Welcome to my first income report! This is where I discuss the REAL money I generated from my business and what strategies did and didn’t contribute to it. I hope to use this as a form of accountability for sticking to my goals, trying new tactics, and motivating other small online creators to monetize their skills.
I don’t consider myself today’s typical creator–making money from UGC brand deals or the like. I’m just a skilled content/concept creator who is trying new things online to make a living from my own mind, work, and creativity.
As background for this first income report, I’ll recap where my business has started and where it is today. The B Chic started as B Chic University (2015) when I created my first student planner. That then turned into a blog where I shared articles about college success, money management, organization and productivity, and entrepreneurship.
Since 2015, my interests and the brand has evolved. I’ve even started and stopped this blog’s web hosting multiple times, not sure if I wanted to continue. But I’ve picked up so many skills along the way. I started to hone in on design, particularly layout design, event planning, and business mindset. I’ve settled back into the blog but have since added the podcast and my YouTube channel!
As far as monetization, I’ve never built up the site traffic to earn from advertising or Amazon affiliate marketing. I did find a niche in Etsy, where I leveraged my interest in pageantry to create my own digital planner. This is primarily where I make money for B Chic which is ironic because I do no marketing for it and I’m not super active in the industry.
As I previously mentioned, my main source of income for B Chic comes from Etsy. I sell in this shop the Complete Pageant Planner and other related smaller planners. In 2022, I also made money from a contract design job that really got me interested in starting a consulting design/marketing/brand business (but we’ll get back to that later). And for the sake of inclusivity, I made money from my real estate business on a few transactions but I don’t include those because my real estate business is separate from my B Chic brand for now.
For 2023, I hope to beef up my income sources by adding in or putting some type of marketing push behind the following:
Going into this quarter, I knew I wanted to end the year with a splash, so I set specific goals and a few tactics to make sure I completed them.