Blog Report for First Half Month (1926 Pageviews) Plus 4 Rookie Mistakes

Hello Everyone! Today, we bring you the monthly blog report, including 4 rookie mistakes, lessons learned, and how we are striving for that work-blog-life balance.

The month went by very fast, we blinked and missed it😊.  With blogging, life has gotten so busy, and time is flying by very fast.

But, technically, it’s actually not been a full month, because we launched the blog on the 9^th.

Also, we did not install Google Analytics until the 15th.  Initially, we did not know we needed to sign up for Google Analytics, we thought Google would track our stats somehow magically/automatically (Rookie Mistake #1).

Lesson Learned: Don’t assume anything, research everything.

Thus, overall our traffic stats will only be for about 2 weeks.

So how did we do? Let’s dig into it.

Blog stats

These are the stats:

1. Pageviews: 1,926
2. Sessions: 925
3. Users: 687
4. Pages/Session: 2.08
5. Session Duration: 00:02:45
6. %New Sessions: 74.27%
7. New visitors: 74.6%
8. Returning visitors: 25.4%
9. Bounce Rate: 59.57%

 

Apparently, as a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, and anything over 70 percent is disappointing.

Thus, we probably need to edit our first few posts, to add more internal links.

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, Ireland, and Australia.

Other countries include Spain, India, Norway, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey, Portugal, Bosnia, Finland, Greece, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Singapore, France, Israel, Kuwait, Nigeria, Philippines, Uganda, Bulgaria, Brunei, Switzerland, Chile, Denmark, Honduras, Indonesia, Italy, South Africa, Mexico, Malaysia, Pakistan, Serbia, Trinidad&Tobago, Tanzania, Kosovo, and South Africa.

Thank you all for visiting our blog!

Most popular posts:

1. How We Increased Our Annual Income From $0 to $160K to $400K+
2. About us
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. 9 Amazing Tips for Using Social Media to Save Money

It seems people really loved the post About us which narrates our poor, humble beginnings as broke, poor new immigrants in US and Canada, 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, and get good jobs.

The readers also loved the post about How We Increased Our Annual Income From $0 to $160K to $400K+ and have even started implemented 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.

And of course you also loved the post about How we live on 15% of our income and our advice on how everyone should try to live on less than 50% of their income.

Engagement/Comments

Overall, the engagement was good.  Our posts got 52 comments which is not bad being that it’s only for  6 posts.

Keep those comments coming guys, we will make sure we reply to every single one of them.

The most commented on posts were:

• How We Increased Our Annual Income From $0 to $160K to $400K+
• About us
• How To Pay Off A Mortgage In 5 Years
• How we live on 15% of our income
• Joining the Million Dollar Club/Challenge and So Can You
• 9 Amazing Tips for Using Social Media to Save Money

Guest posts

We had our first guest post 9 Amazing Tips for Using Social Media to Save Money from Stacy B Miller, a full-time financial writer and editor.

People really liked the article, and liked her outside the box tips.

We have a few more guest posts coming up. Stay tuned.

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

• The article must be original content, no plagiarism, and it must not have been posted anywhere else
• The article must be about money/finance/career/saving/investing/ relationships/ 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
• Must be final version, no drafts
• You agree to reply to comments
• If you are a blogger, you agree to link the post on your blog and share it on your social media platforms.

 

Top Channels

The top Channels are:

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

Top Referrers

 

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

Social Media

1. Twitter has been great. Our goal for the month was to only have 100 followers but we ended up with 702 followers! Not bad for a first month.

Rookie mistake #2: While tired, sleepy, and working late promoting the blog on social media, I accidentally followed a family member on Twitter 😊.

I immediately panicked because we are supposed to be blogging anonymously 😊.

I immediately check to see if they are active, and it turns out they were.  They even had recent pictures on there of Baby99to1percent!

So I panicked some more, and immediately unfollowed and blocked them.

They haven’t said anything to us yet, so hopefully they haven’t realized that we are blogging.  Fingers crossed 😊.

If the family member  ever finds out, it would be catastrophic for 3 reasons:

• For sure they would recognize us, after reading our posts.
• They don’t know our full financial situation, and we want to keep it that way
• They don’t know how to keep anything private: They would announce our blog to EVERYONE including on social media.

Case in point, them having pictures of Baby99to1percent all over social media even though we have asked them not to share any pictures without first asking us 😊.

Lesson Learned: Be very careful where you click, especially when blogging anonymously.

