Project Financially Free has now been live for just over 12 months so it feels like an ideal time to start sharing more posts with a personal angle. I did, after all, start this blog with the intention of sharing more of my journey to financial freedom.
Up to now the focus has been mainly on sharing useful information that I’ve discovered on my journey so far. With the intention of providing honest and up front information and opinion that will hopefully prove helpful to my site visitors. Another area of focus that tends to go hand in hand with publishing, what is hopefully useful content, is growing traffic to the blog. After all, what’s the point in all this content if no one is going to read it!
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Why Am I Sharing My Blog Income Information?
It feels quite strange thinking about putting this information out there for the world to see. However I have a number of reasons for doing so and the pros hopefully outweigh the cons!
One of the main reasons for sharing my blog income is that this blog is tied to my journey to financial freedom and I want to be able to look back on these reports (hopefully years down the line) and see the progress that has been made.
Another reason is accountability for myself – committing to sharing these blog income reports regularly should provide me with added determination to succeed.
One final factor in deciding to share this information is my current obsession with reading fellow bloggers income reports. Particularly those in the personal finance space who have had significant success. There’s nothing more inspiring that looking back over a few months or years or blog income reports and seeing the incredible progress that’s been made! So without further ado lets take a look at the numbers.
*Note this is income earned in January (as most affiliate programs and ad networks pay at least a month in arrears)
Affiliate – £119.83
Not exactly life changing but it’s nice to break the £100 per month mark as that was one of the first targets for my blog income. This amount is made up from four different sources – the lowest of which is a whopping £0.57 and the largest was £100. The income has been generated by only four different posts so that’s something I’m looking to expand on. It would be nice to have a few more posts contributing to the blog income.
Ads – £53.57
Up to now I’ve only been using Google Ads on the blog. However at the end of January I had enough traffic to apply to Ezoic. If you are not familiar with Ezoic it’s essentially an add network / management platform. Having read a number of positive reviews and feedback about improvements in revenue from other bloggers who had made the switch from Google Ads to Ezoic I decided to give it a try. As of writing it’s been live for almost a month and results so far have been very impressive! I’m going to continue with Ezoic over the next couple of months and then review the numbers however initial indicators are it will provide a significantly improved income compared to Google Ads. I’ll write up another post at some point providing more detailed numbers but if you are a fellow blogger and interested to find out more you can apply by signing up here (there’s some minimum traffic numbers required which I understand to be at least 10k page views per month, although it seems all sites are considered so it’s still worth signing up even if you are not quite at those traffic numbers yet).
Sponsored Posts – £154
I’m not going to take on too many of these however providing they are a good fit for the blog I may continue to do one a month. The requests are now coming in fairly regularly however a lot of these are pitching pretty low quality and on occasion pretty shady content to be honest. For that reason most are refused. I think as traffic continues to grow the quality of the companies making approaches for sponsored content is going to improve (I hope!). Although as I said this isn’t going to be a main focus area for me and I would rather grow the blog income via more organic methods like continuing to drive organic traffic and monetise via display ads and relevant affiliates.
Total – £327.40
Not quite enough to retire on yet! 🙂 Although I’m really pleased that I’m starting to see some results from the effort that’s gone in to the blog so far. There’s certainly more I could be doing to increase traffic and up that number but I just haven’t had the time available to do so yet.
What’s Next?
Over the next few months, aside from continuing to share content that people hopefully find useful, I’ll also be looking to experiment with some additional areas to increase traffic (namely Pinterest if I can get my head around it) and income. I’ve not quite decided yet if these income reports are going to be a monthly thing or every two or three months. Lets just hope that in a couple of months time there is still something to report! If you have any questions on any of the above or any particular details that you would like me to share please leave a comment below or drop me an email.
Monthly income reports are always fascinating to read, whether they’re $100 or $100,000 dollars, so it’s really nice that you’re sharing your income openly.
How do you track your spending side of the equation? A lot of personal finance blogs focus on saving and investing, but we’ve found it’s equally important to keep a tab on expenses.