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Blogging life and Income report – August 2015

Hello to everyone and welcome to another monthly income report, we hope all of you are doing great and we want to thank you for following our blogs and being part of our dream. We wish you a very successful month of September.

If you’re new to our monthly income reports, we write about what we did in terms of blogging for our travel blog Mytanfeet, new updates and how we made our money for the month.

And also if you are around Costa Rica and visiting Jaco, we have one private room on Airbnb for rent. We’d love to have you stay with us!

What we have done in August

The first week of August went “normal,” we were preparing content for our blog and getting ready for our trip to Washington. Samantha left a week early to visit some friends in NY and NJ and I stayed at home working on the blogs and other projects that are taking most of my time.

We had the privilege to watch some Orca Whales while we were camping at Orcas Island in Washington and it was incredible! Orca whales are my favorite animal and I had never seen one in person before.

Killer-Whale-Washington-USA

First Orca Whale I have ever seen in my life! – Picture taken by Samantha Wei while I was holding her on the boat so we might say 50/50 credit 🙂

Speaking at TBEX Asia Thailand 2015

Recently we were invited to speak at the next TBEX event in Asia which we are really excited about. We’re looking forward to visiting Thailand for the first time, meeting new people and sharing our knowledge. This will be the first time we both have to do a presentation together.

We will be speaking about how to create your own travel affiliate program which is pretty much what we do here in Costa Rica as our main source of income. Our goal is to cover all the basic steps like, what an affiliate is and what an affiliate program is, how to find businesses that fit the blog’s niche, how to negotiate a better deals, how we track of sales without spending thousands of dollars on software and how to keep the reader engage during the sale process.

Our goal is to show people how they can get more money from their affiliate sales, how they can establish a business relationship with companies and how make your readers to trust you in order to buy your products.

If you guys are planning to go, you can register and get a 20% discount by using this code “Yeison20″.

If you’re a travel blogger and going to TBEX Thailand, please let us know! We want to meet as many new people as possible and can’t wait to meet some of you we already talk to in person. I know it’ll be a very rewarding and worthwhile experience, not to mention we get to visit Bangkok!

Dealing with low season

Costa Rica like any other touristic country has a low and a high season and in low season, some businesses have reported as low as a 70% decrease in business. Low season officially starts in May but due to all the new airlines arriving in Costa Rica and deals that companies are promoting, you can start seeing the decrease of tourists at the end of July or early August.

In July we made over $5800 in commissions and in August we saw a $1300 drop, which is normal for this time of the year but it’s not something we like. After checking all the sales we have done this month, we are expecting another drop on the sales on September and right now we are working hard to prevent these kind of drops.

So due to the “low season” effect this month, we will focus on adding more income streams to make up for the loss. Like any other business you have to be ready and always look for new opportunities. It’s important to understand a country’s tourist seasons if you plan to work in it and know what to expect.

Delay with our sales website

I have been working on building a separate website where we are going to present all the products we’re selling in our affiliate network. The main reason why we haven’t launched it yet is because we want to do it right in every single aspect.

We are opening a company here in Costa Rica in order to have everything done correctly, like I have mentioned before my main goal is to build the biggest booking site for Costa Rica. I know the competition is really high and some companies we know have over 20 employees working only their Internet department alone but I have the best partner in life and business and we work very well together.

So right now I am waiting for one of our lawyer friends to finish the inscription of Mytanfeet inc. Once the company is ready and we get all the permits and everything is good to go, we will launch the site. The process was harder than I though but we will keep going forward.

Will we become a Travel Agency?

When I started in tourism my very first job was at a travel agency. I used to talk to customers, send them quotes and put everything together for them. Some days there was a lot of person to person interaction and some days I used to talked for hours on the phone in order to close a sale.

What we do and most of the bloggers do is offer pieces of information about a specific product or destination that our readers are interested in and place affiliate links in our articles in order to make commissions.

Thinking about my old job, I am doing exactly the same thing I used to do. Pretty much present information to a person that is interested ion a product and if I make the sale, I will get a commission. The difference nowadays is that we are using a different channel and the person to person interaction will be minumun. Everything is done over email in this day and age!

So putting everything together, I can say that yes we want to become a travel agency and make a ton of sells but the difference is that we want to automate the whole process and try to have the least amount of operations. It’s like checking in for a flight. 10 years ago everyone used to get in line to talk to a person in order to buy a ticket and check in. Today if you don’t have a check in a bag you just go to the airline app or the kiosks to check in and get your boarding pass.

August 2015 Stats & Income Report

Traffic

Visits: 67 150 (+1983)

Unique Visitors: 56 150 (+1607)

Page views: 98 626  (+3508)

August-monthly-Report

YouTube channel stats:

Views: 13 969 (+ 2172)

Minutes watched: 34 194 (+4371)

Subscribers: 317 (+25)

Income Report

Affiliate links:

Amazon: $218.35

Aweber: $5.70 (This service is a must have, read how we use it in this article)

Leadpages: $11.1 (Learn how we used LeadPages with this blog)

Mytanfeet Costa Rica Affiliate Network: $4553.14

Mytanfeet International Affiliate Network: $1073.99(Combination of affiliate programs such as Hotels combined, Agoda, CJ, etc)

Genesis Framework: $34.98

Total affiliate income: $ 5897.26

Advertisement:

