Browsing Category

Reports

net worth update
Reports,

July 2017 (250930.54€)

My current worth is €250,930.54 (37.45% of my first goal – €670K).

july net worth

OK, I am onto something now. Not only I was able to increase my net worth by 2000 euros, as I was also able to spend more money with my lifestyle (aka healthcare costs). Plus, my company is doing well and I am loving it.

I am also way less anxious, in general. This is also true for my early retirement plan. I will tell you why:

  1. I am living alone, in one of my previous rentals, spending tons of money with my dizziness and adrenal fatigue, and yet I am able to increase my net worth.
  2. My company is doing well and honestly, I don’t think I must running like Bolt (or Gatlin, for that matter).
  3. I am positive I will be financially free when I turn 33.
  4. It is time to finally calm the f* down and enjoy life. I’ve been running my entire life and the result hasn’t been that I was looking for.

This month I was still very dizzy. However, after a lot of reading, I am finally improving my adrenal fatigue. These are the things I want to do regardless of what happens:

 

  1. I will continue to meditate for 15-30 minutes every single day.
  2. I will go to bed between 10pm and 10.30pm.
  3. I am looking into diversifying my investments to land.
  4. I will still try to be a silent partner in a bigger Real Estate company.
  5. I am relaxing and doing sports like no other time in the last 4 years. The next things to do is to write my following books and escalate my online businesses.
  6. I will start a line of credit based on my current portfolio.

As far as posting on FCTR, I am sorry but I’ve been so dizzy this is nearly impossible now.  I even struggle to write the net worth and online income posts. I promise to try to write at least a post every week. Hopefully, I will treat my dizziness in the next months and then come back to post as often as I was posting.

Rental income

I am living in RP#1, as I said before. This property is listed for sale at the same time. I believe that I will be living until the end of the year, until when I expect to acquire a new property to live in myself. I will get another mortgage for this new home. If I do sell RP#1, I will put €35k to work and throw €10k into P2P lending, as I said before.

The rental income in July was €1,195. This month, it will be slightly higher and then increase substantially until the end of the year. I actually believe that I will hit €2,000 until the end of the year!

In the meantime, I gotta tell you that I bought RP#4! This is a fix and flip without any fixing. I was able to acquire this property for €50,000 and I am confident I will sell it for about €75,000. The garage of the property is rented for €190/mo, so I won’t even be concerned while the property is listed (probably for €99,990).

 

This month, I will finally start the renovation works in RP#3. Like I said, I estimate they will cost me about €25,000. Last time I said I was not sure where I was going to get the money from. Well, now I know: my company has enough money lying around and I will withdraw some dividends – just enough to pay for the renovation works. In fact, I think that I will use a €5,000 bonus I will get from my employer. After this renovation, I have already agreed to rent out 3 units to a sub-leasing company, for a total of €500 per month (which is an essential step to hit €2,000 until the end of the year).

Online income

My online income for July was also bad, as I barely invested anytime online. I will comment on this in the online income report/income diary.

My Real Estate business

My Real Estate business is growing steadily as I was able to do some small biz. I expect to make about €25,000 net with my company until the end of the year. Next year, I will try to make about €100,000.

Goals for July

July’s goals were mostly failed:

  1. Make sure I take medication that works, keep calm, do things I love (like sports, great food, etc) and enjoy life (sounds crazy but I haven’t been doing this). DONE. I will though to learn more and more about adrenal fatigue and neck pain.
  2. Take one week entirely to write my second book, relax a lot, watch movies. FAIL. Permanent dizziness was the reason though.
  3. Plan the renovation of RP#3 and furniture RP#1 entirely (so I can live there properly). FAIL. Pushed this to August.
  4. Write a lot on the blog. Two posts a week and do not fail. FAIL. Permanent dizziness was the reason though.
  5. Start leaving medication and introducing supplements gently. DONE. I will learn more and more about adrenal fatigue and neck pain and introduce more and more supplements as time goes by.
  6. Make at least $200 online and write 1 guest post. FAIL. Permanent dizziness was the reason for this too.

Enjoy life guys!

Ben

online income report income diary report how to make money online
Blog, Reports,

June 2017 (Online Income: $204.86)

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 $204.86 this month? First, the breakdown:

Bluehost : $0 (vs $0 in April)
Affiliate marketing : $118.66 (vs $72.60 in April)
My book : $86.20 (vs $99.94 in April)
Consultancy fees : $0 (vs $0 in April)
Google adsense : $0 (vs $0 in April – I removed all ads from the blog)
Paid surveys : $0 (vs $0 in April)

Total : $204.86

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.

