Income Report – 1st Quarter, 2022

This is my 9th income report and the 1st income report for 2022. If you missed my previous ones, just click here to check them out.

I publish these quarterly.

So this is for the 1st quarter of 2022; Jan-March. (sorry it’s late).

Let’s get into the details.

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GROSS REVENUE – $67,312 (was $88,284 for Q4)

Generally speaking, my income does go up from month to month, but so far 2022 has been problematic. Plus Q4 is always the best quarter of the year, so Q1 will always be lower than Q4.

I did move my music site (musicnerdshq.com) to AdThrive from Ezoic.

Ezoic claims to be comparable in terms of revenue, but frankly, my experience is that they underperform. Plus my sites on Ezoic run slower than my sites on AdThrive (same theme and host and plugins).

So eventually, I’ll move my other 2 to AdThrive also once they get to 25,000 monthly page views which is AdThrive’s minimum for additional sites after the 1st (which require 100,000 page views).

I have still not been doing new videos on my Hot Tub YouTube channel I started in April of 2020, and have decided not to go back to that.

I did, however, start a new YouTube channel (and website) based around the challenges of divorce which I went through in 2021.

That website is https://divorcedparentsclub.com/ and the YouTube channel is https://www.youtube.com/channel/DivorcedParentsClub

Now, let’s break that down by month, category of income, and then by the website (remember, I have 7 websites, and a YouTube channel all earning). And I have 11 websites total.

Jan 2022

Gross income was $22,843

Feb 2022

Gross income was $20,959

March 2022 

Gross income was $23,509

Overall I’m still happy with those numbers. But my goal is to be well over $40k/month by the end of 2022. And I’d still like to sell 1 or 2 of my sites as well.

I just need to get the sites earning that aren’t currently.

Blogging Income by Category for Q1 2022

Ads on my websites – $39,541 (was $57,962 for Q3)

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s a drop in ad revenue of 32%! But again, Q1 is always the lowest of the year and Q4 is always the highest. But last year’s drop was only 20%. Whether that’s related to AdThrive (I was on Mediavine then) or other factors is as of yet unknown. But so far, as I said, 2022 has been inconsistent and frustrating.

Here’s what I did in Q1 for each site in terms of RPM:

Again, RPM is the number of dollars for every 1,000 visitors to my sites. Anything over $20 is considered great, and Q1 is always considered the worst quarter of the year due as advertisers spend a lot in Q4 and get new (lower) budgets in Q1.

Middle Class Dad – $23.99 (was 38.58) – 38% decrease

Kitchen Appliance HQ – $25.30 (was $50.23) – Almost 50% decrease

The Grocery Store Guy – $27.59 (was $42.20) – 35% decrease

Hot Tub Owner HQ– $28.68 (was $56.19) – 49% decrease

Music Nerds HQ – $17.95 (was $56.19) – 44.74% increase (largely due to switching from Ezoic to AdThrive)

Now let’s look at RMP on the sites I added Ezoic ads to last November:

RV Parenting – $28.63 (was $35.66 ) – 20% decrease

Dojo Life HQ – $11.16 (was $14.77) – 24% decrease

Not surprisingly, the RV site is the highest as the advertisers know that anyone who owns an RV or is thinking of buying one is on the wealthier side. But I do need to find ways to get the RPMs up on the other sites.

Also worth noting that despite overall lower RMPs compared to AdThrive, the drop from Q4 to Q1 was a lot lower and more like the drop I used to see from Mediavine.

AdThrive Ads breakdown by website

Middle Class Dad – $5,205 (was $8,971) – 42% decrease

Kitchen Appliance HQ – $5,608 (was $9,777) – 43% decrease

The Grocery Store Guy – $18,594 (was $25,577) – 27% decrease

Hot Tub Owner HQ – $6,923 (was $12,383) – 44% decrease

Music Nerds HQ – $1,790 (was $407.88) – 339% increase (switched ads from Ezoic to AdThrive plus traffic grew)

Now let’s look at the rest of my channels

Hot Tub Owner YouTube – $1,094. (was 1,572) – down 30%, partially seasonal but probably a lot because I paused doing videos as of May 2021. But hot tubs are somewhat seasonal so this may bounce back in Q2.

