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 June Blogging Income report.
Last month, we smashed our goal of making $20,000 a month from our blog but this month, we fell slightly short of it.
We are not complaining though as we still turned over $19,233 in the month of June and amazingly, we have almost cleared 100,000 USD in 6 months with our blog!
To give you some perspective, Anna said in her previous job in the Philippines, even when she was working as the principle of an International School, she was making around $11,000 PER YEAR so the fact that we can make that in one month is still mind-boggling.
As I said last month, when Anna and I first started our blog, never in our wildest dreams did we think our blog would turn into a business that could give us this level of freedom.
The graph below shows our blogging income since the first day we started.
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.
There isn’t a day where we’re not grateful for our blog and the business that we have! We spent most of the month in June traveling around the UK where we spent loads of time with my family.
As usual, in this income report, I will break down exactly how we made this much money from our blog.
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 we are doing this!
Anna, squeezing in some work while we were away for a weekend in Cornwall.
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!
This 7-week course is 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!
June Blogging Focus
Last month was all about launching our new course, Blogging Fast Lane!
I am so so stoked to say not only did we successfully launch the Blogging Fast Lane Pre-Sale but we also sold out in just 2 HOURS!
How crazy is that?!
If you want to make money blogging (serious money) then make sure you are on the waiting list for when the FAST LANE re-opens in August.
Right now we are taking the time to mentor the pre-sale group and make sure the content/framework is the best in the market.
As always, I have broken down our income from 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 – $4,201.56 (+14% 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 $4201.56. We love Mediavine and although have had offers from other companies to switch, we’re pretty happy with them.
Finally, after a few months of it dropping, our display advertising revenue is going back up as you can see below:
March = $4,522.53
April = $4,179.27
May = $3,685.61
June = $4,201.56
Mediavine requires 25,000 page views so if you are an intermediate blogger who is looking to up your passive income, definitely make this a goal. For those that are just starting out (or those who are still far away from reaching 25k, we recently reviewed Media.net and have found them to be a better alternative to using Google Adsense. They are said to have higher RPM rates so definitely check them out!
Affiliates – $5343.06 (-9.14% 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 recently closed four new affiliate partnerships which we are going to start pushing very soon.
Sponsored Posts and Brand Partnerships – $3,539 (-72.11% pm)
In the month of May, we closed 4 big partnerships made of 2 press trips and 2 retainer affiliate deals, which brought in $12,688. That was a big month in regards to partnerships for us, so we were expecting June to be less and it was.
We turned over $3,539 in June, which we are still happy with 🙂
We will be working closely with our Fast Lane blogging students to teach them how to close retainer affiliate deals, which are far more valuable than normal deals.
Products & Services – $6150.24 (+644.83% pm)
Travel Guides
As mentioned, last month, our revenue in January from selling our travel guides was over $700 a month, but at the moment it is around half of that.
This is %100 my fault.
I deal with our sales funnels and technical set up but right now, I still haven’t had time to fix our funnels 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.
But…
We are now using Optin Monster for our lead magnets and so far, we are loving it!
The targeting options, especially with GDPR now in place are amazing. With rolling this out across our whole site this month, we hope to see our travel guide revenue jump back up to $700 a month and more very soon.
Just by adding 1 organic funnel (our Thailand Guide) in June, we are already seeing an increase in our travel guides making $456.68 last month.
It 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 email 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! In fact, some of the people who bought it already closed a few sweet partnership deals.
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.
Total Income from Pitch Like a Pro Templates and Training – $519.56
Blogging Fast Lane Accelerator Pre-Sale & 1-on-1 Coaching
As mentioned last month we SOLD OUT our Blogging Fast Lane Pre-Sale in just 2 HOURS!
This is the reason for our increase in product revenue this month compared to the previous month.
After purchasing the pre-sale, we also offered people the chance to purchase two 1-on-1 coaching calls with us, for a discounted rate.
We were so happy to see that a third of people who purchased the pre-sale, also upgraded and purchased 1-on-1 coaching with us. 🙂
We didn’t really have a financial target for the Blogging Fast Lane Pre-Sale. We just wanted to bring as much value as we could to a dedicated group of people. Obviously we wanted to sell out but honestly, for us, the real focus is getting our students to a full-time blogging income!
Join us in the Blogging Fast Lane Accelerator to…
Grow Your Following and Explode Your Income Through Blogging… Following Exactly What We Did!
The course shows you the exact framework that we used to generate a full-time income from our blog. In fact, we’re even providing you a detailed roadmap on what to do to help accelerate your way into a money-making blog within the first year!
The course is 7 weeks but 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 a full-time income for your blog in no time.
Our strategy is built on creating multiple revenue streams while making sure you have a solid framework for your blog.
If you want to find out more about the Blogging Fast Lane course and how it can help you transform your blog, check out our full course below which includes information on the course outline and all the bonuses.
Total Income from Blogging Fast Lane Pre-Sale & Coaching – $5174
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 June Blogging Income – $19,233 (-16.81% pm)
Money Earned from Passive Income Streams- $15,694.86 (+51.03% pm)
Monthly Blogging Expenses
We also started spending more on Facebook ads. We saw a 20% ROI with our first campaigns which we think is a good start, but I still have a lot more to learn with them. We are hoping to hire a social media manager very soon.
Workspace (ie cafes, co-working, Airbnb), Travel Visas, Insurance and Transportation – $350
VA – $50
Advertising Manager – $578 (runs on retainer and commission of sales)
Facebook advertising – $453
Google Work (email and storage) – $14
Many Chat (Facebook Bot) – $29
XERO (Accounting Software) – $40 Convertkit (email marketing software) – $149 ClickFunnels (pop-ups and landing page software) – $299 Pipedrive (sales CRM) – $12
Other Software (Optin Monster) – Paid for yearly
June Blogging Total Expenses – $1,974 (-26.8% pm)
June Blogging Total Profit – $17,259 (-15.5% pm)
A photo of my University friends during my best friend’s wedding (where I was best man)
Monthly KPIs
Page views – 497,736 Email Subscriber Monthly Increase – Wasn’t a KPI this month as we switched to FB bots RPM (revenue per 1000 page views) – $38.64 Profit – $17,259 (-15.5% pm)
Value Bomb and Next Month Focus
Our Value Bomb for bloggers this month would be….*Drum roll please*.
Apply Automated Emails Around Funnels!
As I said above, we recently launched our new Blogging Fast Lane Course and if you read that page, we share our blogging journey but also at the bottom, we give away a FREE glimpse into one of the Fast Lane lessons.
If you want to learn more about the strategies that we used to grow, attend our FREE Masterclass Training which features tons of information and value on how to make a full-time income from our blog!
As for our focus this month, our next move is to start hiring people to help us grow Adventure in You. We are currently looking for an Editor and a Social Media Manager to help us grow our content and team. If you are interested in any of these roles, drop us a line and we will send you the job description and how to apply.
Until the next time… Your Adventure Awaits. GO FIND IT!
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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