Since 2020, I had to shift my blog strategies because most of my website portfolio was about traveling. In 2021, I had decided to invest more and test different types of blogging investments to see what would have a bigger return on investment.
In this blog post, I’ll give you a blog income report for all my websites as well as a summary of what I’ve learned, the mistakes I’ve made, and more.
Website Portfolio
I currently own 7 websites, because I sold one in December 2021.
- Gold project: Main website in the travel niche
- Silver project: This website (Nomad Life 101) in the travel and lifestyle niche
- Bronze project: A French website in a specific niche within the travel niche (ha!)
- Pink project: A multilingual website about a specific destination
- Yellow project: A lifestyle blog in a low-competition niche
- Turquoise project: A new lifestyle blog owned with my partner in a low-competition niche
- Gray project: A website that isn’t made for monetization (this one won’t be included in this report)
I recently sold the “Coral project” in December 2021 – you can read about my experience selling a website on Flippa here.
Blog Income Reports 2021
In this section, I’ll go over each project and talk about the income sources and expenses of 2021.
Note, that most of my income comes from SEO services which won’t be included in this income report so that I can focus on blog income only.
PSST. Want to learn how to track your blog income? Get our blogging tracker that includes automated Google sheets to track your income and expenses.
Gold Project
Travel niche – Website launched in 2015
This blog is monetized in 4 different ways:
- Sponsors: $12,845.35
- Affiliate marketing: $11,377.71
- Ad display: $8,077.65
- Digital products: $27.83
As the travel niche is still impacted by the pandemic, I had to shift my strategies and focus on different types of content. To give you an idea, I invested about $16,000 in content creation in 2021. But, I’ll get back to this later on.
Learn more about the best affiliate programs for travel bloggers.
Silver Project
Travel and lifestyle niche – Website launched in 2017
This website makes most of its income from affiliate marketing, digital products and sponsors. In total, this website made $2,297.07 in 2021. Most of it came from affiliate marketing.
Although for this website, I did not track the income sources separately as I do with my main website.
I finally joined an ad network at the end of 2021, but as the network sends payments three months later, no ad revenue had been added to this report yet.
Bronze Project
French website in a specific travel niche – Website launched in 2019
This website makes all its revenue with Amazon. It made $482.22 in 2021. As it’s in the travel niche, it’s obviously impacted by the pandemic and the niche is seasonal.
Note that no new blog posts have been published in 2021 – I only did one round of SEO optimization. The plan is to sell this website eventually.
Pink Project
Multilingual website about a specific destination – Website launched in 2019
This website has been growing in traffic, but it only made $19.27 in 2021 with affiliate marketing.
Note that no new blog posts have been published in 2021 – I only did one round of SEO optimization. The plan is to sell this website eventually.
Yellow Project
Lifestyle website about a low-competition niche – Website launched in 2020
This blog doesn’t generate income yet. Some blog posts are still not indexed (thanks to Google Search Console). The domain authority of this website is only at 7 which means that the website isn’t ranking well yet.
Although, I did publish a few blog posts this year.
Turquoise Project
Website owned with my partner about a low-competition niche – Website launched in 2021
This blog doesn’t generate income yet. Again, this website is relatively new and has about 30-40 blog posts currently. The domain authority is only at 3 which is quite low.
So, we are giving the website domain time to grow. We launched it in August.
Blog Investments And Expenses
As I mentioned above, I spent lots of money on content creation. But, I did experiment with investments this year.
Note that most investments were mistakes, but I wanted to try different strategies to see what works better.
Reminder: I make most of my income from SEO services, so I used revenue from SEO services to bootstrap my other projects.
Here’s the list of blogging expenses I had this year:
- Tools and subscriptions: $3,974.25
- Domains and hosting: $531.01
- Blog management assistant: $3,231.10
- Graphic design: $582.19
- Virtual assistant: $5,087.00
- Content creation: $16,197.09
- Pinterest services: $994
- Copywriting services: $791.62
- Video services: $23
For a big total of $31,411.26
Phew.
My goal was to try different strategies for 6 months and then evaluate.
After 6 months, I decided to focus on the only things that were making sense.
So, I got rid of the following expenses:
- Blog management assistant
- Graphic design
- Pinterest services
- Copywriting services
- Video services
At the beginning of 2021, I had hired about 4 or 5 writers and I only kept two of them.
To make my decision, I went to see the stats of each blog post and I kept the two writers who were giving me a better return on investment.
Then, at this moment, I realized that the best content was actually written by me. So, I decided to focus on the blog posts I love writing (how to type of content, and updates like this one) and outsource the rest.
Now, let’s see what I’ve learned in 2021.
What I’ve Learned
As a blogger, the best investment is definitely content creation. As I now have ads on two blogs, the more content I have, the more money I make with ads.
But that doesn’t stop there.
More traffic = more income revenue + more affiliate sales
As a blogger, content is where the return is at! Of course, it depends on your niche, but unless you can become a pro at selling digital products – creating more content is the way to go. That said, you should also focus on affiliate marketing.
More content = more traffic opportunities = more revenue
But, not all type of content is great. In fact, I only recommend focusing on content that you can rank for (hello SEO).
If you wish to learn how to increase your blog traffic by learning SEO strategies, check out the SEO course I created with my partner.
If you’re sitting there, wondering if you need to invest this much – be reassured – no you don’t. For years, I was scared of investing money in my websites for multiple reasons.
Back in the day, I had lots of debts, and most of my income was helping me pay off my debts. Now, that I’m debt-free for a few years, I’m in a situation where I feel comfortable investing more and testing out different strategies.
If you feel like you have enough time to work full-time on your blog and prefer to do everything yourself, simply go for it.
Eventually, when you’re making more money blogging, you’ll feel like there’s too much to do and not enough time. At that moment, hiring an assistant or a few writers may be the right thing to do.
In 2021, I also spent lots of time educating myself with books. The goal was to improve my efficiency and develop systems that work better for my team and myself.
At the end of the year, I also evaluated these systems and adapted them for 2022.
So, if you want to learn more about discipline and productivity, I’d recommend one of the following books:
Goals For 2022
Now that I know that creating more content is the only way to boost profit from a blog, I’ll focus my investment on content creation.
I still have a virtual assistant and I still need some tools to run my blogs including Tailwind, Keysearch, and Canva Pro.
But, I’ll be focussing on publishing more content and optimizing the content I already have.
I’m hoping to double my traffic, apply for ad networks for more websites, and to sell one more website by the end of 2022.
The experiment with investing is now over, so I’ll be putting most of my money into content creation. I’m also engaged in writing a few articles per week myself.
If you need help with developing your own content editorial calendar, take a look at our guide on how to use Trello to plan blog content.
Final Thoughts
And there you go, you have it – my blog income report for 2021.
I still feel like the pandemic is influencing the results on some of the websites, as my main website hasn’t fully recovered yet.
But in the second half of 2021, I managed to double my income, so I’m optimistic for 2022.
I’ll try to publish more updates and report like this on a monthly basis from now on. You can now read my blog income report for January 2022 and my blog income report for February 2022.
Looking for more blog tips and tricks? Read one of the following blog posts:
