some of the fear I’ve been building up. Thank you so much for your openness and inspiration!

    • I’m so happy to hear that you got value and inspiration from the interview, Allie! I appreciate hearing from you and wish you the best on your blogging business! 🙂

  15. JOHN MULINDI says:

    Your list of blogging income sources inspires me to not focus on few ways of blog monetization. Thanks for sharing these amazing insights. This goes along way to help many bloggers.

  16. Jesper says:

    Very inspiring reading Kate!
    Your income report starts from January 2017, but you have been working on this site from October 2015.

    As much as I like your income reports from 2018, I feel the first year is the most interesting. This is where you create your foundation for the coming years.

    Would it be possible for you to share some numbers from 2016 in terms of traffic and income? I am especially interested in your traffic growth.

    All the best

  17. You are the only blogger that I read each post, see is IG post, and take notes while I am reading. I am obsessed with your income reports and actually put them into ACTION. I am excited this year to implement the plan I created from your posts and to see the growth happen. Thank you for all you do. I appreciate you more than you could ever imagine. 

    xoxo,
    Ashlee (@simplholistic)

  18. CHIGOZIRI NWACHUKU says:

    I notice you took Blog to Biz Hive and Amy Porterfield’s Digital Course Creator. Can you please tell me the pros and cons of both of them. I am thinking of taking one or possibly both in the future. Thanks.

    • Kate Kordsmeier says:

      So glad you asked. I HIGHLY recommend Digital Course Academy, and your timing is perfect because the doors open next week (the only time you can get into the course for a year!). I have a review of the course here: https://successwithsoul.co/amy-porterfields-digital-course-academy-review/. On September 6th, you can find out about our bonus package, where if you buy through our link you get $1,500+ in extra bonuses!! Let me know if you have any questions, Chi Chi. I’m here for you!

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