Q3 2023 Blog Income Report: How Swift Salary Made $7,788.94

Another quarter in the bag.

“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”

– Robert Collier

In this report, I'll break down Swift Salary's Q3 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 Q3 2023

New content:

• 5 new articles published. 2 more than last quarter. 69 total.
• 30 new platforms published. 17 less than last quarter. 156 total.
• Added 42 new opportunities. 1 less than last quarter. 227 total.
• Added 3 new platform types but also deleted 3. Same added as last quarter. 8 total.
• 226 new user reviews added. 78 more than last quarter. 920 total.

Updates:

• Created a form for platform owners who want to get their platform featured on Swift Salary. Have already had a few fill it out, which is helpful for getting accurate content out. Hopefully more platform owners will be interested in being featured on Swift Salary as the directory grows.
• Updated the title for main profile platform pages from “[platform_name] Overview, Reviews, & Stats (2023)” to “[platform_name] Reviews, Overview, & Statistics (2023)” for better SEO and click-through rates. Most people are interested in seeing reviews.
• Introduced “Advertise” goal facet on the platform discovery tool + “ways to advertise” facet. You can use these filters to find platforms that offer advertising and advertising solutions.
• Added a loading icon to the platform discovery tool when a filter is interacted with. Better for user experience.
• When the goal is changed on the platform discovery tool (e.g. from “Make Money” to “Save Money”) any goal-specific filters are now reset to prevent confusion.
• Massively improved the way alternative platforms are generated. A similarity score is now generated and shown on alternative pages, and new factors are now considered to make generated alternatives more accurate.
• Made platform alternatives and user review pages completely programmatically generated. I no longer have to manually create the pages in the WP backend. They're automatically created and added to the sitemap + set for indexing when certain conditions are met. Had to delete and redirect all the old manually created pages after implementing this but it's been running very smooth since implementing.
• Added Payout Option pages to the sitemap as they weren't on there before. Should help with indexing.
• Updated user review star rating icons to match the type of review (e.g. earner review stars are green, buyer review stars are orange, etc.)
• Started using the MailerLite API + custom forms to collect subscribers as I was having problems with the WordPress plugin they offer. This is also better for customization and statistic tracking. Now, when someone subscribes, they're sent to a thank you page and I log the data into Google Analytics to see which email opt-in they signed up through and which page they signed up on.
• Changed the “Report Problem” button on platform pages to a simple “Contact” button.
• Added a field to user review forms so users can select whether or not to share their Gravatar profile image next to their reviews.
• Redirected old “Hustle Finder” tool to platform discovery tool.
• Converted both Survey Sites and GPT Sites roundups into programmatic platform roundups. They'll get updated automatically now.
• Added “Rent” goal to platform discovery tool. Use it to find platforms that allow you to rent goods.
• Wrote a new Make Money Online free email series. Launched it on September 14 and it currently has 127 subscribers. That's around 6.6 subscribers per day.
• Coded a simple meta box to show if there are duplicate reviews when editing a single review.
• Created review form for depositors (e.g. for banking and investment platforms).
• Coded editorial review output for the consumer/buyer user type. Also created automatically calculated review value for a platform's minimum payment amount (i.e. minimum cost to use the platforms paid services/products).

Blog Income and Expenses for Q3 2023

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: $7,788.94 Gross Revenue

Happy to see an increase in revenue this quarter. Nothing crazy but I'll take it.

Here's the monthly breakdown:

• July: $2,018.12
• August: $2,932.32
• September: $2,838.50

Revenue Sources Summary

• Affiliate Income ($5,040.29)
  • 1Q
  • Adbloom
  • CJ.com
  • CreditCardGenius
  • GG2U
  • Knowadays
  • Maxbounty
  • Panthera
  • Rakuten
  • Scribie
  • ShareASale
  • Sweatcoin
  • Transcribe Anywhere
• Advertising Income ($2,748.65)
  • Mediavine

Expense Breakdown: $3,185.77 Spent

Notable expenses include:

• Bank Fees and Charges – $203.57
• Tools/Software/Web Services
  • Airtable – $8.22
  • Copyscape – $6.69
  • Evernote – $179.19
  • FacetWP – $104.81
  • GSuite – $50.07
  • Namecheap – $41.37
  • Siteground – $680.31
  • Slack – $37.61
• Freelancers
  • Writers – $1,726.36
  • Review submissions – $172.49

Traffic Breakdown: 154,672 Pageviews

Not bad. Another small increase in pageviews this quarter. Up 14.54% since last quarter.

Platform Page Traffic: 13.1k Clicks

We're tracking platform-related search traffic until we hit 100k clicks/month.

Here's what we had for Q3 of 2023:

13.1k clicks and 1.3M impressions! That's a 71.69% increase in clicks compared to last quarter's 7,630 clicks. That's not as big of a jump as we saw last quarter, but I'm still pretty happy with this.

Here's a quarter-by-quarter overview since the start of the project:

The growth continues!

Email List: 5,714 Active Subscribers

Started Q3 2023 with 5,714 subscribers and ended with 6,092. That's a 378 subscriber (6.62%) increase.

Here's a full look at the gain/loss:

I implemented the new Make Money Online course email opt-in late in the quarter, so hopefully we will see some nice gains from that in Q4.

That said, I'm going to need to run a subscriber re-engagement campaign soon, which will definitely result in some big subscriber loss as, based on my data, quite a few subs (1k+) haven't opened any of my emails in the past 12 months.

(That big red spike on the chart in Q2 2021 is from a sub re-engagement campaign)

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 21.76%. That's a tiny (-0.46%) decrease over last quarters 22.22% open rate.

At the moment, I'm contemplating fazing out this newsletter. The new MMO course is getting more signups and way better open/click/unsub rates and I have some ideas on other automated series as well. These are way easier to run and they ensure subscribers see ALL the content in the series. Writing a newsletter every week takes a lot more time and when a new subscriber signs up, they don't get to see all the past content. It just seems like a better system to run automated series. The only problem I'm having is figuring out how to put sponsors/advertisers in the automated emails with an easy way to update them. Don't really want to have to go through dozens of emails and update them manually when my sponsor changes.

Note: I use MailerLite as my email service provider.

Follow Up Goals for Q3 of 2023

• Publish 5 “How to make money [insert opportunity]” guides. Didn't get any of these done as I wasn't really focused on it. After some SEO research I'm just not sure it's worth the time and effort at the moment.
• Publish 10 platform roundups. Only got 2 published.
• Publish 50 platforms. Got 30 published. Had 47 last quarter so this was a decrease. This was due to a mix of things: publishing new types of platforms takes longer, converting old reviews took longer because they included editorial review content that also had to be transferred, and I was training new hires.

Overall, I'm happy with what I accomplished in Q2. Kind of veered of track of the main goals, but got a lot of good stuff done.

Goals for Q4 of 2023

• Publish 50 platforms, finish converting old review pages. Gotta keep going for this goal until it's hit. I finished converting most of my old review pages last quarter, only 9 left to go.
• Publish 5 platform roundups. Lowering this goal a bit. I have ideas right now for at least 2. We'll see what happens.
• Published 10 more payout option pages. I have 12 of these set for indexing right now but they're pretty competitive. Not getting any clicks on Google. Got to get more out to gain more data.

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

We're in the final stretch of 2023.

Although I'm definitely not feeling optimistic all the time (in fact, lots of self-doubt recently), I'm proud of what I've built so far and excited to keep going.

Let's see what we can do.

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!