Tom is the co-founder of Adventure in You and has been traveling the world for the last 9 years, living in 5 different continents. His advice on travel gear, adventure travel, and business have been featured in Foundr, Business Insider, CNN and more.
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Welcome to our April Blogging Income report!
I am stoked to announce in April we had our best month ever so far, bringing in over 15,000 USD in revenue!
In this income report, I will share exactly how we made this, breaking up every revenue source as usual.
Anna and I, have always said we love the potential of our blogging business, as we don’t see a ceiling to it at the moment. Meaning, we plan to keep increasing the monthly revenue and our traffic.
Our next targets for each of those are:
Revenue: $20,000 a month
Traffic: 750,000 readers a month (currently 500,000)
Reaching the $20K a month mark was a target we set in our goals post at the start of the year and so far this year, we are on track.
Ok, let’s get into this blogging income report, shall we?
As always, please know that in no way are we publishing these income reports to brag! If you’ve already read our previous reports, feel free to skip over the Reasons Why We Publish Income Reports and the Who We Are sections below.
It is important to us that we give our new readers a glimpse of who we are and why were are doing this!
Update: We stopped publishing our income reports after things got a bit crazy as we started to grow pretty fast. If you want to know more about how we monetized our blog, check out our FREE training where we share our content strategy, the biggest change we made, AND how we make our money month on month.
Below are the reasons we started publishing blogging income reports:
Reason 1: When we first started blogging, we knew people were making money from it but we didn’t really know how!
By reading other people’s blog income reports, we gained a deeper understanding of the different ways we could make money from a blog. We are hoping our blogging income reports do the same for others who are in the same shoes as we were two years ago.
Reason 2: We want these income reports to motivate you to keep hustling online or if you haven’t started blogging yet, inspire you to start a blog today.
Making money from blogging isn’t easy… but it IS possible if you learn from the right people and work out a solid monetization strategy from day 1.
Reason 3: FREE Masterclass TrainingWe’re passionate about helping people make money while traveling (so they can travel for longer!) This is what we did and although the road wasn’t easy, it is so worth it!
If you want more information on this, join our on How We Started Making a Full-Time Income from our Blog! The training is 100% free and is full of unique value bombs and actionable tips on how we grew our blog.
Last Reason: The selfish reason we want to start doing this is… to keep us accountable!
By hitting publish on these income reports, we are revealing our successes but also our failures. We learn and continue growing by reviewing our month to find out what worked and what didn’t.
Again, in no way is this a “oh-look-how-much-we-made” post!
In fact, it is quite the opposite as we want to turn this into a reflective learning practice for us, as well as for those that are reading these posts.
If this is your first time reading our blog, Adventure In You, then here’s a little bit about us.
For those that know us already, feel free to skip ahead.
Who We Are (For The New People Reading)
Adventure In You is an adventure travel blog, that focuses on reviewing the top adventure holidays and experiences in the world. On top of reviewing the best adventures in the world, we also provide travel advice and inspiration.
My partner Anna is from the Philippines and is the main writer behind the blog. I, (Tom), am from Wales and manage the business and technical side of the blog. We met while backpacking in Vietnam and have been traveling full time since 2014.
A year later, we started blogging full time in 2015.
We had both spent years saving up for our first traveling experience, with Anna working as a teacher in the Philippines and me working as a waiter in the UK, while finishing my degree.
Like most people, after having an incredible experience traveling, we didn’t want to stop. After we returned to the “real world”, we needed to find a way to keep fueling our wanderlust. We started our travel blog because we simply wanted to travel more but didn’t have the money to.
Our aim to was to build a travel blog that would provide a side income so that we could travel for longer. We never imagined that we could ever earn a full-time income (and more!) from blogging.
After a few months of working hard, we quickly made our first $500 and then what happened next blew us away. It changed how we viewed making money.
By the end of our first year, our travel blog started to bring in $2000 a month. The year after, we started bringing in $5000, $8000 and soon after, we hit $10,000.
