I went to a workshop last month about organizing your small business’ finances and it got me thinking about how unorganized my blog’s data is right now. Every time tax season comes around, I spend hours going through every blog network and affiliate account to figure out how much I made. Ask me how much my Instagram follower count has grown in the last six months and I won’t be able to tell you!
The workshop also taught me about how helpful it can be to actually see your finances and statistics on paper (or in a Google Doc, I don’t own a printer). You can find trends and relate them to a certain post you wrote or an ad campaign you ran, rather than being confused about that random spike in traffic. Once you find those trends, you can guide your future decisions off actual results on what works and what doesn’t, so no more wasting time on Facebook ads if they don’t actually do anything for you!
So I spent a few hours putting together a template to use for my monthly blog statistics and adding in info since January 2018, including:
- Income
- Expenses
- Blog traffic
- Blog traffic sources
- Posts created (and sponsored vs. unsponsored)
- Social media followers + posts created
There are a ton of other statistics you could track and I definitely plan on adding more (like a section on ad campaigns once I remember to start running those), so it’s a really customizable format you can easily adjust to support your blog. And I want to share it with y’all!
This isn’t an “ooh look what I made!” brag, just a “here’s this thing I made that might help you too.” I keep a folder for each year in my Drive, and along with each monthly report I also have a single yearly report where I input my income for each month, so I always know where I stand.
You can view the monthly report here and the yearly report here. To use them, make sure you’re logged into your Google account and click File -> Make a Copy! Also some clarification, under Blog Statistics there’s a line for Home Page Visits. You can find that info on Google Analytics by going to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages and find the views for “/”, which is your home page.
Let me know if you think of another section I should add onto these, I’m still experimenting with it and always open to suggestions!