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Moms Helping Moms

Income & traffic reports are great – I love reading them as much as everyone else. It is exciting to imagine my website will eventually have a substantial impact, like some of those big-name bloggers.

Until that day comes, I’m finding other ways to collaborate with moms to make a difference – like this month when I shared my experience as an Amazon.com seller with Sarah & Beth Anne from the Brilliant Business Moms podcast (I’m episode 78!).

I’ve been listening to this podcast for a while now & love that is specifically for moms. I first connected with Sarah & Beth Anne on Twitter after commenting on one of their podcasts. They then found my January income report & follow-up post How to Sell On Amazon.

If you haven’t yet started listening to the Brilliant Business Moms podcast, it’s definitely worth checking out. And if you’re not on Twitter yet, it’s a great place to meet moms & this post will help you get started.

Expense Creep

While it would be great to make more money, the quickest way to increase profits is to control expenses! My AWeber costs are unnecessarily high. I have been collecting email addresses for the last 2 years, but with no real reason, other than I’ve been told to “build my email list”.

AWeber

I have been giving away a free baby shower game as a “lead magnet” (freebie in exchange for an email address) for my other site BathTimeFunTime.com, resulting in over 3,000 email subscribers. I understood this was something I was supposed to do: collect email subscribers. But for what reason? I had no plan in place for following up with them.

After collecting emails, I was not interacting with my subscribers. Hanging onto these emails not only has been a waste of money (AWeber prices increase along with the number of emails), it would also look like email spam if I suddenly started emailing people who haven’t heard from me in 2 years.

This month I cleaned house, got rid of those old email addresses & brought my costs down. I plan to start using AWeber more effectively & am considering switching over to MailChimp. I only wish I had done it in time for this billing cycle (you’ll see my AWeber costs are still high this month)!

Facebook & Pinterest

I’ve started playing around with promoting content on Facebook & Pinterest. They aren’t ads exactly – it’s more about getting my existing posts in front of more people who might be interested. I’m not sure yet if it will make any difference in terms of traffic, but so far it has been a cheap experiment. I’ll let you know later if it leads to anything interesting.

The Numbers

Reminder: I’m sharing income figures from both of my websites combined (MomResource.com and BathTimeFunTime.com). Currently, I’m only sharing traffic numbers for MomResource.com, but I have been considering posting my traffic from BathTimeFunTime.com in the future. Watch this space.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you have any questions about any of the income or expenses you can leave a comment, and I’ll do my best to reply quickly.

Income Totals

Printable Baby Shower Games: $91.30
Amazon Associates: $0.55
Google Adsense & Youtube: $16.01
Ebates: $1.75

Total Income: $109.61

Expense Totals

AWeber: $49
Quickbooks: $9.95
Facebook boost post: $1.26
Bluehost Web Hosting for MomResource.com: $12.16**
Bluehost Web Hosting for BathTimeFunTime.com: $10.94**
Paypal Transaction Fees for Printable Baby Shower Games: $6.94
Payhip Transaction Fees for Printable Baby Shower Games: $4.60
InLinkz for Weekly Blog Parties: $5.99
Canva: $1
Pinterest Ads: $2.87

Total Expenses: $104.71

**Note about Web Hosting: You can experiment with starting your own blog for just $3.95 a month if you use my discount code. Click here to use my quick-start guide to get your discount & free domain name.

Can I Give You More?

I'm sharing everything I learn about how to GROW your FOLLOWERS & INCOME online!

Do you want to make money working from home like I do?

Just leave your email & I will let you know what else REALLY works!

Net Profit: $4.90

Yes, I agree. Focusing just on the bottom line can be discouraging. I understand now why people choose not to monetize their websites until after they have been blogging for a while.

It’s much more fun to talk about numbers when they mean something significant… especially given how much time & energy goes into blogging. But, I’ve committed to posting these income reports & keeping a close eye on the money as well as traffic definitely does help me grow… it’s just not very exciting (yet)!

Traffic Totals

Below are screenshots from Google Analytics. Click on any of the images to view a larger size.

Traffic Overview

HeliMom was right when she pointed out that my January Bounce Rate of 2.22% was way too low. I followed her recommendations & cleaned up my Google Analytics, which seemed to help fix the problem. This current 16.10% Bounce Rate seems more reasonable, but may still even be artificially low.

While I’m thrilled with over 11,509 Pageviews, that seems way too high given I had 1,589 Users. So, the statistics are great, but I’m still investigating… Any advice? Please leave a Comment below.

Traffic Channels

Social Network User Flow

I love how much traffic comes from Twitter! Even if the visitors are not interested in sticking around forever, I still believe Twitter is a fantastic social network for meeting new people – YOU may even be reading this now because of Twitter.

If you are not yet convinced about Twitter, follow these easy steps in my post Twitter for Beginners. It works, I promise! If anything doesn’t make sense, just leave me a Comment & I’m happy to help.

Of course there is still a lot of room for improvement, but I’m happy to see positive growth (below).

Growth

The large traffic spike at the beginning of February was from my interview with Morgan Molitor from construction2style. She shares how she uses DIY projects from her own family life to make money on her blog & is still my most popular post to date! Click here to read about her DIY blog.

In March the numbers jumped up every time I posted new content: the January Income & Traffic report, an interview with mompreneur Tammy Uyeda from FitSpark, the Thursday Mom Blog Parties. These are all labor-intensive posts though – requiring either a lot of writing or a lot of marketing (or both!).

These “epic” posts are great, but I need to add content that I can post more frequently while still providing value. I’ve been reaching out to a lot of you individually to find out what you want & how I can better help you with your blogs, so I make sure I direct my energy in ways that are meaningful to you. I’d love to hear from you in the Comments section below too.

The Best For Last

I may not be inspiring people to start their own websites in droves (yet!), but I’ve heard from so many moms out there & we are all in the same boat: sitting at the computer, sharing what we love, and hoping to provide some benefit to the millions of Googlers on the planet.

There is only 1 reason to keep updating a website with such personal information – because WE LOVE IT. The traffic & income numbers feel almost like a validation that other people value what we do. A decent income would also would stop my husband from mentioning jobs in social media that I could apply for…! Luckily I have more than a year until our little one is ready for school, so I have time to keep going with this experiment.

If you are considering starting a blog, use my guide How to Start a Blog in Just 4 Steps to get a 40% discount off the monthly price & a free domain name.

If you are a mom, we would love to have you as a member. It’s a great group of moms, it’s free & it’s unlike anything else you will find online. Click here to find out more.

Thank you for reading & see you next time!