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May was an exciting month for us. We increased our income 64%, which is beyond the 25% growth rate we work towards each month. If you are interested in starting your own site, read our post on How to Setup a Self Hosted WordPress Website. Our aggressive year end goal is to generate enough income to cover the expenses that month, which we estimate to be about $2,700. Below is the full breakdown of our May 2016 income report.
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May 2016 Income Report
Amazon and YouTube continue to be our top income generators. We earned a total of $279 through Amazon this month, which beat out YouTube by $4 for the top spot. Amazon CPM banners are paying better than Google Adsense on our website and we decided to replace one Adsense ad with an Amazon ad and saw slightly better results. The fill rate for CPM ads is around 70% which is not ideal and we’re making adjustments to our target CPM and ad placement to increase that percentage.
YouTube ads and fan funding brought in $275. We have noticed some YouTube fans are opting to fan fund through the donation button on our website instead of YouTube, which means the fan funding total isn’t completely accurate.
As mentioned above, Google Adsense isn’t performing very well and we decided to run one ad on the website instead of multiple ads. This led to a decrease in revenue, however we were able to make up that loss with the increased revenue in Amazon CPM ads. We will keep an eye on the stats and may consider removing Adsense from the website all together.
Bluehost Affiliate is a new income source for us. We signed up for the affiliate program when we signed up for their hosting service and our post on how we setup our website has generated a sign up. In the month of May, Bluehost was running a special where they paid $100 per sign up. The standard pay out is $65 for every sign up.
For a more detailed report, watch our video below. Thanks for reading and if you enjoy our content and want to help, feel free to share it on social media, forums and send it to your friends and family.
Yes please keep doing them. I find them very informative and interesting.
Thanks for the feedback Dianne! Looks like we’ll continue the series but may make a few changes to the format.
I agree. I really get a lot out of this content. Thank you!
That’s great to hear. Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment Mona.
Your monthly budget reports are very helpful, not just for RVers, but for any business-minded folks. Thanks for taking the time to do them.
Hi Christopher. Thank you for the feedback and glad you find it helpful.