Make Money Your Way

Choose the way. Earn more. Start today.

October blog income and stats recap

October blog income and stats recap

Welcome to the fourth blog income and stats recap of MMYW! While I hadn’t disclosed income from Reach Financial Independence so far, I will also add it here since the whole blogging thing is considered one endeavor. For example, my VA has been working on both sites for the past months. MMYW is now four months old, how time flies!

Check previous income and stats recaps:

July income  $4,042

August income $2,530

September income $3,307

 

Expenses

 

MMYW

Virtual assistant and staff writing: $457. The VA works 20 hours per week. I wouldn’t have hired her just to take care of RFI but that is a welcome help with the extra work on MMYW, which is why all her salary goes to MMYW.

I bought quite a few posts too for November and December.

Total $457

 

 

 

 

RFI

Total $25. For a gift card for Jason Hull’s Winning with money course giveaway. In honor of Veteran Day, Jason is giving his Winning with Money course for free to all veterans and people in active duty or reservists today. Click here if you want to know more.

 

EXPENSES TOTAL $482

 

 

 

 

Income

 

RFI

$3,405. 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! A couple of deals will deploy in November but they were agreed in October so they are featured here.

Once again I was traveling during the whole month of October so it is not too bad for being on holiday!

 

MMYW

$165. Still waiting for that PR update, that apparently won’t happen this year, and maybe never. It is hard to change the ad reps’ mindset and have them consider the other metrics for advertising. I guess I won’t be making my goal of $3,000 by the end of December!

 

TOTAL $3,570

 

 

After Costs Total

 

$3,088. I was happy to still come over $3,000 considering the big expenses on MMYW. My goal was to cover all our European holiday expenses with online income and I will have to break it down but I think it is a PASS!

 

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. Total: $1,311. One of my awesome readers also pledged to match my donations up to $2,000 so we have over $2,600 now!!

The school year ends on November 30th so that is when the best two students will be announced, then I’ll check with them what they want to study. If I have money left over I will help middle school students buy uniforms and school supplies for next year.

 

Blog stats for RFI

 

Still a slight decrease in pageviews but that is what I should expect when spending the past two months on holidays in Europe and not working on my blog. Overall still a good month.

 

Sept 30th Oct 31st
PageRank 3 3
MozRank 5.4 5.34
Domain Authority 46 47
Alexa Rank 26,794 27,702
Twitter Followers 3,715 3,869
RSS subscribers 791 857
FB fans 1,470 1,465
Pageviews 51903 47,439
Unique 24832 21,062
SEO traffic % 31% 48.5%

 

Blog stats for MMYW

Because MMYW started one year after RFI, I will compare the stats I can find. Back in July 2012, I was blogging in a cave, waiting for the world to come and find me. I had a Twitter account I rarely used, read a ton of PF sites but seldom said hi or left a comment, and didn’t network a bit. It lasted until mid September 2012. So far, MMYW is doing much better than RFI. Although RFI got a PR3 in November and we won’t get any for MMYW soon.

Although I have had a problem this month, instead of the usual 2,500-3,000 impressions a day I was getting in Google, I only got 150 or less for two weeks. I don’t know what happened there, but my pageviews collapsed as a result.

 

Sept 30th Oct 31st RFI Oct 31st 2012
PageRank 0 0 0
MozRank 5.04 4.92 ?
Domain Authority 35 39 ?
Alexa Rank 49968 49,203 1M
Twitter Followers 1485 1,557 250
RSS subscribers 171 225 50
FB fans 52 76 15
Pageviews 9625 8,472 4,350
Unique 5142 4,856 1,375
SEO traffic % 31.5% 45.15% 12.3%

 

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

 

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

 

This post was featured on the Carnival of Financial Planning, Your PF Pro, Aspiring Blogger, thank you!

Pin4
Share3
Tweet
8 Shares

Lovely comments

  2. C. the Romanian says

    These are some really great numbers! I find is so great that in this niche 20,000 uniques can bag you $3,000 per month. Before selling my flagship website in a lower paying niche, I had over 1 million visitors with 5 million page views and only made about $12,000 (I was still extremely happy with that, though).

