Hey everyone! If you’re new around here, I started tracking my blogging income through these online income reports mid-2016. This is a great way for me to keep track of how I make money through M$M, and it’s also a cool way for you to follow along as well! I can’t wait to look back on these several years from now and see the progress.

On a personal level – life is pretty freaking awesome right now. I’m starting to streamline a lot of what I do with the business, which makes it more efficient for me. I was able to spend a ton of time with my wife over the Christmas break and just enjoy life in general.

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting lately now that the site just turned two years old. I can’t even imagine where I’d be or if I’d own a business at all if I hadn’t started M$M. If you’re interested in starting a blog, I truly believe you should at least take a shot because it’s so cheap. You’ll meet a lot of great people, and you never know what it can turn into later down the road!

Take a look at my free blog setup tutorial. If you use my exclusive link in the guide you’ll get a domain name for free! I also suggest signing up for my free blogging course below.

Here’s how I made money online in December:

Digital Marketing Income: $4,689.95

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: $7,891.92

This is the money that I made directly from the blog. I was really concerned at the beginning of the month because affiliate income was so slow. The cool thing about my business is that there are a bunch of ways to make money, and I had some great opportunities with sponsorships and staff writing last month.

Affiliate income: $3,126.20

Bluehost Blog Hosting: $1,700 (Take a look at my free blog creation guide to set up your own site in 15 minutes or less!)LendEDU: $1,053 <- Almost 600 M$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: $200 (The free tool Coral and I use to track our net worth…love it!)Uber: $48Rakuten: $26.20Online Surveys: $60Credit Sesame: $9Blue Apron: $30

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 several thousand per month!

Blog coaching: $3oo

This was the slowest month I had for blog coaching in a while, but it’s totally understandable. People needed to save up for gifts! I was debating if I was going to even keep doing coaching, but people have asked me for sessions in the coming year, so I’ll keep it going for a little while longer.

Sidebar Advertising/Sponsorships: $3,024.22

I didn’t know this before, but December is the best month of the year for ad revenue! Unfortunately, January is the worst, so I’m sure I’ll see a little bit of a drop off. I also had a few sponsored projects in December, which really helped make up for the drop in affiliate income.

Staff Writing: $1441.50

I managed to pick up a really great staff writing gig last month! I’ll be doing more writing with this particular client over the next few months, and it’s awesome because they just want me to write about $$$ and student loan debt. 🙂

Here’s what happened in December for M$M

I really didn’t have any big features or anything like that in December. The month felt slow, but turned out to be the best month my online business has ever had. Weird how that works right?

As far as traffic, the site had around 117,000 views overall. I’ve been happy to stay over 100,000 for about four months in a row now, but it’s time to start pushing that number up! I’ve been much more active on Facebook so far in January, and I’m seeing my traffic hit 6,000-7,000 views a day because of it.

That would push me much closer to 200,000 overall for the month. One of my big goals for the year is to hit 300,000, which I think is possible. We are almost caught up on putting Pinterest images on all of the old posts on the site.

One we get that going and start joining group boards, I’m hoping that Pinterest becomes a good traffic generator for M$M this year.

New site design

I’m super excited about this – I’ve been talking to some web developers and almost have it narrowed down for who I want to use. I am going to feature these reports and make the site much easier to navigate. I’ve had tons of complaints about my crappy search bar, and also making past articles easier to sort through and read.

Salesforce Millennial Panel

This was basically my first panel speaking event, and it was so cool! Salesforce flew me out to New York for a convention they were putting on. I got to discuss reaching Millennials with an audience full of big bank representatives and financial service companies. It was a little surreal when they were asking me questions like: “Should we still be advertising at NFL and NBA games?”.

I was a band director less than two years ago haha. Life is so weird sometimes.

Whether you’ve been with me from the beginning or just now found M$M – thank you! I wouldn’t be able to do this without all of the awesome (almost 100,000) readers for the site!

You can look at my past income reports below:

November 2016 Online Income Report: $11,173.63

October 2016 Online Income Report: $11,343.22

September 2016 Online Income Report: $10,127.27

August 2016 Online Income Report: $6,196.71

Live differently. Your bank accounts will thank me later. ~M$M

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Comments

  1. Congrats man! I’ve really enjoyed following your story from the beginning! Keep rolling! Also-super jealous of you for getting a dog! Can’t wait to get one!