As for consultancy fees: I haven’t consulted this month, for the second consecutive month, because as I said earlier this week, I’ve been very sick in the second half of June. If I am well, I plan to consult a lot until the end of the year.

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 primary focus is not to make money with the blog, but create a very valuable platform that people love.

Expenses

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

Views

Sadly, being sick and having way less time to write for the blog, produce kick ass content and promote it correctly is obviously not let me achieve the expectations I had before. This month, I didn’t experience any growth in terms of views – they are essentially going sideways. I am still happy with a steady, slow but consistent growth, as I look to my blog on a 5-10 year horizon. I don’t care about money, I want to create value and a nice platform to deliver kick ass content, and blow people out of the water.

I am happy with the progress in terms of authority, but I know this will not keep increasing unless I re-start guest posting. Being this sick, it is impossible to keep up with the expectation of writing 10 guest posts a month. Even one ain’t possible – remember I am not producing enough content for my own blog at this point! I actually had a domain decline (from 37 to 33) and a slight increase in page authority (from 43 to 44).

Although I didn’t have many guest posts published in June, my traffic stayed constant. I am still waiting to be featured on a major site.

views june 2017

and the number of sessions:

sessions june 2017

My Alexa rank is good and there is not much to say about it:

alexa stats 2017

Social Media

This month my Facebook page grew by 195 likes to a total of 999 likes, which compares really well against the previous months, representing an increase of 20%. As I said last month, I had a few tricks I could use to grow my Facebook page and these seem to work beautifully. Next month, I will go all in with this trick and hopefully grow beyond 1000 likes. I won’t hit 25k likes until the end of the year, which was my goal, but I think that I can still reach 5k without ads.

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 1091 to 1154, wich means an increase of about 6%. I didn’t grow as much as I expected because although I wrote many guest posts, most of them weren’t published yet. 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 June 2017:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 1000. DONE! I’ve continued with the same technique I’ve used before, and it works really well. I believe I can escalate my Facebook page further, as long as I am not sick.
  • Increase the number of blog subscribers to 1200. ALMOST DONE. I have now a total of 1157 subscribers.
  • Increase the number of followers on Twitter to 350. FAIL. I haven’t promoted my Twitter account at all. I simply lack the time to do this.
  • Write at least 10 guest posts. FAIL. Having been so sick, I didn’t have the time to create enough content for my own blog, so I ended up not writing any guest posts.
  • Reach at least 40k views on my blog.
  • Make about $1000 online. FAIL. I have been sick, that says it all.

Goals for July 2017:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 1200.
  • Increase the number of blog subscribers to 1250.
  • Write at least 2 guest posts.
  • Make about $500 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

net worth update
Reports,

June 2017 (248842.76€)

My current worth is €248,842.76 (37.14% of my first goal – €670K).

net worth june

Finally, a small increase in net worth. Nothing really important happened except for moving my emergency funds to government bonds and saving €1000 from my salary. Yet…

I am SO frustrated…

I live times of anxiety, to be honest. I want to accelerate my dream to be financially independent, especially whenever I get worse from CFS.

It seems that I am walking very slowly towards my dream – not RUNNING like Bolt…

This month, I got a lot worse. As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted much this month. That is because I was dizzy for like 90% of the time. Fortunately, this got better last week. I can see a few things that affect my health in a negative way:

  1. I am not really living the life I want. I want to do business. Make serious money fast. Not making collecting 200 buck rents every month while sending someone over to check
  2. I am not into my research job. It doesn’t excite me anymore. Getting to the best conferences won’t even change my mood. I’d rather be running a business selling homes for most of the time.
  3. I get frustrated if I see people making money really fast. It is taking me for god damn ever to do that.
  4. I am not really improving my life, although I live where I want to live. I am not 100% free as I use to be. Small deals and responsibility fill up my mind constantly.
  5. My body doesn’t seem to relax and enjoy the moment like it used to. I can’t really understand why.

A few things I started to do, which I believe will improve all this together:

  1. I will start a 90-day 15-30 minute meditation challenge. I don’t care which day it is or what came up. I will meditate no matter what.
  2. I will try to be a silent partner in a bigger Real Estate company. The bottom line is, I don’t want to be there (as I have a job and a gazillion of things to worry about), but I want to be part of something greater.
  3. I am going to diversify my investments to land. There is a ton of subsidies nowadays, so I will meet up with someone who knows what this market and start acquiring land.
  4. I am taking one week every three weeks to (1) relax and do sports, (2) write my following books and (3) escalate my online businesses. I am seriously committed to this.
  5. last, but not least, I will carefully study a line of credit based on my current portfolio (a post is coming soon). This is the equivalent to cash refinance in the US, just so you know what I am talking about. This will be a huge step in enlarging my real estate portfolio, should it be taken.

