2022 Income Report: October – December

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.

My Business Background

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.

Income Sources

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:

Quarter 2 Income Goals

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.

Complete the Digital Income Mastery course
Earn $300 in Etsy shop to earn Star Seller badge
Launch B Chic Collective and get 20 members

Complete Digital Income Mastery

This course by Diamond Lee came to me at the perfect time. I spent $99 a few days after my birthday to learn how she did so well on TikTok. Although her course covered how to come up with digital products, which I already mastered, I was there for the marketing tools. And babyyy, let me tell you. It was fire! I’m still growing my TikTok but I’ve grown in so much confidence, gained market research, and honed my messaging.

I have not yielded any income as a result of this program, but I’m excited for what’s in store for my marketing efforts. Since going all in with my TikTok marketing, I pushed my B Chic Collective release back to hopefully build a bigger audience to market to. However, I did fine tune my digital planner thanks to the planner.

Launch B Chic Collective

As I mentioned, B Chic Collective was put on the back burner. I really wanted to prove to myself that I could follow through on a big goal like this. However, with all the effort I put into it, I knew it would do me better to build a solid audience on an active/buying platform like TikTok first.

Soon, I will launch B Chic Collective and will hopefully be reporting residual income and community growth through the income reports.

Earn $300 in Etsy Sales

I set this modest goal because I honestly haven’t met it yet. I sell a very niche product and do no marketing, so I periodically put some marketing efforts behind my products to ramp up traffic. My conversion increased to 2.7% last year and the growth I saw in Q4 2022 (3.7% in Q4) was amazing. If I can put this on semi-autopilot, I’ll be happy. Of course I’ll make product updates, but that will be all since I’m not active in the pageant industry.

$300 in quarterly sales is also a baseline goal to earn Star Seller status. Ever since the boom in Etsy sales during the pandemic, Etsy has taken many steps to validate legit sellers and I want to appear as the top seller in my niche. That is only possible with a minimum of $300 on a rolling 3 month basis along with other parameters I tend to meet without trying.

Total Sales: $372.60

Summary

Although this is a boring report because of my limited income, I hope it’s an exciting foundation for what’s to come!

Income Sources: 1
Grand Total Income: $372.60