Miss Bizi Bee – August 2015 Blog Revenue & Traffic Report

august 2015 revenue report

I’m back for another month of charts, data, and delight. Yep, Mr. Bizi Bee himself!

Last month I closed with this thought:

“August is feeling like it’s off to a quieter start than July. There could be some seasonality at play in the next month or two. The truth is, we have no idea. Part of the first 12-24 months of any business is learning and understanding the ebbs and flows of purchasing behavior.”

August definitely did get off to a slow start, but things started getting more active toward the end of the month and things didn’t end nearly as bad as Kaitlin was anticipating.

Let’s dig into the numbers and see how Kaitlin did in August.

The quick stats:

Traffic: 8,706 unique visitors; +9.7% m/m

Gross Revenue: $4,372; -8.2% m/m

Net Revenue: $2,720; -17.6% m/m

The Sexy Charts:

revenue & expenses Total traffic cumulative p&l

The bad news here is that Kaitlin realized her first month-over-month revenue contraction since her February report. That was back when she was making hardly anything.

The good news is she still turned a decent profit and blog traffic continued to grow. Blog traffic actually had another record month!

Miss Bizi Bee has now generated over $8,800 in pre-tax profit. I have no doubt Kaitlin will be crushing through the $10,000 mark in September.

Now let’s dig down into all the juicy details.

Miss Bizi Bee Traffic Breakdown

As mentioned above, blog traffic continued to grow in August. A 9.7% month-over-month increase in traffic is solid, but I’m expecting we’ll hit a point where this growth looks pathetic. In my experience traffic grows slowly at first and then hits a point where it grows aggressively before slowing and growing a bit more predictably again.

But let’s take a look at where the growth came from in August:

august traffic sources

Organic Traffic

Last month I mentioned that “I’m excited for organic traffic to overcome social as the largest traffic driver. A couple more months like this and that could be a reality.”

As you can see, that almost happened in August.

Organic visits were only about 600 shy of the number of social visits. But what’s more insane is the growth of organic traffic in August — nearly 42%! Recall that organic traffic grew in July by 37%.

Think about that for a moment… that means after working from a higher base of organic traffic in August, the blog still managed to grow at a larger percentage increase than it did in July. This is what I’m talking about when I mentioned aggressive traffic growth earlier. If this type of organic growth keeps up (on a percentage basis) it will start compounding exponentially. Let’s hope!

Social Traffic

But until then, social traffic is still queen bee and grew a respectable 9.1% in August. This is great because it means more people are sharing Kaitlin’s stuff via Pinterest, which makes up more than 90% of her social visits.

Direct & Referral Traffic

Direct traffic was up nearly 15% in August and referral traffic was down nearly 60%. The 60% figure seems large, but the amount of referral traffic is negligible.

Overall, traffic growth was decent but keep an eye on our organic traffic specifically, I have a feeling we’ll see some awesome stuff from that channel in the coming months.

Miss Bizi Bee Revenue Breakdown

August’s gross revenue of $4,372.04 came from three sources this month: Etsy (94.93%), Amazon affiliate links (4.85%), and digital revenue (0.23%):

image (7)

Etsy Revenue

Etsy is still accounting for the lion’s share of Kaitlin’s revenue. As I mentioned earlier, August started slow but picked up steam toward the end. I attribute this to summer vacations before kids start school. Hopefully things stay strong through September and I can be writing about a new record next month!

Amazon Affiliate Revenue

Although blog traffic hit a new record in August, Amazon income fell short of July’s high watermark. This is slightly disappointing, but there are a few things to consider here.

In July there were a fair number of higher priced items that people purchased via Amazon. Higher priced items mean bigger commissions. This was definitely an anomaly to what we’ve seen in previous months. In short, July’s Amazon earnings were exceptionally good.

The other factor to consider is that although there should be a direct correlation between Amazon earnings and blog traffic, our sample size may simply be too small to hold this correlation. Although 8,700 visits sounds like a lot it’s still rather small.

A few bad days of click throughs or adverse purchasing behavior can really have an impact here (and vice versa).

Lastly, we still have no clue if there’s seasonality at play in any given month. Kaitlin as only been at this since November and really didn’t start seeing any measureable data until about March.

Maybe July will prove to always be a particularly good month for Amazon earnings while other months will be notorious under performers. It sounds crazy, but it’s going to take a couple years to really know!

Digital Revenue

The new comer to this list is the digital revenue. Kaitlin recently launched a cool eye chart image design product where you can create customized eye charts and print them out for just $4.99. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out!

Kaitlin managed to sell two of these during August. That’s not much, but it’s pretty neat to see it selling at all! The best part is this revenue is completely passive. Yes, Kaitlin invested a lot of time and money to make the eye chart creator a reality, but it’s all hands off now. As the blog traffic grows the hope is that more people become exposed to the eye chart creator and it generates more revenue.

It would also be a lot of fun to create ads on different Miss Bizi Bee blog posts to advertise the eye chart creator. My guess is they would perform better than the affiliate ads we’re currently displaying.

Overall, August was a solid month in terms of revenue. I know Kaitlin was disappointed that she didn’t set a new record, but it’s not going to be possible to one up herself every month.

Miss Bizi Bee Expenses Breakdown

Expenses were higher in August than July. Total expenses were $1,652.20. This includes everything from craft supplies Kaitlin buys to do her blog tutorials, cost of shipping Etsy orders, and the raw materials costs that go into fulfilling those orders. It also includes Etsy seller fees and advertising costs.

Expenses like Etsy fees and shipping costs were down this month simply because Kaitlin sold fewer items on Etsy (hence the lower gross revenue).

Where things jumped though were her raw material purchases that are used to fulfill Etsy orders. This was mostly attributed to bulk purchases she made. Remember last month’s expenses were quite low because of bulk purchases Kaitlin made during June.

This means that September’s expenses should be pretty low too, right?

Usually, yes. But Kaitlin has been planning an even bigger bulk order for raw materials in September. She hasn’t pulled the trigger on the purchase yet, but it’s going to happen and it’s going to be expensive.

The good news is materials costs after September should come down quite a bit. Oh the joys of buying in quantity!

As you know, I like to track Kaitlin’s expense/revenue ratio. It came in at 38.8% this month which is higher than July but still lower than previous months:

image (8)

Goals and Challenges

Our immediate goal is to get Miss Bizi Bee to generate at least $4,000 in net, pre-tax revenue. I think September has a real shot at this, but with the bulk materials purchase I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m still confident that Kaitlin will hit this milestone in 2015.

The biggest challenge right now is time. Kaitlin has been absolutely swamped trying to keep up on her Etsy orders and maintaining the blog’s publishing cycle while still managing to nanny two adorable kiddos 24 hours a week (not including ~5 hours of commute).

That’s a lot, and I don’t know how she does it.

Because of this, Kaitlin has made the tough decision to put in her notice for her nannying position. On October 16th Kaitlin will be 100% focused on Miss Bizi Bee.

While this will give her a lot more time to focus on her business, I’m not confident it will immediately translate into a bump in monthly revenue. What it will immediately do is give her more time to enjoy life and feel less stressed. That’s hard to put a price on.

Until the middle of October… Travis, signing off!

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