Root of Good January 2014 Blog Update
January was a sweet month for Root of Good. Overall traffic increased by about 20-25% compared to December. The search traffic has really increased in the last month.
I’m starting to notice a trend for social media subscribers. Across all social media channels I tend to get about 100 new subscribers each month. It’s been pretty steady month to month. Now that I’m including Feedly subscribers in my social media count, I’m just short of 500 social media subscribers. I’m feeling good about those numbers since Root of Good isn’t quite five months old yet. What is even more amazing is thinking about where Root of Good might be as 2015 rolls in. Maybe 1,600 subscribers? So “hi” to all who are currently subscribed, and thanks for following. To the rest, make sure to subscribe on Facebook, Twitter, or by email or RSS reader (in the column to the right).
And don’t forget to share! If you see something awesome here, please harass your closest friends on facebook, twitter, or email and share the RootofGoodness with them! Unless you don’t want to let them have a better life and grow wealthier like you.
Stats for January 2014:
Visitors: 15,120 (+3,092 vs previous month)
Unique Visitors: 8,928 (+1,356)
Pageviews: 28,507 (+5,429)
Alexa Rank: 60,189 (-7,497 and lower is better!)
Most popular pages:
$150,000 Income, $150 Income Tax
Running Out Of Money In Early Retirement
SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook subscribers: 71 (+10 versus December 2013)
Blog email subscribers/followers: 67 (+17)
Twitter followers: 176 (+31)
Feedly readers: 147 (+40)
Revenue: $826. Blog earnings are down by almost half compared to last month. There have been a few issues with advertisers being slow in updating their reporting, so I anticipate the revenue figure to be higher in February to reflect earnings that actually occurred in January.
To put Root of Good’s earnings in perspective, $826 in monthly revenue represents 31% of our budgeted retirement spending! That’s almost a third of our retirement budget funded by what’s basically a hobby (that happens to be monetizable). Many days I don’t really do anything related to Root of Good other than approve a few comments and post a few comments in response.
It still boggles my mind that I can generate revenue from writing about the things that cross my mind and then publishing these thoughts on the web. The extra revenue is also another layer of security in our early retirement financial plan. Here’s what I said in my December 2013 blog update:
If I can continue funding half of our budgeted retirement spending from Root of Good revenue, it means I won’t have to withdraw much from our investment portfolio. The portfolio will continue to grow even more, thereby providing an additional margin of safety for our early retirement. As I outlined in my recent article on running out of money in early retirement, getting a little side income flowing is awesome for two reasons. Side income helps avoid the psychological stress of watching investment values decline and it reduces the financial stress of pulling money out of investments when they are down in value. Throughout 2013, investments have done nothing but go up and up. That’s not usually the case, and eventually I’ll be watching our portfolio go down, down, down. Having a little cash flow coming in won’t make pulling small amounts out of the portfolio as painful.
I never got around to writing the prescient blog post about “the stock market is really fun when it goes up forever, but less fun when it takes a dive”. I’m not sure if January’s minor correction constitutes a dive, but it certainly was a wake up call that what goes up can go down. We lost about a year’s worth of expenses due to this minor correction, but we aren’t really worried about it, especially since I’m able to generate revenue from Root of Good. Hopefully the money keeps flowing throughout 2014.
Looking Ahead
In February, Root of Good will have at least one guest post that I’m excited to share. More details coming soon.
In the mean time, I hope to keep publishing a post or two each week. That seems to be a good pace to adequately share what’s on my mind without preventing me from my other idle endeavors.
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Congrats on a great month of blogging! Especially since it’s only been up for 5 months! Side income is great while in the accumulation phase as it helps to spur on investment and get you to the end goal even quicker and even better when the markets are struggling since you don’t have to take out as much from the markets. Win win!
Very impressive! So glad you are able to generate income from the blog. Hope it goes gangbusters this year. Congratulations!
Good for you Justin, and well deserved. You have a great story and you tell it well, so I think your blog will continue to grow quickly this year.
Heck of a month to start the New Year, and offsetting your income needs is definitely a huge plus. Have you put any goals on your blogging, either in traffic, subscribers, or income, for 2014?
Not really. I set out to make at least enough to cover my hosting fees (~$8/month). I reached that goal.
I’d be happy with the $800 per month income since it goes a long way toward funding our retirement spending. As far as traffic, the more the merrier but I don’t have any grandiose goals. Yet.
Wow! $800 a month in blog revenue? That’s huge! I would love to pick your brain about this.
Not bad! I know you mentioned that this is just a hobby for you at the moment, but while your blog has some popularity to it you should really try to set some goals as well as monetization strategies that can be used to your advantage. Imagine if you were able to replace 100% of your budgeted retire spending from income that came as a result of simply writing on this blog!
I think I’d like to see 25-50% growth within a year. Since this is still a rather nascent blog, I figure that might be attainable. For now, I’m going to keep plugging away at 6-7 quality blog posts each month and monetize where it fits in.
Great month! $800/mo is pretty impressive, hopefully it will continue to grow along with that traffic!
Let’s hope!
Traffic is going up, that is the main thing to worry about. You have already successfully monetized the site so as traffic continues to go up, so should your revenue. I reckon you’ll be covering 100% of your retirement costs by the end of the year at this rate 😉
That would be pretty sweet! We’ll see how the year plays out.