I don’t recall if I said I’ll ever do an earnings report post on this website, but whatever, I decided to finally do it because I had writer’s block and I also wanted to show readers I don’t just say how to make money online for no good reason, the same strategies I suggest to you as well as programs are the same ones I use to make me what I am making today and in today’s “case study”, we’ll ONLY examine THIS website.
So has this website made six figures?
So far, in a single year it has not, BUT it has gotten close. and by close, I mean $70,000. Now if you take into consideration all the years this website has been up, then I have actually made over $300,000 on this website, but the goal is to hit that six figure mark in only one year.
I really don’t like to talk about earnings, but I think people who check out this site and wonder if it’s making money deserve to know if that is the case. After all, I do help teach people to get started with making money online and I didn’t do it myself, why would I be eligible to teach it?
But anyway, let me explain how the $70,000 was reached in this post. Well first we have the report of commissions from 1/1/16 until 10/31/16 (If you’re reading this in 2020 and beyond, this site is still growing and you can find more of my reports on this page that reviews Wealthy Affiliate, a program that helped me get this done):
Now I haven’t included the end of November because it’s still being calculated, but so far, here’s the stats for month 11:
$53,000 + $8,000 = $61,000. More reports to show the $70,000 earnings to come:
If you look at my reports from above, with the $8,000 I made recently, you may wonder why it’s so much larger. Well this is because my mainly promoted program on this site (Wealthy Affiliate) has had a Black Friday promotion event going on every end of November that spans for a number of days.
This event is usually the one which brings in higher numbers and almost feels like a “bonus” period for me every year. But yeah, usually these few days bring about 25% of my yearly profits.
The black friday promotion is set to bring in an extra $5,000 in addition to the first $8,000:
Now if you add that number to the $53k above and (hopefully expected) another $5k or more for December, you will get about $70k in total, 30k shy of the six figure mark.
Now this is the report ONLY for this site and if you include my other sites where I don’t pay as much attention which do make money, they combined with this one still don’t get to the $100k, but there’s a positive:
Besides the fact that I have just proven to you that one website can make this much.
I have also increased my profits from 2015 which was, at least for this site, $50k. Now with almost a $20k increase in 2016, that about 40% increased from last year.
Another surprising commission report ($300 made):
I don’t normally promote other products on this site, but sometimes it does pay to do it as was in this case: I promoted a program called Affilorama, but didn’t really advise it as being the BEST.
Yet despite that being mentioned, someone went ahead and purchased it, giving me a nice…$356.19 and here’s proof:
And so far, there hasn’t been a refund, meaning the purchaser is happy for all I know and I’m glad. People may wonder why I don’t promote so many other programs especially ones which pay like this and my answer is that, my goal on this site is to give people the BEST program for making money in this business and I’ve decided on that program as being Wealthy Affiliate.
Even though it pays me less per lead, on a monthly basis, it adds up and the recent Black Friday sales have each surpassed $100.
But while the commission rate is really secondary, the primary reasoning for promoting a technically less paying program is simply because the quality is better and it generally makes my customers happier.
The 4 tips I used to get to this amount:
1) I followed everything in the Wealthy Affiliate program. It is also where I made the above profits from. Most of what they taught me to build this site came from their Affiliate bootcamp course.
2) I blogged quite often, and being that this site is a few years old, I have actually become lazier in my writing frequency. This year I’ve so far reached about a 100 new blog posts, despite my initial goal to be 200. THIS played a gigantic role in my lack of reaching the six figures.
3) 90%+ of all my blog posts were keyword targeted a majority of which were reviews on other products in this market and the good thing is that most of them are horrible, meaning it’s easier to pitch the one I stand by.
So the tip I give you reader is: Blog as much as possible and target those keywords, don’t slump like I did. Even if you get a writer’s block, use some tips to break it and move forward.
4) Promote more than one product if it’s good enough (like I did with Affilorama), but be sure to have a single one that stands out and mention that it does. My experience has shown me that 1 main promotion gives people more calm in knowing that there’s nothing better and it’s easier to make the decision for them as a result.
My final thoughts:
Once the year ends, I will try to do an OFFICIAL year end report on the profits to see if the expected amount was reached, was short or more. But even if it isn’t, the goal moving into 2017 will be to keep on blogging and doing the same 4 things I just mentioned above, but in a more larger frequency since this year wasn’t up to par.
Even if it somehow reaches six figures, which I’d be VERY happy about, the goal for next year would be to make more and more.
Update: More earning reports (years later):
In 2018 I had some updates to this site’s earnings and here’s how much the website made in 2018.
And by the way, I have made several six figure websites before, but they weren’t exactly stable. Here is an example of a 1 page website that made that amount. It later dropped in sales, which is why I decided to make this website for more stable income.
Thank you for your openness about your earnings with this website. Congratulations on the rewards you are enjoying.
You mention that you added about 100 new posts this year and intend to scale that up next year. I have a practical question about this aspect.
When I search your site I can’t see the 100s of posts. I can only see 10 in the side bar, four in the case studies, 3 in the top menu and this particular post. I can also see links to other posts within the content….I just can’t see hundreds. Where are they? No categories or search or archives, to hold them.
I am preparing to scale up content production on my site and I’m wondering where I am going to put all of these posts. My site has about 75 posts at present and its already looking very crowded.
