Welcome to the 11th blog income and stats recap of MMYW! It is starting to get old, but I spent less than a week at home this month, and only two days without company, so working on the blogs was a bit complicated. Looks like things are finally getting back to normal in June!
Check previous income and stats recaps:
November income $2,697 + 10% of Savvy Scot’s purchase price
December income $4,625 + 45% of Savvy Scot’s purchase price
January Income $3,290 + 45% of Savvy Scot’s purchase price
Expenses
MMYW
Virtual assistant and staff writing: $0. The VA now goes to Savvy Scot, and I had stocked up on posts on Q4 2013. MMYW’s domain was expiring but Hostgator
RFI
Total $0.
SAVVY SCOT
VA and staff writing $302. I moved the VA costs over there as it is my newest website, and bought a few posts for it too.
EXPENSES TOTAL $302. The plan is to keep it around the $300 mark for the foreseeable future.
Income
RFI
$2,090 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! Barely over the $2,000 mark this month, and that is thanks to an ongoing writing gig that I got, otherwise it would have been under. Affiliate sales have been great, mostly from Airbnb, but the rest has been slow.
MMYW
$1,730. I think it is the site’s best month so far, after the Panda 4.0 update there was a surge in search traffic and pageviews have gone up.
SAVVY SCOT
$3,155. A pretty good month for SS as well, as the site I bought once more outperforms the sites I created from scratch 
TOTAL $6,975. As usual, 10% will be donated to my charity projects, that is $697
My goal is to make $60,000 blogging this year, I should be at $25,000 so far and am at $26,873. Barely, but on target!
After Costs Total
$6.673. I was about to say I really tried to find the last $25 to take me over the $7,000 mark this month, but in truth I realized I was close on the last day of the month and was too lazy to get ahead on my writing assignments to make it work. Still a solid month, so no complains.
10% of blogging income will go to sponsor young girls’ education in my village, my education fund had $5,555 – $2,196 that I spent on back to school uniforms, books, and boarding school for the best two middle school students who will go to high school for the next three years. The full spending recap is there, and we started the computer program in March, which the kids are loving. If you have an old laptop you would like to donate to my village, let me know!
Left in the fund: $3,369 + $697 from May, minus May’s computer project costs and boarding school costs for two $644 = $3,422.
Blog stats for RFI
Over 60,000 pageviews for the first time, and over 60% search traffic, which I am happy about, since that means I could leave the blog as is and still get 40K pageviews or so. Even got 134 people visit from Bing lol.
I also use a plugin to prevent people from Guatemala from seeing the website, for privacy reasons, which cut a good chunk of traffic, but pageviews grew in spite of it.
| April 30th | May 31st | |
| PageRank | 4 | 4 |
| MozRank | 5.48 | 5.39 |
| Domain Authority | 45 | 44 |
| Alexa Rank | 37,267 | 41,803 |
| Pageviews | 58,430 | 62,392 |
| Unique | 32,185 | 35,957 |
| SEO traffic % | 52.9% | 64.9% |
Blog stats for MMYW
Back in January, for some reason MMYW’s search traffic went down by 50% or more. It was surprisingly low until Panda 4.0 where it went on to surpass the old levels. Hence the surge in pageviews this month. Let’s hope it stays this way.
| April 30th | May 31st | |
| PageRank | 3 | 3 |
| MozRank | 5.24 | 5.22 |
| Domain Authority | 38 | 37 |
| Alexa Rank | 63,562 | 65,557 |
| Pageviews | 19,725 | 28,213 |
| Unique | 11,549 | 15,487 |
| SEO traffic % | 43.4% | 59.8% |
Blog stats for Savvy Scot
Savvy Scot is growing nicely, and I couldn’t be happier with my purchase. It ranks #7 in the UK top personal finance blogs over at Sterling Effort, and allows me to talk about different things and use the £ sign. It had 8,800 pageviews 6 months ago in December when I bought it. Now we are at over 25K.
| April 30th | May 31st | |
| PageRank | 3 | 3 |
| MozRank | 5.32 | 5.31 |
| Domain Authority | 42 | 42 |
| Alexa Rank | 73,611 | 69,776 |
| Pageviews | 22,402 | 25,443 |
| Unique | 13,532 | 16,203 |
| SEO traffic % | 38.4% | 41.9% |
How did your blog grow in the past month? Happy with the results?
