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.
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.
In March, we took on one hell of an adventure meaning for around 3 weeks, we did ZERO work. Unbelievably, despite this, we made $12,621 from our blog, and I am excited to share with you exactly how in this latest income report!
We had some drops in certain revenue streams as we expected/predicted last month, but our passive income performed even better due to our traffic increasing and a few more reasons, which I will go into later.
FACT: One of the best things about building a blog… Passive income!
Some people (including one of my favorites, Gary Vee… “Sorry Gary“), hates the word Passive Income, but personally, I think it’s just a word.
It’s meaning:
Passive income is income resulting from cash flow received on a regular basis, requiring minimal to no effort by the recipient to maintain it.
Well, the adventure we went on in March was to trek to Everest Base Camp and all our efforts was focused on making it there and back in one piece. So I can confidently say that most of our revenue from this month was indeed passive.
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.
Before you say anything else, please note that we spent months building these income streams into a level where it can comfortably bring in an income to support us.
It didn’t just happen overnight… but it is possible. Like any business, work hard, work smart, be patient and eventually, you will reap the rewards.
Ok, let’s get into this 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!
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 $1000 per month, join the waiting list for our new Blogging Fast Lane course, which is coming out very soon.
This 8-week course will be packed full of actionable information on how to explode your following and increase your revenue. We managed to get our blog earning 5 figures a month in just two years and we want to share the exact ways on how we did this!
Now, without further delay, let’s get into this month’s Blogging Income Report!
March Blogging Focus
Honestly, we didn’t really have a blogging focus this month. As bad as that sounds, it is true (and we always say to be honest with your readers in our Blogging Boot Camp Facebook Group).
Our focus what to trek to Everest Base Camp and back while having a kickass time!
I am glad to say… we crushed it 😀
March 2018 Blogging Income
As always, I have broken down our income by different sources.
Display advertising, sponsored posts and brand partnerships, affiliates and products.
Please Note: All income is in USD ($) 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 – $4,522.53 (+32.55% 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 $4,522.53.
500,000 pageviews!!
Having almost half a MILLION people read our blog monthly as it turns 3 this year, is a big milestone for us and is something we’re both extremely proud of.
Free Training: 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, then you need to attend our Free Masterclass Training! Here, we share some of the biggest shifts which changed our business. It’s 100% free and is full of actional value bombs.
Anna’s face when she found out our Mediavine income this month!
Affiliates – $6026.46 (-2.52% 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: This month 12Go, did better than usual for us. If you have a lot of content around Southeast Asia, check them out and decide if you like them. We used them in Thailand, loved them and now we recommend them to our readers for booking transport. We usually get around $100-200 a month, in affiliate commissions from them.
Sponsored Posts and Brand Partnerships – $1,797 (-28.12% pm)
This month was a low month as far as advertising partnerships goes. As you can see we made around 28% less than the previous month,
It’s seemed that most companies burned through their budgets in January, so a lot of them have slowed down a little this month.
We train our students in our Blogging Boot Camp Facebook Group to diversify their income so if one stream goes down, you’re not too badly affected. Relying purely on this business model results in revenue that is always up and down, which is why we encourage our students to focus on other streams such as products and affiliates and not have all their eggs in one basket.
Products – $275 (-55.65% pm)
Travel Guides
Last month, in our February blogging income report I said, “We are expecting this revenue to half next month, due to removing the email lead magnets and testing out new sales funnels.”
It looks like I was spot on!
We lost around $300 in product revenue when I turned off our email pop-ups as I replaced them with Facebook Messenger pop-ups.
I did this mainly because I started sending our traffic down a different sales funnel, testing out its performance (more about this later). Although we are gutted that the new funnel didn’t work, our business wouldn’t be where it is now if we weren’t willing to experiment around to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
Total Income from Travel Guides – $275
Blogging Courses and Information Products – $0
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.
We started our blog in 2015 and within 2 years, had created our dream life… all because of blogging! Through our blog, we were able to travel all over Europe, some parts of South America, all over Asia, and even had the chance to live in both Thailand and Indonesia.
We believe if we can do it, so can others. Plus, we have learned SO MUCH along the way, that we are confident with us helping others reach the same level of success in half the time.
Anna was in a freak accident recently (she broke her ankle in 3 places) which meant she has been in the hospital. Despite this, we are still hoping to launch our new Blogging Fast Lane course, in the first week of May!
This course is going to be 7 weeks and will help people fast-track their way to a money making blog. It will literally save them months of time and help skyrocket their blog to success.
We can’t wait to get it out but we have an announcement… we will only be allowing 25 students to purchase it!
That’s right…
Only 25 students will be able to purchase our Blogging Fast Lane course at the Special Early Bird Price!
But why?
It is simple. This is our new product and first course, and we want to make sure it is the best!!
