Another month has come and gone again! One of the weirdest things about working for yourself is the way that your focus on time changes a little bit. When I was a band director, my life basically revolved around band contests and concerts. The current month didn’t matter as much as which competition was coming up.

When you own a business, each month becomes REALLY important. You measure each month against each other to get an idea of how successful your business was in that time period. I actually enjoy it a lot more than waiting for a paycheck every two weeks!

Last month was great for M$M.

November was another good month for my business. I was down slightly from October, but I’m still super happy with how this whole project is turning out. I also believe that December will be a great month with some of the things I have coming up.

I wake up every day (seriously) and reflect on how lucky I am to work online for a living. If you’ve ever thought about starting an online business, I highly recommend that you at least try it! The cost to start something like a blog is so low compared to other businesses, and there is a lot of freedom with where and how you can make money.

If you want to learn how to make your own blog in 15 minutes or less, check out my blog setup guide here and you’ll get a free domain name with my exclusive link! I also suggest signing up for my free blogging course below. 

Remember when you’re reading this – I’m self employed. That means I have to cover taxes, health insurance, and expenses. Still…it’s not a bad life haha!

Here’s how I made money in November

Digital Marketing Income: $5,659.85

If you’re new to M$M, I’ll just catch you up really quickly! When I left my job a year and a half ago to start working for myself, I wasn’t making much money at all. The site itself had made around $3 when I took the leap of faith.

A reader really liked my story and work on the site and became my first marketing client! This is a great way to make money when you first start blogging because the skill-set is identical to what you do with your own site.

I highly recommend that anyone who spends time blogging go out and try to find some marketing clients. It’s been a great experience for me so far.

Out of respect for clients’ privacy, I can’t name them on the site or list my rates for specific projects, but you’re always welcome to email me if you are an aspiring digital marketer and want tips or guidance!

MillennialMoneyMan.com Income: $5,513.78

This is the money that I made directly from the blog.

Affiliate income: $3,912.22

My income from affiliates was down slightly this month. The main reason is that I didn’t have any big features on large news publications. But even with that, my traffic held very steady in November and my sales were fairly close as well!

Growing my affiliate income will be a heavy focus of mine in December.

Bluehost Blog Hosting: $2,020 (Take a look at my free blog creation guide to set up your own site in 15 minutes or less!)LendEDU: $973.50 <- Almost 500 M$M readers have used this tool so far to research better student loan interest rates for FREE. (Bloggers, I highly recommend that you apply to become a LendEDU affiliate here).Personal Capital: $600 (The free tool Coral and I use to track our net worth…love it!)Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course: $63.60Uber: $66.40Thesis (the theme M$M runs on): $54.12Rakuten: $38.60Online Surveys: $37.50Betterment: $30Credit Sesame: $22.50Turo: $6

If you are a blogger and want to figure out how to make affiliate income, you need to take the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course. This is THE most comprehensive affiliate course I have found so far. I took this course back in August, and saw my affiliate income jump from a few hundred dollars to around $4,000 per month!

Blog coaching: $850

Another great month of blog coaching! I’m super excited for all of my students and love seeing their progress. A lot of them have great stories and ideas on personal finance/entrepreneurship. Can’t wait to see how they develop over the next few months.

Sidebar Advertising: $751.56

This was a really weird month because I didn’t have any sponsored posts on the site. There really just weren’t any companies I felt comfortable with as far as their product and reputation.

However, I have some great companies lined up for next month that I’m really excited about! A lot of people don’t realize this – but for every sponsored post you see on the site, I probably turn down 5. There’s just no value in introducing a crappy product to your readers, regardless of the money.

Every reader I’ve talked about this to recognizes/respects that I have to make money with the site, but appreciates that I protect my readers from shady companies. 🙂

Cool stuff that happened in November:

Overall the month was pretty busy. I’m doing a lot more writing than I used to do, so I definitely had to change up my schedule and switch up the places that I work to keep the ideas flowing.

I am NOT a fast writer unfortunately, but working in different coffee shops around town has been a huge help (and lots of fun). I’m a “regular” at this really cool coffee shop by the water now, so I get the occasional free drink!

I had a TV appearance in San Antonio

This was my second live TV spot, which is a totally different world than I’m used to. A Fox affiliate in San Antonio brought me on for two segments to talk about my student loan debt and then a taped holiday shopping segment as well. They asked me to come back and do more segments next year, so I guess it went pretty well?

