Let’s jump right in with this May 2017 income report! I’m super excited to share with you guys what’s been going on with me lately.
What’s Up With These Income Reports, Anyway?
Ever since my very first month in business (I made a whopping $87), I’ve been sharing my income and expenses for each month, in order to give other online entrepreneurs a good baseline of what a real business looks like during its start-up phase.
My goal with these posts is to give you guys a super realistic look into what type of income and expenses you can expect from being a “girl next door” type of online entrepreneur who isn’t making 5-6 figures each month (yet!).
Let’s do this!
May 2017Â Income Report: An Overview
Naturally, since last month was another best month ever in terms of income…this month was not so great. It was still good, but I continue to be stuck in that hole of lots of expenses with little profit. Hopefully this is just a temporary problem, though. As I raise my prices and launch new projects, I’m thinking that my profit will start to improve. (God, I hope so.)
A FEW HIGHLIGHTS:
- I went to (and spoke at) my first business conference — During the middle of May, Brent and I flew out to Chicago, where I attended the Create Your Laptop Life LIVE event. I even did a little presentation on Pinterest marketing! I had so much fun and did a lot of thinking about the future of my online career. Speaking of which…
- I launched my third business! — A lot of you have already probably heard about this, due to the viral newsletter I sent out a few weeks ago, but if not….hey, I started a new business! This brand-new venture is a total passion project, because I have crazy strong feelings about the topic, but I do hope to slowly monetize it. This third offshoot of my main brand here on MirandaNahmias.com is called The Chronic Illness Entrepreneur, and it’s a community for female entrepreneurs who struggle with chronic illnesses (both mentally or physically). If you read the newsletter I sent out, I go into detail about my own personal experience with chronic illness, so obviously this is something near and dear to my heart. If you have a chronic illness like Chron’s, migraines, PCOS, or depression, I’d love to invite you to come join our supportive community if you haven’t already. I also plan to launch the corresponding website on July 1st!
- I’m officially an LLC! — I’d been putting off transitioning from a sole proprietor to an LLC, but apparently if you’re making more than $5k per month, it’s kind of necessary? I’m not sure. I just know that my CPA made me haha. But, yeah, I’m an LLC now! The process wasn’t too painful and only cost $150 bucks.
Business Goal Setting
My Goals For May 2017: Success or Failure?
- Develop a system to put out weekly newsletters — FAILURE. This is still not in place, but I did send out two newsletters in May, so I feel pretty good about that.
- Keep expenses under $5,000 — FAILURE. Bahaha not even close. Kind of forgot I was going to be taking that trip to Chicago, whoops.
- Get my new homepage design live — FAILURE. Wow, May was certainly productive. I think my main problem was I was so busy with the trip to Chicago, and then the trip itself really affected a lot of the momentum I had going (both because it threw me off and because it gave me some new goals). Let’s try again next month!
My Goals for June 2017 — Let’s Do This!
- Keep expenses under $5,000.
- Get my new homepage design live.
- Launch my new website at www.chronicillnessentrepreneur.com.
May 2017Â Expenses
**Annual expenses not included (such as Tailwind*, hosting costs, and LeadPages).Â
- Deposit Photos* = $29.00
- ClickFunnels* = $97.00
- Active Campaign* = $45.00
- Teachable* = $39.00
- Adobe Creative Cloud = $21.39
- BoardBooster* = $10.00
- Grum = $3.33
- Buffer = $10.00
- Zapier = $20.00
- Zoom*Â = $14.99
- Smarterqueue* = $45.99
- NameCheap* = $37.59
- E-Courses & Ebooks = $97.00
- Design Elements = $13.96
- Ads & Marketing = $1,271.55
- Travel = $1,698.99
- Professional Fees = $156.00
- Referral Payouts = $47.50
- Transaction Fees = $117.65
- Team Member Payments = $2,297.40
Total Expenses =Â $6,073.34
May 2017Â Income Report
- Affiliate & JV Sales = $254.92
- Google Adsense = $9.70
- Passive Income Products + Coaching = $752
- Client Work = $4,386.20
Total Income =Â $5,402.82
Total Net Profit = -$670.52
May 2017 Income Report: All the Stats & Analytics!
- Number of blog posts =Â 2
- Monthly blog page views = 7,359
- Email list subscribers = 5,164
- Facebook page followers = 772
- The VA Collective group members = 1,032
- Instagram followers = 3,860
- Twitter followers =Â 5,604
- Pinterest followers =Â 4,813
- Google+ followers =Â 56
- LinkedIn connections = 588
Final Notes on My May 2017Â Income Report:
I’m not sure that I realized quite how bad things were this month profit-wise until I actually sit down and did the math. This is my first month ever in the red!
That being said, if you take out Chicago’s costs (which we did kind of treat like a vacation), my profit would’ve been $1,028.47, which is much better. I know that I need to make a profit of at least $700 in order to keep paying my mortgage and stuff (combined with my part-time job earnings), so considering we saved up for the trip, it’s okay that we didn’t take a profit this month.
But, all things considered, I think it’s time to step up my game so that I can actually afford to keep this agency afloat. This means launching more passive income products and creating new packages to go with my (upcoming) new website design.
I’m ready, let’s do this, June!