Alex Mizerski
- Feb 4, 2021
- 5 min read

Site Net Worth - January 2021

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!

Recent and Popular Posts:

Fundrise Review

Ways to save on groceries

50/30/20 rule

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.

January 2021 wasn't particularly successful from a revenue perspective, but that doesn't matter and as you can see below isn't our only goal. We saw no rev from Google Ads and no rev from Affiliate Marketing which has been our only source of revenue up to this point.

Where we saw key improvements was from SEO. 30 days ago we only ranked for 2 key words/phrases. Today we rank for more than 10 as a result of updates to our older articles and the addition of some new material. While SEO wasn't a key focus when January began I noticed some trends within our Google Search Console data and began to update and write to see if I could further our improvements there (we did!).

While we didn't continue our run of money making months, we drove more organic traffic. This type of traffic is free and if executed upon effectively could help us turn The Saving Dude into a money-making venture eventually with a minimal amount of financial investment.

The Details:

Site Net Worth Chart - December 2020

Net Worth - $0.00

Well that didn't work out too well for us. We didn't drive the right type of reader to our site. Typically our revenue is driven by Google Adsense, but that wasn't the focus during Jan 2021

Total Hours Spent: 20 hours

January started out hot with 3 reviews written in the first 14 days, but we had a lull with some winter weather that required us to stay home with our son and reduced some of the free time I have to work on the blog

Articles Written: 6 vs 6 in December

Overall this was an average month from a content production perspective. I did spend some time trying to clean up the SEO of some older articles (an evergreen effort) and so far haven't seen results of that effort.

Income Breakdown:

$0.00

Alexa Site Ranking (new this month): 2,461,713 - Not the trend we want to continue. We are down about 400k spots from last month. In defense of the site we were running ads a month ago (because Wix gave us $100 free dollars to do so) and over the last 30 days we have not run a single ad.

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

We added quite a few more affiliate partners - what we are learning is our readers don't care what affiliate partners we review or talk about. If I personally don't use them or don't care about them, then they won't convert to affiliate $$s
I sent emails to 8 publications trying to highlight my writing skills and heard back from zero. From what I've read this is a pretty typical rate of return. If I really want to get this blog some notice I'll have to email a ton more people.
Our goal of 8 articles wasn't met, def a loss

Here is a quick list of what we are worked on in January 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