This post was featured on the My Personal Finance Blog, thank you!
Nice work, overall, Pauline! It must feel good to see SS bring in what it is and seeing it turn out to be a good investment. May was good for me overall and appear to be on track to reach my income goal I set for the year so I can’t complain. 🙂
John @ Wise Dollar recently posted…4 Tips for the Most Productive Vegetable Garden
Congrats on another successful month of blog incomes. Its an inspiration! Keep it up.
Best wishes
R2R
Nice work! I don’t know how you keep up with it all! My stats are pretty steady at this point. Not really growing, but not falling either. I’m OK with it though. Right now I have too many other things on my plate.
Tonya@Budget and the Beach recently posted…Six Month Check Up
Thank you Tonya, I don’t keep up with anything, my VA does haha. Really worth the expense IMO.
I didn’t know air b n b had an affiliate program. Or is that just bookings at your properties?
Stefanie @ The Broke and Beautiful Life recently posted…That’s a Wrap: What Is “Good Enough”?
My own bookings are separate. Airbnb pays $25 when someone you recommended travels and $75 when they start hosting.
Doesn’t Airbnb pay in the form of credit instead of cash? Is there a way to get the referral bonuses in cash instead?
I always enjoy your updates! 🙂
Stephanie @ Six Figures Under recently posted…May 2014– Debt Repayment Progress Report
Airbnb does pay in credit, but we travel often so it is worth it, and I count it as revenue.
Nice job Pauline! Have you written any posts in the past on best practices for increasing traffic/page views? I’ve grown my site, having three consecutive months of higher page views. It’s just not at the rate I’d like. Makes me think I’m doing something wrong or simply don’t know what it is I need to do.
Brian @ Luke1428 recently posted…Why I’m So Excited to Spend Money Again on Cable TV
Thank you Brian. I wrote about networking and getting known in general here https://makemoneyyourway.com/blogging-mistake-network/. My VA does a good job promoting the posts on social media, which take a lot of time but brings good results if you manage to communicate with your niche.
Thanks…that was helpful. I’m doing most of those things and they are time consuming…especially the commenting. Has your experience with a VA been a good one? Where did you find one to do the social media tasks?
Brian @ Luke1428 recently posted…How We Are Paying For Summer Vacations With Cash
My VA has been great so far, it took a little while for her to get used to the PF niche but now she is at ease. You can also hire small tasks on fiverr if you don’t want someone full time.
Wow you are doing amazing Pauline! Good job!
Michelle recently posted…$12,747 in May – Beginning to Break Out My Business Income
I am truly amazed by this! You have really accomplished a lot. Congratulations!
debt debs recently posted…Curve Balls – When You Are Hit With Unexpected Financial Events
Congrats on the great income. I didn’t know you bought Savvy Scott. Can you explain why it makes more than your sites, when your’s have more pageviews and better rankings?
EL @ Moneywatch101 recently posted…My Dividend Strategy
Well first it is a UK site so when people want to advertise in the UK market there are few sites to advertise on, and SS is one of the best known, so it is a go to place for many. Then it has a few posts with affiliate links that are ranking better than posts on RFI. RFI has more pageviews as a whole but if SS has a post with affiliate links that generates 1,000 pageviews per month and 10 convert in sales, while RFI has an affiliate post with only 300 pageviews and 3 conversions, it will make more money. Adsense also seems to have higher paying keywords on SS.
Good progress! Do you think the seller of Savvy Scott is kicking himself now?
May was pretty good for me. There was a step up in organic traffic in January by 30% or so that I wish to just hold on to, as most of the income is passive from affiliate income so the correlation with revenue and traffic is tight.
Financial Samurai recently posted…Different Investment Strategies For Different Life Stages
Congrats! The seller was really busy and about to be sent abroad so he may regret it but had close to zero time to take care of it. I had offered to take care of the blog without buying it, for a share of profit, which he should have accepted though!
Your traffic is still impressive does anyone ever get a reasonable amount of traffic from Bing with Google constant update it would be nice to have a competitive alternative,
constance @ savingdollars recently posted…Do I Need Pet Insurance?
I don’t know how Bing is still alive… probably because it is installed in every new laptop and a pain to uninstall… Every time I turn off my laptop it goes back to Bing and I have to reinstall google even though I am using Chrome.
Great job, Pauline! My income has averaged out the past few months and I am kind’ve in a rut. I have so many paid jobs that I don’t have the time to shake things up either. One of these days! =)
Holly@ClubThrifty recently posted…Joint Birthday Parties: Our Frugal Birthday Party Strategy
As long as work keeps coming that is good news!
You’re doing awesome, Pauline!!!! Our blog income has slowed a bit, but freelancing is solid and doing well. We’ll keep trying. 🙂
Laurie @thefrugalfarmer recently posted…Great Fathers Day Gift Ideas
That’s the spirit!
Thanks for sharing all that great information. I am just at the formative stage in my blog building career and it helps to see what you have done, the statistics that you follow, the growth in your income and the ways that you make money. It is also an inspiration. Thank you again.
Brad @ How To Save Money recently posted…Saving Money on Vacations with Staycations
Things are going very well for you, nice to see since I enjoy reading the blog. I’m in my first month of blogging so I’m not really sure what is good or bad as far as stats go. I’m just working on putting good material out there and eventually I will switch over to affiliate advertising, only that I have tried and believe in.
Even Steven recently posted…Cutting Back on Expenses-Mortgage
Great work Pauline! My traffic is kinda flat for the past couple months, but income was up considerably for the month.
Any guidance on when would be the proper point in time to hire a VA in terms of a trade-off of cost vs. revenue? How did you decide the right time to pull the trigger there?
Derek at MoneyAhoy recently posted…Yard Sale Arbitrage – Soccer Cleats
Depends on how you value your time. Mine does 20 hours a week which is a lot, and costs less than 10% of the income, so I am more than happy to pay. Even if you make $500 and have a $250 VA to do 99% of tasks while you just have to write it can be worth it if you don’t have time otherwise and would miss the extra $250 if you couldn’t blog.
Excellent numbers. I have to gear up on my networking. My pageviews are no where near what you have. I’ll be reading that post you wrote.
Raquel@Practical Cents recently posted…What the FIFA World Cup⢠Taught Me About Passion
Very nice progression Pauline!
Simon Cave recently posted…3 Steps to Realize your Wildest Dreams + One tip from a millionaire to increase your income by 1,000%
I cannot BELIEVE how much your 3 sites are cleaning up! That would be incredible if you are able to pull off making $60K this year.
MMD recently posted…Learning About Yourself and What Youâre Really Capable Of â Through Travel
Congrats with your blogging income! It’s cool to see the site you bought excel like that. I bought another site at the wrong time (I’m planning a wedding, changing day jobs, etc) so it’s not really taken off the way I had planned for it, but as soon as things calm down and I’m actually married and have started my new job, I’ll focus in more.
Daisy @ Prairie Eco Thrifter recently posted…Life Lessons from The Playground
Wow, those income numbers are seriously impressive, congrats! How long did you write for before you started to see some decent traffic? Ive been blogging for about 7 months and have found it to be a slow and steady process
Dan @ Our Big Fat Wallet recently posted…Teaching Kids About Money: Ages 7-8