RV Parenting – $1075 (was $668.15) – 61% increase (only had ads part of Q4)

Dojo Life HQ – $345 (was $179.16) – 93% increase (only had ads part of Q4)

Amazon Associates Affiliate Income – $4,869 (was $6,103)

Here’s the Amazon breakdown by website:

Middle Class Dad – $200 (was $460) – 56% down

Kitchen Appliance HQ – $316 (was $626) – 49% down

The Grocery Store Guy – $22 (this site is currently almost exclusively monetized with ads and Instacart affiliate – (was $8.64) – 157% up

Hot Tub Owner HQ – $2583 (was $2,933 ) – down 12%

Hot Tub Owner YouTube – $1510 (was $1,843) – down 18%

RV Parenting – $195 (previously $101) – up 93.6%

Dojo Life HQ – $4 bucks (previously $0) – Pretty much nothing, but I don’t link to Amazon much on most of the posts

Music Nerds HQ – Pretty much nothing, but I don’t link to Amazon much on most of the posts

Rattlesnake HQ – $.90 (a new site I started with my brother (a rattlesnake expert) that so far hasn’t done much)

Other Affiliate Income – $5,123 (was $4,786) – 7% up

As traffic on a site grows, it’s natural that the revenue grows also. And unfortunately, the reverse is true also.

I still publish 2 posts per day at least 5 days a week across all my sites. But the vast majority of those lately have been on my 2 newer sites which aren’t earning anything yet. And my RV and Dojo sites continue to underperform.

But theoretically, each post is worth somewhere between $20-30 per month to me just from ad revenue. And then when you combine affiliate revenue that jumps to between $30-60 per blog post per month.

So again, theoretically, if I publish 10 blog posts a week, I should be growing my income by about $1,000-$2,000 per month. But again, right now, my focus is on my 4 new sites which aren’t earning anything yet.

The biggest challenge I faced is BetterHelp which is an online therapy affiliate program.

I was doing an average of $1,125 a month with them, but that dropped 50% in September for no clear reason. I did move some of my links over to the Marriage Helper affiliate program upon seeing that drop. but so far they have not done anything and even the 1 sale I generated of $400 didn’t produce a commission (and so far they haven’t given me a reason).

I moved my links back to Better Help and saw no improvement and ended up switching almost all to either Mend the Marriage (on ClickBank) or Online-Therapy.

Mend the Marriage I used a long time ago and had good results with. Then ClickBank shut down my account for no apparent reason and that’s when I found BetterHelp.

Eventually, ClickBank restored my account which is what allowed me to start using some of their programs again.

A couple of the individual brands that have affiliate programs that I use:

• GQueues – A desktop/app task organizer program that I literally couldn’t live without
• Project24 – The only blogging course I’ve ever purchased, and one I highly recommend in this article
• Acabado WordPress Theme – The WordPress theme you’re seeing now. I love it and use it on all my sites
• Name Cheap Domain registration & Hosting – Very inexpensive way to get started blogging!
• RankIQ – A new program I bought in December. I need to do a whole article on it, but I get into some good detail below.

Click on any of those affiliate links to check them out.

Of course, as with all affiliate links, the cost doesn’t increase to the purchaser. The product creator pays me a commission from their revenue when someone buys through my link.

So affiliate links are a great way to say thank you to whoever referred you.

Sponsored Posts – $17,517 (was $17,180) – 2% up

I recapped sponsored posts in my previous income reports, but I’ll restate them again, here.

What is a sponsored post?

A sponsored post is basically a guest post that you get paid to publish.

In 99% of cases, the article isn’t optimized for SEO and will never generate traffic. They are short, sometimes poorly written, with bad grammar, and only designed to get the product or site owner a backlink.

They junk up your site, so for that reason, I backdate them a year so they don’t show up on my homepage. Basically, it was my sole method for generating revenue when I didn’t know any better.

While the money is good, I wish I never started doing them, and I only do them on this site and not any of my others.

It’s also not very passive since I have to physically paste their article in, do some minor editing & formatting, add an image, publish it, and then send them payment info in Paypal.

