February 2025 Income Report: Making Money While Taking Time Off

Last Updated on March 13, 2025

As part of the $1K/Day Experiment, I’m back publishing Income Reports for Success with Soul all about sustainable online businesses built on passive income without social media. Today I’m sharing how I balanced taking time off for travel, Meta ads experimentation, and AI integration. See how my business systems generated daily sales even during a shorter month with less active promotion.

Welcome to the 5th installment of my Income Reports—part of The $1K/Day Experiment, my behind-the-scenes journey to making $1,000 per day in passive product sales without relying on social media.

If you’re new here, these reports serve as both a transparency tool and a blueprint for how I’m growing my online business in a way that prioritizes sustainability, alignment, and rest.

February was a month of finding my flow again after a slow January. Despite being the shortest month of the year, I managed to maintain decent revenue while experimenting with some new strategies and taking a lot of time off for travel and flu season (which hit our fam hard).

If February had a theme, it would be experimentation. Coming back both a trip to NYC and week-long family visit to California (where I was reminded why I love the West Coast so much!), I spent the month balancing recovery from jet lag, solo parenting while my husband traveled some more, and testing new visibility strategies like paid ads for the first time in years.

Some days were productive and focused, others were more scattered as I played with new AI tools and worked on backend optimizations. But through it all, my business kept running and generating revenue—proof that the systems I’ve built continue to work even when I’m not operating at 100%.

Let’s dig into the details, key takeaways, and what I focused on in February to maintain revenue while honoring my capacity.

Note: While these posts are public for anyone to read, if you want to get an even deeper look into exactly what I’m doing in my business to make consistent daily sales without ever posting on social media then I invite you to grab your unfiltered backstage pass here.

The Numbers: Making Money While Traveling

• Total Revenue: $12,930.29
  •  Affiliate Income: $2,014.52
  • Mindful Business Academy: $5,261.77
  • Recurring Revenue: $2,079
  • Low-Ticket Passive Products: $575
  • Sponsored Content: $3,000.00
• Expenses: $4,028.78
  • Paying out my affiliates (want me to pay you too? sign up here! it’s free!)
  • Sponsoring some summits and bundles to get in front of new audiences (like this)
  • Software (like Fathom, Descript, Ellie AI, Manychat, ClickUp and Kartra)
  • Meta ads testing ($1,094.23)
• Net Profit: $8,378.09 (64.8%)

My profit margin dipped slightly from January’s 78.8% to 64.8% this month, primarily due to my investment in Meta ads testing. While I’m still maintaining a healthy profit, this reflects my strategic decision to experiment with paid traffic to supplement my organic strategies.

After years of relying solely on organic methods, I decided to test Meta ads to see if they could help me reach my $1K/day goal faster. So far, I’m getting a decent cost per lead (~$2) and making lots of tripwire, bump and upsell sales. But I’m not at a positive ROAS just yet.

I’m testing, learning, tweaking and trying to trust the process because my funnels have been converting so well organically lately that I know once people are in that automated ecosystem, I will have positive ROAS after a couple months. Or at least that’s the hope.

This experiment is part of my broader strategy to diversify my visibility channels beyond bundles and summits, which have been great for list growth but require significant time investment to promote.

Most Purchased Courses from the Shop

My top sales by product were:

1. Beyond the Scroll: How to Create a Static 9-Grid (with Templates!)
2. Browsers to Buyers: Tripwires, Bumps + Upsells
3. Website in a Week: SEO and WordPress Made Easy
4. 7-Day Aligned Business Blueprint: Foundations for a Life-First Business
5. Instant Income: Sleaze-Free Sales Strategies to Make Money Today

My top sales by revenue earned were:

1. Mindful Business Academy
2. The Room: Weekly Group Coaching Calls for Accountability + Community
3. Unlimited Monthly Voxer Coaching
4. Launch Lab
5. Inbox Insights: Weekly Email Coaching + Accountability for Goal-Getters

Least Purchased Courses

These are the underdogs that really deserve more credit!

