The first quarter of 2023 is complete. The last couple of years have been rough for Swift Salary.
In this report, I'll break down the site's Q1 performance including revenue, expenses, highlights, stats, and more.
If you have any questions about anything, leave me a comment.
To see all of my past income reports (going all the way back to my first year of blogging), go here.
Highlights from Q1 2023
- 28 new platforms published. That's 3 more than last quarter.
- Added 42 new opportunities. Sitting at 142 total.
- Added 1 new platform type. 5 total.
- Hit 546 approved user reviews
- Added Supported Languages to platforms
- Wrote legit checks / added missing info to all platforms (still need to import)
- Launched the platform comparison tool
- Updated the “Visit Platform” CTA button color to purple to make it stand out more
Platform Comparison Tool is Live
As mentioned in last quarter's report, I've been working on a platform comparison tool and launched it around the end of Q1.
If you want to try it out, go here.
The tool is pretty simple on the surface. You select two platforms to compare and it spits out a side-by-side comparison of the key attributes.
Behind the scenes, this is done with a WordPress URL rewrite and then just some custom PHP code to output all the content.
Blog Income and Expenses for Q3 2022
All income and expenses are recorded in Canadian dollars. Income is based on money that has actually hit my bank account (i.e. cash basis accounting).
Income Breakdown: $4,449.99 Gross Revenue
Welp…there goes the nice momentum we were building up. After two consecutive increases in quarterly revenue, we had a steep drop this quarter, bringing us back to ~2019 levels of revenue. Definitely discouraging.
One of our best (recent) money-makers was Sweatcoin, but referral payouts for that app have gone down as well as the # of referrals I'm bringing in, so that hit hard.
But…goes to show how much of a difference just a single successful revenue source can make. There's a lot of money to be made out there, I just need to keep at it and find more little gold mines.
Here's the monthly breakdown:
- January: $1,547.28
- February: $1,005.20
- March: $1,897.51
Revenue Sources Summary
- Affiliate Income ($1,776.05)
- 1Q – $3.01
- Adbloom $53.74
- Clickworker – $33.76
- CreditCardGenius – $17.40
- Dynata – $585.86
- Surveytime – $1.34
- Proofread Anywhere – $164.70
- Rakuten USA – $91.07
- Respondent – $25.42
- Bookscouter – $2.72
- Transcribe Anywhere – $729.45
- 100 Envelope Challenge Printables – $2
- Advertising Income ($2,671.94)
- Mediavine – $2,671.94
Expense Breakdown: $2,434.80 Spent
Notable expenses include:
- Bank Fees and Charges – $131.90
- Freelance writers – $1,578.32
- Incentivized reviews – $22.66
- GSuite – $46.80
- Site Reviews Premium plugin – $130.10
- NordVPN – $131.73
- Pretty Links Premium plugin – $81.79
- Slack – $35.50
- Zoho Books – $276
* Total Net Profit: $2,015.19 *
Traffic Breakdown: 121,435 Pageviews
Saw another decline in traffic this quarter, with pageviews falling 6.53% compared to Q4 2022. Ouch. Fortunately, traffic did start increasing toward the end of the quarter, so I'm expecting an increase next quarter.
Platform Page Traffic: 2.18k Clicks
We're tracking platform-related search traffic until we hit 100k clicks/month.
Here's what we had for Q1 of 2023:
2.18k clicks and 187k impressions! That's a 100% increase compared to last quarter's 1,090 clicks. We had a 241% quarter-over-quarter increase last quarter, so this quarter saw a bit of slower growth, but a 100% increase is still nothing to sneeze at.
Here's a quarter-by-quarter overview since the start of the project:
Email List: 5,463 Active Subscribers
Started Q1 2023 with 5,257 subscribers and ended with 5,463. That's a 206 subscriber (3.92%) increase.
Not bad, but still fewer than I'd like to see for an entire quarter.
Swift Saturday Newsletter Stats
The Swift Saturday newsletter is a weekly newsletter with money-making ideas, money-management tips, and market updates.
If you're interested, you can sign up or learn more here.
Open rates for the newsletter this quarter sat at an average of 21.72%. That's an improvement over last quarters 20.43% open rate.
Note: I use MailerLite as my email service provider.
Follow Up On Goals for Q1 of 2023
- Update old articles. I updated a few articles with small changes, but nothing huge. I need to really sit down, make a list of articles that have lost traffic, and focus on those.
- Publish 50 new platforms. Got 28 published. 56% of the way there. That's not great, but 14 of those platforms were added in March, so output is picking up. A new virtual assistant has been helping me recently and doing an awesome job, so that's really helped.
- Convert old reviews into platform pages. I converted one old review (UserTesting) to test. Looks like it has lost traffic since the update, so that's unfortunate. I think it's the link structure/H1 on the page that's causing problems.
- Release platform comparison tool. Got this done! Check it out here.
Goals for Q2 of 2023
- Start investing in other types of content. I still believe platform pages have a lot of potential, but growth has been slower than expected. Need to start releasing guide articles and other types of content to diversify traffic.
- Publish 50 new platforms. 4th try on this.
- Publish 5 new blog articles. This is a pretty small number so if we actually focus on it, it should be achievable.
- Continue updating older posts that have lost traffic.
Main Objectives for 2023
- Invest more into the business, continue getting better at outsourcing
- Hit 100k clicks/month with the platforms project
- Reach 300 total published platforms (20.8/month avg.)
- Achieve 400k pageviews in a single month
- 10k email subscribers
Final Thoughts
Although I'm pretty optimistic 90% of the time, I'm definitely feeling the struggle here recently with Swift Salary. I'm confident that what I'm working on is going to help others, but growth is taking a lot of time. Search engines just aren't picking up my new platform pages as quickly as I'd hope and my old content is getting clobbered.
I do know this though:
If I make it through this and bring traffic and revenue back up to new heights, it's going to feel real good.
Not planning on giving up.
Want to start a money-making blog of your own? Check out my guide on how to start a blog, then read my post on how to make money blogging.
- Have any questions about this quarter's blog income report? Leave a comment below!
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