I look forward to my overall income being high enough to where I can stop doing these. And again, I only do them on this site and not my other sites. My goal is to stop doing them when my other income hits $35,000/month.

I have raised my rates and negotiate less, so the number I publish has gone down. The income hasn’t dipped by a lot though, but I spend less time on it. I also farmed out a lot of the email back and forth to my virtual assistant.

Consulting – $900 (was $1,200)

I started doing a little bit of consulting from my grocery website during Q3 last year. After all, I worked for Whole Foods Market for almost 25 years, so it’s something I have a lot of experience in.

It’s not something I really push or advertise extensively. But I do have a Calendly form embedded on the site so it’s easy enough to find for someone that really wants to book a Zoom, Skype, or phone call with me to discuss their project.

I’ve recently added a form for internet marketing consulting too as it’s obviously working for me too.

While I do recommend (and use) the Project 24 blogging & Youtube course, I do feel like I have insights unique to my journey that can help others too.

NEED HELP WITH YOUR WEBSITE?

CLICK HERE to schedule a 30-minute Paid Consultation with Me!

Blogging Expenses by Category for Q1 2022 – $10,308 (was $7,698)

Tailwind for Pinterest scheduling – $104.88 (but paid annually at $419.52)

I only do Pinterest currently with this site and not my other 6. With a full-time job and a wife and 3 kids, I don’t have time for more Pinterest.

On my newer sites, I just focus on Organic Google traffic.

But this site was created when I didn’t know as much and a lot of my articles were done with either poor search analysis or poor competition analysis.

So being on Pinterest allows me to get a lot of traffic to this site I wouldn’t otherwise get.

And Tailwind is essential if you want to be on Pinterest! It’s a little slow, and occasionally buggy. And like Pinterest itself, not 100% accurate on the analytics.

But you can’t really do a serious business with Pinterest without it. I will say, however, that over the past 6 months, I’ve gotten more serious about organic Google traffic and for the past few months, Organic Google traffic has reached about 65% of the total which is must better than it was a year ago.

CLICK HERE to check out Tailwind with my affiliate link

Big Scoots Website Hosting – $1,000.85 (was $356.55)

Big Scoots is still fairly new for me. I switched right at the end of Q1. And you can pay an extra $10/month for additional sites beyond the 10 the plan allows for, so it’s jumped up a little from when I first switched to them.

I also pay $17 extra per site now for 5 of my sites for Cloudflare which improves speed. So I do that for my highest traffic sites.

I had a lot of issues with BS in Q4, but they have all been resolved and I put off switching.

I used Siteground for years on all my sites, and I still think they are decent, especially when you’re starting and don’t have much money to spend. You can get started with Siteground for under $5.00/month.

Want to get started with them? CLICK HERE to check out Siteground with my affiliate link

If you can, pay for 3 years up front as when they renew, the price goes up a lot, and if you only pay for 1 year, your price might double at the start of year 2 and you may not be making that much yet.

But if you have more than 1 site and decent traffic (over 50k monthly page views), I would highly recommend Big Scoots.

CLICK HERE to check out Big Scoots with my affiliate link

ConvertKit email service provider – $110.25 (billed annually at $441)

Honestly, email is pretty frustrating. It certainly doesn’t pay for itself. In a way, I wish I’d never started a list (one of a few things I did because Pat Flynn said to do it that hasn’t panned out for me).

ConvertKit is the best of the 4 companies I’ve used (MailChimp, Mailerlite, Constant Contact). But they are also the most expensive, by far.

If you want to build a personal brand or offer a membership site or a course, ConvertKit is a great way to build that list and create drip campaigns.

It can also work really well if you’re doing affiliate marketing and using Facebook ads to drive traffic to landing page opt-in pages (which you can create in ConvertKit) and then drip them emails once they opt-in pushing them to a product or service.

I do not do list building on my other 3 sites and am not sure I ever will due to the expense and time involved in setting everything up initially.

CLICK HERE to check out ConvertKit with my affiliate link

Hired Writers & editor – $8,899 (was $6,935)

These days I have 7 writers (most come and go but I have a few mainstays). I also use a company called Get It Done For Me Virtual Services for all my virtual assistant needs.