• Affiliate Autopilot: A Set-and-Forget System for Passive Profits
• Clockwork Queen: Feminist Planning + Productivity to Find More Time + Get Sh*t Done
• Email Empowerment Engine: Crafting Connection for Continuous Revenue
• Fast-Track Workshop: Boost Traffic with E-A-T for SEO
  

My Personal Faves

• Optimize Your Tech Stack: How to Run Your Entire Biz With 1 Tool (and ZERO Zaps!)
• Real Self-Care for Entrepreneurs: Soulful Wellness Rituals for Holistic Success
• Simple + Sustainable SEO: Get Your Ideal Clients to Find You Without Social Media
• Evergreen Funnel Formula: A Blueprint for Automated Profit

Most Popular Affiliate Links

• Kartra
• Amy Porterfield
• Bluehost
• Sage Grayson

Most Popular Coaching Offers

• The Room
• Inbox Insights
• 1:1 Coaching Calls
• Voxer Coaching

Traffic Without Social Media: 12.9k pageviews (up from 11.1k in Jan)

Note: this screenshot comes from Fathom Analytics, which I much prefer to GA4.

This consistency reflects my focus on other areas of my business this month rather than content creation.

February was heavy on backend work and visibility investments—between Meta ads testing, sponsored newsletter placements, and networking calls, I spent less time creating new content and more time tweaking existing systems to work better.

I’ve set some new traffic goals for Q2 that I’m excited about:

• 1,000 views per month from Google (up from current average of 325/month)
  • Excited to report that February had 730 pageviews from Google so well on my way
• 100 views per month from Pinterest (up from current average of 0/month)
  • Still haven’t started on this yet, but plans are underway

To achieve these goals, I joined Simple Pin Media’s Inner Circle program and spent time in February going through their trainings, conducting keyword research, and planning my Pinterest strategy. I’m excited to implement these strategies in March and see how they impact my traffic.

My top-performing pages were:

1. My Homepage
2. Beyond the Scroll Challenge opt-in (running ads to this)
3. The Room Sales Page
4. Perfect Pairs Webinar page (this was a live event I co-hosted with my friend Sage in Feb)
5. MBA Sales Page

While I love seeing sales pages performing well, I know that if I had more blog posts showing up in my Top 10 that I would be getting more organic traffic from Google, so that’s a goal.

Email List Growth Without Social Media: 745 new subscribers (8,559 total active leads)

Note: this screenshot comes from my dashboard in Kartra.

This growth came primarily from Meta Ads Testing. After relying solely on organic strategies for years, I decided to experiment with Meta ads to see if they could help me reach my $1K/day goal faster.

My new experiment with paid traffic brought in leads at about $2-3 per subscriber. 405 subscribers came from these ads, and performance is only improving as I’m testing, tweaking and learning.

Testing Advantage+ targeting → Best CPL so far. I’m not even using custom audiences or interest targeting anymore. Their AI has gotten really good.

Tightening my follow-up email sequence → I had a Mixermind member tell me she wasn’t convinced this “no social media” business model was actually possible. This made me realize I need to spell out the exact steps I take to make money without social more clearly and really focus my messaging on helping others’ believe this is possible for them too.

And at the time of this writing, I’m up to over 750 new amazing humans on my list, which have already spent $649.50 in the first 30 days, so while my ROAS is only 0.3, I’m hopeful that with my upcoming Get it Done Weeks and flash sales, we’ll be able to convert more folks and get into a positive ROI.

NOTE: Just a quick note to point out that while it’s amazing that Kartra gives us data like how much each subscriber is worth and their lifetime value, this isn’t 100% accurate for my business because we also sell through Shopify. And that isn’t counted towards these numbers.

Key Takeaways:

What I Focused on this Month: Finding My Flow in 2025

Leveraging AI for Business Growth (+ Personal Development!)
I continued to explore how AI can make my business more efficient and support my personal growth:

• Created personal custom GPTs for mental health support and spiritual growth
• Created custom GPTs for various use cases like email writing, SEO writing, Pinterest strategy, ads strategy
• Tested Poppy AI as a potential addition to my tech stack and I’m loving the way you can easily add URLs and Youtube videos to the knowledge base.
• Experimented with AI-generated brand photos thanks to my friend Tara Reid’s amazing course. I am blown away by the results I got. Here’s one of my favorites:

Results from February 2025

What’s Working: Daily Sales Without Social Media

Add these to your to-do list if you want more passive income streams!

