August 2026 Income Report: $128K + My First AI Virtual Event

Last Updated on September 17, 2026

August 2026 was the month my kids went back to school, I ran my first-ever live virtual event and I finally got serious about ads again. My online business brought in $128,431 in revenue and $65,355 in profit, a 50.9% margin, while my first AI virtual event, This Is How We Claude, brought in $53,099, sponsors included. My bookkeeping software swears I lost $45,598, because I paid my partners more in August than in the previous seven months combined. This report has every number, including one I got wrong last time.

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Welcome to installment #17 of my income reports (the full archive of past income reports is here if you want to binge). If you’re new, I publish these to show exactly how a social-media-free business makes money, down to the ad spend and the parts that flopped.

August had a lot going on. My kids went back to school on Aug 3, the same week my Mindful Business Academy price-increase sale closed (MBA went up to $2,497 after Aug 4). My collab guide event ran the entire month, I joined a VIP ads coaching program and had my biggest ad month of the year, and we switched to paying affiliates every week.

It was also the month QuickBooks told me I’d lost money. I hadn’t, and the section on that below explains why, because the same thing can happen to anyone who pays affiliates or JV partners.

The Numbers: My Online Business Profit Margin in August 2026

My online business profit margin in August 2026 was 50.9%, which works out to $65,354.62 in profit on $128,431.38 in revenue. Over the last 12 months, the margin was 55.1% on $850,107.81 in revenue, with partner commissions counted in the month each sale happened.

The 12-month rolling picture

August 2026, line by line

A few notes on those lines, because a table can’t do parentheticals:

• Contractors ran higher than usual because of launch bonuses for my operations director. Paying my people well from a place of plenty is my favorite line on this whole page.
• Partner commissions are me paying out my affiliates (want me to pay you too? Sign up here! It’s free).
• Training + education covered the EverAds VIP tier (affiliate link), Grow with Evelyn (affiliate link) and Mixermind (affiliate link), a couple of other courses and my $99 Skool platform fee.

My software line was $1,769, and in case you’re curious what’s in it, this is the stack that billed in August. Anything marked with a star is an affiliate link, which means I earn a commission if you sign up (at no extra cost to you).

Amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar. My community platform, Skool ★, is $99 a month and sits in my training line, along with memberships in other people’s Skool communities.

As always, I don’t count my W-2 payroll or owner distributions as an expense for these reports, since I’m an S-corp and pay myself a salary separately. Taxes aren’t included in my margin either. This year they’ll run me closer to 25–35% (my accountant is still finalizing projections now that I’ve jumped tax brackets).

Why Did My Books Say I Lost $45,598 in August?

My books showed a $45,598 loss for August because $128,026 in partner commissions from my June and July launches cleared in August. My bookkeeping runs on the cash method, which (per the IRS’s Publication 538) counts income when you receive it and expenses when you pay them.

So the sales landed in June and July, and I didn’t pay out my partners until August. On paper that makes June and July look like geniuses and August look like it fell down the stairs.

I count commissions in the month the sale happened instead. My partners earn 50% of what they sell, and that half was never mine, whether or not the check had cleared yet.

Payouts used to lag up to about 45 days, because we paid on a 30-day hold and only once a month. Since August, affiliates get paid weekly after a 14-day hold. That shrinks the gap without closing it, since a sale on the 28th still pays out next month (so a slice of August’s commissions will clear in September).

A Correction to My Spring + Summer Income Report

My Spring + Summer income report undercounted partner commissions by $17,805, so my real March–July profit was $236,923 at a 53.8% margin, not the $254,275 at 58.0% I published.

That report didn’t include most of July’s commissions. My shopping cart, Kartra (affiliate link), also can’t see buy-now-pay-later sales that run through Stripe, and it credits a few products at the wrong rate, so its commission report runs low. My operations director keeps a separate payout ledger in Airtable (affiliate link) that catches both, and that ledger is what I use now.