 

2. Instagram has also been great. Our goal for the month was also to have 100 followers but we ended up with 313 followers! Also not bad for a first month.

 

3. Pinterest has been challenging. Our goal for the month was to have 100 followers but we ended up with only 47 followers!

It’s very disappointing considering we spend hours trying to make professional looking pins,  pinning our pins and other people’s pins.

 

The solution to our problem is probably to get Tailwind.  We will use the affiliate link of the first blogger to comment on this post with their Tailwind affiliate link.

 

If fellow bloggers could also invite us to corroborate on boards, it would be appreciated.  Right now we belong to only 9 boards, our hope is to add at least 10 boards a month.

 

4. Facebook has also been challenging. Our goal for the month was to also have 100 followers but we ended up with only 1 or 2 followers ?

Yes, you read that right, we don’t know the exact number of followers on Facebook because we are currently blocked 😊.

Facebook keeps blocking and unblocking us, and we don’t know why.  We are not spamming people at all, as currently we don’t do 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 October goes.

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

 

Subscribers

For the month, we had a total of 21 subscribers, double our target of 10 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.

Featured in

Thank you very much to personal finance bloggers who featured us:

• Doublingdollars – What’s The Most Cheapskate Thing You’ve Ever Done? A post about how cheap some of us personal finance bloggers can be. I talk about how back in college I had to survive with a $40/month food budget by being resourceful, buying food from the Dollar store, doing surveys at the mall to get free snacks, roaming around in Costco or the local farmers’ market to get as many food samples I could get…

• PhysicianOnFire – Sunday Best, a collection of articles that Dr POF curates for the readers’ pleasure. Our article How We Increased Our Annual Income From $0 to $160K to $400K+ is one of the articles that he highlighted.

You know there’s nothing like waking up and seeing a pingback from the one and only Dr POF.  He has made our day!!!

By the way, is it strange that when I see POF, the first thing that comes to my mind is Plenty of Fish, the online dating website? 😊

 

Blog Monetization

Even though right now, we are not too focused on monetizing the blog, it’s something we plan to 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.

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

Google Adsense:  We have signed up for Google Adsense but we haven’t put any Adsense ads on the blog yet.  We are taking it easy for now, there are so many other things to take care of first.

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.

• Rookie Mistake #3: We applied for some affiliate programs before we even launched the blog and of course we were rejected by most of them 😊.

Lesson learned: Don’t apply until you have a few posts up.

• Rookie Mistake #4: After launching and publishing a few more posts, we thought we were ready to apply to additional affiliate programs.

We took it really personal 😊 when we got rejected by Coursera and  Udemy , two companies that we use, really believe in and wanted to help promote their free/affordable and accessible education.

 Lesson learned: Don’t take it personal, it’s just business.

The good news is we re-applied, but this time indirectly through Flexlinks, and we got accepted this time. Haha!

       Lesson learned: If you get rejected by an affiliate program, re-apply through another chanel!

 

Sponsored Posts: We had a request for a sponsored post, but we couldn’t agree on the conditions and the price.

For those who have read our posts, you know we advocate for negotiating and not allowing yourself to get lowballed.

But overall, it was a good experience and we mutually decided to work together in the future should the terms and budget change.

 

Goals/Targets

 

Work-Blog-Life Balance

Our work-life balance or should we say our work-blog-life balance has not been great. The blog is taking so much time, that we have neglected some of our household chores.

Our house looks a little bit messy and we are wondering if we should hire cleaning services. But the frugal in us, says we shouldn’t because our blog hasn’t made money yet.

What do y’all think? Should we spend a couple of hundred a month for cleaning services? Or suck it up until the blog starts making money to cover the expense?

And for those of you who blog or have side gigs/hobbies that take so much time, how do you find that balance?

Other than that, Baby99to1percent is doing great at daycare. She started daycare this month and she’s doing great.  She wakes up at 5am every morning excited to go to daycare.

She only cries for half a second, if at all, when we drop her off.

She’s little Miss Popular, she knows and loves all the teachers even the ones from other classes.

She runs to them and gives them hugs and kisses every time she sees them.

She has even made a best friend.  They play, giggle and laugh together all day.

Being that it’s her first month at daycare, we are happily surprised that she hasn’t gotten 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.

 

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

Remember we want to get Tailwind, and we will use the affiliate link of the first blogger to comment on this post with their Tailwind affiliate link.

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 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
8. How I Paid Off My $40,000 Student Loans Before Graduating
9. The resumes that bring in $400,000+/year (Samples Provided)