While yours is so neat and simple looking.
Hey Vitaly do you have a tip for me?
Janelle.
Hi Janelle, I have a blog roll as my homepage which is why you see the latest 10 posts. As for all the posts I’ve written, you can easily see them by going through each blog roll page.
Now as for case studies, I have more than 4 but haven’t added them to the menu yet (but will). As opposed to the rest, it’s not a good idea to overload your site with too many links to all of your posts, eventually it’ll get out of control because you’ll have to much to fit all into one page.
This can slow down your site and confuse your readers, which is why I keep it very simple and show only the latest things and as for the rest, I show proof with case studies and a funnel to what I recommend people get to do what I do.
Hello Vitaliy,
I have read your assessment on how your site has been progressing so far this year. I like your honesty in giving a frank appraisal of events.
You said you are falling short of your goal of a six-figure income. Even if you have to settle it’s not bad because it shows you are having success. And you have admitted that you did not blog enough which is why you are falling short.
You should not any problem making six figures next year if all you have to do is increase your blogs.
You have offered up some good tips. I like them, particularly numbers 2 & 3, and I like your reasoning for promoting WA.
I agree that Wealthy Affiliates is better quality than other online programs.
Thanks again for a good assessment.
Wow, interesting income report you have here. It’s nice and motivating to see other people succeeding online and honestly showing proof regarding their earnings. Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income (top website) started this and it seems many others are following his path. There is so much fluff and misinformation online, that makes it so valuable for people to get out there and show the reality behind it. Keep it up please!
I have heard of Pat before Antonis but honestly, my report wasn’t a reflection of him doing it, but just something I wanted to share to show that I am really doing this 🙂
Really great info Vitaliy and I really appreciate your honesty. The breakdowns are very interesting.
One thing I’d like to know if I can – how much time do you spend on this website a day/week?
If it’s equal to or less than 40-45 hours a week then absolutely brilliant.
When people spend every waking hour on their sites for a return that’s similar to what a standard 40 hour job could get……that’s when I have to question it.
Great read!
My work on this site has fluctuated Iain, in the beginning, I would say I worked about 2-3 hours a day on it so at most about 20 hours on average. As the site grew, I cut down on the work to about 10 hours a week and recently picked it back up again.
Sites which get traffic eventually can be left on autopilot for a period of time so you can work less on it and maybe just handle maintaining things like going over comments and making sure your plugins are to date.
Wow that’s very impressive Vitaliy! I really want to reach same level of income and become a full-time internet marketer. It would give a freedom to live anywhere in the world. How many blog posts do you think it takes to get 300 visitors/day through organic traffic? I have written about 105 and I get about 15 visitors/day through search engines. How many visitors per day your site has? I understand if you don’t want to answer but if you want to give some additional tips for getting that traffic it’s always welcome.
Hi Roope, the 300 visitor a day is a hard estimate to gauge because it varies on which keywords are getting you traffic and which ones are more popular than others.
Sometimes a blog with 50 posts can reach this level but then there’s other times when it takes a lot more. In your case, what i would do is try to socially share your blog more often and try to get comments, this should really help boost the rank of your site and with over a 100 posts, you’re on the verge of breaking into a big authority stage with Google, I think the missing link right now is comments.
As for daily stats, I average several hundred visits. Lately though I’ve been coming close to a 1,000 a day and honestly, I still have yet to determine why. Several clues as to why this huge jump has happened to me is that it’s after the Thanksgiving holidays and that I’ve been blogging more lately and getting a lot more comments.
You have a lot of content on your site and definitely a focus on WA. Is your reported income solely from WA or do you have other sites producing as well.?
Congrats on your site, well done! Also congratulations on a very good year. Sounds like you are ready for many more good years ahead.
Cheers,
Mark
The following report was about 99% involving WA and the 1 sale made for Affilorama for several $100 was another promotion.
Hi Vitaliy,
I am a fan of this site and as a lesser experienced marketer that yourself, hats off to those figures that is close on $6k per month average for the year.
Now if you have a closer look at your figures you notice a slight spike in January, May and of course November, those I suspect are the obvious and stated Black friday sales, new year goal setting and push/strive by people to earn extra cash for the summer.
Interestingly you managed those figures with a mere 2 blog posts per week on average.
Regarding hitting the wall and getting a bit of writers block, with those numbers could you have not outsourced the keyword research and/or content creation and hired someone from upwork or freelancer?
What are your thoughts in relation to hiring someone to write for you, especially when you get writers block, which is going to happen from time to time to the best of us?
Hi Derek, yes the spikes you indicated did probably happen for the reasons listed, but this post was more of a report and not really on why certain months were bigger, I do plan on explaining how certain months and periods during the year can affect sales for niche sites and it’s not always a positive either, depending on the subject.
Also on the note of writing twice a week, that’s only been recently for this year, when the site first started, I would say I was blogging 5-7 times a week regularly and that has been since providing me SEO dividends for the newer posts I write today.
And finally, the idea of hiring a writer has been on my mind for this site, and I have done that on another site, but it’s a road I carefully explore because it’s not easy to find the types of people I can trust with creating the content I deem to be of high quality. I have written about that here and it’s definitely not a door I’m closing for this site, it’s just something I will risk further on if my other sites that use the writer improve in rank for.