This was when we decided that we wanted to help others achieve the same level of freedom we now have.
I want to be honest with you. When we first started travel blogging, we thought we were too late to the game and that we wouldn’t be able to make money.
Some people said we were too late to start blogging and that the market was too saturated… (To the nay sayers, thanks for motivating us 😉 )
Truth is, there was limited opportunity to make money blogging 10 years ago unless you had a huge following. Today though, brands are a lot more willing to work with bloggers, good ad networks have come out and the affiliate opportunities are endless.
Not to mention the social network platforms that are now available to you for free to grow an audience on. The time to get started is now and we couldn’t be more excited to be in the industry!
Blogging changed our lives which is why a part of Adventure In You is dedicated to blogging and helping others succeed in this space.
If you don’t have a blog yet but want to get started, join our Free Blogging Boot Camp Course below. This course will help you start a blog and will teach you how to make money from it in just 4 days!
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This free course walks you through picking a niche, name, getting your blog online and the different ways to make money. It also includes in-depth video tutorials on how to set up your blog on WordPress!
When you join this course, you also get access to our private Facebook group where all the other members hang out and help each other.
We wish we had a course and community like this when we got started!
If you already have a blog but are making less than $1000 per month, join the waiting list for our new Blogging Fast Lane course, designed to help take your blog to the next level.
This 7-week course will be packed full of actionable information on how to explode your following and increase your revenue. We managed to get our blog earning 5 figures a month in just two years and we want to share the exact ways on how we did this!
Now, without further delay, let’s get into this month’s Blogging Income Report!
April Blogging Focus
For those who have been following our social media pages, you would know that Anna had a bit of an accident this month (breaking her ankle in 3 places) thanks to two dogs who ran into her. Despite getting ankle surgery and missing out on a couple of days, considering what happened, I am still so happy at how much work we got to do this month.
Our blogging focus in April was to catch up on the work that we missed while climbing Everest in March and launch a new mini training course in our Blogging School while we’re here in the UK.
After a few weeks or so, we fully caught up on our client work, emails, content schedule and I can proudly say we produced and launched our … *wait for it*… Pitch Like a Pro Templates & Training Course!
More on this later in the report but we launched it just to the members of our Free Blogging Boot Camp Facebook Group and we’ve received fantastic feedback from it. We were so happy because we know it is going to really help new bloggers start benefiting from their blogs straight away!
April 2018 Blogging Income
As always, I have broken down our income by different sources.
Display advertising, sponsored posts and brand partnerships, affiliates and products.
Please Note: All income is in USD ($) and pm stands for Previous Month. Although we’ve listed this amount as our income gained this month, some affiliate networks and clients take up to three months to pay.
Display Advertising – $4,179.27 (-7.59% pm)
We run our display ads through the ad network Mediavine. This month we had around 500,000 page views and made a total of $4,179.27.
Again we hit over 500,000 pageviews, which feels awesome. Although we had more page views than last month, we made slightly less due to the RPM’s being lower. This is something we cannot control as the ad spend of brands is also seasonal.
Live Videos: If you are a blogger and want to know how we exploded our traffic and got to 500,000 pageviews a month in just over 24 months, join us in our Master Class Trainings where we teach a few of the strategies that really changed our blogging journey.
Affiliates – $6512.68 (+8.07% pm)
If you don’t know what an affiliate is, it is where you recommend a product or service and when a person purchases that product or service through your link, you get a commission for referring them.
We work with a range of affiliates but everything we recommend we 100% trust and/or use ourselves. We turn down a lot of offers monthly from companies, if we feel the product or service is of low quality or simply doesn’t fit our brand.
Our affiliate income was generated by these partnerships this month:
Takeaways: Not a big change in our affiliate income this month, but we are hoping to boost this as we roll out 4 new affiliate partnerships… Yes, I said 4! More on this in the next section on partnerships.
