Last month’s Income Report was such a success that we decided to do another one!

Just kidding, we’ve been sharing these Income Reports since 2015 as a way to share how easy (or hard) it is to earn extra money online and what it’s really like starting a blog. Overall, it’s been a blast and a great hobby as we build up our savings for retirement!

What We Accomplished in September

We are flying on Wallet Squirrel lately and I think it largely has to do with the free coffee machine in my new apartment lobby. We have been building links, building content, building relationships, and everything to grow Wallet Squirrel.

We’re doing really well!

• Last month, we’ve been featured on MSN Money, Fit My Money, Making Sense of Cents, and the College of Business and Economics at California State University, Fullerton!
• Contributed to a round-up on Dr. Wealth – How to Invest Post COVID.
• Finally finished our Ways To Make Money Page. It’s pretty epic!
• Reduced image sizes on our pages to increase website speed. Google LOVES fast websites.
• Reached out to 10 places for a guest post, but I guess guest posting just isn’t that popular anymore.
• Became “Content Certified” on CJ Affiliate so we now have hundreds more affiliate opportunities. A lot of them we use already, so we’ve replaced those regular links, with affiliate links.
• Joined the blog directories on Campfire Finance, Bloglovin and Personal Finance Blogs. Two great links if you’re wanting more visibility in the PF community.
• Invested in some fun Twitter tools that helped us boost our followers from 781 to 1,041 in 2 weeks. We’re hoping to share more in an upcoming post!
• Updated some great articles including “8 Personal Finance Moves I Wish I Knew Before Turning 30“, “How I Made $1.88 Selling Stock Photography in 10 Days” and “How To Start A Blog“. The last one we did a complete reformat to what that page looks like and we’ve heard it’s significantly helping our readers!

What Our Website Traffic Looks Like

In addition to what we do and how much we earn, we want to be transparent about our website traffic. Honestly, it’s something a little scary to show and most bloggers don’t share this info.

However, we’re doing it because we want to give you a realistic view of what it’s really like blogging.

September was probably our best month ever! We had 2 days of incredibly high traffic entirely because we were featured on MSN. We were blown away by all the visitors and amazed at all the people still flowing in from the news site. Take a look!

How Much Money We Made September, 2020

Additionally, this was one of the best months ever on Wallet Squirrel in terms of income!

The first part is that our article on MSN sent an incredible amount of web traffic that increased our website ad revenue. We don’t have a lot of ads, so it’s incredible that we made $121.37 in ad revenue! Especially since we use Google AdSense, the lowest paying ad service.

The second part that’s amazing is a couple of Bluehost affiliate commissions just days after we revamped our How To Start A Blog post. This was extremely gratifying after the week we poured into making this page cleaner, and more helpful.

Here’s what one of our best Income Reports looks like, nearly hitting $600!

 

If you’re curious about any of these income streams, we’ve touched on each one before.

• Google AdSense – we make money when people see or click (extra money) on website banner ads
• Affiliate Marketing – we earn a commission if someone buys a product through a link on our website
• Blue Host Affiliate –  an affiliate link for website hosting we use.
• Online Surveys – we earn money from participating in online surveys like Swagbucks.
• Stock Photography – we earn money whenever one of our photos sells online.
• Sponsored Link – we are paid to add a link by companies we rigorously review and approve.
• Interest Checking/Saving Account – we earn interest on the money in our checking and savings accounts.
• Cash Back Credit Card – we earn extra money via 2% cashback from using our credit card.
• Seeking Alpha – we earn recurring ad revenue from SeekingAlpha.com for some articles we wrote years ago.
• Lending Club – we earn interest from peer-to-peer lending.
• Dividends – we earn dividends from the stocks we own.

 

 

Monthly Expenses for September, 2020

Starting and running a blog is relatively inexpensive, but there are LOTS of tools and services out there that help you speed up the growth of your blog.

The more traffic to your blog, there is more revenue potential. So that’s why we test out different products/services and share our experiences with you. You get the benefit of seeing what works and we have fun experimenting. Then as always, our extra money is invested in our portfolio here.

Here is everything we paid for last month.

Monthly Expenses – $216

• Bluehost ($36) – hosting service
• Sitelock ($8) – extra security add-on from Bluehost
• Domain Name ($2) – so we can reserve the domain name WalletSquirrel.com.
• Bloom ($7) – our creative email signup forms.
• Tailwind ($14) – our super awesome Pinterest marketing tool.
• Twitter ($50) – This is for a tool we’re testing out.
• SEMrush ($99) – This has helped us with link building and keyword research.

What’s Next in October!

