Finance Blog Income Report Q3 2023: $1,619
Welcome to my first quarterly finance blog income report!
Key Stats for Q3 2023
- Income: $1,619
- Expenses: $300
- Net Income: $1,319
- Profit Margin: 81%
- Visitors: 8,810
Quarterly Notes from CEO
Q3 2023 was a tough quarter for many niche websites that suffered a significant ranking drops after the September 2023 Google Helpful Content Update.
Major websites such as Quora, Reddit, and Linkedin Pulse saw big jumps in traffic while smaller niche publishers lost as much as 50% of their traffic.
InvestorTrip.com saw a dip in traffic too after the update but I actually increased visitors month over month ovr month by publishing daily and sharing my content on Pinterest, X, Facebook, StockTwits, and Reddit.
Moving forward, I believe niche publishers should expect less from Google SEO since big websites with high domain authority have pushed out smaller websites.
Look for other traffic sources and consider more frequent updates to attract visitors more often. Freshness is an important metric moving forward and don’t forget to update older blog posts to maintain rankings.
Income for Q3 2023
InvestorTrip.com and other social media accounts earned $1,544 from the blog in Q3. This is due to a lot of new changes and strategies that I implemented during the quarter.
Here is the income breakdown:
- Affiliate Marketing: $25
- Guest Posts: $486
- Youtube: $100
- SeekingAlpha: $933
We’ve brought back Google Adsense and have several ideas to improve affiliate revenue while putting more emphasis on user experience.
I’m also thinking about adding a private paid Discord chat since I disabled comments across the site in September 2023.
I love comments but unfortunately 99.9% of visitors didn’t leave a comment. Showing an empty comment field makes your blog look empty plus adds extra code that slows down your blog.
Guest post revenue is a stable source of income but unfortunately guest post resellers offer very low prices to resell your links to their clients.
I was getting tired of receiving only $50 so the reseller can charge their clients $150+ for the same backlinks. I want to maintain the quality of this website moving forward and will reject the majority of guest posts.
Expenses for Q3 2023
Running a finance blog is an extremely high margin business with low startup costs. We currently have zero staff or overhead other than Wordpress managed hosting for $100 per month.
- Rocket.net Managed Wordpress Hosting: $300
Traffic Report
Our site had 8,810 visitors for the quarter. Here’s a breakdown of our visitors per month:
- July 2023: 715
- August 2023: 3,517
- September 2023: 4,587
Traffic was extremely low in July due to inactivity and issues with my Rocket.net Wordpress hosting (everything is okay now).
August traffic was just under 4k visitors but September looks a lot lower due to fewer social media posts being shared.
September traffic performed well thanks to several viral posts such as LCID Short Squeeze and NVAX Short Squeeze.
Our audience is really enjoying these posts on potential short squeeze plays so I plan to publish a lot more of this format.
Q4 2023 Guidance
I expect things to remain a bit underwhelming as we continue updating older content and adding new content to the website. I also plan to jump back on Youtube ASAP to provide more video and audio content along with blog posts.
I’m projecting around 15,000 visitors for the quarter.
Lessons Learned
- Stay consistent: Consistency is so important and I want to continue posting daily throughout Q4 2023 to see what kind of impact I can make.
- Keep Doing What Works: Our new “7 reasons” format helped gain a ton of new visitors so I will keep that format moving forward. If you find something that works then keep doing it until it doesn’t.
