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