That includes editing the articles the writers submit, checking for plagiarism (it does happen occasionally) and grammar and adding all but the main featured image into every article, and getting it ready to publish.

They use VAs based in the Philippians, and while I could hire one or more of them directly on the website Onlinejobs.ph for probably half of what I currently pay (about $100/week), I like having someone who understands the needs of a blogger I can give feedback to directly and don’t really have to train in any serious way.

And if they switch who they have working on my site, it’s on them to train the new people and make sure the editing schedule gets adhered to.

I also have started buying blog posts in bulk from a company called We Write Blog Posts.

They write great articles at a decent price (about 6 cents a word) and I could easily just hit publish once they upload them to my site. I don’t do that as I like to tweak them a little, but that’s personal preference more than necessity.

Logo expense – $100.

I pay $100 to a guy named Max for almost all my logos (MCD and Grocery are the exceptions). He’s great, quick, and for me, it’s well worth it for a professional logo. I hired him to do 1 for my newest site Divorced Parents Club.

NameCheap Domain Hosting – $44.85 (but paid annually per site)

It occurred to me this month that I wasn’t listing this expense.

Many hosts offer free domain registration, but it’s generally safer to host the domain name elsewhere. That way if your host goes down, and you had backups of your site(s) it would be (relatively) easy to move them to a new host quickly.

I started using NameCheap at some point in 2021.

RankIQ – $49 (per month)

CLICK HERE to check out RankIQ before the price goes up to $99/month.

I only got this in December, but the normal price for 1 quarter will be $147. It remains to be seen if this program can do everything it promises, but it looks promising so far.

RankIQ offers supposedly proven longtail keyword phrases in a wide variety of niches and shows you supposed search volume (notoriously inaccurate for most tools).

But also tells you the suggested word count based on the competition, shows you what words appear the most in the top-ranking posts (and you can download that list), and then gives you post title suggestions.

It also tells you how fast you should be able to rank for that phrase.

Then you can paste your article into the program and it will give you a grade as well as what the suggested grade needs to be to beat the competition. It was created by renowned blogger and blogging podcaster Brandon Gaille who I have listened to for years.

You can even request niches if he doesn’t have yours already!

CLICK HERE to check out RankIQ before the price goes up to $99/month.

Bottom Line Net Profit Before Taxes – $57,003. (was $80,584)

That’s a monthly average net profit of $19,001. So that is down 29%.

And that’s an annualized net profit, again, before taxes get paid, of $228,000.

NEED HELP WITH YOUR WEBSITE?

CLICK HERE to schedule a 30-minute Paid Consultation with Me!

In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s my interview on Income School’s YouTube channel!

What’s the #1 way to get started on a blog, YouTube channel, or other forms of internet marketing?

Project 24 (click to watch their video with all the details) is the only internet marketing course I’ve ever purchased, and it will be the only one I ever purchase.

It’s from the people over at Income School, and while they have a ton of great videos on YouTube, it was joining Project 24 that really started moving the needle forward.

I joined in April 2019, and that month, my income was $2,308.56

Compare that to June 2020 (last month at the time of this writing), and my income was $10,463.80. While I can’t say all of that 353% increase was due to what I learned in Project 24, a lot of it certainly was.

CLICK HERE to check out Project 24 with my affiliate link.

What do you get in Project 24?

A TON of different video module courses, the hub of which is their 60 steps to building a website. But then they also have courses (multiple videos in each one) on YouTube, search analysis/keyword research, monetization, and so much more.

And they add new courses a few times throughout the year.

Plus you get their WordPress theme, Acabado, totally free for as many sites as you want to use it on. And then there is their own internal forum where people like you and me constantly chime in to ask or answer questions (along with the whole Income School team).

Did I mention they have a weekly podcast for members only?

CLICK HERE to check out Project 24 with my affiliate link.

Want more detail on how I do what I do?

Watch this video I made that walks you through my processes step-by-step. I put it out on my hot tub YouTube channel, but while I mention that at the beginning, it’s not related to hot tubs at all; just blogging.

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Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay