Blog Report for First Full Month (9,262 pageviews) and Our Strategies

Blog Report for First Full Month (9,262 pageviews) and Our Strategies

Hello Everyone!  Today, we bring you our first full month blog report.  We launched the blog on Sept 9^th, but didn’t install Google Analytics until the 15th.  Thus, the last blog report was only for half a month.

Thus, October is our first full month and today we bring you the report.

So how did we do? Let’s dig into it.

Blog Report – The stats

These are the stats:

1. Pageviews: 9,262!!!
2. Sessions: 4,717
3. Users: 3,341
4. Pages/Session: 1.96
5. Sessions per user: 1.41
6. Session Duration: 00:03:07
7. %New Sessions: 68.79%
8. New visitors: 69%
9. Returning visitors: 31%
10. Bounce Rate: 62.79%

 

When we set out to start blogging, our hope was to have at least 500 pageviews in our first full month, and we are ecstatic to see that we reached 9,262 !!!

Featured in

October started with a bang.  We got featured by POF (Physician’OnFire) in his October 1^st Sunday Best and that alone has brought us about 800 page views which is about 9% of our total 9,262 monthly views.

Our article How We Increased Our Annual Income From $0 to $160K to $400K+ is one of the articles that he highlighted.

Others that featured us during the month are:

• SomeRandomGuyOnline – Friday Blog Round Up
• FullTimeFinance – The Financial Impact of Kids, 12 PF bloggers weigh in
• KiwiAndKeweenaw – Route to FIRE – Reduce Your Spending Roundup
• MyFamilyBudget – Personal Finance Advice You Would Give Your Younger Self
• OurFinancialPath – Debt Success Stories

 

Thank you guys, we really appreciate it. As rookies, we need all help we can get.

If you want to feature us, feel free to do so. If you need a quote or you want to interview us, please feel free to reach out. We are a friendly bunch 😊.

J Money and Cait Flanders feel free to feature us on RockStarFinance please (shameless plug 😊 ).  They say Ask And You Shall Receive…😊

Readers all around the world

It’s good to see that we have readers all around the world, from America (North, Central & South) to Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe.

The top 5 countries are US, Canada, UK, Australia and Germany. We got traffic from a total of 67 countries.

Thank you all for visiting our blog!

Most popular posts:

• How We Increased Our Annual Income From $0 to $160K to $400K+
• About us
• Our Biggest Money Fight and 9 Lessons Learned
• How we live on 15% of our income
• How To Pay Off A Mortgage In 5 Years
• What Do Millionaires Know About Money That Most People Don’t?
• Blog Report for First Half Month Plus 4 Rookie Mistakes
• How to Negotiate Your Salary Like a Pro
• 15 Frugal Ways To Prepare For An Emergency
• Joining the Million Dollar Club/Challenge and So Can You
• Our 6 Financial Mistakes and 15 Lessons Learned
• 9 Amazing Tips for Using Social Media to Save Money

 

It seems people still love the post About us which narrates our poor, humble beginnings as broke, poor new immigrants, who put ourselves through school, worked 2-3 jobs at the same time, barely had food to eat, lived in not so safe neighborhood surrounded by alcoholics, gang members, gamblers, prostitutes, drug dealers/users,…

But were able to overcome the challenges, graduate college, get good jobs and start successful side gigs.

Our readers also still love the post about How We Increased Our Annual Income From $0 to $160K to $400K+ and have even started implementing the career advice, we gave in that post.  They have also asked us to continue dishing out some more career advice which we will gladly do. Stay tuned.

We also continue to receive emails every day from our readers asking us for advice.  And we always make sure to reply to all of them. So please feel free to reach out if you have any question(s).

Our readers also loved the post about Our Biggest Money Fight and 9 Lessons Learned and our advice on how to maintain a successful, harmonious, loving marriage.

Engagement/Comments

Overall, the engagement was good.  Our posts got 117 comments during the month for a total of 169 which is not bad considering we we only post about once a week.  Keep those comments coming guys, we will make sure we reply to every single one of them.

 

Guest posts

We had our 2nd guest post What Do Millionaires Know About Money That Most People Don’t?  from Benjamin Davis, a fellow blogger at From cents to Retirement.  People really liked the article, and it’s number 6 on the most popular list.