Now that we met last month’s goals by updating our Ways To Make Money and How To Start A Blog pages, we can focus on more new content and growth.

New content, will be easy as we have some awesome ideas for some upcoming posts.

I may be a little more excited about our upcoming growth spurt. We are looking at joining a fun personal finance mastermind group, Money Mix Insiders. I’ve been wanting to join one for so long and collaborate with other personal finance bloggers! I joined one mastermind group 3 years ago with a wide range of entrepreneurs and it was a blast, but having more focused PF bloggers will be epic! We’re thrilled to see Wallet Squirrel continue to grow!

Every day feels like an uphill struggle, but it’s a massive relief to see our income reports continue to increase revenue. It’s inspiring to see our labor every month on Wallet Squirrel translate to real dollars!

Our income reports have become a monthly ritual to be transparent about what we’re doing on Wallet Squirrel and how much we make. Think of it as a behind the scenes look at what we do. Perhaps a VIP pass into the inner workings of what blogging really looks like.

What We Did In July, 2020

• We wrote a fun article – 37 Amusing Facts About Money To Dominate Trivia Night. Each fun fact was a blast to share and all our friends have loved this article!
• We updated 2 older, but popular posts because the Google Gods love when old posts are updated with new, relevant content. So we updated our TeeSpring Review article (a fun way to make extra money) and our 3 Reasons Why Monthly Stocks Are Better Than Quarterly.
• On the website end, we now made our sidebar “sticky”. Meaning the bottom content of the sidebar will “stick” with the reader as they continue to scroll down the article. This will help with ad revenue, but more importantly, share our popular articles like “Ways To Make Money” with our readers. I’m hoping this helps people consider checking out the article! Do you see it?
• In SEO we added a few more links on other websites (thank you to those added us!) plus we submitted to 10 different sites for a guest post. So far no one has reached back out to take us up on the offer, but we’ll keep trying. In these situations persistence is key!
• Lastly, if you follow us on social media, you may have noticed we’ve been super active lately. No formal reason, we’re just kind of digging social media recently.

How Much Did We Make in July, 2020

The third straight month of our income being in the $200’s. By itself, it’s not incredible, but I personally need to see this increase for my personal motivation. Seeing these income reports consistently go up is a bit of an ego boost and a reminder that people can make money blogging.

I need this and I think most people do in some capacity. We need to know we’re doing something right and I think we are!

If you’re curious about any of these ways to make money, here are past articles we’ve written about each one!

• Google AdSense – make money when people see or click on website banner ads
• Affiliate Marketing (earn a commission if someone buys a product through a link on your website)
• Blue Host Affiliate (website hosting we use, if people use our link we earn a commission)
• Stock Photography – We make money whenever one of our photos sells online.
• Sponsored Link – Companies pay us to link back to their site. If it makes sense, we add it.
• Interest Checking/Saving Account – Making extra money from the money already in my bank account.
• Cash Back Credit Card – I use my credit card all the time (responsibly) and make an average $25 back a month!
• Seeking Alpha – I wrote a couple of articles for Seeking Alpha 2 years ago and continue to make money for each page view
• Lending Club – A Peer-To-Peer Lending Company. I invested in loans and make interest back monthly.
• Dividends – All the money we make on Wallet Squirrel, I invest in dividend stocks. These continue to residual income every month and at some point will fund my retirement if I keep building this up!

 

 

How We Spent Our Money In July, 2020?

Earning money is great, but it does cost a small amount to run a blog and our various money experiments. Not much, but here is a full break down of the expenses to run WalletSquirrel.com.

Monthly Expenses – $67 Total = Bluehost [$36], Sitelock [$8], Domain [$2], Bloom [$7], Tailwind [$14]

Every Tuesday Adam and I meet in the morning to discuss money coming in and money going out. We keep it all in a ledger and the above were our expenses. We also go over each charge and ask ourselves “Do We Really Need This?”.

Most items are necessary to keep our website running, but others like Tailwind we could cancel and be virtually unimpacted. However it saves us time, so we continue to look at it to grow our Pinterest traffic.

We’re currently at 35,000 monthly views, that’s up from 5,000 monthly viewers at the beginning of June. A nice increase for sure if you’re ever considering Pinterest for traffic!

What’s Next In August?

I would really like to get a guest post on a website with 40+ Domain Authority. It’s not easy.

I’m also going to continue to build out our Ways To Make Money page until we have more ways than any other website on the internet. It’s a process. Lol

Lastly, we’ve been approved for some fun affiliate links recently, for products we already use. I’m excited to share a bit more about those and see if anyone else is looking for similar tools to help their blog. Let me know!

