Can You Make Money Blogging? June 2015 Revenue Report

Miss Bizi Bee Revenue Report: June 2015

Last month I spent some time laying out two KPIs for Miss Bizi Bee to better measure general performance. Revenue and traffic are the most important metrics for Kaitlin and I’m happy to report that she crushed it on the former again in June.

The quick stats:

Traffic: 6,563 unique visitors; +2.2% m/m

Gross Revenue: $3,887; +67% m/m

Net Revenue: $2,096; +64% m/m

The Sexy Charts:

revenue-and-expenses-june

traffic-june

cumulative-pnl-june

Kaitlin has now netted $2,787 before taxes since starting Miss Bizi Bee in November, 2014. That’s pretty impressive! I’m excited to see how this ends up in five more months. Now let’s dig into the details.

Miss Bizi Bee Traffic Breakdown

It wasn’t all rainbows and roses in June. Traffic growth left a lot to be desired with a paltry 2.2% month-over-month increase.

To get a better understanding of what went on, I drilled down and compared month-over-month changes per traffic channel. Here’s what that looks like:

traffic-channels-june

If that’s giving you analysis paralysis, here’s what happened. Social traffic (which is primarily Pinterest) dropped about 9% in June. Since this is the largest traffic driver to Miss Bizi Bee, it had a pretty big impact. The 10% increase in direct traffic was not able to counter the drop we saw from Social.

However, the bright spot in June was organic traffic growth of more than 30%! This is a great increase and is really the biggest reason why traffic still managed to growth modestly even though social traffic declined.

Referral traffic dropped heavily in June on a percentage basis, but with just a few hundred visits in May it’s simply not a big piece of the pie.

So what’s this all mean?

Up until now Miss Bizi Bee has been largely dependent on Pinterest for its traffic. This has mostly been a positive thing. Pinterest gave the blog a big, early boost in traffic. Without it Kaitlin may have become pretty frustrated with the pace of traffic growth and perhaps struggled to find the motivation to blog.

But that frustration may have simply been prolonged. Depending on one channel is never a good thing, and we’re starting to see that channel taper off. That’s why I’m happy to see the growth in organic traffic this month. In fact, that channel has been growing every month since inception and the numbers are just now starting to be meaningful.

In short, I think the traffic that came from Pinterest early on was a great positive reinforcement for Kaitlin. But I don’t think it’s easily replicated. Having multiple traffic channels is good from a diversification standpoint and organic traffic is nicely working its way into the mix now. That being said, it could be a few months before we start seeing some serious traffic growth again.

Miss Bizi Bee Revenue Breakdown

Despite traffic growth being flat, Kaitlin crushed it on the revenue front in June. Revenue jumped 67% from the previous record set last month for a total gross of $3,887.67. Expenses were also up in June, hitting $1,790.80, which is largely expected since most of Kaitlin’s revenue comes from Etsy where there is a rather linear relationship between Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and order volume.

That being said, Kaitlin did take some steps this month to improve her margins. We were able to source some commonly used supplies from overseas to really cut down on costs as well as buying some materials in bulk. All this means is that expenses may have been a bit inflated this month as Kaitlin invested in inventory that she will hopefully be using, at least partly, over the next couple months. We’ll see what the numbers say in July, but the hope is expenses taper off a bit as a percentage of revenue.

Total expenses clocked in at about 54% of gross revenue both in May and June, so the expectation is that this settles down to something a bit lower in the coming months. I’ll be keeping my eye on this chart:

expenses-revenue-ratio-june

The other variable that could (and should eventually) have an effect on this graph is Kaitlin’s Amazon affiliate earnings. This revenue channel works opposite of her Etsy revenue. As revenue grows, the cost of revenue should decrease on a percentage basis.

Once content for the blog is created it lives forever and should continue earning income forever with no additional expenses. Costs like hosting and domain registration are fixed. The only new costs each month are for additional content. In short, this is the scalable revenue channel, but it will take much longer to grow.

Last month we broke Miss Bizi Bee’s revenue out by channel so we could see how much each channel represented on a percentage basis:

revenue-channel-breakdown-june

As you can see, things did not change much in June. Kaitlin had some direct orders this month, but Amazon affiliate links account for just 3% of the total. So what happened here?

The lag in Amazon revenue can be attributed to two things: 1) almost no traffic growth (as reported above) and 2) a poorer click-through conversion rate compared to May.

With more traffic, Kaitlin should see more people clicking on her affiliate links and purchasing materials. However, we weren’t able to grow traffic in June. So that element was out of the picture. But traffic didn’t decrease, so we’d expect at least the same total revenue from Amazon as was realized in May. But this wasn’t the case. Amazon generated $182 in May but just $115 in June.

After taking a look at the number of affiliate link clicks and the conversion stats between May and June, the mystery is easily solved:

amazon-order-june amazon-orders-may

In short, Kaitlin saw both more clicks and a higher conversion rate in May than she did in June even though she had more traffic in June.

Was May a particularly good month?

Was June particularly poor?

No clue.

The truth is we just don’t have enough data to know. There could be some consumer seasonality buying preference at work here. Kaitlin simply hasn’t been at this long enough to have the historical data to know what to expect.

My gut tells me that it’s summer and people are more “checked out” then they otherwise would be. They’re taking vacations and perhaps not in the buying mode they were in during May.
Regardless, it will be interesting keeping an eye on this trend and maybe putting some charts together once we have more monthly data.

Checking in on Miss Bizi Bee’s Goals

Last month I outlined short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals for Miss Bizi Bee. The short-term goal is to get to net, pre-tax earnings of $4,000 per month. Kaitlin made a huge step toward achieving this goal in June. With more than $2,000 in pre-tax profit she’s more than half way there!

That being said, I expect some headwinds in the coming 2-3 months. With little time to promote the blog, traffic growth is dependent on organic growth.

Growing Etsy revenue is also a challenge. Kaitlin does a fair bit of promoted listings, but hasn’t added much to her shop recently. I think the key to hitting the $4,000 target will be adding more items to her Etsy shop and potentially increasing her promoted listing budget simultaneously.

Regardless, the $4,000/month goal is an end-of-year target. I think taking a couple months to see how things settle and enjoying the journey thus far is a great idea.

See you next month!

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *