This is the third in a series of monthly reports detailing the revenue and expenses from my blogging business over time.
In the first report, I covered content generation, my early traffic numbers, and the hosting expenses I had building my blog over the first six months.
In the second report, I covered January 2017 and how I started using Gmail add-ons to organizing my blogging processes, and to capture and track the dozens of new “shiny” ideas I would have every day about what I could do with my blog moving forward.
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February 2017 Summary
In addition to the Boomerang charge this month, I had an additional $10 USD charge for my MailChimp email list as I switched from the free to paid plan.
I switched to the paid plan as I wanted an email automation sequence to be able to send out my lead magnet industry report and attract more people to my newsletter.
Mailchimp recently allowed email automation in their free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers. This is a huge advantage to people just starting out with their blogs and would have saved me over $100 in 2017 if it was available back then!
Getting Started with Lead Magnets
I generally recommend that you start with a very simple, one-page lead magnet when you first start your email list. This is because I have seen a lot of people get frustrated when they pour several weeks into an ultimate guide, mini-course, or video series only to have it fall flat. These “failures” are important learning experiences, but it is nice to have something on your website, actually working, in the time when you are learning as well!
My first lead magnet was a seven-page report compiling all of the combustible dust explosion incidents I could find in North America into a single document. You can download the report FYI on this landing page, under “2016 Combustible Dust Incident Report (North America). Note that this page is where I send people at the end of industry presentations, so there is a bunch of extra and newer stuff as well.
I purchased the paid version of Mailchimp so that I could automatically send people the report when they signed up on my 2016 report signup page. I attracted people to the page by including a 3D image of the report in my sidebar and by sharing infographics and short articles through social media.
Creating a lead magnet was an important part of growing my newsletter. At the start of February, I only had 33 people on my email list. By the end of 2017, I had increased this to 550 people and, at the time of writing (October 2018), it is at 1219 people. I will write more on the strategies I used to grow my email list in the future, but almost half of my total signups came through these lead magnets which I created every six months.
