Welcome to 2024.
“When the going gets tough, put one foot in front of the other and just keep going. Don’t give up.”
– Roy T. Bennett
In this report, I'll break down Swift Salary's Q4 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 Q4 2023
New content:
- 4 new articles published. 1 less than last quarter. Some pages and other articles were moved around. 77 total articles.
- 27 new platforms published. 3 less than last quarter. 183 total.
- Added 14 new opportunities. 28 less than last quarter. 241 total.
- Added 3 new platform types. Same added as last quarter. 11 total.
- 52 new user reviews added. 174 less than last quarter. 972 total.
- 1 new YouTube video published. 1 more than last quarter. 3 total.
Updates:
- Published first platform with a “depositor” user type: KOHO. This paves the way for more platforms like this to be published in the future.
- Ran email subscriber re-engagement campaign to remove inactive subs
- Converted Surveys by Country and Surveys by Payout Option roundups from pages to posts for better discoverability.
- Implemented code to programatically update alternatives page post modified date when the platforms on the page change.
- Replaced Ad Inserter plugin with custom code to reduce number of active plugins.
- Created custom WP console-style dashboard for tracking specific activities on my site (like when pages are updated programatically)
- Updated affiliate disclaimer
- Filmed paid survey apps YouTube video
- Improved code for programatically creating platform roundups (like this). I was running multiple WP queries before, now I only need one. I can also check when new platforms are added, or when platofrms are removed. When this happens, I programatically update the post modified date.
- Introduced the “Browser” device type to the device taxonomy so users can more easily find app-based platforms if preferred.
- Added descriptive questions to platform editorial review ratings. E.g. safety -> “Is this platform safe for users?”
- Updated platform main profile header tag to contain “Reviews & Overview” for more immediate clarity.
- Updated platform page header mobile layout to be centered. Looks cleaner.
- Finished converting all old review articles into platform pages. This took a lot longer than expected — about 4 months.
- Updated Apps That Pay You to Walk quite thoroughly, though rankings have only decreased since, which is frustrating.
- Updated category archives with new custom output including a relative email opt-in, recommended reading, and sub-topics if available.
- Removed “Start Here” page as it's no longer needed. Each category hub is its own start here page.
- Removed Content Views Pro and WP External Links plugins, no longer needed. WP External Links was also causing a strange problem with widgets (e.g. removing attributes like “required” from input forms and messing up my email opt-ins)
- Built the article discovery tool. Similar to the platform discovery tool but for quickly and easily finding articles on the site.
- Added “Review at a Glance” section to platform main profile pages for better user experience.
- Updated site footer for cleaner look and easier navigation to certain pages.
- Updated “Contact” button on platform pages to “Comment” for more clarity. Some users thought it was for contacting the platform owners.
- Started funneling subscribers from MMO course to Swift Saturday weekly emails.
Blog Income and Expenses for Q4 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: $3,118.45 Gross Revenue
Welp, the win from last quarter's increase in revenue was short lived. This was a bit predictable as a large portion of my income last quarter came from affiliate sales of a course that was on promotion. Another thing that contributed to the drop was a decrease in traffic (more info on that below).
This level of income is less than I made in Q4 of 2019 (4 years ago). This hurts.
Here's the monthly breakdown:
- October: $1,152.03
- November: $1,298.59
- December: $667.83
Revenue Sources Summary
- Affiliate Income ($714.89)
- Advertising Income ($2,403.56)
- Mediavine
Expense Breakdown: $1,847.54 Spent
Notable expenses include:
- Bank Fees and Charges – $72.47
- Tools/Software/Web Services
- Airtable – $49.34
- Asset Cleanup Pro – 43.53
- GSuite – $50.07
- MailerLite – $404.18
- Namecheap – $21.75
- OpenAI- $27.21
- Siteground – $208.15
- Slack – $35.90
- Freelancers
- Writers – $843.30
- Review submissions – $94.91
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Traffic Breakdown: 107,783 Pageviews
As mentioned above, after last quarters increase, traffic declined again this quarter. We lost all the gains we made plus some extra. From what I can tell this is due to the Google update that happened in November. Two of my top traffic roundups significantly lost rankings (even though both have been updated pretty regularly).