Once my bookkeeper finished reconciling, July’s revenue also settled $1,663 higher and March–July expenses about $1,210 higher. If you pay affiliates, the lesson travels well: your cart’s commission report is a starting point, and a simple ledger of what you owe versus what you’ve paid is the real answer.

August 2026 Revenue Breakdown

Mindful Business Academy and my shop did the heavy lifting in August, bringing in 82% of revenue between them. The shop jumped from $6,397 in July to $49,351, almost all of it from the event.

How much of MBA was pay-in-full vs. payment plans?

About 66% of August’s MBA dollars came from pay-in-full sales, and payment plans brought in $19,056, most of it from people who bought months ago. I treat those installments as semi-recurring revenue, because they show up whether or not I’m selling anything that month.

This comes from my cart, so it runs about $3,400 lower than the QuickBooks line above, mostly because of when payments land in the bank.

Add the installments to my memberships and my recurring revenue was $23,449, or 18% of the month. If you sell anything over a few hundred dollars, a payment plan is one of the easiest ways to smooth out your income.

What Does My Online Business Earn Without Launching?

About $44,000 of August’s revenue came from outside my two launches, roughly 34% of the month. The two launches were the MBA price-increase sale, which closed Aug 4 and brought in $35,432 in new MBA sales, and This Is How We Claude, which brought in $49,099 in August sales.

The rest came from payment plan installments ($14,631), new MBA sales after the price went up ($6,431), memberships ($8,818), coaching ($6,759), Sponsor Spotlights and newsletter ads ($3,741) and affiliate income ($3,438), minus refunds, plus about $3,400 of MBA timing differences between QuickBooks and my cart. I think of that number as my business’s resting heart rate. (Because it mixes two sources, treat it as a close estimate.)

If you’re wondering whether evergreen sales are worth building, $44,000 in a month with no live launch attached is my answer. The evergreen system behind my daily sales is the place to start.

How I Ran My First AI Virtual Event With Claude

This Is How We Claude, my first AI virtual event, brought in $53,099 ($49,099 in sales during August plus $4,000 from sponsors, who paid in July) and added 3,875 brand-new subscribers. Claude (affiliate link) did most of the building, and I put in roughly 10 to 15 hours of my own time.

What the event was

The heart of it was a free, 99-page guide in which 17 entrepreneurs answered the same question, how are you actually using Claude? It was free for the month of August only, then gone.

On top of the guide sat a paid VIP All Access Pass with all 17 contributors’ Claude skills, a live roundtable on Aug 25 and a private podcast version of the guide. Four sponsors paid $1,000 each, and every contributor could earn 50% as an affiliate.

The part that surprised me

I pushed this event back a month, then still built it at the last minute. “I had such low expectations for this,” I told my mastermind group on Aug 13. “Is anybody going to care about this?”

Day one made $2,765 while I was test-driving e-bikes with my kids. The last day, Aug 31, was the biggest at $6,159. In between, Claude built the promo while I made the decisions, sometimes from in front of the TV.

During a live Watch Me Build session with my members, I described it this way: “I was watching a movie with my husband with my laptop next to me, and I’d tell Claude to go create the pretty links. Twenty minutes later, that was done, so I’d tell it to do the next thing.” Claude did the work itself, instead of handing me copy to paste in.

At the event’s live roundtable, I said, “I used Claude to run this entire event. I probably only put in 10, maybe 15 hours of my own time, and I can’t believe that was possible.”

The headline numbers

For anyone planning a similar event, a free guide with lots of contributors can pay for its own ads and still leave you with a much bigger list. Mine kept about 64% of what it brought in.

What I’m keeping for members

I found about $15,000 I left on the table, and one offer I expected to carry the back end sold exactly zero. The full debrief, with every leak ranked and the fix for each one, lives in The $1k/Day Experiment, along with the dashboards and my weekly diaries.

The sequel, This Is How We Claude: Scheduled Tasks Edition, runs Oct 15 through Nov 15, 2026, with every one of those leaks on the build list.

What Happened When I Stopped Avoiding Ads?

