Blog Income & Traffic Report - October 2018

Welcome to my first blog income and traffic report. A few people have asked me why I would want to publish details of my blog income and traffic online. Won’t you be embarrassed? Do you really want the world knowing your business? You get the idea.

Having followed some of the best bloggers online, I think there is a huge opportunity for millennials to use blogs and online businesses to rapidly increase their income and get them on the road to Financial Independence.

When you look at the stories of Ruth Soukup and Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, it is clear to see that blogging can and does change people’s lives.

Blogging can be the thing that allows people to leave their dream life.

To be clear, I have no plans to quit my business, I love what I do and my work is really kind of my hobby, so there is no way I would want to stop.

What I would like to do though is give hope to all the millions of millennials out there who have subscribed to the stories in the media that we are the ‘doomed generation’, destined never to own a home and never have enough money to retire. 

I want to use this site to show that it is still possible to have a profitable blog business, even in 2018

So Why Post An Income & Traffic Report?

I wanted to share these reports on a regular basis for a number of reasons, in no particular order:

1. To show what is possible

I truly believe that Millennials have an incredible opportunity in creating a blog or knowledge commerce business and that almost anything is possible online. I have been inspired by the income reports from several bloggers like Michelle Schroeder-Gardner and Grant Sabatier who are now regularly reporting five and six figure months. 

The only problem is, these are experienced bloggers who have been doing it for years. I want to prove that it is still possible to start a new blog, in 2018 and make a reasonable income.

2. To show the hard work that happens behind the scenes

To many people, blogging looks really easy. You throw a couple of posts online, add a few adds and affiliate links and hey presto – get rich quick, right? Wrong.

Blogging takes a lot of hard work and dedication and in the early months, you could well be blogging to yourself.

I want to chart the journey from new blog to (hopefully) successful blog and show you the trials and tribulations along the way.

3. To hold myself accountable

I am a big believer in setting goals and then having people hold you accountable. By publishing my blogging goals online, I have the whole world to hold me accountable for what I say I am going to achieve.

That’s not to say that I can achieve every goal, every time, but I will certainly give it my all!

Now that you know the reasons for the report, let’s get underway:

Blog Activity & Updates

October was a super busy month for me in the Financial Planning business. We had a great month and set some new records. This meant that I didn’t have as much spare time as I would have liked to write articles for the blog.

I posted 7 articles in October and the most popular of those articles so far has been the first of my series on Financial Resilience.

I have been busy preparing the first product for sale on the blog. It started out as a budget planner for use with the envelope budgeting system which I recommend, but it has evolved to be more of a full financial freedom planner.

It now includes a budgeting planner, a net worth tracker and a ‘dream life’ calculator (which is designed to help you work out how much your dream life will cost annually and also then figure out how much capital you need to sustain it). 

I am still very much focused on building out great content for my blog and I am trying to post 2 times a week. In October this has been more like once per week, but I am letting myself off given how busy the month was.

I am going to ease off on myself a little bit in November also as the end of the year is always a really busy time in the Financial Planning business.

I have set myself the task of having the ‘Financial Freedom Planner Bundle’ (as I am not going to call it) live on the blog by the end of the year. This will be challenging as I am learning some new skills and need to build out some landing pages and other content for the launch.

Blog Goals for November:

1. Post at least 1 high quality new article each week
2. Finish work on the landing page for Financial Freedom Planner Bundle

Blog Traffic In October

October was my best month yet for traffic, although the numbers are still super, super tiny.

I have not been focusing that much on traffic so far, instead preferring to get the blog to a stage where I have a good amount of high quality content first.

My first traffic building strategy has been to add comments to some of the other awesome blogs that I follow. This has started to pay off and I am noticing a spike in traffic on days where I am adding comments. I need to make this a more consistent habit and also expand the blogs that I am reading and commenting on.

I started my blog in early August 2018, so I am now around 3 months in. I have really enjoyed the process of writing for and creating my blog and it is a passion that I pursue in my spare time.

So, let’s have a look at the numbers for October compared to September:

Total Users: 72 (+132%)

Page Views: 273 (+44%)

I know that these figures and still pretty much insignificant compared to the multi-million page views that some other sites are getting, but it feels like a good start.

I am happy that I have doubled my users and added around 44% to my page views. I have also started to see just a couple of referrals from Google, meaning that my blog is beginning to appear in some search results.

I have read that it can take from 6-12 months for a site to begin to appear in Google on a regular basis and that it can take even longer in crowded niches like personal finance.

I am expecting it to take at least a year to see big traffic numbers from Google and possibly even longer.

For next month, I am going to continue to read and post helpful comments on other great blogs that I follow and in addition I am going to get started with Pinterest.

Many bloggers use Pinterest to grow traffic to their blog and I am going to be giving it a try. I know nothing about Pinterest and so I am going into this as a total newbie.

I think I am going to spend the rest of this year getting to grips with the system and how it works and then I will probably take a Pinterest course in early 2019 to really grow my knowledge.

Traffic Strategies Used In October

1. Posted comments on other awesome blogs that I follow

Traffic Goals For November:

1. Continue to post comments on the other blogs I follow
2. Expand the range of blogs that I am following / comment on
3. Begin to experiment with Pinterest

Blog Income in October

This will be a fairly short section for today’s post, but one I hope will get a lot bigger in coming months.

My blog income for October was (drum roll please….) ZERO!

Yes. My income for the month was a rather un-impressive $0, however I do not currently have any products on the site, my traffic is very, very low and the only advertising I have is some Amazon recommended products panels.

In the future I want to be more active with my own products, affiliate links and ads, however there has been a lot to do in the past 3 months. I have built the design of the site, written all of the content thus far and added some back-of-house systems to make everything run smoothly.

As time goes on, I hope to be posting a number higher than zero of course and at this point, I will go into more detail about where the income is coming from and what’s working and what’s not.

Blog Expenses In October

My expenses were very minimal this month. I use the Kajabi platform to build and host the blog, as well as manage my e-mail lists and e-mail campaigns, host my products and process payments. I paid for Kajabi a year-in-advance and got a sweet deal with all sorts of bonues thrown in, at much less than the usual price.

My expenses for October were:

Stock Photos for Posts - $2

I use Canva to create the artwork for most of the site. It is super simple to use and you can create some really beautiful artwork on there without being a graphic designer. I mostly use the free images and graphics that they have available on there, but occasionally they don’t really fit the bill.

In this situation, Canva gives you access to a much larger library of paid images, that cost only $1 for a single use. I used two paid images in October hence $2 spent. Not too bad!

I will most likely subscribe to the Canva paid version at some point in the future which then gives you access to all the paid images. While I am still getting my blog off the ground, I am happy to just pay $1 a go.

Summing Up

All in all, I am happy with the progress the blog is making, although it is a little slower than I would like. I think the site is starting to look pretty reasonable and I still have loads of ideas for new content and improvements.