So here we go again, right? New year, new goals and the “this year I’m going to do better” thoughts. Well why not. If each year I can do a little more and a little better than the last there’s progress right. To keep me going this year, I’m going to try and update my progress from month to month on a few projects I’m working on. Kind of like all of the online income reports you see on other sites, except some of the projects I’m working on don’t even have income sources yet, like YMIDoingThis.com. As of the time I’m writing this post there are no revenue generating activities on the site. Hopefully, at some point that will change, but we’ll see. For now though I’m just creating a starting point to track some projects I’m working on, sites I’m building and few other income producing ideas I have been dabbling with to get things going.
Project 1. Amazon Affiliate Site (already running)
One of the first projects I’ll be tracking is a site a friend of mine and I have been “working on” for the past few years. OK, maybe more than 5 or 6 years now. I say “working on” in quotes because most of the work we do is login and look at the stats. For example last year we had a grand total of 7 new articles published on the site, 4 of which we didn’t even do.
This is an Amazon affiliate site we started originally as a test to see if we could actually earn a little money and prove whether or not it worked. Guess what, just like all you’ll see on a bunch of other passive income type of sites, I can confirm that is works. It sure doesn’t feel like a passive income project when you get started. There is a lot of writing and learning how to work with WordPress since neither of us wanted to invest much in getting it going. Even when you are not doing much there is stuff to do. Updates to WordPress and plugins, an occasional hacking of the site, changes to the google algorithm that changes your traffic, and even some user caused problems. One of the goals this year is to see if we can get it earning a bunch more. Not a very SMART goal right? Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant and Timely. So before I get too specific on a bunch of goals for improvement let’s take a look at where things are at now.
First let’s look at the traffic to the site. Here’s a snapshot from google analytics for 2021:
For those of you familiar with google analytics, this is the Source/Medium report found under Acquisition and then All Traffic. It basically shows all the traffic to the site and where it came from. A majority of the traffic for this site comes from Google search. Here’s a quick breakdown of all the traffic:
It’s pretty clear where most of the traffic comes from. Almost 80% from Google. After that another 13% is direct traffic, which to me at this point is pretty suspect. I’m not sure why or how this happens. Next up Bing and Pinterest come in at around 2% each followed by Yahoo at 1%. Everything else includes sites like Duckduckgo, Facebook, Baidu, YouTube, Yandex?? and t.co which when I typed this in I get a message that looks like it’s from Twitter. There are others on there too but aside from the top 5 or so nothing is really significant, unless I start to focus on new traffic sources, which is not really part of the plan right now.
Overall for 2021 this site had 57,862 sessions, which averages out to about 4,821 per month or just over 150 sessions a day. If you look at the annual chart you’ll notice there was a lot more traffic at the end of the year versus early on. It’s an Amazon affiliate site, so natually there is a lot more shopping going on during the holiday season. Traffic goes up for the site during this time too as we focus on a number of different products sold on Amazon. Speaking of Amazon, let take a look at how that amount of traffic turned into clicks on Amazon and then into sales. Here’s a quick chart of what the stats look like:
You’ll notice right off that the only 2 months of the year that passed the $500 mark for earnings were November and December. These two months pull up the average for the year quite a bit. Hopefully with more consistent work on the site we can even that out a bit or maybe just make each of the months a little more visible on the chart. For example there’s no earnings bar in January 2021. Here’s what happened, we has some pretty good sales in December of 2020, but then in January of 2021 we had some returns. Those get taken right out of the commissions you earn so with little to no earnings and a few big ticket items returned, you could end up like we did for the month. January 2021 net total was $-43.64.
For total click from our little site to Amazon, we had 18,178. This is a 31% click thru rate when compared to the total of 57,862 sessions. I don’t know how good that is but it gives me a starting point to measure from. We also had a total of 1362 items ordered, so that gives me a conversion rate of 7.49%, which I think is pretty good. If I can keep those two rates the same while increasing traffic, I’d be happy.
Next question is what would I like it to earn? I read about and listen to podcasts about people who have created affiliate sites and can earn a living doing it. I’m not in a position to live of of $30,000 right now but if the site earned that much I’d be really happy. Is it possible though? If the conversion rate and click thru rates remained the same I’d need about 10 times the amount of traffic. So instead of 57k views in a year I’d need the site to get 570,000 sessions. Seems like a lot, but that’s only 47,500 sessions a month. I’ve seen lots of case studies where this number is possible. of course that would also turn into 181,780 clicks through to Amazon and 13,620 sales if the average sales price remains the same as well. By the way this would mean that I’d have about $960,000 in sales too because last year the site had about $96,000 in sales revenue. It all seems kind of out of reach, but that would be the numbers. I think I’ll go with a smaller goal to get started though, something more realistic.
