Monthly Report 3: Our first $1k And How you can do it

Last updated on December 2nd, 2022 at 12:38 pm

This months’s monthly report is divided into 3 parts:
1. The results of our third month’s traffic and income in the blog
2. A review of the first 90 days of Gamintraveler
3. Behind the scenes of all the work we’ve been doing and why we are happy you’ve been sticking around
4. Special bonus for you!

This month’s report will have a much more focus on the “how” of things so that you’ll be able to duplicate what we have done, in case you really want to travel and earn money at the same time. We’ll tell you some of the biggest secrets and challenges that we’ve done to create the growth we’ve experienced for the past 90 days.

And remember you’re not limited to our growth, so you should be open to the chances that you can even grow faster. Ain’t that sweet? ;).

1. The results of our third month’s traffic and income in the blog

The juicy details of Month 3: Jan 12-Feb 19

This month, we had to go a little bit more than the usual cut of 31 days. Due to a lot of exciting things going on (more details later), some live screenshots are no longer available. And again, I didn’t want to use all my time screenshotting, and counting, because we have a lot more fun information we are excited to share to all of you. 

Page Views – 22,310
Unique users – 10,310
Email Opt-in rate – about 2.4%
Income earned – $1010

In short, we have higher traffic than last month. Although our first month still stands as our best month for the first 3 months, we are quite happy with this month’s results. On average, Gamintraveler is getting around 16-18k views, (to be specific, we go to Google Analytics) and around 7k-10k unique readers monthly.

This month’s email opt-in rate is also higher than last month’s rate (2.45% vs .69%). We currently have about 700 subscribers on our email list, more or less. Here’s the best news, we definitely earned so much more this month. (Yay)

Income earned from blog – $1010

Yes, it’s our first big monetary milestone. We went from around $200 last month (from meager affiliate sales) to our first thousand.

How did we do that? Read on to find out more.

The process behind earning your first thousand from your blog

I will need to be blunt and tell you that this did not magically happen. Even if does appear like that, the money, and the growth in general, that we have on the blog right now is due to the consistent and carefully planned work and effort that we have put into our travel blog since the beginning. How? By being clear with our intention.

There are a lot of bloggers who start with blogging without any idea what they really want to do with it. This is totally not a bad idea by the way, because you can definitely start a blog without a clear goal then build it at some point.  However, for us to be able to have the discipline and momentum to put in a lot of our best work from the start, we have to be clear with our goals. Okay.

We’re not even SUPER clear about the end goal. No. We also don’t have massive 12-month goals. Remember we are travelers right? ha! But seriously, we have the clear intention that we will use our blog to fund all our future travels. We want to give our full time effort to the blog. So we are willing to put in solid work for the first few months to have a great foundation.

It is a growing effort. Building a blog is like a bamboo growing. Just like every business, and for us, we will need to give the blog some space to take root and while we are building a strong foundation, we are ready to earn on the side too. We have also set some deadlines, like having a good amount of traffic and attention for the site before Ruben goes back to Europe.

From then, we will be a remote team of 2. So we really need to learn so much about how each other work and what results and work commitment we can expect from each other so by the time we have to separate, we’ll have better work rhythm.

Where did the earnings come from

No. We didn’t suddenly become masters of affiliate sales. There is so much work that goes through making affiliate funnels – heavy technical understanding of SEO, managing all affilliate links on the site, adding the ads here and there, and really optimizing the site to the nitty gritty, and to be honest, we didn’t feel that it was time for us to be working in that direction.

For one, we are currently taking care of my little toddler (a 3 year old. I’m a single mum). So that in itself takes up a lot of the time, (it is a full time job indeed), and then the rest of the time we use on our blog, and one of our secrets – networking online (meeting people online – more on this in a bit, I promise).

We are really happy to share to you ALL the tools that we have been using, tell you why we have picked those tools, and have affiliate links for those tools (because why not, right? Doesn’t even cost the buyer a dime more) but apart from that, we are pretty chill in that area.

So if you are thinking you cannot start earning immediately to fund your travels, then you might wanna hang out more on the blog since we are continuously creating a lot of guides. I myself had to make a quick decision years ago to just earn online, so shoot me an email and I’ll give you some solid tips.

Online networking

A little bit of background about me – I have been working online since 2012. So yup, even if none of my friends have ever experienced working online, I had to make that ump for myself. So I left everything – job offers from friends with businesses and other work from office options, to stay at home and earn an income online. No backup plan.

I have to tell you this. If not for the relationships we tried to build online, we wouldn’t be able to get to where we are today. And no we are not talking about Branson level of networking relationships. I’m talking about being around (online) people who are focused in working online, earning through their blogs, building businesses online. There are a million ways to earn from the internet. And for us this month, we are earning through social media management and web development.