Sponsored Posts and Brand Partnerships – $3,434 (+91.10% pm)
Shout out to Becky, my beautiful sister and Advertising Manager, for working hard and crushing it with sales this month.
This month our partnership revenue grew by 90% compared to last month. The % increase is due to our sponsored post and partnership sales being lower than usual last month.
I always say this… Sponsored post income can vary wildly every month which is why we recommend having multiple income streams.
We are on the verge of closing 4 new big partnerships soon, as we recently decided to stop working on smaller campaigns. So again, this revenue stream will fluctuate in the next few months.
These partnerships will be a retainer and affiliate based, meaning we will be able to focus and execute them to a much greater level than the usual one-off campaigns.
To execute partnerships more effectively, we are currently mainly focusing on 6-month partnerships.
Although we are focusing a lot of energy on growing our Blogging School at the moment, we are still committed to building our adventure travel content and partnerships, at the same time.
Our Blogging School students trust us enough to teach them, so in return, we are committed to continuing to walk the walk, and to lead from the front.
spending quality time with my sister while in the UK
Products – $1048.3 (+281.2% pm)
Travel Guides
Our revenue in January from selling our travel guides was over $700 a month, but at the moment it is around half of that, coming in at $349.
This is %100 my fault.
I deal with our sales funnels and technical set up but right now haven’t been able to re-fix our funnel set up, since I switched and tested out Facebook bot pop-ups.
This means a large portion of our traffic is no longer seeing really relevant lead magnets, resulting in them not being shown the guides at a discounted rate.
The Facebook Messenger pop-ups test was a not a success as opt-in rates were around 3 times lower and the funnel set up just couldn’t be fully integrated within messenger.
So back to grabbing emails and running our sales funnels through good old classic landing pages.
Total Income from Travel Guides – $349
Blogging Courses and Information Products – $699.3
As I mentioned last month, this is a brand new revenue stream that we will be growing over the next few months.
It feels incredible to be generating over 6 figures a year from our travel blog and we can’t wait to help other people do the same.
This month we launched two new things:
#1 A brand new Travel University area.
Every course and product we launch will be found here making it easier for our students to access the free trainings and any paid courses they have purchased. The idea behind the travel university is to help people make money from their passions. Right now, it’s just through blogging but later on, we plan on adding more courses.
As I mentioned earlier in this post, we launched this product early just to the members of our Blogging Boot Camp Facebook Group and were so happy they loved it. We got heaps of thank you’s and virtual high fives and we couldn’t be happier.
We ran the early bird sale for a few days and 35 people grabbed it.
The Pitch Like a Pro Templates & Training is a mini-course designed to help new bloggers start benefiting from their blog straight away, by showing them how to pitch companies and brands like a pro.
We’re big believers that you don’t need a huge following in order to start contacting brands. It’s all about bringing value to the companies that you pitch and showing them a unique angle and why they should work with you. In this mini-course, I dive into that through my in-depth video tutorials.
To take it to the next level, when people buy this mini training, they also get the exact email templates that we use for pitching for free hotels, food, activities and more.
These are templates that we have developed, improved, and customized over the years.
I can’t stress how valuable this training and templates are for new bloggers!
There is also a bonus module covering sponsored posts, with a few video lessons with me, plus (yes, I included it) my templates for pitching for sponsored posts/partnerships!
Blogging Fast Lane Course
Ok, we have to apologize to the people who have been waiting for this course, because we have kept changing the launch date.
One reason we started doing these income reports is to keep us accountable so I can say, in this case, it is really doing just that.
There have been unexpected things such as Anna’s accident that caused delays, but it’s time we set a date.
So that being said, we have decided to run an early bird launch of the Blogging Fast Lane on June 8th.
We have been filming all week and putting the final touches on the modules.
Within the next two weeks, we will have the official Blogging Fast Lane course page live!
There are currently over 2000 people that have expressed an interest in the course through our email lists and groups so we are excited to finally show it to them. Because we want to make sure we give everyone our 100% support, we are limiting this initial launch to the first 25 people.
