Oh, my! Can you believe it’s October already? Shall we start preparing for Christmas already? Time flies, huh? I already shared my  Q1 report and Q2 report, I hope you enjoyed following my growth thus far. I seriously hustled in the last three months, and I call this my season of running, building & creating. I hope to spend my last quarter of 2016 taking things easy & preparing to rock 2k17. Let’s see how it goes!

I truly believe that sharing is caring. Reading income + brand reports by other bloggers helped me big time on improving myself. For this reason, I would love to share my Blog + Business reports, so that my customers and readers can get a better idea of the behind the scenes of Kotryna Bass Blog + Design.

Alright, so here is the summary of how I did in the third quarter of 2016.

INCOME

Q3 was my biggest quarter income wise! I’m so excited! I worked my butt off, and it seriously paid off! For all of those wondering how the heck I make money from my blog + biz here is all of my sources:

Design Shop– 63%
ETSY– 15%
Affiliate Income- 21%
Other- 1%

Total passive income: 90%

In the Q2 report, I wished to double my affiliate income from 8% to 16%. The best news is- I almost tripled it as it’s now bringing me 21% of my income. This is the biggest win this season & I can now surely say that making money directly from your blog posts is more than possible. I’m thrilled to see my design shop still bringing me a solid amount of income every quarter.

I managed to work with some awesome people on custom blog designs this quarter, but I kept my custom client work to the minimum. Don’t get me wrong- I absolutely love branding & creating blogs from scratch, yet my goal is to rely mostly on passive income streams. I’m very happy to see this quarter I made 90% of my income this way.

EXPENCES

I finally made peace with my financial situation & therefore I tried to save as much money as possible this quarter. That’s why I’m pretty proud of the way I handled my money during the last three months. I finally took a plunge & decided to start investing in learning something new & I joined a few online courses. I wanted to get involved for ages & I’m really glad I did. From my experience, spending money on your education is the best thing you can do for your business. You get extremely motivated & things start to happen so much faster!

TRAFFIC

My traffic grew significantly this month as I finally challenged myself to clean up my SEO. Yes, I know, it’s been a while… I also successfully managed my social media accounts in order to bring more readers from social media. I also managed to get quite a few mentions on other blogs & websites which I’m so thankful for. I’m also looking for some guest blogging opportunities, so if you think your blog would benefit from some blogging + biz tips- get in touch & let’s do something great together! Simply send me a message through the contact form & I will get back to you asap.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Here are some of the numbers I took note of on January 1st, 4th of April, 6th of July and today:

Twitter: 1496 → 2342 → 2454 → 2566
Instagram: 2700 → 4874 → 7491 → 10829
Facebook: 2651 → 3048 → 3227 → 3477
Pinterest: 362 → 655 →  1646 → 2828

I’m so, so excited to see my Instagram & Pinterest accounts growing so fast. I finally hit 10k mark on Instagram & it’s been bringing me solid traffic every month. My Pinterest is still staying strong as my biggest source of referral traffic & I hope to bring it even bigger by the end of the year.

I guess I should also focus on Twitter + Facebook more & create strategies that would help me grow & bring better content to my followers over there. Feel free to leave me some useful links if you’re currently working on increasing your presence on these platforms.

NEWSLETTER

I hit over 2.5k subscribers to my newsletter list which is HUGE. I can’t believe that I only started building my list less than a year ago and it already proved to be the best thing for my business. I filled my free resources library with a bunch of useful digital goodies, templates & printables. I’m also very excited to announce that I’ve now moved my Weekly Round-Up posts to be viewed on newsletters only. JOIN TODAY!

AM I SATISFIED?

Extremely! Not only I had the best summer ever & spent so, so much time in the fresh air, I also managed to rock my blog + biz. I exceeded all of my income goals, managed to grow my social media following & published some useful posts that received a pretty nice feedback from you guys.

I’m so thrilled to see what the next quarter will bring my way. I wish to bring some seasonal, Christmasy content over my social media accounts & you guys are always welcome to leave suggestions if you need any help with a particular topic. Thanks for sticking around, you’re the best!

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How was your Q3? Did you achieve all of your goals? What are your plans for the next three months? Let me know in the comments!