Do you want to guest post for us? Our rules are pretty simple and straight-forward: 

• No plagiarism. The article must be original content and it must not have been posted anywhere else
• The article must be about money/finance/career/saving/investing/relationship/business/…
• Ideally it should include a personal story, so that our readers can relate to you.
• Ideally it should at least be 1,000-1,500 words
• Links are allowed but at least half of the links should be linking our articles/resources
• No drafts. Must be final version.
• You agree to reply to comments
• If you are a blogger, you agree to share the guest post on your social media platforms, and link to it on your blog.

 Top Channels

The top Channels are:

1. Referral
2. Direct
3. Social
4. Organic Search
5. Other

Social Media

• Twitter has been great. Our goal for the month was to only have 1,000 followers but we ended up with 1,502 followers! Not bad for a first full month.

 

• Instagram has also been great. Our goal for the month was also to have 500 followers but we ended up with 710 followers! Also not bad for a first full month.

 

• Pinterest is still a challenge. Our goal for the month was to have 100 followers but still have not achieved,  we ended up with only 91 followers! It’s very disappointing considering we spend hours trying to make professional looking pins,  pinning our pins and other people’s pins

 

This month, we definitely have to get Tailwind and set aside some time to get familiar with the tool.

If fellow bloggers could also invite us to corroborate on boards, it would be appreciated.  Right now we belong to only 26 boards, our hope is to add at least 10 boards a month.

We have also created 2 boards for the community:

·       ALL PERSONAL FINANCE BLOGGERS

·       ALL PINNERS

Everyone is welcomed to join. We only have 1 rule: For every PIN you add, Repin 2 from other people. Follow us and then message us to be added to the board. Once we add you, you can add other people too.

• LinkedIn page and LinkedIn profile

Our LinkedIn page is not doing too well, but our LinkedIn profile is doing better.  Please make sure you follow us.

• Facebook is still very challenging. Our goal for the month was to also have 100 followers but we still have only 1 or 2 followers .

 

Facebook keeps blocking and unblocking us, and we don’t know why.  We are not spamming at all, as we haven’t done much on Facebook.

It could also be because we are blogging anonymously.  Facebook does not like anonymous bloggers at all, or those who blog under a pseudo name.  We will see how next month goes.

For those of you who blog anonymously, how have you handled the Facebook challenges?

Subscribers

We now have 42 subscribers. We are so thrilled that you guys are finding our content worthwhile.

Please share with your friends, family members, colleagues… After all, this blog is about Progress, Prosperity and Financial Independence for ALL.

PS: It has come to our attention that our emails sometimes go straight to Spam, Promotional or Important folders.  If you have subscribed and you don’t see our emails in your inbox, please check those folders and set the emails to go to your inbox.

If you don’t find our emails at all, let us know and we can manually subscribe you again.

Monetization

Affiliate Links: We have signed up for a few affiliate programs that we think our readers will benefit from. For example, if you need an easier way to manage/track your finances/investments, check out the Personal Capital app.

If you want to start blogging, Bluehost can get you started.  Make sure to also check out other resources that we recommend such as books that have helped us get where we are.

Even though right now we are not too focused on monetizing the blog, it’s something we might actively pursue in the future.

Our blog is about progress, prosperity and financial independence and our readers are definitively interested in how they can make more money so they can achieve financial independence faster.

Thus, it only makes sense for us to try to monetize the blog and write about our successes, failures, and lessons learned…

Check out some of the blogs that are making decent money:

• MakingSenseofCents makes $100,000+/month blogging
• MillennialMoneyMan makes $16,000+/month blogging
• PhysicianOnFire makes mid-five figures/year and has only been blogging for 1.5 year.
• RetireBy40 is on path to making $60,000 this year blogging.
• And many more…

Do you want to start blogging? It’s easy. Bluehost can get you started

 

Goals/Targets

 

Our Top 10 Strategies

Besides making sure we have good content, we have 10 strategies and spend at least 2 hours a day executing them.  Fortunately most of it is done in the train ride to/from work:

1. Being active on social media and generously sharing others content. We don’t mind oversharing, we realized for every follower we lose, we gain 10.
   
2. Changing our social media bio’s: When I first joined Twitter, I followed a bunch of people but I wasn’t getting many follow backs.  And now, I unfollow about 1000/month so I can follow back those that actually follow me.
   I started seeing momentum when I changed my bio. My bio used to be the typical generic stuff “CPA, blogger, happily married, mom of 1…” but I wasn’t getting many followers.