    And I totally understand you with the Page Rank update… I am not sure when or if it’s comming, but for blogs launched after the previous update, it’s a real pain 🙂
    C. the Romanian recently posted…October 2013 Income Report and Spending ReportMy Profile

  4. Simon @ Modest Money says

    Given that you’ve been on holiday for the past month, this are certainly great results…makes the dream of “passive” income and a nomadic lifestyle all the more accessible and fun 🙂
    Google pagerank updates…long overdue if they are still planning on doing it, or they can just come clear and say they are discontinuing it and everyone can sigh and move on…would really help with most advertsisers who still consider pagerank!
    Simon @ Modest Money recently posted…TradeKing Review – Exclusive Review of TradeKing BrokerageMy Profile

  5. DC @ Young Adult Money says

    Great stats for both sites! I’ve struggled when it comes to increasing my RSS subscribers, so if you have any tips for that I’d appreciate it. It’s too bad about the lack of a PageRank update, but at least you had one site up and running with a PR. I know some people who started their first site too late and haven’t had a chance to get any sort of PR update so they have zero sites that are above zero for PR.
    DC @ Young Adult Money recently posted…5 Frugal Ways to Celebrate the HolidaysMy Profile

  8. John S @ Frugal Rules says

    Great work Pauline, especially for being on vacation for most of the month! In regards to the PR update, who knows if we ever will get another one. 🙂 I had a pretty good month overall as income was the best I’ve ever had and working on implementing some of my takeaways from FinCon.
    John S @ Frugal Rules recently posted…What is it That You Prize Most?My Profile

  9. dojo says

    Well, you have some really great numbers here 😉
    My blog is slowly picking up speed, it was ‘dead’ 2 months ago, but it’s slowly growing and getting more traffic. I am constantly working on it and the content, hope to develop it constantly in the next months.
    dojo recently posted…Your credit card is NOT your emergency fundMy Profile

  14. JR @ Increase Credit Limit says

    Congrats, that is a solid month! It seems like more and more people are using VA’s and having a lot of success with them, allowing them to free themselves up to do the less tedious tasks. It seems like that’s a strategy I will have to look more into! Thanks for sharing and congrats again on an excellent month!
    JR @ Increase Credit Limit recently posted…How to repair your creditMy Profile

  15. writing2reality says

    Great month indeed, especially considering the vacation and travelling! As others have said, it seems more and more people are using VAs and growing by adding staff writers. It is great to see people developing sustainable streams of income through their online endeavors, and I hope that you have continued success in yours!
    writing2reality recently posted…2013 Prosper Investment CriteriaMy Profile

    • Pauline says

      My VA does a lot of social media tagging, twitter, FB, pinterest etc etc that brings quite a bit of traffic when a post is retweeted by other people (or whatever the equivalent is on other platform, I don’t do more than Twitter and FB!)

    • Pauline says

      I would say an impersonal, automated niche site is easier to let down for a few weeks but no one is irreplaceable so after you have a bit of SEo traffic the number of direct traffic that stops visiting doesn’t make a big change in your pageviews.

  22. MMD says

    That’s so great that you are donating a portion of your income to a noble cause! Nice work on getting your revenue so high.

    I’m still struggling a bit myself to get advertisers to change their mindset on Pagerank even though it seems like it is on its way out for good. Unfortunately I think it will take a formal announcement from Google before the general SEO public will make this move. I’m still optimistic that our side projects could be very suitable revenue taps!!
    MMD recently posted…Could Early Retirement Planning Be Ruining Me?My Profile

    • Pauline says

      you go first :). Not comfy with the NW as it is not something people talk about in Guatemala, there is a G maps pinpoint of where I live on my blog so I wouldn’t want someone to get the wrong idea… even though most of it isn’t in Guatemala.

  26. Jane Savers @ Solving The Money Puzzle says

    I am amazed that you can accomplish so much while on vacation. I am working hard at my blog and I have yet to see any progress. Perhaps I need a lengthy vacation to refresh my mind and get things moving? It has been so many years since I had a little get away that I am not sure what I would do if I didn’t have to go to work.
    Jane Savers @ Solving The Money Puzzle recently posted…11 Ideas That You Can Use To Make Your FortuneMy Profile

  30. Andrew@LivingRichCheaply says

    I thought last month I would have some more time to spend on my blog being that I took 2 days off to watch my infant son after my wife returned to work. Well I’m a first time parent because I didn’t know all the attention a little baby requires so I haven’t been consistently posting and working on the blog. Hoping to be more consistent. I’d really like to improve my readership and possibly monetize at some point.
    Andrew@LivingRichCheaply recently posted…Tax Shelters for You and MeMy Profile

  31. robert@moneybulldog says

    Good to see you are keeping such a close track of things Pauline. Running a site is so much harder than most people seem to think, and the record keeping is one of the time consuming things no one thinks about

    • Pauline says

      In Guatemala, we spend about $1,000 each a month, so that is more than covered. I am paying for the full trip to Europe as BF paid for last year’s trip, and I think that was covered by the surplus from July and August since I started that goal, however September and October did not fully cover the trip.