To earn 1K, Ruben and I worked with 4 clients. 🙂 We are currently offering our services for social media strategy and development, social media management, web copy and web design. The results that we have on the blog, PLUS all the work that we have put in – design, email marketing, how to get traffic — we use all these and someone’s talent and love for meeting people online (wink!) to land these clients. We actively sought and won 2 clients from partnering with an agency, and 2 more from being friendly and helpful in Facebook groups 😉 That’s it.

We were able to close more work deals this month, however since these projects have just begun, we didn’t feel that we have to include it in this month’s income report.

A review of the first 90 days of Gamintraveler

If you think work ends with consulting and freelance work, there is so much more! For Ruben and I, Gamintraveler is a chance for us to work together on some client projects which are challenging and exciting on their own.

But since we are actively building the blog, the traffic and the community, we also started getting emails from some organizations and individuals who want to pay us for work. These range from paid writing, to paying us to be featured on our blog. Imagine that. 🙂

We haven’t fully explored this area, and we are just entering the world of blog sponsorships, which I know is one of the top goals of a lot of bloggers in different industries, but we are so excited with all the potential that the blog can make.

On blog sponsorships

This can pretty much work in two ways – You either make the first move to contact agencies or individuals so they can pay you for some work that will be beneficial for their brand, or they contact you first instead. The latter one was what happened with us.

We had a couple of people approach us via email and our contact form on the site, and ask us about sponsored posts on the blog. If you haven’t encountered that term before, a sponsored post is a form of advertising where in a written copy (at least for our blog) is created for the purpose of promoting a product or a brand but in the form that aligns with the blog’s goal.

For example, brands or individuals can pay travel bloggers to have a post related to their flight company or travel gear, or travel tours, and that post will directly advertise a particular brand, while still educating people about travel. You can offer to write promotional posts for brands and post them on your blog with links to their products, or if you are on their radar, and they feel that you are a good fit for their brand, they can contact you and ask you if you can place promotions for them on your blog and on your social media channels.

We didn’t add the monetary value of some of the sponsored posts since they’re not on the blog yet, so these might be added on next month’s report depending on the project’s timeline.

On Affiliate Marketing and promotion of other products

I will have to say, and Ruben will totally agree with this, that right now is not the moment for us to focus on affiliate marketing. This is not to say that affiliate marketing is not a big income generating machine. We have seen it work with a lot of people online, so it’s definitely promising.

However, based on the time we have, our skills, and what value we’d be happy to offer to people, we really want to focus on consulting work, social media marketing and management, and the best is offering our own products. We are more “help” focused, so for now, we intend to go that path. And like always, we’ll be documenting our experience in the blog.

On writing reviews for brands and products

We are happy to announce that we will dive into the world of reviews for our trip in Asia this month. Yay. 🙂

So far, we’ve talked and confirmed with around 5 hotels in this trip, all sizes, small to 5-star hotels, so we are really hoping that you’ll have a range of different choices. Click here if you want to get insider guides on how we got all these deals. 🙂

Our Asia trip (Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand) will start on February 23 and it will go til March 23. We’ll be traveling and working together for a month – Hitchhiking in the road, reviewing hotels, meeting new friends, exploring cities, lying down in beaches, and working more on the blog.

And really, we don’t think we will reach this without all your support. All the messages you have sent to us, we take time to read ALL of them, although we don’t have the change to write a response to everyone. 

We’ll make sure we will share to you all the experiences we have in traveling and creating this blog, to inspire you to travel and for you to know that you can earn while traveling. We are in this journey, and we are happy to share to you all our successes and failures.

For today, let’s work on 2 things, shall we?

No. 1 – If you want to see everything that we will be doing, from leaving Philippines, to all the places we’ll visit in this trip, and get behind the scenes, and get to know us SO MUCH MORE, hang out with us on Snapchat. We are “gamintraveler”.  We are ready to just know you so much better and have MORE fun together. Add us up and we’ll see you there.

No 2 – (This one with a more serious vibe.) We are currently working on a special project for everyone who wants to learn the what, why, and how of blogging, how to build 50K traffic for your blog in 90 days PLUS accountability partnership from Ruben and I.

Yup, we want to partner with you for 8 weeks, and help you not only get your feet wet, but to completely dive in the exciting world of blogging. We will have a private email and Facebook community for this project, so if you feel like you need more info, CLICK BELOW so you can get more details.\

So that’s it. Snap with us, join our special project, and hang with us in the blog and emails we send weekly. We ARE very happy that you’ve been sticking with us through this journey. We have received a lot of emails telling us how you want us to continue the blog, and help you with your own blogs, and we feel that we are in the best place and time of our life.

You inspire us.

Thank you and see you around! x

And oh, share the love to someone you know who needs the energy of this community. Click on our social media buttons below to share awesome travel vibes.