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Let’s jump right in with this April2017 income report! I’m super excited to share with you guys what’s been going on with me lately.
What’s Up With These Income Reports, Anyway?
Ever since my very first month in business (I made a whopping $87), I’ve been sharing my income and expenses for each month, in order to give other online entrepreneurs a good baseline of what a real business looks like during its start-up phase.
My goal with these posts is to give you guys a super realistic look into what type of income and expenses you can expect from being a “girl next door” type of online entrepreneur who isn’t making 5-6 figures each month (yet!).
Let’s do this!
For the second time in 2017, I’ve bested myself and achieved a highest month ever! This is super awesome and I’m so proud of myself, but at the same time, my expenses were SO high. That is partly due to the fact that we spent a lot on ads in April, combined with team member payouts (which are always the biggest expense), but I really want to work on bringing down my expenses in April.
Hopefully in May I can improve my profit margin and limit some of my more extraneous expenses. As you’ll notice below, I was able to cut out one expense in April — ConvertKit! I wrote a blog post about why I made the switchfrom ConvertKit to ActiveCampaign recently, which you can read to find out why I made such a huge change in my marketing strategy.
A FEW HIGHLIGHTS:
- Facebook ads went full steam ahead — My ad costs this month wereinsane. I did get a huge influx of passive income purchases and a big leap in my email list, but holy cow it cost me some big bucks! I plan to reduce these costs in May, because it’s just not sustainable for my budget right now. But it was a neat experiment and I’m so glad I did it, because it was fun and I got a whole bunch of new potential customers and engaged audience members.
- I hired a health coach/personal trainer —I try to stay mostly business focused here in my income reports, but one big change this past month is that I’ve started to transition into making health my #1 priority.In the past, I’ve always put my business first, but I eventually came to the realization that this might not be a great decision for me. While my business is still super important to me, I’m hoping to put more of a focus on eating healthier and exercising this year. This has been an awesome change so far, but it’s also distracting and somewhat time-consuming, so I had less time to work in April than I would’ve liked. Hopefully I will be able to gain a better balance of these two things over time.
My Goals For April2017: Success or Failure?
- Develop a system to put out weekly newsletters — FAILURE. I was really hoping to get around to this, but I guess it will have to wait. We’ve got too many other things in the pipeline right now!
- Get my new sales page live — SUCCESS! I’m so happy that Ifinally finished designing my new sales page andtransitioned it over to this website. It’s not 100% done, but it’s live, so that still counts.
- Make $500 in infoproduct sales — SUCCESS! I kicked butt on this due to the Facebook ads.
My Goals for May2017— Let’s Do This!
- Develop a system to put out weekly newsletters.
- Keep expenses under $5,000.
- Get my new homepage design live.
**Annual expenses not included (such as Tailwind*, hosting costs, and LeadPages).
- Deposit Photos* = $29.00
- ClickFunnels* = $97.00
- Active Campaign* = $45.00
- Teachable* = $39.00
- Adobe Creative Cloud = $21.39
- BoardBooster* = $10.00
- Buffer = $10.00
- Zapier = $20.00
- Zoom*= $14.99
- AppSumo = $49.00
- Smarterqueue* = $43.05
- HelloSign = $99.60
- E-Courses & Ebooks = $7.95
- Office Supplies = $52.68
- Ads & Marketing = $1,798.49
- Professional Fees = $350.00
- Referral Payouts = $240.00
- Paypal & Wave Transaction Fees = $190.52
- Team Member Payments= $3,433.11
Total Expenses =$6,550.78
- Affiliate & JV Sales = $207.52
- Google Adsense = $7.12
- Passive Income Products + Coaching = $1,506
- Client Work = $6,632.40
Total Income =$8,353.04
Total Net Profit = $1,802.26
April2017Income Report: All the Stats&Analytics!
- Number of blog posts =3
- Monthly blog pageviews =7,182
- Email listsubscribers =4,800
- Facebook page followers= 691
- The VA Collectivegroup members =853
- Instagram followers = 3,764
- Twitter followers =5,586
- Pinterest followers =4,609
- Google+ followers =52
- LinkedIn connections = 454
Final Notes on My April2017Income Report:
So this month was kind of a double-edged sword. On the plus side, April was my best month of sales ever! So that is super awesome. But my expenses werecrazy high. My goal is to eventually balance out so that my profit margin is 50% (meaning that my net profit is 50% or more of my total income). I definitely didnot achieve that this month.
But progress is progress! I was happy to see after my disappointing month in March that I was able to turn it around quickly and have another awesome month in April. My increasing amounts of networking is paying off, and everything I learned inmy high-end mastermind program is finally coming into place.
I still have two larger pieces of my plan that I haven’t initiated yet, which are (1) my new homepage design, and (2) switching up my pricing model to include more packages.
As you saw above, I hope to go live with my new homepage sometime in May, and hopefully sometimethis summer I will be able to fully launch the new pricing system. That part is going to take quite a bit of backend work to get into place, though, so I know that it’s going to be the longest part of this process by far. It could very well be that lower-income months are ahead of me as I start to focus on creating and launching those packages in June.
But, in the meantime, I’m super hopeful for May. I already have a few prospective client calls booked for the first few weeks of the month, so I’m feeling really good about that. But two things are making me nervous, which are (1) I’m going to Chicago mid-month for a Create Your Laptop Life conference, which will cut into client work time for 1 week of the month, and (2) since we’re reducing ad cost, I know that my infoproduct sales will be going down, so less of my May income will be coming from that.
I’m ready, though! Bring it on.
