Display Ads & YouTube – $1,925.31

Own Products – $412.5

Instagram Sponsorship – $320

Expenses: $1,709*

My expenses include things like office rent, premium hosting (Pressable), Tailwind, ConvertKit and paid advertising. This month, I also bought the Genesis Framework from Studio Press along with some WordPress themes, which was pretty expensive at $499. *Taxes and PayPal/Stripe fees are not yet included in this figure.

Total Income: $11,376.22 / Income After Expenses: $9,667.22

What Worked In January 

Switching Hosting To Pressable

If you’ve been reading my income reports, you will know that for 2-3 months now, something has not been right with my hosting. While everything had been smooth previously, my theme (Divi) had undergone some updates that completely blew thing out of the water.

At one point, I wasn’t even able to publish a blog post. Personally, I think my hosting issues came down to two things: 1) any updates that Divi had done and 2) I had outgrown my plan and had “too much traffic” for it.

Since then, I’ve decided to switch to Pressable – it’s a premium hosting service that currently costs me $45/month – expensive, but totally worth it. Pressable improved the speed of my website a lot, which even led me to gain about 40% in Google traffic. That’s HUGE!

While I still recommend Bluehost to new bloggers, when you start reaching the 100,000 pageviews /month mark, you’ve probably outgrown your hosting, if you’ve started out with an affordable host. At that point, you should probably look into premium hosting, like Pressable, WP Engine, or others.

Note: DON’T change your hosting if you’re in the middle of a busy period for your blog, like launching a new product, etc. There’s a plethora of things that could go wrong with switching hosts. That’s exactly why I decided to wait until my busy period (November-December) was over before switching over.