My online income and blog stats in December 2017

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.

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 $317.49 this month? First, the breakdown:

Bluehost : $0 (vs $0 in November)
Affiliate marketing : $31.05 (vs $29.26 in November)
My book : $36.34 (vs $49.10 in November)
Consultancy fees : $0 (vs $0 in November)
Sponsored posts on other sites : $300 (vs $0 in November)
Produts to review: $250

Total : $317.49

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.

This month, I haven’t consulted as I am still sick and I don’t feel like consulting. I feel dizzy and overwhelmed, and I experience nausea throughout the day.

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 had no expenses this month.

Views

Still dizzy and nauseous (for one year now!), I’ve been able to post as often as I wanted. I haven’t posted as much on Quora – I actually prefer to invest my time on awesome posts for From Cents To Retirement. I have been targeting posts with at least 2000 words, that are really comprehensive on the topic I post on.

Unlike what I thought, I haven’t been featured in another big newspaper again and so the views came down to “normal”, plus December is a really bad month in terms of traffic:

views december 2017

And the number of sessions:

sessions december 2017

Something odd happened with regards to this! I have been able to steadily increase the number of organic searches I have every month, and they finally surpassed 30% of the total number of visits. Yet, this month they came down aggressively – I hope I wasn’t penalized. I am still up with my goal to be at 1,000 views per day exclusively from organic searches until July 2018, and 25,000 likes on Facebook. If I am able to do this, my blog will have enough views to build the basis for a reference for early retirement. This is why I am so focused on hitting these two numbers!

My authority has increased: the domain authority is now at 34 and the page authority is 45. I actually thought I would have a higher increase based on last month’s acquired links, but this hasn’t been the case. Therefore, I am onto SEO once again.

My Alexa rank is now stable at 294,500!

Social Media

My Facebook page grew from 2059 likes to 2100. This is an increase of about 2%, which, compounded, would make me hit roughly 2400 likes by July 2018. Of course this is not good and I need to dramatically enhance what I am doing with my Facebook account. 🙂

As I said before, I am not keeping track of Pinterest anymore.

As for the subscriber count, I was able to grow it from 1726 to 1739, which means an increase of less than 1%. This is because I lost some subscribers as I sent too many newsletters (as I predicted before).

Goals for December 2017:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 2200. FAIL.
  • Maintain the number of blog subscribers, as I will clean up some that don’t open newsletters. DONE.
  • Write at least 1 guest post. DONE.
  • Make about $250 online. DONE.

Goals for January 2018:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 2200.
  • Maintain the number of blog subscribers, as I will clean up some that don’t open newsletters.
  • Write at least 1 guest post.
  • Make about $250 online.

In the meantime, let me know if this information is useful to you by commenting down below.

Your biggest fan,
Ben Davis