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I'm Mara — I help creatives create and launch digital courses and profitable products. I love chatting about online marketing, design and goal setting!

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Money

September 2024 Income Report: $8,515.20

Welcome to my September 2024 Income Report!

This is my monthly post where I share a full behind-the-scenes look at my business, including exactly how much money I earned and spent in my online business.

 In this post I’ll cover:

  • How my business makes money
  • How I did on the goals I set for last month
  • My exact income and expenses 
  • My goals for the upcoming month 
  • All of the tools and resources I use to run my business

You can read all of my previous 2024 income reports here:

Total for the year so far: $98,943.75

How does my business make money?

I’m an online course strategist and digital marketing expert. Most of my income comes from one-on-one clients where I help them build, manage or launch their online courses.

I currently have 8 monthly retainer clients and I’m not working on any project based client work at the moment (since my monthly spots are fully booked!)

I also earn money through affiliate income, speaking engagements, coaching, and selling my own digital products.

My September 2024 Income: $8,515.20

Client Work: $8,352.25
Affiliate Income: $162.95

My Expenses: $1,362.70

What I spent money on:

  • Credit card processing fees
  • A VA who helps me schedule blog posts, schedule emails and keep up with my bookkeeping
  • A website designer who helps edit pages on my website and keep things up to date
  • A co-designer who collaborated with me on a big sales page and website project
  • Your Template Club’s social media templates (which helps me remember to post things on my own Instagram account) 
  • Manychat
  • Office Supplies: a pack of pens and some new notebooks
  • Coffee at Panera – when I was exclusively working there or meeting a client

How Did My September Goals Go?

  1. Plan and promote my free Black Friday Training – COMPLETE!

This goal was a huge success! I hosted a Black Friday training with my friends Dolly DeLong and Bekah Read. We had an incredible turn out, people asked amazing questions and we launched a new product together: The Black Friday Simplified Kit.

2. Don’t save money! DONE

For this goal, instead of focusing on long term savings like retirement, I wanted to prioritize short term savings and build up a buffer for things like doctor visits, dentist appointments, gifts, car repairs and more.

I did this and it was great! I saved up a bunch of money for expenses that I know we’ll have between now which has helped me feel a lot less money stress.

3. Celebrate my daughter’s birthday – Done and so, so much fun!

My daughter turned one in September. We did all the traditional birthday things and more! We took her to build a bear for the “pay your age” bear, spent the day at the zoo, opened presents, had a birthday party and took tons of cute photos of her smashing a cake!

My Goals For October

1. Meet with accountants 

Before the end of the year I want to finalize who I’m going to work with for our taxes. I’ve previously worked with several different accounts, but I’ve never found the right fit and last year I had a really stressful situation where our accountant become super overbooked, had trouble communicating and our taxes didn’t get done until July.

2. Record a new podcast intro!

I’m still working on relaunching my podcast, Create a Better Course. As part of that I want to update the music and shorten the intro.

3. Go to Therapy

Woah this one sounds intense, but it’s really not. I’ve noticed I have a lot of random emotional and mental clutter lately. In the last year I’ve had some major changes (baby, husband became a mostly stay at home parent, business is incredibly busy). I think it would be super helpful for me to talk to a neutral third party about it and get a few skills to cope with some of the things that cause me a lot of stress and frustration.

4. Try out having a fridge discussion list

I’ve had this weird problem lately where my husband and I get a huge backlog of things we need to talk about. Some of it is small stuff like figuring out what we’re buying a family member for their birthday, other stuff is bigger life planning stuff.

We’re both tired more often these days and we have less free time to just chat. When we do have time we both completely forget all of the stuff we wanted to talk about so we’re going to try a whiteboard on the fridge this month and see if having a spot to jot down all of our discussion ideas makes a difference.

Income Report Wrap-Up

Here’s a few quick notes about this past month that I noticed while writing this.

  1. My contractor expenses are WAY up this year. I’m accepting a lot more help because I have less free time. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s where the bulk of my money goes for expenses

  2. September was a stressful month for me in business. I had a lot of client launches which always adds an extra layer of stress BUT despite a more stressful month I didn’t actually earn more money. I’m income is actually down a bit – this is fascinating to me because I feel like I worked more than usual, but I guess sometimes what we feel isn’t reality.

  3. I’m still really feeling like my time is so limited and it’s been especially hard to find time to focus on my own business. I wish I had the answer to solve that. I think it’s a combination of eliminating tasks, saying no to things and finding more things that I can outsource.


All of the software and tools I’m currently using to run my business

A quick note – Some of the links below are affiliate links which means I may get a small kickback if you use them. There’s no additional cost to you and all of these products are things I actually use in my own business.

Business Money Tools:

Personal Money Tools:

  • Ally Bank For my everyday checking and savings account
  • Wealthfront Long term savings like my emergency fund and future house down payment fund.  
  • Alliant Visa Signature – My personal credit card that receives 2.5 cashback. We use these for most of our everyday expenses.

Productivity and Goal-Setting Tools:

Social Media:

  • Your Template Club – Canva templates for Instagram and Facebook that you can easily customize 
  • ManyChat – For sending automated messages on Instagram and Facebook
  • Metricool – To schedule posts on Instagram and Facebook  
  • Tailwind – For scheduling Pinterest pins 
  • Canva – To create graphics
  • Ring Light – The ring light and tripod I use to film content

Podcasting:

  • Riverside – Recording podcast episodes and interviews 
  • Libsyn – Where I host my podcast episodes 
  • Microphone – For recording podcasts, events and videos 
  • Calendly – To schedule guest interviews

Email Marketing:

Website:

Other disclosures:

Relay Bank: Relay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and FDIC insurance are provided through Thread Bank, Member FDIC. The Relay Visa® Debit Card is issued by Thread Bank pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. and may be used everywhere Visa® debit cards are accepted.

*This post may contain affiliate links.