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The end of the year is my favorite time. It’s the perfect opportunity to reflect back on the year before and get excited about the year ahead!
I love creating new goals and also looking at my 2023 blogging income report and how much money I made!
This is the best year my business has ever had, so I am excited to share with you the income I made, tips I picked up along the way to improve for next year, and how to grow your blog income in 2024 as well!
First, let’s talk about all my income sources for the year.
2023 blogging income report: Business income sources I track all my income, expenses, and monthly personal bills in my budget tracker. I created this to get better at tracking my personal finances, and making it easier to track business finances as well.
It’s been so useful to understand what’s going on financially with both me and my husband in our personal bills, and it makes it easy to report earnings for taxes at the end of the year. While also great for seeing how my business is growing month to month!
| If you’re looking to get in control of your finances in 2024, and you want to make money with your blog- this is a must! You can check it out in my shop right here. |
Shop sales/Digital Products My first, and lowest, income source was from shop sales and my digital products.
I don’t typically promote my digital products all that much, and when I do make sales, the income still isn’t much due to the products being priced reasonably low.
I plan to add more digital products this year and make them a more premium expense to help boost my profit from my shop.
Digital products are a great way to make income while you aren’t working because you can make them once and sell them even if you aren’t around. There is no trading your time for money and it can be a great income source if you can get it up and running properly.
I also like to experiment with where to sell my digital products. I’ve tried Etsy, Gumroad, and WooCommerce when it comes to selling. In the future, I’ll be using Teachable for a course (Coming in 2024!)
My favorite was actually WooCommerce if you can get it up and running properly. I struggled a bit with it and found it hard to make sales because there wasn’t a lot of traffic to my blog.
But also, that’s pretty much all my fault for being bad at promoting my digital products to begin with! I also really enjoyed how low the fees were, the ability to customize to fit your brand, and the flexibility with payment options.
It is a bit too advanced for me right now, so I’m sticking with Gumroad for the moment. Which is a good option as well!
| So in 2023, I made $100.82 with digital products in total.
YouTube Ad revenue Not all of my money came from blogging specifically though, a good portion of it came from my monetized YouTube channel.
This was my first full year being monetized, and it shows!
To get monetized on YouTube you have to have 4,000 watch hours in the last 12 months OR 10 million shorts views in the last 90 days AND 1,000 subscribers.
Back when I was monetizing still, shorts weren’t a part of the equation so I worked really hard to have 4,000 watch hours, which I hit back in December of 2022.
And up until the last few months of the year, I was cashing out every 3 months. Because you need $100 in revenue to cash out.
So, that means my December revenue won’t hit until January. This means it didn’t get counted for 2023, despite making it in 2023. I only count what actually hits my bank in this post.
| With that being said, I made $781.48 in YouTube ad revenue for the year.
Affiliate Income But after that, we have affiliate sales. I got much better at selling affiliate products in 2023, which is something I hope continues to grow in the new year.
I’d really love to make passive income from my business so it can work while I am not working. And if you’d like to learn more about this, I recommend checking out my ebook about how to make money blogging, even if you have a small audience.
Because this year I was able to make $946.46 in affiliate income.
My audience isn’t that big, compared to a lot of other content creators online. Right now I have about 4,500 subscribers on YouTube and a small audience on my blog.
So it is definitely possible to make an income blogging, even if your audience size is small! Check out the ebook down below.
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Client Work This is my last, and biggest, income source for the year- client work.
I’m not a huge fan of doing client work because while it does pay well and it’s pretty easy to do, it also takes up a lot of time and I would rather put my energy elsewhere.
My big priority is to be able to have my business work for me when I am not working so I can drop whatever I’m doing and prioritize things outside of work. Mainly, my future kids.
I’m very excited to one day become a mother and be able to stay at home with them. And while client work allows me to stay home now, I’d rather put my energy back into my business over other people’s work!
But, for now, it’s a fantastic gig and I am in no way complaining. This is such a blessed position to be in because I made a total of $5,562.83 with client work this year.
This is bonkers for me to say because that one income source is more than I have made total in my business years previously. I’ve never made over $5,000 a year EVER and yet here I am making that with just one income source– to say I’m grateful is an understatement!
2023 blogging income report: How Much Money I Made! So with all that being said, in my 2023 blogging income report I made a total of $7,391.59 this year! However, here’s the kicker- this is what most content creators won’t tell you.
This big shiny number is great, it’s literally the most I ever made but, I also have expenses.
My expenses for 2023 were $4,546 and with the income being $7,391.59 I made a profit this year of $2,845.59!
