Just a Girl and Her Blog: $2,446 to a $51,803 Peak Month, With Ads Only 8% of Income, Over 34 Published Reports

The breakdown says almost the opposite.

Just a Girl and Her Blog is a home organization and decor blog. It grew its monthly income from $2,446 in February 2014 to $51,803 by October 2016.

Abby and Donnie Lawson, the married couple behind it, published the numbers on the blog every month for 34 months. They did it under Twenty Three Publishing, LLC.

The final report, December 2016, showed $41,700.

Blog income usually calls display advertising to mind.

But look at the October 2015 report, where the detailed breakdown survives. Ads (AdThrive) account for $1,365 of $17,639, under 8% of the total.

The largest pillar is their own eBooks and courses at $9,144. Affiliates follow at $7,130.

That mix is the real story behind numbers this large for a home-and-family blog.

34 months that didn’t go in a straight line

It was no straight line.

Two months in, income fell to $894. And the $26,041 of June 2015 was followed by a $17,639 month.

Monthly figures swung with product launches and sales. The couple framed the reports as “a chance to reflect on the month, what went well and what didn’t go so well.”

Across two and a half years, though, income passed twenty times the starting point.

October 2015: ads 8%, own products 52%

Let’s take apart the finely documented October 2015.

Product sales of $9,144 break into three. Framework, their blogging course, brought $7,140. The organizing guide Simplify brought $1,070, and Paperless Home, on digitizing documents, brought $934.

The affiliate total of $7,130 is led by web host Bluehost at $3,610, with Media Temple at $1,000. Ads bring $1,365.

The report also includes an efficiency metric. Income per 1,000 pageviews (RPM) was $41.45.

Ad-only blogs tend to sit at single-digit RPMs. This is an order of magnitude higher.

Their own products, not ad slots, are what lift the money made per reader.

Working backward from income, monthly pageviews were in the 400,000s. Raw traffic was never the exceptional part.

Expenses came to $2,987. They include affiliate payouts on Framework at $1,120, ConvertKit at $319, a conference ticket at $360 and an assistant’s pay at $390.

That leaves net profit of $14,652.

It’s a cottage-industry media operation at an 83% margin, with most of the labor supplied by the couple themselves.

The store was an email list, not social media

The blueprint behind the numbers is email.

As of October 2015 the list held 41,826 subscribers, with a net gain of 2,196 that single month.

Readers came in through two or three posts a week. The couple collected them as email addresses rather than social followers, and sold their own eBooks into that list.

The channel that moved $7,140 of Framework wasn’t algorithm-dependent social or search. It was a list they could reach directly.

The other thing worth noticing is the work done by the income reports themselves.

Top affiliate Bluehost ($3,610) is the web host that aspiring bloggers sign up with. A monthly income report is the most persuasive possible ad for the idea that a blog can be a business.

1. Read the income report

   The reader sees in numbers that a blog can be a business.

2. Start a blog

   They sign up for hosting through the Bluehost link in the report.

3. Learn to run it

   They buy Framework to learn blogging.

Income disclosure, affiliate and their own course line up into a single funnel.

Set it next to a Japanese blog that built the same structure, and the show-your-earnings blog turns out to be the same trade across borders.

The reports stopped two months after the best month

In December 2016 the reports end at number 34.

The archive page offers no explanation, and the blog itself carried on.

The stop came two months after the best month of the entire published run ($51,803). That’s hardly the timing of a decline.

It’s useful material for thinking about disclosure as a tactic.

As with another set of reports that closed after 136 months, disclosure has a right time to stop as well as to start.

A 20x climb in 34 months, made in US home blogging in 2014 to 2016

What depends least on the era in the Lawsons’ record is the revenue mix.

An RPM of $41.45 came on traffic in the 400,000-a-month range, which isn’t exceptional. It came from reader problems like organizing or running a blog. Those are solved by learning a procedure, so they fit into an eBook or course.

Some readers also turned into people starting blogs of their own. That’s why Bluehost’s $3,610 and Framework’s $7,140 rode the same path.

A course business polished all the way to a $4.5M exit sits on the extension of this line.

The slope, on the other hand, has to be read with its era.

These numbers were made in the US home-and-family genre, with its strong Pinterest and blog-subscription culture. They came during the 2014 to 2016 upswing of the blogging boom.

A 20x climb over 34 months includes that tailwind.

The same mix won’t reproduce the same slope.