I spent $21,627 on Meta ads in August, 16.8% of revenue and my biggest ad month of the past year. Two things got me there: EverAds (affiliate link), an AI tool that helps me build ads (it doesn’t run them for me), and paid coaching with Evelyn Weiss’s team through the EverAds VIP tier and Grow with Evelyn (affiliate link).

Ad work has a way of sitting on my to-do list for weeks. A weekly check-in with a coach who expects a Loom from me turned out to be the fix, which is useful information if you have a task like that too.

How EverAds works for me

I paste in a sales page, it maps out buyer personas and what they believe, writes the callouts, drops in my photos and price badges, and generates hundreds of versions. I narrow those to 75–125 ads and launch the campaign into Meta without ever opening Ads Manager.

In one Aug 19 working session with the EverAds team I built two campaigns with more than 100 new ads, then built three more that afternoon. My diary from that day: “Now the problem is narrowing down all of these amazing creatives so I don’t hit my account max of 250 ads running at a time. HA! Never thought I’d have that problem!”

What didn’t work

Not everything won. As of Aug 24, two campaigns had spent more than they made, and one was quietly sending more than half its budget outside the US until I caught it. On that same Aug 19 session I told the EverAds team my best-performing ad of all time is black with white text on top, and I keep noticing that the styles that feel least on-brand often win. (Your taste and your buyers’ taste are two different things, it turns out.)

If you’re weighing ads against posting, I wrote about why paid ads and organic social media aren’t the same thing. My budget ladder, scaling rules and weekly coaching notes live inside The $1k/Day Experiment.

How Many Hours Did I Work in a Back-to-School Week?

I worked 24.75 hours in my tracked week (Aug 17–21), my third week with the kids back in school, and the business made $18,315 in sales across that full week (Aug 17–23), about $740 an hour. Almost all of the work happened during school hours, with breaks, and evenings went to my family, with one exception on Thursday.

Monday’s panic attack came out of nowhere around 11 (clammy, shaking, throwing up, the full menu). “This is the weirdest panic attack I’ve had,” I wrote in my diary, “because while it’s totally classic for me in terms of symptoms, weirdly my mind is not hooked into this.”

I took a Zofran, slept for two hours and was back at my desk by 3, reconciling affiliate payouts. I wrote that I was “so grateful I have the kind of job that can flex for things like this,” and that afternoon’s payouts included my operations director’s July bonus. In my diary I wrote about “how good it feels to be doing this from an abundant place where I can afford to pay my people well.”

Since school started, my phone gets locked away from 6 to 8:30 every night, and our family does 15 minutes of quiet reading with spa music on. Friday was EMDR and then a tattoo, which I’ve decided to call a theratoo. If you’re building around a body or brain that needs flex time, this is what a 25-hour week can hold. The full hour-by-hour diary is in The $1k/Day Experiment.

Where Did My Website Traffic Come From Without Social Media?

My sites had 28,411 visitors and 50,340 pageviews in August, according to Fathom Analytics (affiliate link). Paid ads sent 37% of them (10,413), my emails sent 4,482 through tagged links and 11,047 came direct.

Search is a much smaller slice than it used to be. My search traffic has dropped a lot over the past couple of years, partly because I’ve put my energy into email, partnerships and ads, and partly because AI has changed how search works. Google now answers a lot of questions right on the results page, and more people ask ChatGPT or Claude instead of clicking through to a blog.

What’s working in search

Income reports are still my most-read content. My archive page had 430 visitors in August, and people who read my last report spent an average of 10 minutes on it. Detailed comparison posts that I wrote years ago with real numbers, like my honest Kartra review, keep bringing in search visitors month after month.

Both have the same thing in common. They share first-hand numbers and specific opinions you can’t get anywhere else, which is exactly what search engines and AI tools look for now.