The Pinterest account is about to finally get going at 100%!

Coral (my wife) did a great job of getting the account to over 1,000 followers. The biggest problem for a site like mine that is starting to get a lot of content on it is going back and updating old posts and adding pictures.

I still have a lot of work to do in that area, but I’m hoping to get some of that knocked out in December. A big help was hiring someone to create Pinterest images for all of my old posts. Definitely money well spent, and I’m looking forward to being really aggressive on Pinterest like I have been on Facebook to drive up my affiliate sales.

I am tentatively looking for a virtual assistant…

It’s a little scary putting this on the site because I know I’ll get flooded with applicants, but what better way to find someone? I’m really looking for someone to do some social media scheduling, email sorting, possibly Pinterest images, etc.

It might be pretty light work at first and then maybe evolve into more? We’ll see 🙂

If you know of someone – shoot me an email to Bobby @ millennialmoneyman.com (separated for spam purposes)

M$M helped more people this month

I try not to forget that the main goal of this site was to help people, maybe make them laugh a little, or even get pissed off at me for my thoughts on money. As long as I can get people to think a little harder about what they are doing with their money, it’s a win in my book.

If you’ve been here for a while or just found the site – thank you so much! Readers are the main reason I do this as passionately as I do.

You can take a look at my past income reports below:

October 2016 Online Income Report: $11,343.22

September 2016 Online Income Report: $10,127.27

August 2016 Online Income Report: $6,196.71

Comments

  1. That’s another awesome month Bobby! Really enjoy seeing this breakdown. It’s awesome to see what’s possible out there.

    1. Thanks! Hoping for an even better December, but I’m definitely happy with everything right now!

  2. Another great month. There is just something about breaking that 10k a month mark. Congrats!

    1. Thanks! I totally agree, but honestly any amount of money doing this is a great accomplishment!

  3. Glad to hear things are going well! I’ll have to check out that affiliate income course, your results are certainly impressive.

    That’s cool to hear you hired someone to do Pinterest images. I should probably do that – I started going down the Pinterest path but decided it is too much work.

    1. I highly recommend getting someone else to do Pinterest work for you if you don’t want to do it! The course is great and paid for itself many times over the month that I took it.

  4. Congrats on another great month, M$M! Dat affiliate income, tho! 😉

    I’m trying to grow my Pinterest too, and it does take a lot of work! Especially if (like me) you didn’t optimize for Pinterest in the first place. D’oh!

    I’m not sure if it would help you at all, but I use Canva and Upsplash to create cool Pinterest graphics for free.

    1. Thanks! I actually use Picmonkey and have been pretty happy with that so far. I just don’t have the eye for the Pinterest images, but I’m happy with the person I have making them for me!

  5. Congrats on a great month. One of my goals for next year is to take my affiliate income to another level. I plan on knocking out a huge chunk of my debt.

    1. Thanks Jason! Take the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing Course if you haven’t already!

  6. Awesome posts. You put out some very inspirational stories. Keep it coming!

  7. Congratulations on your blogging success! This is very inspirational to those of us just starting out in the blogging world. I love seeing what the opportunities are out there.

  8. Congrats on another great month! The consulting portion is pretty cool. It’s what I did here in San Francisco after about a year and a half of not working with anybody after early retirement. Keep the brain busy and things going.

    I think I’m gonna call it a year. Crazy how bullish everything is yeah?

    Sam

    1. Thanks Sam! Yeah definitely trying to stay busy – most people don’t realize how weird it is when you don’t have the same schedule as the rest of the world. 🙂

      Ha yes, very crazy…

  9. Hi Bobby,

    Congrats on the progress! I’ve followed from the beginning and finally took the jump today to start my own blog! dollardiligence.com

    It’s interesting to me that it’s really unpredictable in terms of how you will earn your money from the beginning of the blog. Who knows if it will be from coaching, affiliates, ads, etc. I’m just getting going, and trying to prioritize and do things one step at a time. I’ve really enjoyed following your journey. I would like to go through a coaching session sometime!

    1. Hey Kyle! That’s so cool, congrats on getting started! I would say just focus on the content for a while and figure out what you want to write about before trying to monetize. But when you do, there are definitely a lot of options and you kinda just “find your way”. I’d be happy to set up a blog coaching session with you whenever you’re ready!

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