November Income – Your Modern Family

November Pageviews:  1, 917, 455

Blogging time:  almost 2 years.

Hi!  I share my income each month, so that you can see how it is possible to earn a living with your blog.  This is only for yourmodernfamily.com  and not for bloggingontheside.com.

I simply share it here for three reasons:

1- My personal family and friends aren’t interested in blogging, so I don’t share my blog with many people in my ‘real’ life.

2- I don’t want to sound “braggy” to anyone, so it is better to keep my personal life personal, (again- my personal friends don’t even know that this blogging website exists).   I hate to hurt people’s feelings and some of my friends have to work a little harder to make ends meet (My husband and I were in that situation not too long ago.  Having a family of six on a single salary is tight.  This blog pays for things that were ‘luxuries’, like sports & preschool- the rest gets saved) 

3- I want to inspire other bloggers to know that they can do this, too, so this is how I am able to do that, because only bloggers are reading this page and you guys know what to do with this info and how to use it. 🙂

So, about this report:
This is what I am owed (pending payments)… so this is what I have done and I am waiting for them to pay me for these things.

Example:  I wrote a sponsored post for $950, but they will not pay me for several months (usually about three months).   There are times when a company will close or when they will forget to pay me for my work.
I now have my husband (a finance major) helping me to keep track of this, because I have not been good about this in the past and I know that companies have gotten away with not paying me.   He started managing my income this month to help me out and its been great.

Also, remember that this income does not include my OUTGOING money.  I pay for things like newsletter services, memberships to blog-related things, editors, new camera lenses, products for posts (example- ornaments to make the TMNT ornaments), affiliates for my books, meeting expenses, accountant advice, signing up for Young Living (b/c I see huge potential there!),  website design costs ($300), website hosting ($150 a month, but up to $300 a month), etc…    This accounts for a lot of my earnings, but you have to spend money to make money

November will always be a high-earning month, before Christmas.  December will be just as big.   a great one, and you will find that November and December are usually ‘big’ months, but January and February will slow down.

Also- please note that We DO NOT SPEND THIS MONEY.  This money is being saved, to be used to pay off our house.  My payments are directly deposited into an account that is separate from our family account (in another bank).   I don’t even have checks or a debit card for that account.  In order to take money out, I have to physically go in, with my drivers license and ask for a certified check.   I try to make it as hard as possible to get this money out, to try to deter us from wanting to use it.
Once our house is paid off, we will start saving it to go towards our four children’s college educations.     I don’t think that that we will be “spending it” for a very long time (four kids X $30,000 a year for college = around $500,000 and that is without inflation!)

The exceptions:
1- Donations (church and charities)
2- Preschool payment and the kid’s field trips, etc… (anything school related)
3- To pay for my blog-related expenses

I tell you this because I don’t want you to think that I just go out shopping all day or don’t treat this income like the blessing that it is to our family.

What blogging IS NOT… 

Blogging is not a “few hours here or there”
Blogging is not “my hobby”
Blogging is not “easy money”
Blogging is not “a quick buck”

What blogging is…
Blogging is how I contribute to my family
Blogging is a lot of work, at night, when my family is in bed.
Blogging is how I feel that I can help other moms from home.
Blogging is how I can stay home with our kids, but still earn a living.

Now for the breakdown of my income:

Sponsored posts:
Breakdown of sponsored posts: 30% sponsored posts
My e-books: 25%
Affiliates 10%
Books: 35%

(I recently moved from using only Google Adsense to letting The Blogger Network take care of all of my ads.  You have to have certain number of Pageviews to work with them, but it has paid off.  We still use Google Adsense for bloggingontheside.com)

QUESTION and ANSWERS….
There have been many questions on our Blogging on the Side Facebook page, so here are my answers:

– I work probably 3-4 a day (every night I work from about 9:00- 1:00 am) I try to hope on throughout the day to check FB messages & emails when I can.

– my initial goal was to pay for preschool

– The first big blogging expense was buying my laptop (macbook pro) and my camera (cannon rebel) – those totaled over $2,000. I spend $150 a month on hosting fees, plus overage costs (this month it went over by $200 b/c of traffic). I have monthly subscriptions to places like Picmonkey, ejunkie, etc… I pay anywhere from $100-$1000 in affiliate fees for my books.   I have spent a lot of money on design things so far, since blogging (over $1,000).  That is my best investment, next to my laptop & camera.

• Just a few off the top of my head.
  – Do  I log into Tap Influence & Izea daily to find posts?   No, they email me directly with offers. I don’t really go looking for any posts anymore. (unless I feel like its a slow month or something)

  – Do I work in the day?  Not really. So today I just got home from work (I am a play therapist & work a few hours on Wed) but normally my day looks like this:
  7:00 – up with the kids 
  8:10- kids to school. Get our younger kids ready to go. 
  8:40- drop our 4 year old off at preschool 3 days a week. 
  9:30- Workout at Burn Bootcamp (local workout place)
  10:30 – run errands with our two year old. 
  11:40- pick up our preschooler 
  12:00 – lunch w the kids 
  1:00 – quiet time (I am working right now during quiet time) for about 30 min.) 
  Make dinner… 
  3:15- kids home from school
  4:00- homework with kids
  6:00- dinner 
  7:00 -bedtime for the kids.

  45 mins · Edited · Like
  – DO I HAVE A VA?   No, I don’t have a Virtual Assistant. I run my blog alone, with the help of my husband on the finances. 

  – Do I message the big bloggers that I mentioned to ask for shares?   No, I just promote & share a post to their Facebook page once in a while, but most of my traffic is organic. I share to other’s FB pages about 1-3 times a week. I find that if I have a share-worthy images and a post that people are looking for, the shares are really organic, meaning the are ‘found’ and shared without me doing much to promote it.–  Why don’t I share my income on my Your Modern Family Page- I don’t want to make my real-life friends & family feel uncomfortable.

  TO SEE MY TOP-TRAFFIC POSTS, THEY ARE HERE ON MY ABOUT PAGE.

You will want to see the post on top pages that share your posts on Facebook.

SEE MY MORE RECENT INCOME REPORTS –>> CLICK HERE FOR INCOME REPORT.  

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