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December blog income and stats recap

 

December Blog Income

Photo Credit: Pinterest/Problog.com

Welcome to the sixth blog income and stats recap of MMYW! While I hadn’t disclosed income from Reach Financial Independence so far, I am adding it here since the whole blogging thing is considered one endeavor. For example, my VA has been working on both sites for the past few months. MMYW is now six months old and I have bought my third blog five weeks ago.

 

Check previous income and stats recaps:

July income  $4,042

August income $2,530

September income $3,307

October income $3,570

November income $2,697 + 10% of Super Secret Website’s purchase price

 

 

Expenses

 

MMYW

Virtual assistant and staff writing: $250. I bought a final bunch of posts that are scheduled until May so I can take a break from expenses now.

Also sent the VA $50 for Christmas, which were mostly for her work on MMYW for the past 6 months.

 

RFI

Total $0. Love those months…

 

 

SUPER SECRET WEBSITE

 

Server migration $5. That was a Fiverr gig.

VA and staff writing $287. I moved the VA costs over there as most of the 20 hours per week were spent optimizing the new website.

 

EXPENSES TOTAL $542. Much cheaper than last month’s $673 but still expensive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Income

 

RFI

$2,265. This is a mix of Adsense, affiliate sales, and direct advertising, plus a little income I got from my ad referral network’s commissions. Contact me if you are interested in joining the ad network!

After a low November, December was pretty good. Adsense is up, affiliate sales are up, hope it stays this way in 2014.

 

 

MMYW

$2,360. The PR update has finally happened early December and with that advertisers have a sudden interest in MMYW. I have to say they generally knock on RFI’s door and then I pitch them MMYW but many have accepted. I also put more affiliate banners and links here and there which have picked up nicely.

My 2013 goal was to make $3,000 with MMYW during its first 6 months. The 6 months mark was on January 1st, and that goal is a PASS at $3.080! However, I have spent a lot of money on the site, six months worth of VA, the staff posts and the hosting/odd Fiverr gig have eaten most of the profits. I will do a full breakdown soon.

 

 

 

Super secret website

If you read my post last month, you know I bought another PF website! I won’t disclose the URL or the sales price just yet, I started managing it on the 1st of December, but moved it a bit with my contacts during the last week of November, in hopes to start making back the sales price as soon as possible. My goal, as I explained in the post about closing the deal, is to make my money back in 6 months. The online world is a risky business and you never know when the rules will change. Anyway, since I bought it, I made just over 55% of the purchase price. 10% from November and 45% in December.

I gave it a theme makeover, and put a few affiliate links and banners, both Adsense and sales have been satisfying so far. I was lucky to be able to renew some existing deals that had expired, and brought a big of cash too.

I also had to buy some posts, and my VA is working on it a lot, so I her salary will be allocated mostly to the super secret website.

 

 

TOTAL $4,625 + 45% of super secret website’s purchase price. It was a great month.

 

 

 

 

 

After Costs Total

 

$4,083. Looking forward to a great 2014! My goal is to make $50,000 this year between the three sites.

 

10% blog income for charity pledge

 

10% of blogging income will go to sponsor young girls’ education in my village, my education fund now has $404 from July and $253 from August, $297 from September, $357 from October, $269 from November $462  from December. Total: $2,042. One of my awesome readers also pledged to match my donations up to $2,000,  and the lovely Kim from Eyes on the Dollar gave me an additional $500, so we have over $4,500 now!!

 

The school year ended on November 30th and I offered a full ride to the best two students to go to boarding school. So I am committed to those two kids for the next three years! That will set me back more than the $4,000 I collected but the school bills monthly and it should be just fine to reach the $5,000 a year my project needs.

I just paid the first $350 to enroll them and in a few days we’ll drive to the school to install them and buy uniforms and supplies. That is really exciting!

 

Left in the fund: $4,542 – $350 = $4,192.

 

Blog stats for RFI

 

Pageviews are back up since I came back from Europe, which is good news but I am trying to improve search traffic so I don’t depend so much on being there or not.

 

Nov 30th Dec 31st
PageRank 3 4
MozRank 5.35 5.5
Domain Authority 47 45
Alexa Rank 32,328 32,637
Twitter Followers 3,948 4,537
RSS subscribers 912 980
FB fans 1,457 1,442
Pageviews 49,224 53,105
Unique 23,862 26,943
SEO traffic % 51.2% 47.3%

 

Blog stats for MMYW

Because MMYW started one year after RFI, I will compare the stats I can find. After almost 4 months of blogging in a cave, Q4 2012 was the time I really started to get out there. I guest posted everywhere that would have me and started making friends with other bloggers.

In November 2012, RFI jumped from PR0 to PR3, and so did MMYW in December, after a miracle, unexpected PageRank update.

 

Nov 30th Dec 31st RFI Dec 31st 2012
PageRank 0 3 3
MozRank 5.16 5.3 4-ish
Domain Authority 40 37 35-ish
Alexa Rank 55,473 59,159 500K
Twitter Followers 1,612 1710 500
RSS subscribers 257 293 75
FB fans 2,232 2,216 150
Pageviews 11,704 13,001 7,886
Unique 6,971 8,936 2,738
SEO traffic % 45.15 49.4% 32.2%

 

Sorry about the lack of information on RFI, some info is not available in retrospect. But so far, MMYW is doing way better.

 

Super secret website

 

Super secret website is almost 2 years old. Here are the starting stats when I bought it. I think I may have lost the feed subscribers in the server migration but I need to double check that… My analytics are only 3 days old so I’ll start reporting next month.

 

Nov 30th Dec 31st
PageRank 3 3
MozRank 5.25 5.26
Domain Authority 43 41
Alexa Rank 265,407 119.327
Twitter Followers 5,680 5697
FB fans 1,460 1451
Pageviews ? 8,875
Unique ? 3,216
SEO traffic % ?  37.9%

 

How did your blog grow in the past month? Happy with the results?

 

This post was featured on the Bloggers Classifieds, Carnival of Retirement, thank you!

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Lovely comments

    • Pauline says

      I got my first deal as a PR0 and I think my DA was between 35 and 40. But they are pretty rare. It looks like PR3 is when you start getting popular, with a DA of at least 30, preferably over 40.

  3. DC @ Young Adult Money says

    Woohoo so glad you got your pagerank updated! It’s intense how much weight advertisers put on it. I have seen some care more about domain authority, though. My blog is still chugging along at a consistent revenue/expense/income so I’m happy with that. Here’s to growth in 2014, though!
    DC @ Young Adult Money recently posted…The Weekly Quick Hits RoundupMy Profile

  5. FI Pilgrim says

    It’s fun to see the progress difference between RFI and MMYW, and it’s also encouraging to see how far you’ve come in the last year! My stats are similar to your RFI ones from a year ago, but even with an 80k alexa ranking my PR only went to 2, which was a bummer. Still, 2 is better than 0!

    Thanks again for letting us see what makes a great blog tick!
    FI Pilgrim recently posted…How To Keep Your Goals Moving ForwardMy Profile

    • Pauline says

      RFI got from 0 to 3 and it took another year to move from 3 to 4. Hope it doesn’t take you that long to move up!
      What is not described in the stats is the linking and I did a lot of guest posting on RFI before the PR update once I got out of my cave, I am sure that helped a lot.

  7. lyle @ The Joy of Simple says

    Hi Pauline and once again, congrats on your online earnings 🙂

    Also, congrats to the kids in your village who also benefit from your online success. It adds a more humane factor to the numbers and is surely a win-win all around. You’re doing wonderful work for those children and I hope you get to do much, much more for them in 2014!!

    Take care and once again, thanks for sharing.

    All the best.

    Lyle
    lyle @ The Joy of Simple recently posted…2014 – Time To “Git ‘er Done!”My Profile

  16. C. the Romanian says

    Congrats, Pauline! It appears that your Super Secret Website will start making a profit next month, which makes it a really great deal! Not to mention the fact that your overall revenue was really good!

    December was a good month for me too, with better results than expected, but everything started to go down in January (in my case, January and mostly February are really slow months)
    C. the Romanian recently posted…Is Your Hair Stopping You from Saving Money?My Profile

  17. jane savers @ solving the money puzzle says

    I am finally seeing a bit of growth in readership but still no ad revenue.

    I am technically challenged and I attempted to copy ad code to my site. The ad agency tells you to copy the code to your page. They do not tell you WHERE to put the code and I put it in a very bad place and it took the GreenGeeks 24 hours to sort out the mess and get me back in to my blog.
    jane savers @ solving the money puzzle recently posted…A 10 Year GIC, Lots of Licenses, A LOC Sale And Money Quickies For January 9, 2014My Profile

    • Pauline says

      You can give them access for a day or two so the set it up, if you are unsure. The easiest way is to create a widget with text and paste it there, then you can move the widget on your sidebar.

  18. KK @ Student Debt Survivor says

    Looks like everything is coming along nicely. I re-read the post about the schooling for kids in your village and it made me tear up a little. I can’t think of anything more powerful and worthwhile then helping kids get a good education!

    As for my blog stats, I did get a bump during the google page rank update which was great. I really need to work using SEO when I’m writing posts. So far I’ve just been writing and not really paying attention to key words. I’m going to shoot you an e-mail about joining the ad network.
    KK @ Student Debt Survivor recently posted…Box Wine: Frugal & Fun or Cheap & Chintzy?My Profile