Rental income

I moved temporarily to RP#1, as I said before. This property is listed for sale at the same time. I believe that I will be living until the end of the year, until when I expect to acquire a new property to live in myself. I will get another mortgage for this new home. If I do sell RP#1, I will put €35k to work and throw €10k into P2P lending, as I said before.

The rental income in June was only €1,195 because some of my tenants on RP#3 simply vanished! Remember I was going to have a contracted automatically bumped by €50? Yeah, forget that. Those tenants are gone! They haven’t damaged the property at all and actually left it completely cleaned. However, they left without a warning – which is a contract break. 

Now, the good news. I rented out another unit in RP#3 (for €240) starting from August 1st. Again… on the last day of the month! 🙂 This means that RP#3 alone will be collecting €755.

The other good news is that without the tenants who left, I can start working on the renovation of the remaining units in RP#3. I estimate this will cost me about €25,000. Not sure where I will get the money from, to be honest. After this renovation, I have already agreed to rent out 3 units to a sub-leasing company, for a total of €500 per month. This will be an 8-10 year contract. This means that RP#3 will yield €1,255. Considering the rental income from RP#2 (and assuming 0 dollars from RP#1), I will total €1,770/mo until the end of the year, assuming I don’t buy further real estate.

Online income

My online income for June was bad, as I barely invested anytime online. I will comment on this in the online income report/income diary.

My Real Estate business

My Real Estate business didn’t really witness a growth but I hope to change this quite soon.

Goals for June

June’s goals were miserably failed. A lot happened, but I was sick for most of the time. Being sick most of the time sucks. I really need to work on my health. Moving to RP#1 and a few other things I’ve been done will pay off in the long term, I hope!

  1. Make at least $1000 online and continue to promote the blog aggressively.  FAIL (I was sick for most of the time)
  2. Bring down RP#3 last bills to less than €1000. DONE (I paid off all the bills on RP#3 there were)
  3. Read one book. FAIL (I was sick for most of the time)
  4. Rent out another unit. DONE (This is a 2-year leasing contract)

For the next month:

  1. Make sure I take medication that works, keep calm, do things I love (like sports, great food, etc) and enjoy life (sounds crazy but I haven’t been doing this).
  2. Take one week entirely to write my second book, relax a lot, watch movies
  3. Plan the renovation of RP#3 and furniture RP#1 entirely (so I can live there properly).
  4. Write a lot on the blog. Two posts a week and do not fail.
  5. Start leaving medication and introducing supplements gently.
  6. Make at least $200 online and write 1 guest post.

Enjoy life guys!

Ben

online income report income diary report how to make money online
Reports,

May 2017 (Online Income: $172.50)

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 $172.50 this month? First, the breakdown:

Bluehost : $0 (vs $0 in April)
Affiliate marketing : $72.60 (vs $55.50 in April)
My book : $99.94 (vs $21.21 in April)
Consultancy fees : $0* (vs $1050 in April)
Google adsense : $0 (vs $0 in April – I removed all ads from the blog)
Paid surveys : $0 (vs $0 in April)

Total : $172.50

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.

As for consultancy fees: I haven’t consulted this month, at least not more than the hours I had already sold. I received a ton of new requests, but my time was so limited that I didn’t accept any yet. I will consult big time during June for sure! I already secured some contracts. In the next two months, I hope to surpass the $2000 mark on consulting alone.

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 the blog, but create a very valuable platform that people love.

Expenses

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

Views

I am happy with the direction the blog is taking, and I 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.

I have been focused on increasing the website’s authority, high-quality referrals and growing my social media accounts. I am happy with the progress in May: the domain authority boosted from 24 to 32 and the page authority raised from 37 to 43! As I anticipated, I both went up and I think that until July/August I will experience even further increases. 🙂 Again, I hope that Google recognizes my serious effort here, and boosts my ranks soon!

Although I didn’t have many guest posts published in May, my traffic did grow slightly. In June, should I manage to have 15 guest posts published, I think that I will grow definitely to something around 30k views. I am still waiting to be featured on a major site.

blog views may 2017

and the number of sessions:

sessions views may 2017

For the second consecutive month, more sessions, more users, and more page views!

