It is getting harder to find these as many successful affiliates and bloggers have stopped providing this information.
Income Reports
The list includes some smaller sites and some making over $1 million per year. There is a wide range of dates of these reports, but all are within the last few years.
The Bewitching Kitchen
A food blog with lots of recipes. One of the key take-aways from this income report is to keep a sharp eye on your expenses. With a total income stream of $6300+ there were $3300 in expenses. That’s around 53% of revenue.
INCOME
Sponsored Posts: $1143.28
AdThrive: $4721.20
Amazon: $305
Other income: $ 142.52
Total Income: $6312.99
EXPENSES
Virtual Assistants + Contractors: $1190.31
Supplies (Office supplies, supplies for blog projects, and groceries for recipe development): $220.04
Adobe Photoshop CC: $14.57
ConvertKit: $128.35
FlyWheel (Host): $164.19
GSuite (Email): $5
Imagify Plugin: $6.09
Kajabi: $163.14
Meet Edgar: $31.47
Facebook + Pinterest Ads: $0
Travel: $823.81
Total Expenses: $3300.69
NET INCOME: $3012.30
Fatstacks Blog
Fatstacks is a hugely successful blog that gets most of their revenue from ads. They are proponents of writing information content targeted at lower competition keywords and scaling with outside writers.
Fatstacks makes some serious coin. Their income reports are a bit different in that they are reports of their own niche sites. They don’t report income from the blog itself which is likely substantial. They only make one site address actually public (Niche Site 8: Cyclebaron.com) which makes it harder to understand the content vs. revenue picture. But still hard to not be impressed by these numbers with almost all coming from ad revenue with the exception of Niche Site 2 which is affiliate revenue dominant.
- Niche Site 1 Revenue: $68,122
- Niche Site 2 Revenue: $4,666
- Niche Site 3 Revenue: $458
- Niche Site 4 Revenue: $1,823
- Niche Site 5 Revenue: $93
- Niche Site 6 Revenue: 966
- Niche Site 7 Revenue: $210
- Niche Site 8 Revenue: $51
Total Revenue all 8 sites: $76,389
COMBINED EXPENSES
Kinsta hosting: $2,064
Bluehost hosting: $5
Nitropack: $32
SurferSEO: $59
Amazon AWS (: $110
Virtual Assistants: $5,200
Cloudflare: $205
Loom: $10
Ahrefs: $179
Convertkit: $29
AWeber: $19
Photos: $800
Quickbooks: $10
Jotform: $40
Tailwind: $120
MeetEdgar: $50
Grammarly: $45
Canva: $48
Buzzsprout: $12 .
Adobe Spark: $20
Answerthepublic.com: $99
Facebook ads: $1,500 USD
Total expenses for 8 niche sites: $10,656
Net Income: $65,733
CONTENT INVESTMENT
Fatstacks views content creation as more of a capital investment than expense so they list it separately. This is also what most sellers like Empire Flippers do when selling a site so it makes sense at this scale.
CleverGhosts content service: $3,000
WriterAccess: $1,000
In-House writers: $4,978
Content products: $600
Total: $9,578
income after content : $56,155 USD
Matthew Woodward
Matthew is a master marketer. He is particularly effective with his email campaigns. This report goes back a couple of years since he stopped publishing them. He made a lot of revenue from only about 50k monthly visitors. …
INCOME
Affiliate Income – $21,737.79
Other Income – $12,212.79
NET INCOME: $33,950.58
EXPENSES
Kinsta Hosting – $100.00
Drip – $400.50
Kapa99 – $399.00
Facebook Advertising – $4,710.77
TOTAL EXPENSES– $5,610.27
NET PROFIT: 28,340.31
Most of his income comes from affiliate marketing. He is making relatively small amounts from a large number of affiliate programs. Notice he had some private affiliate deals as companies like ahrefs do not have a publicly available program. Lately he has been killing it with a WPX private deal/relationship …
AFFILIATE EARNINGS
Affiliate Earnings
A2Hosting – $340.00
Accuranker – $200.00
ActiveCampaign – $9.20
Ahrefs – $243.06
Aweber – $77.40
Blog Advertising – $741.32
Blue Chip Backlinks – $250.00
BlueHost – $65.00
Brightspark – $3.99
BuyProxies – $27.00
CheapWindowsVPS – $27.73
CloudBoss – $90.50
CMS Commander – $20.43
ConvertKit – $8.70
CSSHero – $105.20
CSSIgniter – $96.95
Domain Hunter Gatherer – $1,831.99
Drip Revolution – $282.93
EasyBlogNetworks – $215.11
EasyExpiredDomains – $15.12
FCS Networker – $105.76
FreshDrop – $17.74
GetResponse – $21.12
GSA Captcha Breaker – $320.82
GSA Search Engine Ranker – $682.52
GSA SEO Indexer – $71.29
Hostgator – $500.00
HPBacklinks – $7.80
iPage – $480.00
IPVanish – $664.15
JustHost – $240.00
KDPRocket – $194.00
Kinsta – $970.00
Kontent Machine – $1,100.10
LeadPages – $351.30
LearnDash – $55.65
LinkEmperor – $163.16
