Side Income Report for May 2019: How I Earned $11,609 This Month

While most side income reports are from bloggers and podcasters who started 5+ years ago, here’s one for my blog that just launched 5 months ago.
Let’s dive into my first side income report.
1. Side Income in May 2019: $11,609
For me, May was a month to test new passive revenue streams outside of my coaching and consulting services – I launched my first digital product, added Google AdSense to my site, and joined 29 new affiliate programs, increasing the total from 20 to 49.
- Affiliate Revenue: $2,906
- Thinkific: $988
- PodBean: $873
- Bluehost: $450
- Transistor: $181 (recurring)
- Buzzsprout: $127 (recurring)
- HostGator: $100
- GetResponse: $80
- Siteground: $50
- Inmotion Hosting: $50
- Constant Contact: $7
- Product Sales: $353
- AdSense: $150
- 1:1 Coaching and SEO Consulting for 6 B2B Clients: $8,100
Expenses in May 2019: $1,371
- Web development: $375
- Content writers: $320
- New equipment for online course: $272
- GDPR cookie consent plugin: $49
- Extended widget options plugin: $29
- Indeed job posting: $26
Net Profit: $10,238 (88% Gross Profit Margin)
Now, onto some key takeaways, traffic stats, a May recap, and plans for June.
May Takeaways:
1. Affiliate Programs
The biggest thing I learned this month is that making $2,906 this month in affiliate revenue didn’t feel like much of anything. Sales add up over time – $50 here, $20 there – over the course of a month it doesn’t feel like much until you add it all up.
I’m happy to see a diversified mix of affiliate programs so that I’m not overly reliant on one program or a single blog post.
I was helped by a crazy $957.60 commission from one Thinkific sale. Someone (my hero) paid for a $399/month annual plan ($4,788 payment) and I received 20%.
I’m also seeing strong performance in the podcasting space, with PodBean and BuzzSprout leading the way. I’m currently generating about 18-20 trials/day for podcast platforms.
In web hosting I made $650, which is up from $300 in April. This is led by Bluehost, but after joining other affiliate hosting programs like HostGator, I’m seeing some potentially stronger conversion rates from other companies.
Also, affiliate program dashboards are all over the place and pretty difficult to track. Programs are either in networks like Shareasale, Impact, CJ, or in their own self-hosted platforms.
Out of the 49 affiliate programs I’m in, I have to bookmark 34 different URLs to individually track results:
If you’re a developer (or know one) and could create a platform to pull affiliate programs into one dashboard via APIs, take my money please haha. 🙂
I also increased my percentage of passive income by 22% this month:
- In April, revenue was 92% coaching/consulting and 8% affiliate revenue.
- In May, revenue was 70% coaching/consulting and 30% passive income (affiliate sales, digital product, and ads).
This proves to me that you can start to generate some solid passive income by month 5 (or sooner).
2. Product Sales
I launched my first digital product Backlink Blueprint 1.0 to help new bloggers scale their SEO and link building process. I sold 9 copies in May (not as much as I was hoping for), but only promoted via one email.
3. AdSense
Finally, I added Google AdSense in early May and it started bringing in about $5-7/day. I don’t love how it adds a few banners into my blog posts, but I’ll keep it for now to monitor results and switch to a better ad network once I’m over 75-100,000 visitors/month.
4. Coaching and consulting
I currently work with 8 consulting clients and 2 bloggers that I coach. My SEO and content marketing consulting revenue actually decreased by 50% this month because of time constraints with a full-time job. I just hired an awesome freelancer to help build this back up in June.
2. Organic Traffic for May 2019: 31,126 Users (+111%)
My organic traffic increased 111% month-over-month, growing from 14,740 users in April to 31,126 in May. My blog is now over 90% organic traffic.
Monthly traffic has grown 2,614% since January.
3. Email Subscribers for May 2019: +685 (+112%)
I use ConvertKit for my email marketing and added +685 new email subscribers in May, compared to +322 in April and +211 in March. This increased primarily because of the overall traffic increase and a few CRO tweaks with OptinMonster.
Tasks Completed in May:
- Added 29 new affiliate programs and built a co-branded landing page with HostGator
- Blog Posts: Added 7 2,000+ word articles to blog.
- Best Ecommerce Platforms
- Best Website Builders
- How to Make Money on YouTube
- How to Sell on Amazon
- Bluehost vs. HostGator
- HostGator vs. GoDaddy
- Best Name Generators
- Guest Posts: New articles on Zapier.com (DR 91) and ConversionXL.com (DR 84)
- Zapier.com: 7 Tools to Personalize and Scale Your Email Outreach
- ConversionXL.com: YouTube Ads: How to Set Up, Run, and Monitor Campaigns
- Updates to Current Content:
- Added 2,000+ words to Web Hosting article
- Added 1,500+ words to Podcast hosting article
- Added 1,000+ words to Online Course Platforms article
- Added 1,500+ words to Email Marketing Services article
- Link Building:
- 238 new backlinks
- 11 new referring domains with DR over 70
- New Tools Added:
- ThirstyAffiliates (free) WordPress plugin for affiliate link cloaking
- Ad Inserter plugin (free) for Google AdSense
- BigCommerce for WordPress ($29.95/month) for ecommerce
- GDPR Cookie Consent ($49/year) to follow GDPR guidelines in EU
- Keyword Rankings:
- Moved to page 1 for online course platforms
- Got to #13 for how to make money online
- Moved from page 3 to page 1 for affiliate programs (#7)
- Got featured snippet (#1) for podcast platforms and moved up to #7 for podcast hosting
- I received 13 new featured snippets for my best web hosting post
- Moved to page 1 for best email marketing platforms
Plans for June:
- Hire employee to help manage consulting business (in progress)
- Build out full step-by-step online course based on my 7-day email series (plan to launch in July; in progress)
- Create new affiliate marketing digital product with directory of programs, signup links, and how to negotiate higher commissions (in progress)
- Publish 6 new blog posts and 5 guest posts
- Improve page load time by replacing Google fonts and improving site speed by 5 points from 88 to 93
That’s it for my (very first) side income report for May 2019.
The purpose of these new side income reports will be to showcase that you can make a sizable side income from a brand new blog and showcase your side income within 5 months, not 1-2 years.
If you want to see some of my top performing affiliate articles, you can check them out here:
- 19 Best Web Hosting Services of 2019
- 11 Best Podcast Hosting Sites of 2019
- 13 Best Platforms to Create an Online Course in 2019
Thank you so much for reading – I’m very grateful you found your way here. Please feel free to reach out to me anytime.
awesome work, Adam. love the transparency. that’s some serious backlink growth. any insight into that specifically?
I think it comes down to 2 things – outsourcing the writing and making real relationships for links. For May backlinks I see in Ahrefs, most are from real relationships I have where I now send them links and can drop links into guest posts.
Another epic piece, Adam.
It’s even more interesting to know you have pushed a couple of high competition keywords thus far.
For me, discovering your blog is spot on and life changing. Like I told you in the email. I am in the middle of launching a new blog.
I feel blessed to have the pleasure of reading through your work, picking your brain and hoping to put all of these into serving the community I’d end up building with my new blog.
Continue doing the great work you do, my dear friend.
Confession – I have practically been living here on your blog in the last 72 or so. And I have consumed more of your content than you can imagine.
I’m indebted for how much value I have gotten so far.
Thank you! Thank you!! Thank you!!!
Hey Abdulrahman – your comment is very much appreciated my friend. I’m so glad you’re finding my content valuable and I’ll connect with you again soon via email. Your comment means a lot and I’ll continue to do my best to give the most actionable, non-fluffy, non-generic content :).
Hi Adam,
I stumped across your blog a couple of hours ago, after days of researching effective blogging, and I finally feel like having found an approach that can actually work. I’ll definitely give it a shot!
Having said that, I was wondering whether you can add an article about your first time coaching/the work with your first few clients? Did you already have a concept in place? Materials to work with? Or are you going into these meetings fairly openly and see what the client wants? I’d really appreciate some insights into that 🙂
Anyways, big compliment on your side, spot-on content and a really good read! Keep up the great work!
Wow! Just loved the way you have explained everything. It motivates other bloggers seeing you who feel that blogging is something too competitive and they do not get results.
What i love about you is that you do schedule your upcoming stuffs and your clarity towards the goals
Keep Up The Good Work
Also on this blog do you personally write all the posts or you outsource them. I am asking just because of curiosity
Hey Pankaj,
Thank you – I’m glad you enjoyed this income report. For my own blog, I work closely with a writer and outsource the initial first drafts. They’re typically 4-5,000 words and it would take forever for me to write them. When I get them via Google Docs, I edit and publish them myself. The main writing I do is updating my content over time to make it better and help it rank.
Thank You So Much For Your Kind Revert!
This is something which will help you to grow!
Load Of Love
Good Job, Adam, Its a inspirational content for any blogger. Thanks for the information
Hi Adam,
I am totally impressed by you awesome work and made me to start a bussines on affiliate marketing based on your suggestions.Before to start i have one question.
How can i quantify my earnings for each affiliate website such way to know daily my income.
Is there any software which can realised that.
I will much appreciated your reply.
Regards,
Dan
Hey Dan, thanks for the comment. I’m in a lot of different affiliate programs and they all have different dashboards/reports. There are a few tools like Affluent that attempt to pull all of your affiliate programs into one dashboard, but it didn’t work that well for me. I pretty much look at each affiliate dashboard and then track everything in a spreadsheet with columns for each month and rows for each program.
Hi Adam,
Is it Possible to get Google Adsense for my Affiliate site? My site has already high-quality content. I am seeing that you’re using Google adsense as well as Affiliate Promotion on this site.
Hey Rakib,
Yes, you can use ads in addition to affiliate programs. I’m currently using Mediavine for ads, but you can join Google AdSense without issue.
I just read this post after reading your most recent income report in December 2020.
Wow! It is amazing to see how fast you grew, and where you are at now.
Nice job on the hard work, it is is definitely inspiring to me!
– Zach
Thanks Zach!
Hi Adam have to say your website is really inspiring me. Having attempted a few years ago to start my own blog it didn’t really happen for a number of reasons and I was gutted. Yet, I come on here and read your blogs and feel inspired to know that I can do this. I am struggling at the moment getting my head around how the affiliated marketing works and how all that is installed, but possibly with a few more reads I’ll ‘get this’ and be able to more forward with my vision.
Hey Donna, I’m glad you found my blog. I hope you continue to find my content helpful. 🙂
Hi Adam,
This is for the first time, I had ever seen such inspirational content.
You are super cool man. I don’t have words to express how delighted and motivated I am feeling.
I found you on youtube and also commented there, that it is the best thing that ever happened in my life.
I also own an educational site and struggling to get the most out of it.
But now I feel that I had landed in the right place and will do good for sure.
Thanks for being such a wonderful mentor and honest approach.