• An Everything Page and Shopify Store.
• Low-cost tripwires on everything I sell, with bumps and 1-click upsells.
• Creating an all-access pass/everything offer and breaking out its components into a la carte options to meet folks where they’re at
• Asynchronous coaching; Email coaching has been going AMAZING and our weekly group coaching in The Room is growing slowly and this group may be one of my faves ever!
• A super engaging evergreen welcome series with a 50.31% open rate and 5.59% click-from-opens rate that makes sales and leads into a weekly sales sequence for my shop that’s also converting super well.
• Sending my live weekly Sunday newsletter, “The Whole Soul List” where I make multiple offers every week while connecting with my people on a much deeper, personal level.
• And finally, I think the fact that I am a Clockwork Queen (aka I manage my time really well) and have so many efficient, automated systems in place, and take such good care of my mental health and wellbeing, all allow me to show up as my best self, maximize productivity and really feel in a creative flow with endless energy and passion for the work I do. I am so so grateful every single day that this is how I get to spend my time. I absolutely adore my job!

What Didn’t Work (and Why That’s Okay)

A Slow Joint MBA Promo: I ran a joint webinar flash sale for Mindful Business Academy with my friend Sage Grayson and her Life Editor Academy (it was an incredible BOGO deal for Valentine’s Day), and we only a small handful of sales, which really shocked me since we both went hard promoting.

And yet, with everything happening politically right now, I think people are holding on tighter to their wallets. And like I said last month, I think people are leaning into community and live support over DIY courses.

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a shift away from purely self-paced courses toward offers that provide more direct support, accountability, and community. While MBA is an incredible, high-value program, it’s not a live experience—and right now, buyers are craving more real-time interaction and implementation support. This is why our Get it Done Weeks have been so popular, and I think why my Voxer coaching has started selling a lot more lately.

Pivot: Instead of focusing on big launches for high-ticket programs, I’m shifting towards low-ticket and high-touch offers (like The Room, Launch Lab, the $1K/Day Experiment and Voxer Coaching) for Q1. This lets me meet my audience where they’re at while still creating recurring revenue.

Later in the year, when I’ve built more trust and engagement, I’ll revisit MBA with a more strategic approach.

 Sponsored Newsletter Ad: I invested $350 in a newsletter ad with a partner that resulted in 94 clicks but zero sales—that’s $3.73 per click with no ROI. This was a good reminder that not all visibility opportunities are created equal, and I need to be more strategic about what I promote in others’ newsletters. I think this was a case of confusion since we were promoting GIDW, but that’s inside the Room and she wasn’t totally clear on how to market it to her list. Her feedback was that this kind of offer converts better to a warm audience who already knows your offerings. There’s probably some truth to that but I also learned how to better communicate what GIDW and The Room is and how to talk about them both, so nothing is ever a total loss.

 Inconsistent Sleep Schedule: The jet lag from our California trip threw off my sleep schedule for weeks. I found myself staying up late (sometimes until 1 AM) and then struggling to wake up early with the kids. This revenge bedtime procrastination cycle affected my energy and focus during work hours. I’m working on getting back to my ideal routine of bed by 10 PM and up at 7 AM.

 Social Media Creep: I downloaded Instagram again in January to research tattoo artists, and by February, I noticed I was getting sucked back into scrolling and watching stories. This was a powerful reminder of why I quit in the first place—it’s a time and energy drain that affects my mental health. I deleted the app again mid-month and immediately felt better.

