Why are we sharing our income?

Let me start by saying, the purpose of this income report is not to brag about how much money we’re making from our YouTube channels and website. Trust me, it’s nothing to brag about!

Julie and I decided to take this crazy adventure of building an off-grid dept free homestead from scratch back in June 2018 when we bought 7 acres of raw forest in Idaho. We will be moving there and starting to build in June 2019. In January 2019 we decided to take our hobby YouTube channels and website seriously by trying to turn them into a profitable online business that can support us while we build our homestead.

Starting June 1, 2019, we will be unemployed and have no other income other than this online business. We have saved enough money to dry in a modest house and eat rice and beans for about 6 months. Haha! Then we will be flat broke.

Our goal is to be making $5,000 a month by the end of 2019. It’s going to be a huge challenge to get there in the next 12 months. However, sharing our adventures and encouraging others to live a more sustainable life on their own terms is something Julie and I are both really passionate about. It would be amazing to make a full-time living doing something we enjoy so much, so we’re going for it!

Before we go any further, I have to thank Jim and Ricky at Income School for all of their help in making this dream become a reality. They run a course called Project24, which has been extremely helpful and has a great community built around it.

Our hope is that by transparently sharing our journey from the start, we might inspire you to go after one of your biggest dreams. So without further ado, here is our January income report.

Income Report

Amazon Associates: $154.78

We are part of Amazon’s Associate’s program. That means that when we share a link to a product that is for sale on Amazon on our blog or in the description of our YouTube videos we can earn a small commission if someone purchases that product through that link. There is no additional cost to the purchaser, Amazon just shares a little with us for bringing them a customer.

We share different links on our YouTube channel than we do on our blog. That way we can see how each one is performing. Here is how they each did this month:

• Amazon – Down to Earth Homesteaders: $61.92
• Amazon – YouTube: $92.86

Insights:

It was surprising that our blog earned around 2/3 as much income as our YouTube channel did through Amazon Associates because our blog only received 1,760 page views in January as compared to our YouTube Channel which received 484,400 video views.  What will happen when our blog reaches 400,000 page views a month?

Our YouTube channel likely performed so poorly because only 9.1% of its audience is in the USA as compared to our blog which is 75% from the USA. Also, it is easier for a reader to interact with our Amazon links in a blog post than it is for a viewer on YouTube.

Predictions:

We have not yet fully monetized our blog posts and resource pages with Amazon links as Jim and Ricky at Income School recommend. But, over the next couple of weeks, I plan to finish that. The traffic on our site has been steadily increasing, so I expect our income from Amazon to increase next month.

YouTube Adsense: $331.07

We have three YouTube channels: Martin Johnson, Pak Martin, and Julie Johnson however we are only really active on Martin Johnson. We still earn a little money from our other channels but it will continue to decrease unless we start publishing more videos to them. However, publishing videos take a lot of time and energy and sometimes money. At this season of our life, we will only be focusing on our main channel Martin Johnson. Here is the income break down.

• Julie Johnson: $15.53
• Martin Johnson: $269.08
• Pak Martin: $46.46

Insights:

Our income from YouTube is pretty dismal when you look at the number of views we get. On Martin Johnson, I received 484,400 video views in January but only earned $269.08. That works out to about 54¢ per 1,000 views. It is so low because 74% of our views come from Indonesia. Indonesia along with all other developing nations have very inexpensive ad markets which translates to very low income for the creators.

Why do we have so many viewers from Indonesia? We lived there for 5 years and grew our YouTube channel there. Now that we have moved back to the states our old videos keep getting 1,000’s of view a month. Plus, our new videos are mostly being viewed by our Indonesian subscribers.

Predictions: 

I’m expecting to slowly gain more American subscribers over the next few months, which should increase our ad revenue slightly. However, I’m not expecting too much growth until we start building our house in June.

TubeBuddy: $9.50

We use TubeBuddy every time we upload a video.  It is a Chrome extension that helps us save a lot of time optimizing our video titles, descriptions and tags. TubeBuddy also helps make replying to comments a lot faster. There are a lot of other great features of TubeBuddy that we use but this is not the place to talk about that. If you want to learn more about Tubebuddy you can check it out here.

TubeBuddy provides affiliate links which users who love their product can share. If someone subscribes to TubeBuddy’s service we earn a small commission. It is a three-way win. TubeBuddy gets a new client, we get a small commission and our readers/viewers get a great service that can really help them grow their YouTube channel.

Insights: 

I don’t actively promote TubeBuddy so any revenue we receive we are grateful for.

Predictions: 

I don’t expect much change over the next month because I don’t plan on actively promoting it.

Total Income for January: $495.35

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Expense Report

Convert Kit: $49.00

We use Convert Kit to manage our 2,000+ subscriber email list. With Convert Kit, we can send out notifications about our new videos, and blog posts which helps grow our YouTube channel and Blog by bringing new traffic to it each time we publish.

I highly recommend using ConvertKit for your email list building.

Genius Link: $10.00

Genius Link helps us get the most from product links we share with our audience. It helps us boost revenue, automate, and simplify our life.

How does it do this? Genius Link detects a shopper’s country, language, device, and more, then routes them to the best page for them. For example, when we share a Genius Link to a product, Genius Link will automatically send a US shopper to the US Amazon store, a Canadian shopper to the Canadian Amazon store and an Indonesian shopper to Lazada (an online store in Southeast Asia). Can you see the increased earning potential?

I highly recommend using Genius Link to direct your traffic to the proper online stores if you have an international audience.

TubeBuddy: $14.25

I already told you about why we love TubeBuddy earlier. If you are a YouTuber you need it!

Udemy Pinterest Course $9.99

We took a course on Udemy about how to use Pinterest but it was not all that good.

Total expenses for January: $83.24

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Net Profit: $412.11

We have just started promoting our blog on Pinterest which will hopefully increase our traffic over the next month. This was something that Jim and Ricky at Income School really stressed. So Julie has been learning everything she can about how to use Pinterest to drive traffic to our blog. I’ll report back next month on how we did with that.

I can wait to see what happens in February!

Hope you have a really great day and keepsm:)ing!

-Martin