Welcome to my income diary. If you wonder how do websites make money and how to make money with a website, you may find my reports useful.

I release reports on my online income every month. In 2017, I am projected to make $15k on online income.

I’ve received many e-mails concerning this matter. Most people ask me “What can I do to start a side online business?” or “What can I do to make a few hundred bucks at the end of the month”? First, know that I offer consulting services for this, on 1:1 consultations. Either way, let me hash out a general recipe here:

0) Choose a niche. Many people choose niches based on keyword search. I highly recommend people to blog about what they are passionate about instead. If you add value, any niche will work out for you.

1) Set up a website. I host my website on Bluehost, which I highly recommend. For one, its cheap, two is highly reliable. If you are interested in starting a blog of your own, I created a tutorial here, to help you start off.

2) Blog. A lot. You may have noticed that I’ve posted twice in the month, on specific months when I started From cents to Retirement. Doesn’t work. It won’t tie people in, it won’t please search engines and your blog will rapidly be forgotten. Note that I am not saying “publish crap”. Do not, if you expect to have loyal fans and grow. But do not forget to publish.

3) Promote your blog. A big part of having your blog out there for people to see is through high-quality posts – eventually, people will share. Promoting your blog will not only get it out there faster but deeper. Promoting your blog can be very hard, but its necessary.

4) Monetize. Adsense is an option. I like Amazon a lot. If you offer consultancy services, as I do, you need to show you can do it yourself first, but clients will pop up eventually.

So, how did I make $1126.71 this month? First, the breakdown:

Bluehost : $0 (vs $100 in March)
Affiliate marketing : $55.50 (vs $35.88)
My book : $21.21 (vs $45.36 – I listed the book for $0 for 2 and a half days to prove a point on Quora)
Consultancy fees : $1050 (vs $0 – finally started to accept consultancy work again! More about this on Friday!)
Google adsense : $0 (vs $2.34 – I removed all ads from the blog)
Paid surveys : $0 (vs $25 in March)

Total : $1126.71

Disclaimer: the BlueHost and the Amazon links are affiliate links, which means that I get commissions if you buy products or services through them. The amounts reported above are before any fees, taxes or expenses. I can’t say exactly how much I will net from this.

Note that although I am committed to release my income diary and help those who want to know how to make money with a blog, if they and blogging for money, my primarily focus is not to make money with blog, but create a very valuable platform that people love.

Expenses

I didn’t have any expenses with the blog this month.

Views

As I said last month, I changed my strategy pertaining to traffic. Although I’ve been having way fewer readers, I am very happy with the direction the blog is taking, and I honestly prefer to have 25k warm viewers than 100k cold viewers. That being said, I still want to achieve 100k viewers until the end of the year! We are obviously talking about a nasty piece of work (especially without redirecting cold traffic as I’ve done before), but I am confident I will achieve it.

As I also said last month, I have focused on increasing the website’s authority, high-quality referrals and growing my social media accounts. I am very happy with the results in April: the domain authority boosted from a shy 10 to a still-not-so-great-but-more-than-double 24 and the page authority went by from 24 to a respectable 37! The best part of this is that I expect massive boosts in the next two months. 🙂 The reason for this is that most of the backlinks that I received in April will only be accounted for in May or even June. I hope that Google recognizes my serious effort here, and boosts my ranks!

All in all, the traffic went up very slightly this month. The key idea is to increase it by at least 50% every two and a half months, on average. Yes, a very hard task, I know. Either way, that is where I want to set the bar at. Let’s see what happens. We all know that being featured on a major site can be a game changer. Honestly, I though that guest posting on <50k sites would still provide considerable traffic, but it turns out I was wrong. :/

blog traffic april 2017

and the number of sessions:

sessions blog april 2017

More sessions, more users, more pageviews, higher avg. session duration, lower bounce rate. It could not be better 🙂

This time the number of new visitors increased to almost 60%. Again, I am happy with the decreasing boucing rate, for which the new blog theme is contributing, I am sure.

My Alexa rank is still good, and I haven’t had a big penalty for “losing” the December stats (although you can clearly see the drop at the end of the month) – Alexa is based on the 3 previous months. Let us see how it will come out next month.

alexa rank april 2017

Social Media

Last month, my Facebook page grew by 99 likes, while this month I was only able to grow it by 71 likes (an increase of about 12%), to a total of 601 likes. I’ve started to use a new technique to grow my number of likes, and I think this is a heck of a good one – plus it will target very good leads! I started to finally believe that the goal of 25k likes until the end of the year is simply impossible, but I still have a few tricks to use, as well as Facebook ads. Not sure how well I will do, but I would really like to grow my facebook page drastically.

As I said before, I am not keeping track of Pinterest, and I will hire a VA to take care of it for me.

The subscriber count grew from 938 to 1029, wich means an increase of about 9% (which compares well to an increase of 4% last month). I like these numbers the better and I know what made by grow “that much” – guest posts! Guest posts work great to increase your subscriber count. I am still convinced that the goal of reaching 6000 subscribers until the end of the year is achievable because I have a few tricks that I will use, and I still expect to be featured on major sites.

Goals for April 2017:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 700. FAIL. Although I’ve done a good job as far as my Facebook is concerned, I am yet to achieve 700 likes.
  • Increase the number of blog subscribers to 1100. ALMOST DONE. Although not quite there, I can’t say I am disappointed.
  • Increase the number of followers on Twitter to 200. DONE. Twitter is not really my favourite social media platform, but I will make the effort to hit 1k until the end of the year.
  • Write at least 14 guest posts. DONE. Yes, I’ve done this. Couldn’t be happier. 🙂
  • Reach at least 40k views on my blog. FAIL. I underestimated how many viewers I’d get from guest posting.
  • Make about $400 online. DONE. I will post more about my consulting business on Friday, but I am very happy for now. 🙂

Goals for May 2017:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 700.
  • Increase the number of blog subscribers to 1200.
  • Increase the number of followers on Twitter to 350.
  • Write at least 10 guest posts.
  • Reach at least 40k views on my blog.
  • Make about $800 online.

In the meantime, let me know if this information is useful to you in the comment section down below.

Your biggest fan,
Ben Davis