If you would like to see how much I made month to month, check out my Instagram reel down below! And follow me there if you’re interested in more!
There is also one more expense creators don’t tell you about and that is paying for taxes. Since I work for myself, I don’t get taxes taken out of what I earn. I need to do that myself.
Every year previously I haven’t had to worry about this since my deductions have been high enough and my income has been small enough. I expect this year to be the same.
How I’m improving my business financially in 2024 I also want to talk about some of the smart financial things I have done for my business, and what I’m doing in 2024 to continue to be smart and grow my business!
I am not a financial expert in any of these things, but this is what works for me. Hopefully, it’ll give you an insight into the business side of things that aren’t often talked about and may give you some ideas or goals to set in your business.
Open a separate business bank account This is something I did last year for my business. Before, I wasn’t really making enough to justify opening up a bank account specifically for my business income.
But last year, I finally took the leap.
I opened this account to be smart with my finances and to better keep track of the income I was making, but at the time, my income still wasn’t a lot. So I also used it as a mindset and manifestation thing.
I got the idea from a book called You Are a Badass at Making Money. She suggested opening a bank account for your business (despite what you were making) as a way to manifest more money into your business.
You would essentially be showing the universe you were serious about making money. And for me, it worked! Once I opened up a brand new account, my income increased very shortly after that.
I also felt very professional and more like a business owner, and less like someone doing this as a hobby.
I am currently not a registered business, so I couldn’t open up an “official” bank account, so I just opened up another checking account with my bank and wired all my business deposits to it.
This year, I’ll also be saving money in that account for business expenses. That way everything for my business will be done from one account.
Saving for taxes Another thing I am doing in 2024 to improve my business finances is starting to save for taxes.
As I mentioned, before in previous years, I wasn’t making a lot so I didn’t need to really worry about paying taxes. But in 2024 I am expecting (and manifesting) my income to drastically change.
Which means I need to prepare to pay up at the end of the year!
So I opened up a high-yield savings account and will be saving 15% of everything I make.
If you’ve never heard of a high-yield savings account, or if you don’t have one- it’s a good idea to look into it! The more money you have in a high-yield savings account, the more you get paid in interest at the end of the month.
For example, in my regular savings account, I just got 26 cents in interest… yes CENTS! But in my high-yield savings account, I make about $60 a month , just for the money sitting there.
So I have one for emergency savings and another account I just opened for taxes. That way my money can make money and I’ll only ever use it for taxes.
Eventually, I would like to up my savings to 20-25% of what I make because the recommended amount is 20%-35% saved of income, but I’m not making enough to be able to do that just yet! I will be by the end of the year though.
Track your income & expenses Speaking of taxes, it’s also important you know how to report them right! You need to be tracking (and keeping a record of) your expenses and income for the year.
Not only for your records but so you can report it for taxes at the end of the year as well.
I keep notes in my budget tracker each month on how much I spent and the income I’ve made so that I know what’s going on in my business, if I’ve made a profit, and if my business is growing.
But you need a record of this as well, just in case. So I created a label in Gmail for emails that come through about how much I made and receipts of what I spent. A label is basically Gmail’s version of a folder to organize all your stuff.
Then, at the end of the year, I can go over my monthly records in the budget tracker and double-check to make sure I recorded everything correctly. This makes tax time so much less stressful and keeps things easy to file!
I recommend you start tracking things like this ASAP and if you want the budget tracker I use, you can pick up the template in my shop right here!
Saving for retirement This is something that I actually started two years ago at this point. Since I don’t have a regular 9-5 job, I don’t have access to a 401k to start saving for retirement. So, I had to do this myself.
There are a few different options but the one I liked the best was a Roth IRA account. You can contribute up to a certain amount each year, and the number grows every single year.
So for example, in 2023 you’re able to contribute up to $6,500 a year, and in 2024 it will be $7,000 a year. At 65 and a half, you can start taking money out of it tax-free.
I liked this option the best over the other one I saw, which is subject to taxes when you make a withdrawal later on. I’d rather worry about the taxes now instead of later.
Now, while I did not contribute anything close to the max, I did what I could. And I also invested it as well, which has been growing!
However, I truly have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to this stuff, so I can’t really give you any advice on it.
But if you’ve never looked into retirement savings before as a self-employed person, hopefully, that gives you some terms to look up! Take advice from people smarter than me in retirement investing… because I’m definitely not the one!
And I think that is pretty much it. 2023 was a great year, a lot of growth and good things happened and I expect that to continue with more exciting things to come in 2024.
Thanks for sticking around with me in 2023, I hope you’ll stay in 2024! And don’t forget to pin this post!
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