My Alexa rank is still good, and I am actually over the idea that there will be a big penalty for “losing” the December stats. I also noticed a big increase of my Portuguese audience, which I am glad to see.

alexa rank may 2017

Social Media

This month my Facebook page grew by 203 likes to a total of 804 likes, which compares really well against last month (71 likes), and represents an increase of more than 25%. As I said last month, I had a few tricks I could use to grow my Facebook page and these seem to work beautifully. Next month, I will go all in with this trick and hopefully grow beyond 1000 likes. I won’t hit 25k likes until the end of the year, which was my goal, but I think that I can still reach 5k without ads.

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 1029 to 1091, wich means an increase of about 6%. I didn’t grow as much as I expected because although I wrote many guest posts, most of them weren’t published yet. 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 May 2017:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 700. DONE! I’ve hit 800 likes using a new technique. I am very happy with this.
  • Increase the number of blog subscribers to 1200. FAIL. I managed to hit 1091 subscribers, so I am still far behind my initial goals.
  • Increase the number of followers on Twitter to 350. FAIL. Not really active on Twitter, I am still at 277 followers.
  • Write at least 10 guest posts. ALMOST DONE. This is such a difficult task! I managed to write 8 guest posts but I had to put myself under a lot of stress. Hopefully, this will pay off big time.
  • Reach at least 40k views on my blog. FAIL. Not as many guest posts as I wished and SEO hasn’t kicked in yet. Struggling to increase my view count considerably.
  • Make about $800 online. FAIL. I didn’t consult as much as I expected to, which led to much less money online. However, I used my time very wisely, growing my brick and mortar business considerably.

Goals for June 2017:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 1000.
  • 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 $1000 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

net worth update
Reports,

May 2017 (247397.66€)

My current worth is €247,397.66 (36.93% of my first goal – €670K).

net worth may 2017

Again, a net worth decrease. Guess what… RP#3 is still sucking up cash!

Why doesn’t RP#3 simply end taking so much money away?

The renovation works are now over, but I had two last bills to pay. One (of €1900) is still carrying over to June, so I expect another net worth decrease next month. However, all units rehabbed in RP#3 are already rented out, so it will take 2-4 months to recover the almost €30k I had to put in to make it appealing for tenants. I’ve run the numbers again, and I am confident that I will have the money I spent remodeling the property completely back in 4 years. This is good, because the property itself cost me more or less the same, thus making it an 8-year deal (although I plan to keep this property forever, as I said last month). Still fine with me, given the entire potential of the property.

I couldn’t rent out the last unit of RP#3 that is good enough to rent. I hope to rent it out during June.

Rental income

This was the last month of my tenants in RP#1, and I will move there this month (unlike what I said last month, I will, in fact, move there because the contract I secured on a rental for myself didn’t go through). As I said, my idea is still to sell it, but I will move there because I think it will take me about 3-6 months to sell it. My idea is still to put €35k to work and throw €10k into P2P lending.

The rental income for May was €1225, which is the highest I’ve achieved in my lifetime, as I said last month. Next month RP#1 won’t be rented, so I’ll collect €1195 in rents. Hopefully, I’ll rent another unit in RP#3 soon and bring the rental income close to €1500.

Online income

My online income for May wasn’t that good, as I invested way less time consulting than in previous months. I will comment on this in the online income report/income diary.

My Real Estate business

My Real Estate business is gaining continuing traction and I am very happy with the direction it is taking. I will report on it next month.

Goals for May

May’s goals were not achieved because I changed my strategy in the first week of the month, but I am happy with the month. Overall, it was a great month!

  1. Make at least $1500 online (aggressive goal).  FAIL (I didn’t consult at all because I started to invest time on different things).
  2. Read two books. FAIL (Yes, I know that I suck when it comes to keeping promises of reading books. Sorry, I simply invest my time in many projects.)
  3. Rent out another unit. FAIL.

Just because I failed every goal, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t like this month. In fact, this was one of the most productive months in 2017!

Next month, my goals are:

  1. Make at least $1000 online and continue to promote the blog aggressively.
  2. Bring down RP#2 last bills to less than €1000.
  3. Read one book.
  4. Rent out another unit.

The environment at work is still great and I like what I am doing. However, it is indeed requiring way more time than I expected at first.