   Then I noticed, some of the popular twitter accounts bio’s talk about numbers/money such as “Paid off $35K student loans in 2 years,…

   Also my most popular post talks about making a lot of money…So I decided to change my bio to “Increased our income from $0 to $400K+/yr and so can you. We show you how to do it on our blog”.

   Since then at least 20-100 people follow me each day on Twitter even on days where I’m lazy and not active 🙂.

3. Actively participating in the community.  The most user-friendly, blogger-friendly forums for Personal Finance fanatics are the RockstarForums.  From these forums, we have gotten a lot of value such as being able to ask questions, getting free promotions, interviews/quotes,…

4.Commenting on large and medium size blogs in our niche (personal finance).  For example, it’s by commenting on POF blog, that he noticed us and included us in his Sunday Best which brought us 800+ pageviews almost 10% of our traffic.

5.Paying it forward and reading, commenting and/or subscribing to smaller or newer blogs. We remember how ecstatic and encouraged we were when we got the first comment and the first subscriber. Thus, we make sure to provide other new bloggers with the opportunity to experience the same.

Also the smaller bloggers are more likely to engage with you and also visit your blog.

6.Replying to all the comments and emails we get.  We have been getting more emails /questions than we expected, thus we might respond a few days late, but we always make sure we respond. We usually give urgent career-related questions a priority. Sometimes we might even turn our answers into a full blown blog post such as this one: How to Negotiate Your Salary Like a Pro

7.Generously linking to other blogs. For example, in this blog post, we have linked at least 14x to other blogs. You never know who might return the favor. Also when you generously share backlinks, people are more likely to guest post for you.

8. For every backlink we get, we give back at least 2: One in our monthly blog post, and another in our ‘Featured In’ .  We also make sure we thank them,  comment and share the posts.

9. Promptly providing quotes when asked.  We try to provide the quotes in the same day. These are usually easy to do 1-3 paragraph quotes, thus there’s no excuse for not responding fast enough.

10. Setting targets and following through.  As you can see, we have set 12 targets for ourselves and we make sure to monitor them every week, and see what’s working and what’s not working, and change our strategy(ies) accordingly.

• Upcoming strategy: Automating our social media posts and pins so it frees up some more time to share others content and also to allow us a better work-blog-life balance

 Work-Business-Blog-Life Balance

Our work-life balance or should we say our Work-Business-Blog-Life balance has been better since last month. We have stopped trying to do everything, and only prioritize what’s important.

We have also learned a lot from blogging. We have learned how to reach out to strangers, and promote your blog/product.  Thus, we have learned that we kind of neglected one of our product that took us a few years to bring to market, but that we only promoted it to people we knew and only on LinkedIn.

Therefore, we have decided to re-launch it, and promote it as much as we promote the blog 🙂 , and to everyone in the industry. Thus we have created a Twitter account, and Facebook page for it..

So far, we are receiving positive feedback.  We will keep you posted.

Other than that, Baby99to1percent is still doing great at daycare. The daycare is attached to a high school and sometimes when we go out, random people (the high school students and teachers) will come to us and say hi and start talking to Baby99to1percent.

Apparently, she’s little Ms Popular at the daycare/high school, she’s apparently always smiling and saying hi to all the people passing by and that’s how a lot of them know her.

We are also happy that she hasn’t been sick at all, and has been able to attend daycare full time with no sick days off.   It has helped us focus on our jobs, businesses, and blog.

Special thanks to those who:

• Visited our blog
• Read our posts
• Commented on our posts
• Shared our posts
• Liked our posts
• Retweeted our posts
• Featured us in their posts
• Guest posted on our blog
• Replied to our rookie questions
• Personal finance bloggers who have paved the way for us.

 

How about you guys? What are your targets or goals? Any tips or strategies you want to share?

Thanks for reading.  Please feel free to comment, share and subscribe! We love ya and wanna get to know ya!

Do you want an easier way to manage/track your finances/investments? The Personal Capital app can help.  Do you want to start blogging? Bluehost can get you started.  Make sure to also check out other resources that we recommend such as books that have helped us get where we are.

Do you want to learn more about us? If so, you can also read these other posts:

1. About us
2. How We Increased Our Annual Income From $0 to $160K to $400K+
3. How we live on 15% of our income
4. Joining the Million Dollar Club/Challenge and So Can You
5. How To Pay Off A Mortgage In 5 Years
6. Our Biggest Money Fight and 9 Lessons Learned
7. Our 6 Financial Mistakes and 15 Lessons Learned