November 2016 Online Income Report: $11,173.63

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: $63.60
Uber: $66.40
Thesis (the theme M$M runs on): $54.12
Rakuten: $38.60
Online Surveys: $37.50
Betterment: $30
Credit Sesame: $22.50
Turo: $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