Here’s goal #1. Publish content weekly. Last year we only had 7 new posts. 4 of them all came in the same week and 2 of them during the last week of the year. That only leaves one post at any other point in the year, so a total of 3 weeks during the year had a new post. I’m sure that doesn’t look great to the search engines that take new content into consideration. It averages out to less than one per quarter. This year, the goal is one per week to get started.
Goal #2. Increase traffic. It’s measurable, but not something I actually have control over. The thought is that if I’m constantly posting to the site the traffic will naturally increase, so my initial goal is to get from 150 or so per day to 200 per day. It doesn’t sound like much but that is a 33% increase.
Project 2. New Amazon Affiliate Site
Not much to say here yet. I just purchased a domain a few days ago and am going to start from scratch. The goal for this site is to see how fast I can get it up and running, with some content published. The next step would be to get some of the content ranked in Google good enough to start generating traffic and of course after that, how long will it take to earn my first dollar on the site and how far can I take it from there.
Goal #1 Install WordPress and get the site active
Goal #2 Publish 10 pieces of content
I’d like to have traffic goals or earnings goals but the traffic is something that is pretty much out of my control. I know there are things you can do to speed things up like creating backlinks, social media profiles and other stuff I’ve read about, but I don’t know how good those things really work, or how to get real quality backlinks without hiring a service to help with the process.
For now, I’ll just get some content published and maybe create some related social media profiles and we’ll see where we get from there.
Project 3. Selling Tradelines
This one is more about managing the options I have and making sure the tradelines are available as soon as possible after each one is cleared up. If you are new to selling tradelines here’s the basic idea. When you sell a tradeline it’s basically like renting an authorized user spot on your credit card. The temporary authorized user never gets a card or the number, but benefits from the credit history of the particular card. I wrote a longer post about selling tradelines that you can read here.
Project 4. Selling Options
Selling options has always been an interesting idea for me. I’ve dabbled a little in a bunch of different kinds of options but came across selling calls and puts as something that was generally lower risk. Lower rewards too, but I want to give it a try and keep track of the performance vs something like the S&P500 or a total stock market index fund. Mainly to see how it compares and whether or not it is worth the extra work versus being diversified across a broad market.
The idea is pretty simple here too. If there is a stock I would like to purchase, instead of just purchasing the stock, I’ll sell a put. If the price declines during the next month or so I’ll end up purchasing the stock and keeping the premium from selling the put. Basically it decreases the cost of the purchase. Later when I’m ready to sell the stock, I’ll sell calls until the stock hits the price and I am required to sell the stock.
During the time between the buy and the sell I can sell puts and calls with strike prices farther out to still collect small premiums. We’ll see how this goes. First to really keep track I’ll need to segregate off some funds in a separate account so it’ll be easy to keep track of the total account or fund versus an investment at the same time in the S&P500
Goal #1 Open an account
Goal #2 Sell my first options.
Project 5. YMIDoingThis.com
I’m still trying to figure this one out. The domain doesn’t really scream “I’m a personal finance expert!” But hey, I’m not. I just know a bunch of stuff and I know there are a bunch of people who know a bunch of more stuff than I do. The same goes for anyone who is writing about personal finance. First thing to remember is that it’s personal. Not everything you or I know will be applicable to everyone else. There are probably some who read up to the tradelines parts or options parts and started to think I was making things a little to risky. There are others who might just think it’s not for them. There may even be one or two people that find this helpful. Who knows?
I’d like to say the goal for YMIDoingThis is to become a premier first stop for some great personal finance information, but I’ll start smaller. First I need to get in a regular habit of writing on the site, then I’ll worry about other things.
Goal #1 Publish some kind of content at least weekly. First thing I really want to do is get in the habit of consistently publishing content. Hopefully it will at least be relevant to personal finance, financial independence, entrepreneurship, passive income or some kind of business building activity.
Goal #2 Increase traffic. Kind of a lame goal. It certainly doesn’t meet the SMART Goal Setting criteria, so maybe instead of a goal let’s call it a point of focus. During this last year there has been a limited amount of traffic to the site. Granted there has also been a very limited amount of work on the site, new content on the site or really much of anything.
Hopefully some of the stuff I put on here is helpful to some.