    1. Thanks! He does need a bit of training so he’ll get along with our cats haha.

  2. That is pretty cool that you got to work with SalesForce, aka one of fortune 100s fastest growing companies! That is amazing!

    1. It was really cool! I’ve never done anything like that before, but it did feel a lot like standing in front of a classroom and teaching. They talked to me about doing their big convention in San Diego next year, but we’ll see!

  3. It’s tough to hustle a lot during December when things slow down so much, but it sounds like you made out nicely. 🙂 I’m also seeing quite a drop in ad revenue in January, so that totally sucks. Oh well!

    Oooh, I can’t wait to see the new site design. Oh dude that’s neat that Salesforce contacted you! I used to live in that software so it’s just funny that they’re trying to ‘figure out’ Millennials.

    1. Yeah December was weird, but almost every month starts out with me freaking out and then everything being cool at the end of it haha. My traffic is up, so it’s hard to tell exactly how much the ad revenue has dropped so far.

      EVERYONE is trying to figure out millennials. Pretty crazy.

  4. Wow, this monthly income is awesome. Do you also have a blog traffic chart from the very beginning? Getting here in 2 years is more than impressive!
    As a matter of comparison: yesterday’s AdSense revenue of my blog was 1c 🙂

    1. I do! I think if you go back a few pages in my blog posts I’ve got a traffic report post!

  5. Awesome Stuff! We love you being so transparent with your self employment. Huge motivator! Keep grinding and making awesome content on your site. You are helping so many people!

    1. No problem! Little scary at first but you just get used to people knowing how much you make eventually haha

  6. Awesome job Bobby! You are an inspiration for a lot of people (including myself). Keep doing what you do man!

  7. Wow, those are big visitor numbers already Bobby. Your new monthly visitor goal is even more ambitious. I’m impressed, and I have no doubt you’ll reach it too. Count me on board for the ride.

  8. Hi Bobby. I’m really enjoying following your progress. Did you get approached to start the new writing gig or were you out hunting for it? Hope 2017 rewards your efforts.

    1. Hey Craig – I was approached, I want to say that they found my site through Google.

  9. Great job! This is motivating! I just started my blog (freedomfinancialcoach.com) and hope to be able to follow your path soon. Wish you the best of luck with 2017!

  10. Congrats on all the success my man! I’ve learned quite a bit from your site alone! One of the only sites that knows how to keep a millennials attention. It’s a new generation for money talk and your one of the leaders of the movement.

  11. Well done! Very encouraging ???? I’m just getting started with blogging. So far I struggle to make time for it while working full time. But I’m enjoying learning a lot from people like you that are open and sharing their experience. Keep up the good work.

  12. Congrats on the great month! I’d love to be able to get to 10% of that some day!

  13. I found your site through Facebook, and this is maybe the second post I’ve read of yours. Thanks for being so transparent, and I’m happy for your family that you’re able to make an income for yourself through yourself. Keep it up! I’ll be contacting you soon about blogging.

    1. Thanks for the kind words Eze! I appreciate it. Doing income reports was pretty scary at first, but so far I think it’s been really helpful for people that want to start their own site or even a different small business. Talk to you soon!

  14. I find what you’re doing interesting, especially posting your income by source each month. I pretty quickly thought about how it was changing over time and threw together a little graph for you. Think your readers would find this helpful but not sure how to get it to you as I can’t paste it into this comment box.

  15. Congrats on having a stellar month and getting to this point so quickly. It’s so impressive. I just started trying to monetize last year and in December I had my good month. I now need to kick it up a few notches. Wow on your traffic. My original blog (from 4.5 yrs ago) has almost as much as your December numbers, but not that income from the blog. I recently took Michelle’s course and now need to implement some more. Hoping to have a big pivot month in the next 2 months or so.

    I also need to learn more/figure out strategy on sponsored posts, etc. on my site (it typically gets 120,000 page views/month). I’d love to learn more how you have done that/how much you charge, etc. I’ve just been turning people away who ask to guest post, etc (as originally my blog had a different purpose). I may be willing to reconsider, but super worried about quality/content from others. (And, I don’t have the time to write sponsored posts…my time would be better served freelancing/marketing for others).

    Thanks for the inspiration.

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