My online income and blog stats in October 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. 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 $78.36 this month? First, the breakdown:

Bluehost : $0 (vs $0 in September)
Affiliate marketing : $29.26 (vs $116.09 in September)
My book : $49.10 (vs $49.10 in September)
Consultancy fees : $0 (vs $0 in September)
Google adsense : gave up!
Paid surveys : $0 (vs $0 in September)
Sponsored posts on other sites : $0 (vs $22 in September)

Total : $78.36

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

Views – the BOOM I’ve been waiting for!

Still dizzy and nauseous (for 10 months now!), but I’ve been able to work more and publish more often. 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.

However, what really increased the traffic this month was a series of features on other blogs and huge sites. For instance, I wrote a very nice post for Budgets Are Sexy, called “What I Learned From Interviewing 19 Millionaires“, which was very well received by the audience and was worth a mention on Business Insider!

But wait, this is not the end!

In the same month I was featured on Budgets are Sexy and Business Insider… I was featured in one of the biggest newspapers in Portugal – Jornal Económico – which decided to write about my story. You can check out the article here (in Portuguese). This site receives between 4 and 6 million views per month!

As a result, my story went viral (having been shared for 3300 times) and my blog and my Facebook page went crazy!

The good news is that next month there will be more. 🙂

Being featured on big sites is the dream of every blogger. Here’s why:

views october 2017

This has allowed me to achieve the second best month ever for the blog! And check out the number of sessions:

blog sessions october 2017

Look at these juicy stats. 🙂 Let us put the spikes (the biggest being from Jornal Económico) aside. The number of sessions per day has increased since last months and I am finally getting closer to respectable bounce rates. I really hope I can get to under 60% until July 2018. The average session of 3 minutes is awesome.

I have also written many guest posts, which is definitely helping with my SEO. Right now, I am above 100 sessions from organic search every single day. Hopefully, I will hit 1,000 sessions until July 2018 – that is the goal.

My authority hasn’t moved a bit: the domain authority is 33 and the page authority is 43. We’ll need to wait until all the new links are considered, which will raise both authorities a lot, I hope. I will also continue to publish more and more guest posts and promoting the blog further to help with this process.

My Alexa rank started to reverse due to the huge traffic boost:

alexa october blog 2017

Social Media

Being featured on large sites is also great to social media. My Facebook page grew from 1158 likes to a total of 2015 likes. This is an increase of about 42.53%, which is of course not sustainable in the long term. If it was, I could hit almost 35,000 likes by July 2018. I would love to grow my Facebook page to this number, but being sick and tired doesn’t help!

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

As for the subscriber count, I was able to grow it from 1259 to 1726, which means an increase of about 27%. This is the largest increase in subscribers ever, and it has to do with the massive exposure I had this month. Last month I said I’d hit 1500 subscribers until the end of the year and this is vastly surpassed already! 🙂

Goals for October 2017:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 1400. VASTLY SURPASSED. Being featured on big sites is GREAT!
  • Increase the number of blog subscribers to 1400 (aggressive goal, but I think I will get there). VASTLY SURPASSED. Being featured on big sites is GREAT!
  • Write at least 2 guest posts. SURPASSED. I wrote 5 guest post and I was featured on big sites as well!
  • Make about $250 online. FAIL. Honestly, I think that I need to push affiliate sales or consult a lot to make decent money. Being dizzy most of the time, this is difficult to do.

Goals for October 2017:

  • Increase the number of likes on my Facebook page to 2200.
  • Increase the number of blog subscribers to 1800. Note that I will lose some subscribers as I will send lots of newsletters this month.
  • Write at least 2 guest posts.
  • Make about $200 online.

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

Your biggest fan,
Ben Davis