I've noticed the search results for roundups are now often taken over by forums (Reddit, Quora, BlackHatWorld, etc.) and things like app listings and product websites rather than actual roundups. Kind of worrying if Google continues taking it that way, but I struggle to see how it's better for user experience. Some of the content is quite thin and really not helpful at all. I've also seen some savvy affiliate marketers sneaking affiliate links into Reddit comments and such, and I can only imagine that's going to get worse and worse if it continues to work.
That said, it's easy for me to say that I think my user experience and content is better than the results Google is serving. Of course I would think that. And even if it's true, it doesn't change anything. It seems my best bet at this point is to start looking for alternative sources of traffic.
Some ideas:
- Start my own subreddit and repurpose content there. I'm not really sure how well this will work as, from my experience, it's the more aged and authoritative subreddits that are ranking in the SERPs.
- Run paid ads. Once the platform discovery tool is built out a bit more and I have a more diverse range of platforms on my site, this might be a viable option. Much more risky though.
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 Q4 of 2023:
16.4k clicks and 1.96M impressions. That's a 25.19% increase in clicks compared to last quarter's 13,100 clicks. That's a much smaller jump than we've seen in past quarters, and as you can see from the chart above, it seems that even my platform pages are being hit by the Google updates.
On the bright side, these pages did grow, and they didn't get hit as badly as my regular articles.
Here's a quarter-by-quarter overview since the start of the project:
Email List: 5,714 Active Subscribers
Started Q4 2023 with 6,092 subscribers and ended with 5,655. That's a 437 subscriber (7.17%) decrease.
Here's a full look at the gain/loss:
As you can see, as mentioned in last quarters report, I ran a re-engagement campaign this quarter which resulted in the removal of a lot of inactive subscribers. This has had a positive affect on my open rates though so it was needed.
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 21.90%. That's a tiny (0.14%) increase over last quarters 21.76% open rate.
Note: I use MailerLite as my email service provider.
Follow Up Goals for Q4 of 2023
- Publish 50 platforms, finish converting old review pages. I did finish converting old review pages, but only managed to get 27 new platform pages published. This is definitely not enough to grow traffic how I'd like to.
- Something I can do to improve this right away is get better at asking my freelancers for revisions. A lot of the time if something is missing from a writeup, I'll dive in and fix it myself. This seems productive as it gets done right away and exactly how I like it, but in the long term it just keeps me on the hamster wheel. It takes time away from me being able to focus on higher level tasks like content planning, keyword research, code improvement, etc.
- Another thing I need to do is stop worrying about platform pages being perfect. They're going to need to be updated at some point anyway, so if they're not perfect at first, that's ok.
- Publish 5 platform roundups. Only published one (cashback sites). However, I researched a ton of ideas for Q1 2024.
- Plan: I need to start doing groups of similar platforms, publish a roundup for them, and then move on to a new group. What I've been doing is just focusing on one group for way too long and it makes it impossible to publish more roundups. These can bring high traffic if they rank well so they should be higher priority.
- Publish 10 more payout option pages. I didn't end up doing any of these as they don't seem to get indexed very well. Might need to take a closer look at them in Q1 2024.
Goals for Q1 of 2024
- Publish 50 platforms.
- Publish 5 platform roundups.
- Publish 10 more payout option pages.
- Publish 4 YouTube videos. New goal. Focusing on an alternative traffic source. Google search traffic is getting rougher and rougher, so why not try Google's video search platform. What could go wrong?
Final Thoughts
Alright, it's a new year. Not the best start to one for Swift Salary, but I'm still not losing faith just yet. I also have some other projects in the works that I'm excited about for this year, so I'm staying optimistic.
Let's make 2024 a good one.
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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