Income and Traffic Report – Soukaina Collections Crochet Pattern Business

This is the latest traffic and income report at Soukaina Collections and the first report for 2020. This month was a great month for my handmade & crochet online business. I achieved new milestones and I’m happy to show you this month’s results…

I didn’t work that much this month, but I’ve used the 80/20 rule… I made a new crochet baby dress set that includes four items (dress, headband, hat, and shoes). So I have four posts ready to go on the blog!

Note: This post contains affiliate links, if you make a purchase through one of the links below, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Before we continue, if it’s your first time on the Soukaina Collection crochet pattern blog, you may want to have a look at my backstory…I started crocheting and selling my finished crochet handmade items in the real world two years ago (you can learn more on my About page), and in February 2019, my father advised me to start a blog and create my own patterns.

I then registered my domain with my father’s SiteGround web hosting (after a long brainstorming session that lasted several days in order to find my domain name, but I think it was worth it), and I learned how to create a blog with WordPress, and how to drive traffic to my blog with social media and SEO.

This is how my brand Soukaina Collections was born.

Today, a few months later, my crochet blog gets close to four thousand monthly visitors, my Etsy shop (crochet patterns for babies) gets hundreds of (happy) monthly visitors and most importantly, I make many sales, I make some Internet money (and growing). I’m super happy with my results, and a few months ago, I would never imagine that it would be my turn to write monthly income reports for my readers and (soon) subscribers (when I find some time to sign up for an email service provider)!

Actually, I really started working on my blog since July 2019. That means that I’m really working on my crochet business for seven months now.

Why I’m writing an income report?

Income reports are well known in the blogosphere, and I’m doing this for several reasons.

First, that was suggested by my father, and he knows what he is doing when it comes to market an online business (he started doing business online in 2007).

Secondly, the purpose of these reports is to teach my friends, readers, what I do to market my crochet pattern business online.

Lastly, I strongly believe that putting my results and progress online will motivate me even more because I actually have to put some real numbers for you to see. Plus it may increase traffic to the blog a little bit as well.

I plan to publish a new income report here every month for at least a few months. You can see my first report here, how I made my first sale and also my first affiliate commission online.

What can you expect to see here?

My results, failures, and progresses.

You’ll get some insights, experiments, and strategies that may help you to create or grow your own crochet, knitting or craft DIY Handmade business. Before you read further, I think you’d want to know how I’m going to start making some money.

So how do I make money at Soukaina Collections?

At the time of this writing, I make money selling patterns on Etsy, and promoting affiliate products (Amazon and other affiliates).

Save it to Pinterest!

I will add MailerLite email software soon because getting your email marketing right is really, really important when you are selling online.

Online You can choose to go with paid traffic, or you can decide to go the “free” route (well, it’s not really free because your time has a cost), with SEO and Social media. You can decide to focus on selling paid patterns or giving your patterns for free and make money from advertising (Adsense, Mediavine, adthrive, etc.) and affiliate marketing or do a mix of both.

This is my complete business plan (more on how these different strategies are working for me below). Oh, and I want to stress out that there is no “one size fits all” way of marketing your online business. Like in a real brick and mortar business, everyone runs his business as he wants.

In this report, you will only find the online traffic and income side of my crochet business. I put the offline part on hold anyway. I didn’t sell any finished crochet handmade items offline lately because I’m focusing on my online business.

Ok, enough said…

Here’s what you want to see:

1) Money:

Etsy Shop: $108.20 (Last Month: $51.60)
Amazon (affiliates): $0.36 (Last month: $0.00)

Expenses:

Etsy Seller Fees: $14.51 (Last month: $9.27)
SiteGround Hosting: Free

Profit: $94.05 (Last Month: $42.33)

2) Traffic:

Important Growth Metrics (Unique Visitors):

4,004 Visits (Unique Users)
7,915 Pageviews

(Last Month: 2,495 Visits & 4,295 Pageviews)

Traffic for each main source:

Google: 690
All Free Crochet: 427 (Last Month: 679)
Ravelry: 166 (Last Month: 256)
Facebook: 896 (Last Month: 134)
Pinterest: 1148 (Last Month: 414)
Direct: 680
Instagram: 10 (Last Month: 0)
Twitter: 4 (Last Month: 1)

My Comments:

1) Money:

Yay! I’ve managed to double my monthly income! I believe it’s because now I have two crochet baby dress set in the shop. I know my readers love them.