Google Adsense: $207.59

Youtube:$15.24

Total Advertisement: $222.83

Coffess, Pizzas and Beers from Readers: $5

Total Affiliate comissions and Advertisement: $6125.09

Expenses August 2015:

Traffic Hosting Planet: $24.99

MaxCDN: $14.99

Lead Pages: $40

Aweber: $30

Total Expenses: 109.98

Total Income for August 2015 : $ 6,015.02 (-1,400.23)

Social Media and email subscribers

Twitter followers: 17 220 (+720)

Facebook likes:  2113 (+73)

Instagram: 5164 (+600)

Emails subscribers: 2715 (+241) Learn how I used Lead pages and Aweber to gain subscribers and automate income

Celebrity Status

Google Page Rank: 3

Alexa Rank: 195 902 (+3997)

Domain Authority: 40 (+4)

Thoughts and Plans

We have a lot to do until we go to Thailand which is just a little over a month away. We need to finish some of the projects we’re working on now, write our speech and prepare for our presentation. That is the big thing we’re going to focus on for the next month, plus always writing posts and working on our sales site.

We are soo close to hitting 100,000 page views and we’re really hoping that we will hit it in September. We recently got approved for rich pins on Pinterest (follow us here) and our referral traffic from Pinterest has shot up. On average we get about 300-400 a day, now we are getting about 1,000. So if you’re interested in increasing your Pinterest traffic, definitely buy a scheduler tool (we use Buffer) and get approved for rich pins. We’ve been scheduling our pins a couple times throughout the day around 2-4 PM and 6-9 PM on weekdays and every other hour on weekends since that is when most people are on Pinterest.

Amazon sales has decreased which also reflects the low season in Costa Rica since not as many people are traveling here the next couple months, so people are not buying as much. Samantha is exploring more ideas for ways to increase Amazon sales beyond what we sell for Costa Rica so we can keep increasing Amazon sales.

Another interesting thing to note is that once we hit 5,000 Instagram followers, we have been contacted by a few companies who found us on Instagram and want us to work with them. It’s worth building up your followers on Instagram and plus, it’s just really fun. Same with Twitter, we have also been contacted by companies on Twitter for product reviews and business opportunities so it’s a good reminder to us to never forget the power of social media when we get tired of scheduling and finding interesting things to post.

So this is what we have done for the month of August and how our travel blog made. Feel free to leave any comments and if you’re interested in starting your own travel blog, learn how to do so in my 3 easy step tutorial.

Pura vida !!!

Mytanfeet-Team-on-top-of-hill

On the top of the hill

Yeison Kim

I am a Costa Rican travel blogger on a journey to create a digital nomad lifestyle through internet marketing and building my online business.

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below

Sharon - September 7, 2015 Reply

Congrats on another great month! I love seeing your success and I hope I end up getting to talk with you guys in Bangkok!!

    Yeison Kim - September 7, 2015 Reply

    Thank you Sharon, I really like reading your reports too. We really hope to see you on Bangkok too and if it not possible this time maybe next time.

Maya - September 7, 2015 Reply

Good job guys! I’m not able to get to tbex, would your talk be available for stream or maybe purchase? I recently found out about rich pins on pinterest. Did you make them yourself? I’m not sure if I could get them done right.

    Yeison Kim - September 7, 2015 Reply

    Hi Maya!

    I have seen previous TBEX sessions on youtube and I know they record them so probably you will be able to find it only if they post it for sure I will have it on this blog. Setting rich pins is super easy just follow up this quick guide https://business.pinterest.com/en/rich-pins

Sofie - September 7, 2015 Reply

I’ so so so bummed I won’t be at TBEX Bangkok. I actually have the ticket, but I can’t really justify flying there for tbex alone and the timing is a bit off.
Damnit!
Really wanted to talk to you guys about the affiliate network you set up.
Other than that: amazing work:)

    Yeison Kim - September 7, 2015 Reply

    Thanks Sofie, sorry to heard you cant go if they record the session and we have access to it I will post it on the blog 🙂 thank you!

      Sofie - September 8, 2015 Reply

      That would be great, but so far I don’t think they’ve ever released recordings:/ Sharon will just have to take notes for me:p

Liz Smith - September 11, 2015 Reply

As always – great stuff! We really love following along on your progress. You are an inspiration to other bloggers, and prove that the best approach is not to follow the crowd and do what everyone else is doing, but rather paving your own way and providing real value — while actually building a solid business.

Kudos to you! We wish we could see you in Thailand (maybe we will find a way…). You are going to blow some minds there, that’s for sure!

Congrats and cheers to another great month!

Liz (and Josh)

    Yeison Kim - September 12, 2015 Reply

    Hi Liz!

    Thanks for the nice words :). We have seeing Travel Blogging courses around the internet and we have never tried them, first some of them are very expensive and second we like to experience things by ourselves if it works great and if it doesn’t well at least we have a blast trying it to make it work.

    If you guys can make it to Thailand please let us know thanks!

Konrad Braun - October 12, 2015 Reply

Truly exciting stuff Yeison. Congrats on your continued success!

    Yeison Kim - October 13, 2015 Reply

    Thanks Konrad! it’s all about being consistent and hard but fun work.

Praca zdalna - October 13, 2015 Reply

Thanks for that inspiring post. You made a “Good Job” ;). Good luck for you.

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