2016 is definitely the year of growth for my blog + business & I’m very excited to share my ups & downs with you all. I truly believe that sharing is caring. Reading income + brand reports by other bloggers helped me big time on improving myself. For this reason, I would love to share my first Blog + Business report, so that my customers and readers can get a better idea of the behind the scenes of Kotryna Bass Blog + Design.

Let’s go! Here is the summary of how I did in the first quarter of 2016:

INCOME

Income wise it’s been great. Compared to Q1 of 2015 my income grew by 30% which is insane For all of those wondering how the heck I make money from my blog + biz here are all my sources:

Design Shop– 66%
ETSY– 21%
Affiliate Income- 9%
Sponsored Posts- 4%

Total passive income: 80%

It’s pretty obvious that design work earns me more than any other category. I’m glad most of that income come from my premade blog designs rather than custom projects. Don’t get me wrong- I love creating websites from scratch & improving myself by taking up advanced design orders, but my overall goal is to gain at least 90% of my income through passive sources.

My Income from ETSY is currently only 21% which is awesome. I wish to finally close my ETSY shop and start selling 100% on my own website by the end of the year. I only opened my website last April and I’m pretty thrilled to see it’s already bringing me 66% of my income.

I also started using Affiliate links on my blog during this quarter and gained 9% of my income through them. This refers to times when I suggest services/goods here on kotrynabass.com and someone purchases the product through my link, giving me a small commission in return. Please note that I only advertise products that I truly trust & believe in!

Sponsored posts brought me only 4% of my income in Q1 of 2016 and I’m pretty satisfied with that. I’m not the biggest fan of doing sponsored posts & I’ve been really selective lately.

EXPENCES

With the growth of my blog + biz, I also noticed the increase of my monthly expences. Mostly because I signed up for paid services to help me grow even further. I look at this as an investment rather than expences, so it doesn’t break my heart to see the number increased by quite a bit. Not only I’m now paying monthly for Mailchimp, Buffer & Boardbooster, I also finally signed up for Leadpages which was a HUGE investment, but so worth it! Schedulling my social media and automating my newsletters helps me concentrate on expanding my blog + business and building better products. I’m doing more than ever with less effort all thanks to these awesome tools!

TRAFFIC

I can’t say much about the growth of my traffic, unfortunately, but I hope to reflect more on this topic once the Q2 of 2016 has passed. The thing is, during February my blog + website was hacked which affected my performance for around 2 weeks and I’ve been working on bringing my readers + customers back to this day. For this reason, I decided to change my host and I’m currently using Bluehost and would definitely recommend them to anyone! Their customer service is simply brilliant, go & try reaching out to them via their ‘live chat’ option, they reply in seconds! Hopefully, my sites will be up and running properly for the rest of the year.

SOCIAL MEDIA

The number of my social media following is growing daily & I’m soo excited about this! Here are some of the numbers I took note of on January 1st and today:

Twitter: 1496 → 2342
Instagram: 2700 → 4874
Facebook: 2651 → 3048
Pinterest: 362 → 655

I hope to talk more on building each of these platforms in the future. I’m pretty confident about my instagram these days as I don’t have to put as much work into it in order for the numbers to grow. Currently, it grows by around 50 new followers daily. I use my facebook page to repost my instagram pics & share my blog posts. Apart from that I don’t really do anything special for promoting my facebook page, but it still grew by almost 500 during last 3 months which is great!

Pinterest is my latest discovery & I can’t wait to compare my numbers in Q2 with you all. It hasn’t grown that much during Q1 simply because I only started working on it in the last couple of weeks. My tactics have been working great! I deleted loads of my old pins, created more board & started pinning more in general. I have no idea what’s been holding me from using Pinterest for so long, but it’s definitely my new addiction!

NEWSLETTER

I only started building my newsletter in November & it’s been going pretty great so far.

During Q1, I finally started taking my newsletter seriously by offering freebies, including action boxes into my posts & using social media to get more subscribers. I also launched a FREE Design Your Own Blog course a week ago & it’s been doing wonders for the growth of my newsletter list. I’m definitely going to share the results with you all!

My point of focus for Q2 is to continue working on Pinterest, improve the products I offer & continue growing my newsletter list. I’m also hoping to improve my automation. I want to create outgoing systems that will help me gain followers & grow my income without my daily effort. I feel pretty confident about my future plans, friends. This is the greatest feeling that a creative can have!

How was your Q1? Did you achieve your goals? What are your plans for the next 3 months?