May was a great month, and I’ll explain why in a bit but first let’s refresh why we share these income reports.

Here on Wallet Squirrel, we talk about building multiple streams of income. We’re transparent with what we make and how we make it.

Our goal is to build a blueprint for people to generate their own additional income streams (if you want). We do this for fun and enjoy the additional income they bring.

We’ve been sharing these income reports the last 5 years and we continue to so because it’s a blast!

What’s Been New On Wallet Squirrel Last Month?

We’ve been up to SO much in May, it’s honestly nuts. Like someone gave drugs to a blogger, busy. Lots of cool things to share!

On the backend, if you’ve ever wanted to be a blogger (if you want to blog) here is what it’s like.

• We updated our Google AdSense ads to make them responsive (fit different screen types better).
• We transitioned our affiliate links to Amazon Affiliate links rather than Viglink. (more to come on that)
• Updated our “Top Posts” on the sidebar
• Created a template for upcoming Wallet Squirrel Instagram posts
• Sent a couple of emails to potential sponsors (hopefully that works out)
• Signed up for HARO (Help A Reporter Out) to get some Wallet Squirrel Press, maybe…
• Updated our Homepage look. It’s REALLY cool!
• We joined a couple of Influencer Networks. We’re writing an article about this later.
• Set up a Media Kit (email us if you want to know what that looks like)

On the frontend, we have added some awesome posts!

• StepBet Review: How I Tried StepBet for 6 Weeks & Won Money – This was a crazy long experiment where I was walking around my apartment for 6 weeks to get my steps in. However, I won the challenge on the app and actually won money for being active! I was super impressed with the app and share lots of screenshots of how much I made and how it works.
• I Bought 85 Shares of DCP With The Recent Oil Crash and Made $500 – It was a fun dividend purchase when both the coronavirus and oil was at an all-time low. I spent around $200 on 85 shares at $2.50 per share and now those shares are worth around $935. Pretty cool, but I really just enjoy the dividends!

May 2020 Income Report

The coolest part about May is that it was the highest Dividend Payment I ever received and since my future income relies on those dividend payments, I really love as they increase. A big part of this was those additional 85 shares of DCP I bought.

Here is the full income report with all our various streams of income.

If you are curious about any of income streams, here is where we’ve written about them before:

• Google AdSense (article coming next month)
• Affiliate Marketing (earn a commission if someone buys a product through a link on your website)
• Blue Host Affiliate (website hosting we use, if people use our link we earn a commission)
• Stock Photography – We make money whenever one of our photos sells online.
• StepBet – We made money being active. See the recent article
• Sponsored Link – A trading platform paid for a link in a past blog post. It made sense because they are pretty cool.
• Interest Checking/Saving Account – Making extra money from the money already in my bank account.
• Cash Back Credit Card – I use my credit card all the time (responsibly) and make an average $25 back a month!
• Seeking Alpha – I wrote a couple of articles for Seeking Alpha 2 years ago and continue to make money for each page view
• Lending Club – A Peer-To-Peer Lending Company. I invested in loans and make interest back monthly.
• Dividends – All the money we make on Wallet Squirrel, I invest in dividend stocks. These continue to residual income every month and at some point will fund my retirement if I keep building this up!

 

 

Where our money goes

It super great to earn money, but there are a lot of things we have to pay for in order to manage WalletSquirrel.com. Here are what those expenses look like. Honestly, it’s not a lot of money to manage a blog.

Monthly Expenses – $83 Total = Bluehost[$36], Sitelock [$8], Domain [$2], Bloom [$7], Tailwind [$14]

Any additional income goes toward investing in those dividend stocks. It’s like the circle of life but in reality the circle of investing. We make money through these money experiments and that money goes directly to our investment funds to make more money with dividends!

What’s Next For June

June is going to be another big month! We’re doing lots of outreach via emails and some awesome social media outreach coming up.

In fact, that’s a big reason we updated our homepage (feel to tell us how great it is in the comments below). We wanted to make sure with our new outreach efforts, that when people visit our website, they would instantly know what we do and what we’re about.

It’s going to be a great month! I’m not sure where all this crazy blogging energy is coming from, but it’s going to be fun in June!

All the monthly income is below, but the exciting part is the news coming next month about Wallet Squirrel!

Sources of Income January – $147.72

$52.31– Cashback Credit Card

$50.80 – Dividends

$20.23 – Interest Checking/Savings Account

$9.55 – Wallet Squirrel AdSense

$8.72 – Stock Photography

$3.68– Lending Club

$1.37- Epic Niche Site Affiliate Marketing

$1.06 – Seeking Alpha Articles