I can’t believe it’s July already. It feels like I wrote my Q1 report just yesterday and here I’m again. This quarter, I learned to slow down in order to speed up and I’m very excited to see wherever this strategy worked the way I thought it would.

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 Blog + Business reports, 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 second quarter of 2016.

INCOME

Income wise it’s been great. Compared to last quarter my income was slightly lower, but I’m still exceeding my previous year’s income by quite a bit. For all of those wondering how the heck I make money from my blog + biz here is all of my sources:

Design Shop– 73%
ETSY– 17%
Affiliate Income- 8%
Sponsored Posts- 2%

Total passive income: 88%

I’m so excited to see that 73% of my income comes straight from my website. Last year, this time, I was still relying on ETSY a lot and finally this dependence reduces every single day. It’s scary yet very rewarding to go self-hosted and be in charge of all of your traffic yourself. My Income from ETSY reduced from 21% to 17% which is awesome.

I finally determined my niche this quarter and had been blogging consistently every week. However, I reduced my blogging tips posts to only once a week which I believe affected my Affiliate Income only bringing me 8%. I wish to double this number by the end of Q3.

Sponsored posts brought me only 2% of my income in this quarter, and it’s OK. To be honest with you, I’m not the biggest fan of doing sponsored posts.

In the last quarter I’ve been only taking upon single custom design project a month, and I believe this was the main reason my income was a bit lower than usual. I’m not worried about this at all tho! My overall goal is to make all of my income in a passive day one day, and I’m very happy to see I’m already making 88% of my earnings this way.

EXPENCES

I finally updated my camera! I decided on Canon 6d with a 50mm 1.4 lense. It was quite an investment, but I’ve been planning this for almost a year now, and it was just about time. I found the best deal out there, and it’s definitely worth every single penny!

This year I also started using paid services to help my blog + business grow further. I seriously wouldn’t be able to function properly without my favourite tools! They let me do more than ever with less effort all thanks to these excellent tools!

TRAFFIC

I’m very excited to see that my traffic quarter was significantly higher compared to Q1. I finally took time and studied my SEO score in order to improve it, and I’m so glad to see all my work is paying off! My organic searched almost doubled which is amazing!  It keeps growing every month, and I can’t wait to see where the next quarter will take me. I also turned Pinterest into my biggest source of referral traffic which was a huge change, I still get a fair load of traffic from other social media platforms, but Pinterest proved to be the most effective so far.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Here are some of the numbers I took note of on January 1st, 4th of April and today:

Twitter: 1496 → 2342 → 2454
Instagram: 2700 → 4874 → 7491
Facebook: 2651 → 3048 → 3227
Pinterest: 362 → 655 →  1646

Even though I kind of ignored Facebook & Twitter this quarter- I finally cracked the code of using Pinterest. You can see that I got 1k subscribers in the past three months there, and I can’t say I was working my ass off for this. The thing is, I learned to use it in the right way, and it actually doesn’t require more than an hour a week of my time or even less!

Instagram has been one of my strongest social media platforms to this point. Not only I reached the 5k mark and blogged about it, but I’m also now getting closer and closer to 10k! Holy moly!

NEWSLETTER

Not even a full year into building a newsletter I reached my first 1k subscribers and by now I also almost doubled it!

This quarter I launched some very valuable freebies that caused my newsletter list to explode! My 7-day FREE email course: Design Your Own Blog attracted many of up and coming bloggers, and I’m so glad to see them turn into my clients and loyal readers. Last week I also launched my first E-book Start A Successful Blog Today, and the response I received from my new subscribers is just astounding!

AM I SATISFIED?

To be honest with you all, last day of June kicked me pretty harsh. It was devastating to me as I realised that it’s already been six months since we all made those New Year resolutions and I couldn’t help but remind myself how much I haven’t done yet to reach my Q2 goals. I took a deep breath and held it in. I then opened my notepad and started typing my biggest achievements in the last six months. I was shocked to see that I managed to triple my online following. More than that, I also successfully launched my first ever e-course, I kept blogging consistently without hitting a blogging breakdown, I published an e-book, I exceeded my income goals, I improved my photography skills, I learned to slow down, I put my bookkeeping in order, I started exercising again & made new blogging buddies. The truth is, I did more than I planned back in January, even if I missed on some tasks I originally was supposed to complete.

How was your Q2? Did you achieve your goals? What are your plans for the next three months? Let me know in the comments!