The course will be showing you the exact strategy that we took to turn our blog into our full-time income in just over two years. In fact, we’re even providing you a detailed roadmap on what to do to help accelerate your way into a money making blog.
On a side note, we have also noticed that most people who are interested in the course are currently working full time in other jobs.
With that in mind, we created the course in a way that students can work on it during their free time ie. around their jobs. We honestly believe that if you follow the roadmap that we created down to a tee, you will be able to start generating an income for your blog in no time.
If you want to be one of the first 25 students to purchase this course and skyrocket your blog, with us right by your side, then click the lovely yellow button below and sign up for updates.
(Trust us, it will be the best decision you have made this year)
Other Products: We also own a travel app called Get Stoked but we have shut down this project and are deciding on next steps.
Total April Blogging Income – $15,174 (+20.23% pm)
Money Earned from Passive Income Streams- $11,740.25 (+8.47% pm)
passive income = best feeling in the world!
Monthly Blogging Expenses
We cut down our expenses this month in a few ways.
Our hosting team moved our images to a different server meaning we no longer use AWS, which was costing around $25 a month. Plus we fully moved our sales pages and products to ClickFunnels, meaning we could get rid of Sendowl which was another $24 a month.
VA – $50
Advertising Manager – $357 (runs on retainer and commission of sales)
Travel Visas and Transportation – $0 (family time :-))
Travel Gear – $0
Workspace (ie cafes, co-working, Airbnb) – $200
Facebook advertising – $45
Google Work (email and storage) – $14
Many Chat (Facebook Bot) – $10
XERO (Accounting Software) – $40 Convertkit (email marketing software) – $140 ClickFunnels (pop-ups and landing page software) – $299 Pipedrive (sales CRM) – $12
April Blogging Total Expenses – $1,167 (+2.3% pm)
April Blogging Total Profit – $14,007 (+22.6% pm)
Monthly KPIs
Page views – 502,209 Email Subscriber Monthly Increase – Wasn’t a KPI this month as we switched to FB bots RPM (revenue per 1000 page views) – $33.10 Profit – $14,007 (+22.6% pm)
Value Bomb and Next Month Focus
Our focus for May is all around the Blogging Fast Lane. We need to finish the course content (which is very close), email copy, landing pages and the member’s area.
So it’s going to be a very busy month!
Our Value Bomb for bloggers this month would be….*Drum roll please*.
Offer something.
When I say offer something I mean offer a product or service. It can be an ebook, a detailed guide to somewhere you’re really knowledgeable in, a 1 on 1 travel planning session with you. The sky is the limit!
Since launching products, we not only increased our revenue but also got more focused on the direction of our blog.
Think… How can I help my readers? What would they like to buy? How can I provide value?
We just launched a new product but over the next few months, we plan to launch even more. The Blogging Fast Lane course is just one of them!
We have also been thinking about offering an Adventure Holiday with us but right now, our holiday affiliate partnerships are doing well and we simply don’t have time to arrange an epic trip. Maybe some time in the future though!
Bloggers Challenge Yourself: This week come up with three things you think your readers would love. If you currently don’t offer any products or services start small. Email those three things out to your email list and ask them to vote for which one they would love for you to offer. In the following weeks create the product or service that had the most votes. Launch it as soon as you can.
Until the next time… Your Adventure Awaits. GO FIND IT!
P.S For those already blogging but making less than $1000-$1500 a month make sure you are on our waiting list for our Blogging Fast Lane course. This course is going to be packed full of actionable advice on how to increase not only your blog following but also your income.
P.P.S. For those wanting to start a blog join our Free Blogging Boot Camp Course. To date, we’ve helped over 5000 people start a blog and learn how to make money through this course. The advice and the amazing community of people just getting started blogging will help you get over any of those things holding you back and help set you up for success.
Disclaimer: Some of the links below (such as Blue Host) are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. As always, we only recommend products and services we trust.
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