2018 Review : First steps to financial success

Since I see that people like to read these yearly reports from members I decided to also make mine in order to keep some record down the line of how my progress is going. I am a bit late on my review as my website is an Amazon affiliate website and as you know Amazon takes some time in order to process your payments because of returned products. As such I had to wait until Amazon would process December payments in order to have a clear idea of how I did in my 1st year.

Although 2018 was not a full year as I became a premium member on the 23rd of January and naturally the first 3-4 months was trial and error as well as building my website period so I consider that real work began around the beginning of the summer.

Traffic

But before I talk about money we have to see how I did with the element that bring this...traffic. The first chart shows total traffic for 2018 that starts in 23rd of January and ends in 31st of December. As you can see my traffic increased almost every month. November was the best month due to Black Friday but December wasn't bad also. Keep in mind that this includes organic traffic and social media traffic. Each dot is for a single month.

My next chart is even more important as it includes only organic traffic which means only users that are searching from search engines. Here as you can see there is almost the same improvement every single month. The first few months naturally I had almost no organic traffic as my articles were ranked very low on Google (after 5th page).

Now I have to mention a few things here. Since I have a 9-5 full job and 2 small kids waiting me at home it was very hard to make time to write for my website. If you can publish articles every day then it's fine, do that. But with all the research I have to do along with all my other work the best I could do is write 2 quality articles per week.

For the whole year I managed to keep this schedule without any deviation except for the last week of the year between Christmas and New Year that I was sick and I didn't manage to write anything. So the results you see here are with 2 articles per week which include product reviews, movie reviews, video games reviews and general articles. The amount of articles I wrote is as this:

1. 9 General articles
2. 67 Home cinema equipment reviews
3. 27 Movie reviews
4. 4 Video game reviews

Income - Expenses

There are three sources of income I have right now. Amazon US, Amazon UK and Adsense

Amazon US

In one year I made 88.32 euros in total with November being my best month and December my 2nd best. In these 2 last months of the year I made around 77 euros from my total yearly income.

Amazon UK

In the whole year I made 24.07 euros. The UK Amazon is much harder to make sales and the comissions I had so far are very few and far between making it a hard nut to crack.

Adsense

For adsense you need to have a lot of traffic to gain anything meaningful. And I mean a lot. In the first few months I was getting almost nothing but since November things started to look better as my traffic started to gain traction. Again what you see is a monthy chart for the whole 2018.

Things definitely look better towards the end of the year and hopefully as my traffic will grow more so will this. I am planning in the future to use Mediavine instead of Adsense as I hear the profits are better but the minimum limit of sessions you need to have is still not a factor I have achieved but I hope to do so in the next year or 2.

Closing

Just to keep things simple here are the raw numbers I achieved in 2018:

Total Income - 2018 (Includes all three sources I currently have) : 167.89 euros

Total Expenses - 2018 (Includes WA and hosting subscriptions) : 709.99 euros

Total - 2018 : -542.10 euros

Just to clarify I was a montly premium member until the Black Friday deal when I went yearly so my subscription expenses were higher that what it could be. I paid 10 monthly fees before i went for the yearly Black Friday subscription. For 2019 I expect it to be lower since I went yearly from now on.

And that's all for my 2018 report. My plans for the next year is to continue as I did in the last. To be able to write 2 quality articles per week and we will see where it will take me. Having taken the Black Friday deal I commited myself to have my financial success. I don't know how much time it will take me and I hope what I am doing is the right thing. The charts at least show that what I am doing is right so I will continue to do so and we will see how much improvement I will manage to achieve.

I must point out that I followed the training to the letter and I write my reviews exactly as the training and Jay's webinars are teaching us. I was not sure if I will be able to be successful but at least if I fail I will say that I did everything as the training indicated so I would have peace of mind. So I would suggest you do the same. Stick to the training, follow the advice of experienced users and don't deviate a single inch. At least this way you will know for sure you tried your best.

Hope you enjoyed my report and wish you all a productive and successful 2019.

Stratos