Loganix – $146.24
LongTailPro – $1,845.16
MTTB – $44.10
MyThemeShop – $166.77
NinjaOutreach – $49.50
OneHourIndexing – $217.58
PandaBot – $209.83
PowerUpHosting – 18.60
PrivateInternetAccess – $54.00
PrizeRebel – $67.91
ProductLaunchFormula – $158.80
ProxyHub – $2.77
Raven Tools – $10.14
S2Member – $61.43
SECockpit – $68.97
SEMRush – $865.09
SEO Content Machine – $115.88
SEO Powersuite – $224.10
SEO Clerks – $21.50
SEO Monitor – $307.78
SERanking – $65.87
SERP Book – $11.41
SERPed – $1,441.52
SimplePageTester – $48.20
Siteground – $500.00
SumoMe – $1,832.50
SwagBucks – $5.00
TBSolutions – $75.00
TemplateMonster – $34.00
TheBestSpinner – $202.39
Themify – $95.40
ThirstyAffiliates – $12.63
TrafficPlanetHosting – $400.00
TweetAttacksPro – $329.09
URLProfiler – $39.50
VideoMakerFX – $27.00
Website Auditor – $46.77
Whitespark – $1,018.88
WordAI – $99.37
WPBeaverBuilder – $89.55
WPProfitBuilder – $33.84
WPRobot – $50.80
PracticalWanderlust
Travel bloggers with well over 100K monthly viewers. They do an excellent job of multi-channel content marketing with the website, podcast, Facebook, Instagram and other channels.
Interesting to see the added expenses that travel bloggers have — traveling. Over $1800 of the $4300+ of income was consumed by travel expenses. Though I would say there is some personal benefit to that expense.
They have a good mix of affiliate income and ad revenue with some of their own products in the revenue mix. Some strategic comments in this month were …
- Awin was top performing affiliate network
- SkimLinks performed well and new revenue channel
- Mediavine was a big success for ads
INCOME
Advertising:$1,593.20
Non-Amazon Affiliate): $1,024.92
Amazon Affiliate: $952.40
Contract Writing: $200
Consulting & Courses: $520
Grand Total: $4,305.96
EXPENSES
Google Apps: $20
ConvertKit: $128
Virtual Assistant: $40
Adobe Creative Suite: $31.78
Hosting: $48.62
Slaying Social Services: $39.50
Keysearch: $8.45
Social Media Management Tools: $55.15
Professional Development: $25
Total Blog Expenses: $396.50
Travel: $1,843.65
TOTAL Expenses: $2240.15
NET INCOME: $2065.81
Fitnancials
Fitnancials is a smaller personal blog styled site. The focus is on women’s money issues and side-hustles with a side dose of healthy plant-based eating. An interesting combo.
They do a great job of monetizing a relatively small amount of traffic. They are a great example of not needing 100’s of thousands of monthly visitors to make money online. You just need to hustle.
Fintnancials actually made most of their money with sponsored posts. These are people who have sites that align well with yours and want to create a post on your site and get a backlink. There is some controversy with this as technically Google wants you to make that backlink nofollow or sponsored. The person paying for the sponsored post is often only interested in a dofollow link. Best to do these all as written by you and not have any mention of accepting sponsored posts on your site.
Affiliate income, ads and VA generated another $2400+. The $900 of VA work shows the spirit that is needed. Be willing to take on contracts and other work in your area of expertise as you grow.
Some successful strategies that are highlighted include:
- Pinterest Infographics
- Free resource library for email list building
- Free “How to Start a Blog” email course for list building
INCOME
Sponsored guest posts: $2,178
AffiliateMarketing: $859
Virtual Assistant Work: $900
Ad Income: $675
TOTAL INCOME (before expense): $4612
Easy Baby Life
A baby blog with over 500k monthly page views. Most of the income is from Mediavine ads. They have a healthy RPM of $8.20. One thing of note is the lower expenses of this type of blog. They only spent $676 on over $4300 of revenue and ~$500 of that expense was for one-time purchases of some design work and Tailwind.
INCOME
Amazon – $398.
Other affiliate income sources – $111
Mediavine Ad Network – $3,801
Grand total – $4,310
EXPENSES
Boardbooster – $10.
Aweber – $29.99
Sucuri – $16.66 per month
Hosting– $55
Design – $400
Opt-in plugin – $60
Tailwind. – $104
Total costs – $676
NET INCOME: $3,634
Wrapping Up
Income reports give you an inside look at how businesses like yours are run.
How they make money. What expenses they have. What tools they use.
We included reports that ranged from solo entrepreneurs that were just hitting there stride to sites with much larger expenses. Notice that none of these succesful companies had just one revenue stream. Diversification is key to your success.
