Thanks for being a regular reader! I truly appreciate it. You helped me reach my goal of blogging full time!!! Thank you!!! If you haven't already, please subscribe to my RSS feed. It gives me the opportunity to hopefully keep your attention! If you have any questions or comments for me, please contact me and I'll get back to you asap. Thanks for visiting!
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)
- 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 I Make Money Blogging. 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.
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 – 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 http://howimakemoneyblogging.com/, but feel free to ask anything you’d like at either site!!!
You rock! You still sound like you love it too.
I’ll give you five bucks to do my monthly update for me. That way, you’ll be five bucks closer.
Crystal these results are bad ass. I honestly don’t know how you do it. My biggest question, how did you get 800 rss subscribers?
Great job! You’re making a killing with your advertisement business.
Still rockin’ those goals Crystal!
Amazing work! I’m genuinely happy for you Crystal.
Btw, have you done any posts on how to handle filing taxes? Obviously this is a once a year thing, and you need to pay federal and state I’m sure, but what about social security/medicare/all the other crap they tack on? Maybe you could do a blog about that.
Awesome and inspiring as always.
congrats for you! I remember reading all the way back when you barely had the goal of becoming a full time blogger, and now here you are! you’ve come such a long way.
Another great month!
Congrats on a great month!
Not bad at all for a slow month! Keep it up Crystal!
I always love your updates. And I hope I’m doing enough to justify being an expense
Super, Crystal! Can you tell us a bit more about the commenting issue? You said you weren’t doing it as much and noticed a decline. Are you referring to commenting on other blogs? Have you written on this subject before? I’d love to know more!
Another strong month Crystal, way to go.
Keep up the great work. Maybe one day I will compete with you.
(in a friendly way, of course).haha. In my dreams…
You’re doing a terrific job! Keep up the great work.
I don’t know how you do it. I was thinking you should sell your advertising spreadsheet to those that want to manage their own ads but need a system. I’d buy it!
That is amazing Crystal!!!!
You are a MACHINE!
You go girl! You need to start doing speeches and talks nationwide!
awesome !!
Congrats crystal!
Rocking the world no matter what! That’s why you will always be my inspiration.
Great job Crystal! November seemed to be a slower month for me as well. That’s great though that your other sites pulled in more ad revenue than BFS! Wild! Which one of your other sites was leading that list?
Great job once again Crystal
No blog purchases for this month? Slacker! Just kidding. Figure you’ll get bored with all the praise!
How can you say it was a slow month when you won a steak dinner??? (Or was that for October? Or did I make the whole thing up and I am just getting old?)
Congrats!
Crystal- I’m really looking forward to the yearly roundup. As amazing as your monthly figures are, I think seeing the annual figures will be mind-boggling. Yes 10k/month is crazy to think about, but when you see the 120k/year – that’s going to grab a lot of peoples’ attention.
Congrats on all the success.
Great job!!! It’s exciting to read about the income you bring in each month!
Another killer month! Who knew that your goal to make $30K/year would quadruple! You’re making that in 3 months. Congratulations Crystal!
That is awesome! Still waiting for you to earn some $$$ off of my blog!
!!!
Congrats on another great month! Here’s to a great December!
Wow. Paula wasn’t kidding about the numbers you’re pulling in. Hopefully I’ll catch up to you soon.
Thank you everyone for your supportive comments! They make me smile as they pop into my email throughout the day!
@Niki, I do still love my business although I miss blogging as much as I wanted – now it’s back to being my favorite hobby.
@Jake, LOL.
@neo, I don’t know. I mention my RSS in my Sunday updates I think, but in general, I don’t promote signups majorly…but sign up for my newsletter please.
@Jonathan, I’ll definitely write it up when I do my quarterly filing for the first time towards the end of this month or the beginning of January.
@Newlyweds, it wasn’t that long ago, lol.
@Jana, definitely! I love you as an expense.
@Linsey, I sent you an email as you know, but for everyone else, I meant that it is super important to comment on other blogs. I have been sucking at this…
@Barb, I just sent you my boring Excel sheet.
@Jacob, About Life Ins and Money on the 20s both do very well.
@Buck,
@Kris, it was slower than October ($18k). Still kicks ass over my past day job.
@Matt, glad Paula pointed me out. I hope you make lots too!
Asserted nicely say set it contains unessential things that you used to share here and basically it was totally fond either.
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