Ben

online income report income diary report how to make money online
Reports,

April 2017 (Online Income: $1126.71)

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

net worth update
Reports,

April 2017 (248469.47€)

My current worth is €248469.47 (36.92% of my first goal – €670K).

net worth april 2017

Finally, a net worth increase! Unlike what I thought, April turned out to be a turning point, as far as the direction of my net worth is concerned.

Not a great month, still?

Well, guess what… There were still some bills to pay, regarding RP#3. This was a very expensive property to rehab and although this was a great deal at first, I’ve dropped so much cash there, that I am not sure this will be my best deal ever, unlike what I thought at first. Last month, I said that the bleeding would continue during April (which in fact did), but I was able to stop it as I generated some extra cash this month (see below). 🙂 There will be a last bill to pay, next month, which I estimate to be around €1900. I am confident that this property will yield nice money in the next 10 years, without me to worry much about it, so this was definitely an investment for the long haul.

I was also able to rent out another unit in RP#3, yesterday (the last day of the month!). Another unit rented on the last day of the month! God, there is a pattern here!!! I was able to rent it for €250/mo, but the contract will only start on June 1st. This means that there is only 1 unit free left on RP#3, and so I may consider rehabbing some of the other units in the next months. Yet, my priority is to rent out the last unit (I will try to do this during May) and increase my free cash flow.

Rental income

My tenants from RP#1 asked me for a 1-month extension, which I accepted. Therefore, they will only vacay the property at the end of May. I actually changed plans on this property, as I decided to sell it. My idea is to take €35k to flip another flat in the area and throw €10k to P2P lending. I will NOT move to RP#1 as I was able to get a good deal on a rental for myself, in the same area.

The rental income for May will be €1225, which is the same as I had during April and the highest I’ve achieved in my lifetime, as I said last month. As I was able to rent another unit from RP#3, I will be able to keep this rental income and even increase it before September, when one of the leasing contracts increases automatically by €50/mo. I think I will hit €1500/mo then. As I said before, whatever cash is generated from my Rental Properties is entirely re-invested into the Rental Properties themselves.

Online income

My online income for April was AWESOME. I will comment on this in the online income report/income diary.

My Real estate business

My Real Estate business is dormant, as I am investing a lot of time on the blog. I expect it to gain traction soon, but I can’t project any numbers.

Goals for April

April’s goals were, in general, achieved:

  1. Make at least $500 online and continue to promote the blog aggressively (details in the income diary). DONE. This will be explained in the online income report.
  2. Read two books. FAIL (I invested too much time on guest posts and my consultancy business)
  3. Rent out another unit. DONE!

My goals for May (does not include the goals for the blog – those follow in the income diary):

  1. Make at least $1500 online (aggressive goal).
  2. Read two books.
  3. Rent out another unit.

I also started my part-time research position and I AM LOVING IT. The environment at work is great and I love the project. I think it will take me way more time than I expected, but let us see as time goes by.

Ben

online income report income diary report how to make money online
Reports,

March 2017 (Online Income: $208.58)

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 $208.58 this month? First, the breakdown:

Bluehost : $100
Affiliate marketing : $35.88
My book : $45.36 (I set the price of the book to $1 as a special offer to my subscribers)
Consultancy fees : $0 (turned down some work, because I was really busy with other projects)
Google adsense : $2.34
Paid surveys : $25

Total : $208.58

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 commited 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.

Expenses

This month, I had considerable expenses with the re-branding of the blog:

New template for site : $49
Programmer : $50 (eventually I had another programmer helping me out, but as he is my personal friend, I am not sure how I will pay him)
Promo video : $20

Total : $119

These expenses are pretty much 1-time expenses and now I don’t expect to spend money on the blog until the end of the year.

Views

I changed my strategy pertaining to traffic. Although I’ve proven in the past that I can send a lot of traffic to the blog (see the traffic in Sep-Dec in the picture below), in I am not interested in doing that anymore. Yes, that does convert some people into loyal readers, it does increase the number of subscribers and followers (not to mention that I make way more money that way). However, not only that takes most of my time (which I could invest in producing awesome content for my blog) as the traffic falls immediately if I stop using those channels.

I am now interested in building a sustainable platform that grows steadily and organically, as I am confident that I have now enough valuable content for that. To do that, there are a few things I am focusing on: the site authority (PA and DA), high-quality referrals and growing my social media accounts.

