How Much Money My Personal Finance Blog Made in April 2022
April was actually a remarkable month for my blog for a few different reasons. Without wasting too much time, let's go ahead and jump in!
The Newest Posts in April
The Blog's Wins
Featured Snippets Are Incredibly Powerful
If you read this blog with any regularity, you'll know that my gold standard for all things SEO is "Income School." They are incredibly down-to-earth and realistic with blogging timelines, especially with new bloggers, and have helped me every step of the way in their content.
One of the things I have taken away from them is the dreaded "Google Sandbox." This is an unofficial timer that is rumored by new bloggers, and it's essentially Google's version of limiting your content until you gain its trust. For typical niche sites, this period is about 8-10 months. For sites in my niche of personal finance and investing, it's about 12-16 months. But there is a way to get around this waiting period for your articles to perform, and it's called a "Featured Snippet."
Featured Snippets are those at the top of a SERP that attempt to quickly answer your question. These articles are judged by Google to answer a question quickly and accurately, and is rewarded by immediately shooting to the number one spot on the SERP.
Well, one of my posts from March gained a Featured Snippet! When I looked at my Ahrefs dashboard, I almost shot through the roof because I was officially number one on Google for something! So it was to my great surprise that this article not only captured the Snippet for one set of keywords, but for NINE SETS OF KEYWORDS. The traffic I've seen coming in from this piece has been amazing, which leads me to my next point.
Greater Optimization on High Performing Posts
Theoretically, as you evolve as a writer, you will learn more stuff. Better writing, better schema for your articles to rank, etc. This is diametrically opposed to the Google Sandbox, as hypothetically your worse content will perform higher based on the publishing and sandbox timeline.
As this is the case, I have spent a majority of my time going back and optimizing my top performing posts from months gone by. Some of the ones that are starting to gain attention don't quite have the right headers, the right line breaks, and some don't have any ads on them at all. Going back and fixing this information, to me, provides a greater ROI at this moment than cranking out more content at the same clip.
The Power of Interlinking
My previous section talked about my Featured Snippet, which was a blessing and a curse for a short time. I'd hop into my Wix dashboard and be presented with "People are spending time on this page!" But then I'd also see "people are leaving this page after reading." Essentially, people were getting to my site via the Snippet, reading the article, then bouncing. Not great.
Ideally, I'd like to keep my users on my site by having them read other articles that may be relevant to them. This brings me to my newest strategy of interlinking. Throughout all of my articles, you'll now see "Related" in bold text, along with a link to one of my previous articles if you'd like to read more. If you like this strategy, shoot me a note! I'd love to hear feedback on this.
So far, however, it's working. I've gone from ~1 pageview per user to closer to 2 pageviews per user after adopting interlinking, which has seen my pageview totals skyrocket from month to month (organically, anyway).
Blogging Plans Moving Forward
Continued Keyword Research
Keyword research is definitely my least favorite part of blogging, but it could be the most important. If no one is searching for your article, then no one is reading it! Then you've wasted everyone's time and you've made $0. Well, this is how I started my blogging journey in the beginning.
I will say that I got lucky on some of the posts that I wrote in that some of my articles gained a bit of traction. However, a vast majority were losers. After I started researching my keywords in December, I've seen a dramatic improvement in my SERP performance, which has translated to greater traffic and higher RPM's in Adsense.
Freelancing!
Through my keyword research and increased organic discoverability, I've also uncovered a new revenue stream: freelancing! Turns out, someone likes my writing enough to pay me to do it for them. I had my first freelance request come through at the end of April, which I can't talk about too much at the moment.
If you want to see my freelance piece when it goes live for the next big investing platform, follow me on Twitter to see the link!
Personal Finance Blog Revenue - April 2022
You've been teased enough. Here's my revenue for April:
Income:
Adsense - $111.21 (+2.98% month-over-month)
Medium -$134.25 (-15.95% month-over-month)
Affiliate - $0 (sign up for Albert for a free $150 using my link)
Expenses:
$0
Total: $245.46
2022 Total: $912.99
So close! I'm nearly at $1,000 in earnings for the year, and it's only the beginning of May! My goal by the end of the year is $2,500 in total earnings, because that will have paid for one full year of my car payment. Looks like I'm well on track to that number.
If you're interested in future income reports, don't forget to sign up for my email list so you never miss a post! And don't forget to sign up for Robinhood using my link so you can get a FREE stock valued all the way up to $200. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time!
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