Etsy Shop: I have 26 crochet patterns in my shop now. My goal is to get at least 50 because I’ve read that traffic starts to really increase on Etsy when you reach that milestone.

I think that it’s because December & January are the best months for crochetpreneurs, crochet pattern designers and anything crochet in general. I’m expecting to get a lower number in the coming months, but I believe that if I manage to get more traffic, I can stay at the $100/month mark or above.

Amazon: As you can see, I got almost no commissions from Amazon from them. My father used to make several thousands of dollars per month promoting affiliate products during the last decade, so I can see that $0.36 won’t make it. So I’m going to replace the native ads with an ad for the Aweber email marketing software because it’s a really powerful and reliable email solution (my Dad used it for years and literally made tens of thousands with this email provider). I’m telling you this because I want you to know that I only promote things that I (or Dad) have tested, and I’m sure you will be thrilled should you decide to make a purchase following my recommendation.

2) Traffic:

A BIG traffic bump this month as well, I went from 2,495 unique visitors last month to 4,004 visitors in January!

All my “hard” (it’s not that hard, plus I love it) crocheting work starts to pay off. There was a total of 5,393 sessions on the blog. Remember that at 10,000 sessions per month, I can sign up with Mediavine. I’m not there yet, but as I add more and more articles, I’ll get closer.

Google: the search engines still send a lot of traffic to my blog. I’m creating new crochet designs and I plan to create some blankets. I hope they’ll send me more and more traffic as I add more pages to the blog.

All Free Crochet: I got less traffic this month, but I think it’s because I only created one baby dress this month. When you put a pattern on AFC, you get a traffic bump because you are on their first page in your category, then, when your design drops on the second page, traffic slowly decreases, it’s normal.

Facebook: I created my brand new Facebook page, you can see it (and give it some love) here, and traffic increased dramatically as a result. See for yourself, I went from 134 visitors last month to 896 in January. That’s great! I definitively need to up my FB game.

Ravelry: Traffic went down again this month (and still no sales there). It’s still a viable source of traffic, a few hundred visitors is always a good thing. I don’t expect to make any sales there though.

Pinterest: traffic is becoming insane there. I went from 414 to 1148 visitors, and the truth is although I’m pining every single day, my Pinterest strategy is far from being perfect. For now, I just pin at least 5-10 times daily. As I said before, I believe that Pinterest is a long term strategy, and I’m glad to see that I get more traffic from them. I have a hard time to gather the stats from their analytics but it’s the way it is. The key with Pinterest is pining consistently, and putting your best pictures out there. I’m definitely not a picture professional, but I’m trying my best with both Canva and Befunky. Some of my images get hundreds of saves, and others are a total mess. It’s a numbers game. This month I didn’t really use my Tailwind account because I’ve used more than 87 pins from my 100 free pins credit. So I can’t really post in tribes because when you post a design there, you have to share other people pins as well. With the few left, I may post my latest baby dress. I’m not sure whether I should add Tailwind to my tools yet. I think I’m going to wait until my monthly income gets bigger because Tailwind is a monthly recurring investment.

Ok, I’m done writing this month’s report. January was a great, traffic and sales were almost double what I do monthly.

3) Goals:

I’ve reached of my goals for this month except making more affiliate commissions (ask Amazon…) and publishing 10 new blog posts, I think all I can do is 3-4 blog posts per month from now. Traffic and sales increased, and I’m adding more lovely designs to the Soukaina Collection brand “I create modern crochet patterns for babies”.

Plus the main goal for January was creating a new baby dress set, this was done with love as well!

Thanks for reading my report and following and supporting my blog.

Happy crocheting (or Happy blogging, knitting, whatever you do online)!