To do this, we want to work with each student closely to understand throughout the course what they struggle with, what they understand, what they don’t understand, what they love and what helped them the most.
This will allow us to not only provide an insane amount of value to the first 25 students, which we would usually charge 1000’s of $$ for, but it will also allow us to improve our course, for when we open it at the full price later on in the year.
I hope that makes sense!
That being said, 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 March Blogging Income – $12,621 (-0.65% pm)
Money Earned from Passive Income Streams- $10,823.99 (+5.97% pm)
Thanks to our ads, affiliates, and products, it’s crazy to think that we’re able to generate this amount of money form our blog while climbing to Everest Base Camp!
Takeaways: For bloggers, we cannot recommend the importance of creating your own products and growing out various affiliate models. Have a good look at your site, assess what’s working, and create a revenue plan to help you grow your own passive income streams. If you make less than $1500 a month from your blog then sign up to get updates for our new Blogging Fast Lane course. You can thank us later when you are making good money consistently 😉
Monthly Blogging Expenses
We cut down 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 – $295 (runs on retainer and commission of sales)
Travel Visas and Transportation – $310
Travel Gear – $0
Workspace (ie cafes, co-working, Airbnb) – $87
Facebook advertising – $140
AWS (image hosting) – $0
Google Work (email and storage) – $14
Many Chat (Facebook Bot) – $10
XERO (Accounting Software) – $40 Convertkit (email marketing software) – $137 ClickFunnels (pop-ups and landing page software) – $99 Pipedrive (sales CRM) – $12
March Blogging Total Expenses – $1,194 (-59.4% pm)
March Blogging Total Profit – $11,427 (+17.1% pm)
Monthly KPIs
Page views – 495,336 Email Subscriber Monthly Increase – Wasn’t a KPI this month as we switched to FB bots RPM (revenue per 1000 page views) – $25.50 33.60 Profit – $11,427 (+17.1% pm)
Value Bomb and Next Month Focus
This month, we are stoked to see that our profit was up but if you look into the numbers more, you will notice our RPM (revenue per 1000 page views) is down. Last month it was $33.60 and this month it is $25.50.
Essentially meaning that we made less for every 1000 views to our blog and the reason is:
1.We stopped using an affiliate platform called Rakuten.
To recommend Booking .com to our readers, we use to use both Booking .com’s platform and Rakuten. The reason for this was that Rakuten used to give a better commission when recommending cheaper hotels. They also paid us a flat rate instead of a commission on the total booking price.
We stopped using them as Booking .com changed their agreement with Rakuten, changing their payment terms (this happens sometimes), meaning we had to switch all our links back to just Booking .com affiliate platform.
This resulted in around 30% less income this month, as again the way they pay out is different. We won’t lose that income in the long run, it just wasn’t recorded in this month.
2. We altered our sales funnel
As mentioned, in February, I predicted we would lose around half our ebook income because I was changing our email pop-ups and where I sent the traffic.
The ebook income did half, but we got to experiment even more with Facebook Messenger bots.
So this month our Value Bomb for bloggers would be….*Drum roll please*.
Have a clear SALES FUNNEL.
A SALES FUNNEL is crucial to any business (including blogging). The thing is, most blogs don’t have a sales funnel, but they absolutely should.
The definition of the “sales funnel” is essentially the buying process that companies lead customers through when purchasing products and/or services. The funnel is divided into several steps, which differ depending on the particular sales model.
We started thinking about sales funnels early on because, at the time, it was great we were getting pageviews but we weren’t making much (if any) money.
I had done some sales previously, so start researching about online sales and took a few courses.
Now we have several sales funnels which take our readers down our different products and services!
We have funnels for our ebooks, affiliates, ads, sponsored clients, and more.
This means we can also measure whats working and what’s not. For new bloggers, it isn’t too early to start either. The quicker you start, the quicker you make money as you see another purpose to your blog rather than just to get views.
Free Training: If you are interested to learn more about how to apply sales funnels to your blog and increase your revenue join our Free Masterclass Training! Here, we share some of the biggest shifts which changed our business. It’s 100% free and is full of actional value bombs.
Sales funnel tools: In the free training I will be doing in our group, I will mostly be discussing the FREE ways you can implement sales funnels. However, if you are a blogger who is making over $1500 a month or is generally just serious about taking your income to the next level, you should be using ClickFunnels (Click to Start a Free 14 Day Trial).
It is by far the best tool out there. I have used Thrive Landing page builder, Optin Monster, and Sendowl. My friends have used Unbounce and Lead Pages, but nothing compares to ClickFunnels.
I don’t want to hard sell you on it, so won’t go through why I use it now, but again try it for free and see what you think. If you don’t know why you need it, then jump in our group and watch me go through the training.
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. When we first launched it, we sold out in 2 hours!
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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