In the early days of my blogging journey, I loved reading income reports of established bloggers. I even googled “blogger income report” or “travel blogger income report” or “asian blogger income report” obsessively because I was so hungry for knowledge about how to make money.

Reading other blogger’s income reports has been monumental and life changing. They made me believe that it is possible to make money from a blog. They became my role model, someone I want to be 5 or 10 years down the road. I loved to visualize what my life would be when my blog can earn me $100, $1000 or $10,000 a month.

Now that I’ve reached the stage where I think my blog is pretty sustainable, I have been contemplating if I should write my own income report on my blog. The more I think about it, the more unsure I become.

On one hand, I really want to inspire new bloggers to start a blog and make a side income out of it. On the other hand, I don’t want to brag how much I’m making. And I obviously don’t want people think that I’m blogging just for the money. I love blogging, I love travel, so I want to monetize my passion. A writer gotta eat, right?

It doesn’t help that income is quite a taboo topic in my culture. Everyone wants to know how much you’re earning but nobody wants to ask directly.

Upon much deliberation, I have come to the decision to publish my income report for the following reasons:

  • Reading other people’s income reports changed my life, so I want to do the same to inspire new bloggers to pursue their dreams.
  • I want to record my resilience, lessons I learned, mistakes I made and my aspirations. I do this for me, because I need this.

I will not publish monthly income reports because it’s pretty time consuming and might be too detailed to be useful. To give you a bird’s eye view of my blog’s financial journey, I will publish yearly and quarterly income report instead.

I really hope these reports will be beneficial to you!