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