What I’d change (and what I’d tell you to change)

• Refresh the posts that used to rank. Update the stats, put the answer in the first couple of sentences and add a short FAQ. A refreshed post often does more than a brand-new one.
• Write more posts that only you could write. Real numbers, real comparisons and real results are what AI tools quote.
• Make sure AI tools can read your site. Check your robots.txt file (the instructions crawlers read before visiting) so it isn’t slowing down or blocking the bots ChatGPT and Claude use.
• Send search visitors somewhere. Every post that gets traffic should point to a free opt-in, so a one-time reader can become a subscriber.

That’s the core of Anti-Social SEO + GEO, and it’s the refresh I’m working through on my own blog this fall.

How Do You Grow an Email List Without Social Media?

I grow my email list by borrowing other people’s audiences and buying ads. As of mid-September I have 21,117 active subscribers on Beehiiv (affiliate link), with an average open rate of about 45% over the past three months.

Borrowing an audience takes a lot of forms: bundles, summits, guest podcasting, email swaps, sponsoring other people’s newsletters, JV webinars and collab guides like August’s event. Over the last three months, partner webinars and the event brought in more than 2,700 subscribers without a dollar of ad spend.

My Beehiiv cleanup automation also removed 2,055 inactive subscribers on Aug 10, nearly all of whom hadn’t opened any of roughly 50 emails (I added 46 of them back). My goal is 35,000 active subscribers by the end of 2026, and email is worth that effort. The DMA found email returns $42 for every $1 spent, and McKinsey found email is 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. If you want the pitching and partnership side of this, that’s Social-Free Visibility.

What August Taught Me (and What It Means for You)

Count affiliate commissions the day the sale happens. If you pay affiliates or JV partners, keep a running tally of what you owe next to what you’ve paid. Otherwise a launch month looks more profitable than it was, and the month you pay out looks like a disaster.

Accountability gets the avoided work done. Ads sat on my list until a coach expected a weekly update from me. That’s also why The Room exists, with weekly group coaching calls and a Get It Done Week every month for the project you keep putting off. It’s $997 for the year (about seven months free compared with paying monthly) or $197 a month.

Subtraction usually beats a new idea. In my diary on Aug 20 I wrote, “It’s rarely a new idea. It’s usually subtraction.” The Room’s monthly option is my test case. About ten members pay monthly, nearly all grandfathered at the old $97 rate, and since I raised the monthly price to $197 in March, only three new people have joined that way.

This fall I’m deciding whether to sell The Room like the year-long program it is, at $997 or a three-payment plan, and bring monthly back only if new sign-ups drop. I’m also planning Black Friday as a membership week instead of a full production.

What’s Working Right Now

Building a profitable online business without social media comes down to stacking a few systems that each do one job well. These three are doing the most for mine right now.

Goals for the Rest of 2026

1. Launch This Is How We Claude: Scheduled Tasks Edition on Oct 15 with every round-one leak fixed.
2. Keep scaling ads with EverAds while they stay profitable.
3. Decide this fall whether The Room keeps its monthly option.
4. Fix my robots.txt and refresh the old posts that should be pulling search traffic.
5. Reach 35,000 active subscribers at a 40%+ open rate by the end of the year.

If You Want to Watch Me Build This

If August’s numbers landed somewhere in you (the idea that your business could keep running while you’re riding out a panic attack, or test-driving e-bikes, or just really tired), I want to tell you about The $1k/Day Experiment.

It’s my behind-the-scenes membership, with weekly diaries of exactly what I’m testing, the dashboards I use to make decisions, the full debriefs I don’t publish here and live office hours. The complete This Is How We Claude debrief and my EverAds coaching notes are in there right now.

Think of it less like a course and more like a business documentary that updates every week. It’s $197 a year (that’s $127 less than paying monthly, about five months free) or $27 a month. Join The $1k/Day Experiment here.

The Bottom Line

August looked like a loss on paper and turned out to be one of my better months, once my partners got the half they’d already earned. So far in 2026 I’m averaging $1,394 a day in profit against a goal of $1,000, working roughly 20 to 25 hours a week with no social media.

Your turn: what’s the task that’s been sitting on your to-do list the longest? Tell me in the comments.

FAQ: AI Virtual Events, Profit Margins + Social-Free Marketing