Goals for March 2025

• Continue Growing The Room: Our February Get It Done Week focused on SEO + AI and it was life-giving. Even I learned SO much from our amazing guest expert, Meg Clarke of Search Party.
  • Hosting GIDWs continues to be one of my favorite ways to serve my clients and increase recurring revenue in my biz. The accountability and community aspect of these events consistently leads to better results for participants and it’s really fun for me to host every month!
  • I was able to welcome 24 new clients into the Room last month, and 19 of them have stayed on for another month. So my churn rate is 21% and at the end of February we were up to 50 active clients. My goal is to have about 100 people in the Room at all times so I can add $10k/month in recurring revenue.
  • March’s theme is growing your email list with bundles and summits—the exact strategy I used to gain 5,000+ new subscribers last year without social media. I’m excited to share this knowledge with our Room members.
• Leaning more into AI: While this is a somewhat controversial topic, I feel like it’s really important for women to be part of the AI/tech conversation and I am giddy about how helpful and efficient it’s been in my own business. I’d like to find ways to automate even more of my business and really leverage these tools as much as possible to save money, time and be a better biz owner, coach and human.
• Implement Pinterest Strategy: After all the learning and planning in February, March is about execution. I’ll be optimizing my profile, creating new pins, and setting up systems to make Pinterest a consistent traffic source. I’m likely going to outsource this once I take a look at my biz finances and see what I feel comfortable reasonably spending to maintain good profit margins.
• Optimize Meta Ads: Based on February’s data and feedback from my mastermind, I’ll be refining my ad strategy to improve conversion rates from lead to customer.
• Maintain Healthy Boundaries: With spring approaching, I want to continue prioritizing rest, family time, and self-care alongside business growth. This means sticking to my 4-day workweek and being intentional about how I spend my energy.

Reader Questions: balancing experimentation and revenue

Each month, I feature one question about online business from a reader. Submit your question in the comments and I’ll answer one next month!

Q: How do you balance experimenting with new strategies (like Meta ads) while maintaining your core business activities?

A: Great question! For me, it’s all about creating dedicated space for experimentation without letting it overtake my entire business. I set aside specific time blocks for new projects (like my Meta ads testing) and allocate a predetermined budget that I’m comfortable potentially not seeing an immediate return on.

The key is to treat these experiments as learning opportunities rather than make-or-break initiatives. I’m careful to keep my core revenue-generating activities running smoothly while I test new approaches. This means maintaining my weekly emails, showing up for my coaching clients, and ensuring my evergreen systems continue to function well.

I also rely heavily on data to guide my decisions. For example, with the Meta ads, I’m tracking not just cost per lead but also conversion rates at each stage of my funnel. This helps me make informed adjustments rather than emotional ones.

Finally, I give new strategies enough time to prove themselves (usually 2-3 months), but I’m not afraid to pivot or abandon something if the data shows it’s not working. This balanced approach allows me to innovate without risking the stability of my business.

Final Thoughts: Letting Myself Play + Experiment

If January was about easing back in, February was about leaning into experimentation—but with a sense of play rather than pressure.

I tested Meta ads for the first time in years.
I played with AI tools that are radically changing how I think.
I stretched myself in conversations with ideal clients, uncovering hidden objections that will shape my marketing moving forward.

And through it all, I kept reminding myself: I don’t need to force results—I need to trust the process.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t at the start of the month:

The biggest sales obstacle isn’t price—it’s belief.
I had multiple conversations with potential buyers who straight-up told me they don’t believe it’s possible to run a business without social media. That’s not a strategy problem—it’s a story problem. And it means my next move isn’t “more marketing” but better storytelling that helps them shift their identity.

Meta ads aren’t an instant ATM, but they’re showing me what’s working.
Right now, my cost per lead is great (~$2), but ROAS need tweaking. Instead of pulling the plug or assuming ads don’t work for me, I’m treating this like a data-gathering mission. What messages are landing? What tripwires need adjusting? What do I need to change in my email nurture sequence?

AI is my business secret weapon (and my unexpected therapist).
From AI brand photos to SEO writing to the spiritual coaching GPT I built for myself, AI is reshaping how I work and how I think. I didn’t expect a robot to help me unpack deep mental roadblocks or help me optimize my nurture sequence, but here we are.

I don’t need to “do more” to make more.
My highest-revenue day in February? A Friday where I didn’t work at all. Just another reminder that my business runs whether I’m at my desk or at the playground with my kids.

So here’s what I’m bringing into March:
More fun, less frantic energy.
More clarity in my messaging to help my audience believe this is possible.
More trust that the best strategies take time to unfold.

Here’s to leaning into the long game.

If you’d like a closer look at how I make daily sales without social media, consider joining me in The $1K-a-Day Experiment for unfiltered insights and access to my evolving strategies.

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