December 2016 Income Report

People often look at successful men and women and say they “are so lucky.” They often are lucky, but little do people know how most of that luck resulted from hard work. As in “the harder they worked the luckier they got”.

I have been told this in reference to my marriage, my daughter, and in regards to being able to earn a respectable income from anywhere in the world working just a few hours per day.

Truth is, I consider myself exceptionally lucky. Or should I say blessed. It did require a ridiculous amount of hard work to attain that luck and those blessings though.

I did not wake up one morning to a thriving marriage. It’s taken years of hard work and sacrifice on both our parts to get it here.

I did not wake up one day to having more passive income then I needed to live a comfortable lifestyle with. It took years of hard work, sacrifice, and persistence to grow it to that level.

I also never woke up to my websites ranking in top of Google for competitive keywords without me first putting in the time, energy, and resources.

Yes, I have all those things now, and I am lucky to have them, but I got lucky because I never gave up and put in the work required. I got lucky because of a proactive work ethic.

There is an old Bible passage that says “You reap what you sow.” This not only means I reap the same things I sow, but also means if I sow little, I will reap little. In other words, the more I sow (the harder I work), the more I reap (the luckier I get).

So as I wrap up 2016, I consider myself exceptionally lucky and blessed. I – by the grace of God and hard work – not only am healthy, have an exceptional family, have total time freedom, and have a bigger life than I could have ever imagined having at this age. And I am extremely grateful for all of it!

SEODagger.com Income for December 2016

December was another exceptional income month for us overall. Although income from this blog went down, it was our best ever month in terms of passive income earned. By passive I mean: income earned from sources neither my wife or I actively worked for to earn. Or… we worked for it ages ago and yet continue to earn from it month after month.

It wasn’t the best month in terms of overall earnings, but by far the best in passive earnings. Which was very cool to see. I don’t mind overall earnings taking a dip as long as the passive (hands off) income keeps growing. The passive earnings are ultimately what buy us true time freedom.

With that said, how did this blog do in December?

DISCLAIMER: I never include earnings from ventures unrelated to this blog. I own and am a partner in a bunch of online business ventures, but – for the sake of a fair case study (not to mention legal reasons) – only earnings directly related to SEODagger.com will be shared here.

The Affiliate Income Breakdown: 

• MyeCoverMaker: $381.30
  • Not a bad month from that one simple review post I wrote years ago. I know there are dozens of similar sites now competing for “ebook cover” customers but these guys have been good to me and pay on time – every time – so my loyalty lies with them. Besides, theirs is the only program of it’s kind I have actually used and hence can confidently recommend.
    
• Nix’s Press Release Service: $9.48
  • I talk about his service in most of my posts these days, but did an extensive review here. The post has started to get a few search engine visitors per month, so at the end of December I purchased some PBN links for it to help it rank better. It is a fairly competitive niche, so I’m not expecting any drastic rankings for it any time soon. I’ll keep building links to it until it gets to where I want it to be 🙂

That is all the income I can with 100% confidence attribute to this blog.

A grand total of: $390.78

Decembers are historically my worst months in the SEO and Internet marketing niches. Some niches I own thrive just before Christmas, but not this one… and that is ok. That’s why I am spread out, hehehe.

SEODagger.com Expense for December 2016

I finally decided to get some overdue work done on this blog. So – aside from having a lower than November income month, I also had a fairly high expense month.

No regrets though. It was money and time well spent in my opinion and I am confident it will find its way back into my pocket tenfold in 2017.

DISCLAIMER: Only expenses resulting specifically because of this blog will be listed here.

This Blog’s Expense Breakdown:

• Fiverr: $81.25
  • Fiverr is (aside from Konker) my absolute favorites site to outsource redundant tasks to. I used to spend hours scouring fiverr gigs and order random services… just because. Nowadays I am a bit more intentional with what I order and tend to order in bulk to save a few dollars when I can. The expense listed is – including discounts etc – exactly how much of the costs went to promoting this blog. 
    I ordered 5 PDF submissions from iWebSEO to promote various pages on this blog and 11 articles from NatashaNixon to use as PBN posts that will eventually be used to promote a couple pages on this blog.
• Virgin PBN Network: $41.94
  • This is a new service I am trying out. Same as on fiverr, I ordered a bulk batch of backlinks from this guy and the total cost of the links pointing to this site is $41.94. I ordered them at month’s end so am not expecting him to have them done for another couple of weeks.
• Programmer: $40
  • I had my programmer integrate the search bar back on this site’s navigation and fixed some mobile display issues.

Total Blog Expenses for December: $163.19

December Takeaway

December saw me take a more proactive approach on this blog. Meaning I actually worked on it a bit more than usual and also spent money on it. Despite that I took home $227.59 USD from it.

This blog isn’t my only source of online income (by far) and is – in the grand scheme of things – almost irrelevant, but I keep it going to eventually turn it into something worthwhile.

As I was doing year end brainstorming in December, I kept telling myself that I should stop doing these income reports as they aren’t really worth my time but then I had to remind myself that this blog always was more of a discipline thing for me… not so much a money thing.

So… although you’ll continue seeing changes on this blog going into 2017, I plan on keeping these income reports coming. At least for the foreseeable future.