This month, my traffic was pretty similar to that of February, totaling about 21k views. SEO is yet to take off (which now makes sense to me – I need 3 months of hard work to start seeing good results from that – I will talk a lot about this on Friday) and I’ve had increased traffic from referrals even though I haven’t been featured on any major site yet. Now, I did expect to drive a lot of traffic in a “sustainable way” but it didn’t happen. I know what went wrong and I will correct that in the future, when I use the same strategy.

views march 2017 blog traffic income diary blogging for money how to make money with a blog paid surveys

and the number of sessions:

sessions march 2017 blog traffic

Once again, I have 50% new and 50% returning visitors and the bouncing has decreased to 71.46% (I am killing it on organic searches, as I have bounding rates of up to 43%!). The blog theme is now much more user-friendly and I do expect to decrease my bouncing rate even more.

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 ranking march 2017

Social Media

Last month, my Facebook page grew by 31 likes (an increase of about 8%). This month, I used many other techniques and I was able to grow it by 99 likes – to 530 likes – an increase of about 23%. This is more exciting because if I continued to grow my facebook page at 23% compound, I’d have 3415 likes by the end of the year. Yes, this is still nothing compared to my goal of 25.000 likes, but I will use some tricks to increase it and I am finally considering using some Facebook ads to put some gasoline in the process. Social media will be the cornerstone of part II of my crazy SEO experiment (check out part I here), and I expect a massive increase of likes.

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 900 to 938, wich means an increase of about 4%. I know exactly why I had a smaller increase than last month – I sent two many newsletters and I had a lot of unsubscriptions. 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.

Goals for March 2017:

  • Release my book. DONE!
  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 750.  FAIL. (I was to partner with a SM company, which didn’t happen yet)
  • Increase the number of blog subscribers to 1100. FAIL. (I expected to drive a lot of traffic to the blog, which didn’t happen)
  • Reach at least 50k views on my blog. FAIL. (same as above)
  • Make about $500 online. FAIL. (a direct consequence of not driving enough traffic)

Goals till April 30th:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 700.
  • Increase the number of blog subscribers to 1100.
  • Increase the number of followers on Twitter to 200.
  • Write at least 14 guest posts (check out the post on Friday to know why…)
  • Reach at least 40k views on my blog.
  • Make about $400 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

net worth update
Reports,

March 2017 (247344.39€)

My current worth is €247344.39 (36.92% of my first goal – €670K).

net worth march 2017

And after 12 months of steady increases in my net worth, another (minor) decrease this month. And guess what, April will probably suffer even more.

Why another net worth decrease?

Same reason as last month… RP#3 continues to demand cash cash cash!!!! As I’ve been saying, I estimate the bleeding will only stop in May, when the renovation is over. I am confident that this property will yield nice money in the next 10 years, without me to worry much about it.

I still have 2 free units but I am not worried that they will stay vacant for another month or 2. I realized that I’ve been micromanaging this property. When you acquire more wealth, you tend to manage things in a more macro perspective, and that is what I am doing right now.

Rental income

The rental income for April will be €1225, which is the highest I’ve achieved in my lifetime (in May I will move to RP#1, and so the rental income will decrease to €950/mo, unless I rent another unit of RP#3 in the meantime). In September, one of my leasing contracts increases automatically by €50/mo, and so, if nothing changes, the overall rental income would be €1000/mo at that point + whatever I can get from the units that are not rented out yet. If I rent them, I may well hit €1500/mo of rental income. This money will entirely be used to grow the real estate business (in particular, renovate the other units in RP#3) to keep increasing it.

Online income

My online income isn’t yet anywhere I estimated it would be at this point, but I will comment on this in the online income report/income diary.

My Real estate business

My Real Estate business had to be suspended for 2 weeks, as the Real Estate license we were given had some kind of problem. It will be re-issued. Not sure how much money I will make in 2017.

Goals for March

The goals I had for March were clearly missed, not only because I have been sick for two weeks, as I also decided to change my strategy at the beginning of the month. However, I am comfortable with the results I had.

  1. Make at least $300 online and promote the blog. (this will be explained in the online income report)
  2. Read two books. FAIL (as I invested a lot of time re-branding the blog, creating content and working on the SEO)
  3. Complete the renovation of the first part of RP#3. DONE! The bleeding will now stop. This is finally over (it took well over 4 months). I will publish a post on this, eventually.

My goals for April (does not include the goals for the blog – those follow in the income diary):

  1. Make at least $500 online and continue to promote the blog aggressively (details in the income diary).
  2. Read two books.
  3. Rent out another unit.

As you know, I was also offered a part-time research position, which fits my current situation very well. I signed the contract last week and I am excited to do this – it will give me the time I need to work on my projects while making some monies and continue to do some research. The contract will last for 12 months.

Ben