Alex Mizerski
- Jan 1, 2021
- 5 min read

Site Net Worth - December 2020

Welcome readers to our monthly Net Worth Statement! I plan to include a monthly net worth statement for a variety of reasons. First, most of the other blogs I read and follow have started out supplying income statements (we focus on net worth here so that's what I'll provide). They are a good read and give you a sense of where their focus is from a site monetization perspective. Second, because I intend to try and monetize this site I think it will be a good tool to help me track progress and share with my audience how that part of this project is going. Third/last, I think, is transparency and accountability for both myself and anyone who follows the blog. The more transparent I can be about the progress I'm making them better I can focus my attention on the efforts that are moving the needle. In addition, if I know I need to write this article once a month I better have something to add!

Before we get too deep into the nitty-gritty let me add some context around how The Saving Dude came to be and a little about the Why behind the site. A few years ago my wife and I launched a blog that mainly focused on taking care of our amazing English Bulldog, Daisy. Shortly after we launched the blog I took a job in a new city, we moved three times in 18-months and the blog writing got away from us. I did, however, get a taste for what building a blog can be like and I loved it. I really enjoy writing, I enjoy building things, and I really like the challenge of trying to build a business online. Writing a blog provides me with an opportunity to exercise all those mental muscles in one place.

If you want to start your own money-making blog take a look at my step by step instructions.

So in late July 2020 The Saving Dude was launched with the intent of showing our readers how to increase their net worth by tracking basic information month over month. In addition, we have and will talk about easy ways to save money, easy ways to make money, and a few other random topics that I might stumble upon that seem cool and relevant to talk about. I'll also reflect on some of the things that my wife and I have done to save money over the last few years. Some of these efforts have been difficult and not all saving is easy. The results of our efforts have added up to an additional $250,000 added to our net worth in the last 3 years. We have also paid down nearly $100,000 in debt during that time! So I'd say it was all totally worth it.

If you are familiar with The Saving Dude a key focus here is net worth and growing it over time. In the spirit of consistency, we will report out all of our expenses and income that count toward our monthly net worth. This will look slightly different than a typical net worth tracker as I will isolate income and expenses per month vs over time.

November was another fairly successful month (when compared against previous months). We made another 35 cents from advertising on the site and we made our first money from affiliate marketing, 30 more cents for The Saving Dude!

The Details:

Site Net Worth Chart - December 2020

Net Worth - $9.90

By far our best month driven solely by Google Adsense

Total Hours Spent: 20 hours

December started out hot with 6 articles published in the first sixteen days. Then the holidays took over.

Articles Written: 6 vs 8 in November

We started out the month hot and I thought it was going to be a record month for articles written, but alas, that did not happen. Someday, I'll release 15 articles in a month, one every other day. That is the goal at some point.

Income Breakdown:

$9.90 - Via Google Adsense

Alexa Site Ranking (new this month): 2,057,030 - This is about 1,000,000 spots better than last month so that's promising. As far as I've read your ranking is not a direct reflection of your ability to make money from a site, but I need to get more traffic and build an audience so this will be a good measure for a year or so to see how my traffic is growing. Getting under 500,000 will be the goal for 2021. Top personal finance blogs range from 10,000-90,000 in Alexa Ranking so eventually, I'd like to get there, but for now, I'll take 500k.

Here is a quick list of what we are worked on in October with updates:

Update the Side Hustle Guide and Starting a Blog to align with our SEO optimization efforts from September - updates to both of these articles haven't driven a ton of additional traffic because the keywords/phrases we are trying to rank for are very challenging but this effort will pay off in the future
Write a ton more material - while we didn't write more total articles the articles we did write took more time to ensure they were thorough and ready for our readers - the focus over the next few months will be releasing more articles/content with a side-eye to SEO
Ensure all articles have some sort of ad within them to help monetize the site - This was key to the $1.32 we made during October - done but because of the Adsense issue our rev went down MoM

Here is a quick list of what we are worked on in November with updates:

Update a variety of articles for SEO - updates were made to 5 articles in an effort to start to rank in SEO, but as yet, I haven't seen any success
Release more content - I have seen SEO success with one of our newest articles. I believe that success is driving some of the Alexa score improvement
Add more affiliate partners - done, 8 more added

Here is a quick list of what we plan to work on in December with updates:

Add more affiliate partners - done 10 more added
Email a variety of publications to try and get backlinks to articles (helps to give the site credibility) - I only emailed two publications
Write at least 8 more articles - almost

2021 Goals: