These posts are a way for me to share the ups-and-downs of working for myself, of trying to take my business off the ground, of how to make money as a digital nomad, or whatever you want to call it. They’re a way of holding myself accountable every day because I know at the end of the month I’m going to have to tell you what I’ve done to be better.
You can read all of my previous income reports here.
If you’ve been around a little while, you may remember that I used to write a post every month about life as an expat in Mexico City. Instead of doing that, I now send out monthly newsletters. If you want to know more about life in Mexico or want to follow along with my journey a bit more closely, you can sign up for the newsletter at the bottom of this post.
April 2017 Income Report
This month was ridiculous.
I think I worked less this month than I have in the last eight months and yet I’ve absolutely blown all of my previous monthly incomes out of the water.
It was a sort of freak month. I don’t expect the next few to be this strong, but I took the copywriting work that was coming my way all month and it boosted my income to a number that I would never have dreamed was possible this early on in my journey.
Expenses
I had quite a few expenses this month. I had to pay my yearly hosting fees for Eternal Expat this month and I’ve also started working on another project (yes, a THIRD website. I’m a masochist). I’m really excited to push on with everything and am starting to understand that I need to spend money on my projects in order to see them blossom.
VA Costs
I got rid of my VA halfway through the month. I was giving him less and less responsibility and in the end, I felt like I was just wasting money on tasks that weren’t even that important. I spent $36 on VA costs this month.
BoardBooster
I have started putting a lot more energy into building my Pinterest. It is BY FAR my largest driver of traffic to this site and I want to build on that. If you’ve never used BoardBooster before, it’s a website that repins your pins to different boards of your choosing. It basically recycles your posts so that as new people follow you, your old posts still get seen. I’m sure it does loads more, but that’s what I’ve started with so far.
I have the 1,000 pins a month plan which costs $10 a month.
Email Marketing
Still using Mailchimp, still happy with it. I’ve started playing around with the plugin a bit more and, as you can see at the bottom of this post, adding email collection boxes around the website. I’m not working as hard on email collection as I probably should be, but it’s all part of the balancing act. As always, it costs me $15 a month.
Facebook Marketing
I didn’t do much with Facebook marketing this month. They gave me $10 in free credit which did exactly what they wanted it to do, I started spending more money boosting posts again.
This month I spent $20 on Facebook Marketing.
Hosting Fees
I bought this website a year ago this month, so I had to renew it again. It wasn’t even a question about whether or not to stick with Siteground, I’m a huge lover and I’m not going anywhere. The customer service is crazy good and my site has never once been down.
The first year, like most hosting plans, was much cheaper. That being said, I still felt that it was reasonable compared to other companies. For my second year of hosting on a bigger plan, I paid $137.
I also purchased another domain name for a completely different website that I’m hoping to get off the ground in May. I was able to host that same site alongside my Eternal Expat hosting plan, so I only had to pay $18 for the domain name.
If you want to know a bit more about Siteground, you can read my post about starting a blog here.
Total Expenses: $236
Income
Like I said before, this month was totally weird. I took two entire weeks away from this blog and any promotion of it, which is why the affiliate and sponsored content income are both way lower than usual.
I did, however, get a glimpse into what it’s really like to be a “digital nomad” in the sense that I was on the move for two straight weeks AND working while I was traveling. I was writing copy on the plane, while we were on buses, early in the morning before any of my friends woke up, and late at night at a bar where I could get some good wifi.
I don’t really want to make a habit of that, to be honest, but I’m really proud of myself for producing quality work in un-ideal situations. It was also pretty cool to be able to make such a great income this month and still enjoy two weeks of vacation around Mexico.
Copywriting
This month I was asked to participate in a huge project for one of my copywriting clients. The bulk of this month’s income came from this.
This month I made $2,776 through copywriting work. I literally had to do the math three times to believe that this was actually true.
Sponsored Content
This month I was pretty terrible at replying to emails about sponsored content. I think I probably made a few people angry and I learned a good lesson about making my emails a priority. I also really need to unsubscribe from like every single thing I’ve ever given my email to because WOW do those emails clog up the inbox!
In April I made $150 on sponsored content.
Youtube
Even though I didn’t make a single video in April, my subscriber count just kept going up.
This month I made a whopping $4.20.
You can check out my Youtube channel here.
Affiliate Marketing
I let my affiliate marketing plans fall to the wayside this month. I’m still pretty happy to see that despite totally ignoring this in April, I still made money.
This month I made $83.85 on Affiliate Marketing.
Total Income: $3,014.05
An increase of $1484.05 from last month.