It has been a slower month than normal, but holidays can do that. I appreciated the few days that were lighter than normal with emails, but I hope it picks up soon.
I wanted to blog full time by 2012. To reach that goal, I thought I needed a bunch of traffic on all of my blogs. Specifically, I was aiming for 25,000 unique visitors a month at BFS by August 2011 and needed to be making $30,000 a year total by 2012.
Well, there was a change of plans. I literally got too busy with my online work to keep my day job, so I quit as of July 15th, 2011! Self-employment is rocking so far!
I figured the best way to keep my eye on the prize is to hit monthly targets, so I started posting here. Between that and the fact there seems to be major interest in the subject, I started an update around the 1st of every month of my blogging stats and income generated. I'll also do a huge 1 year update at the beginning of every January.
Here were my goals for November 2011 followed by the results:
- Alexa Ranking: 31,000 /33,185
- Visits: 19,000 /17,928
- Unique Visitors: 15,000 /14,174
- Pageviews: 30,000 /27,946
- RSS subscribers: 800 /753
- Twitter followers: 1000 /939
- Traffic breakdown: 7000 from Referring Sites (3660), 3000 from Direct Traffic (2167), 8000 from Search Engines (11,270), 1000 from Other (832)
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Total Gross Income: $10,000 / $10,786.07
Monthly Income Breakdown
- Advertising on BFS: $905.22
- Advertising on My Other Blogs: $1644.37
- Writing (Staff Writing and Freelance Posts): $300.00
- Blogging Services (Running advertising on other sites and freelance tasks): $7936.48
I had $589.22 in expenses as well since I had to pay $269.22 in Paypal fees and I had my basic expenses as well. But I didn't buy any new sites, so yay for less than 6% in expenses this month!!! If you'd like to see my exact blogging expenses breakdown for this month, check out how to set up a blog and manage money coming in and going out. I have been attempting to keep them at 15% or less of my overall income.
That said, my net profit this month before taxes was $10,196.85
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As I mentioned at the start, my traffic was down this month due to the holidays and because I stopped commenting as much. So for December, I am going to keep my same goals and see if I can power through another holiday month or not. We'll see. Either way, I am so glad I quit my day job!!!
Seeing that I hit my self-employment goal much earlier than expected, I am now making goals to get my traffic up and my income stabilized. I hit my traffic goals, but I will still be focusing on content since BFS keeps me sane.
In the meantime,
I am paying myself $3575 a month / $1650 every 2 weeks
(a third of that goes to taxes…), so I better darn well keep bringing in at least that. The extra money is currently being divided up with 75% going to our mortgage and 25% going towards investments as we've been learning how to trade stocks– we've suspended extra additions to our fun money and vacation accounts.
My goals for December:
- Alexa Ranking: 32,500
- Visits: 19,000
- Unique Visitors: 15,000
- Pageviews: 30,000
- RSS subscribers: 800
- Twitter followers: 1000
- Traffic breakdown: 7000 from Referring Sites, 3000 from Direct Traffic, 8000 from Search Engines, 1000 from Other
-
Blogging Income: $10,000
Any questions, comments, or advice? As I mentioned, I go into more detail with my income and expenses on the 1st of the month at https://howimakemoneyblogging.com/, but feel free to ask anything you'd like at either site!!!
