Reaching $100K in monthly revenue

Yay! Finally making six figures a month in revenue! What a lovely finale for these reports.

This is going to be a super short blog post. I just set up my timer here and gave myself 30 minutes to write it.

Why?

I’m super busy. Honestly, I can’t recall a time in my life when I’ve been this busy. For starters, we’re moving to a new home this week. As you can imagine, that alone cuts into my work time like crazy.

You may recall that when we moved to the US three months ago, we made the decision to move into a fully-furnished AirBnB type rental so we can hit the ground running and keep working right away.

Now it’s time to move into a long-term rental. And furnish it from scratch, too. Yikes!

The good news is that we have several days for making the move, starting tomorrow. The bad news is that yes, I’ll be out of commission for several days, moving stuff between two places.

You’d think that we’ll have nothing to haul, coming from a fully-furnished place. But you’d be wrong. We managed to buy a bunch of stuff, including office furniture. AirBnB accommodations rarely have fully operational office rooms, so we created our own here.

But it’s never just one thing, is it? When it rains, it pours. I found that to be particularly true here in Florida. We are also dealing with several other issues that I won’t bore you with. I can tell you they are time-consuming as heck.

And then there’s this small issue of actually running my ever-growing web publishing empire.

And now I’m seven minutes into typing this post, so time to talk about the latest traffic and revenue stats.

A super brief report for September

Sorry, no time to go into too much detail this time around. I just had to share the fantastic news though –

Yup! We made it past the $100K point in revenue!

$105,782 to be exact.

September exceeded my expectations with an increase of more than 17% in revenue from the previous month’s total of $90,196.

While some of that was thanks to our continuous and steady growth in traffic, I think we were also seeing the effect of the end-of-quarter higher RPMs too.

As always, I don’t have an exact breakdown of our expenses. We managed to publish 518 posts in September, so we probably had around $45,000 in expenses based on my usual formula (you can see the breakdown in last month’s report).

Future Plans for Yeys

This will be my last report of our overall revenue figures.

When I started these reports, I wasn’t making any profit at all. In fact, I was investing a lot of money into the business and ending my reports in the red. Month after month. It took a leap of faith to keep on investing.

The reports I shared documented the growth of some of the sites from infancy. I think many people appreciated seeing that and understanding how slow the process can be.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have experienced this growth over the past two years. I’ve moved from writing my own content on 2-3 blogs into creating a company with 9 full-time employees and dozens of contractors.

I’ve come to the point when my daily dealings are very different than what they used to be when I started out. The challenges of running a company are a far cry from those of working on my own. Most of them are unique to my setup and shouldn’t really interest most of this blog’s readers.

The reports I’m going to share

I still want to continue blogging on Yeys, and I know that everyone loves reports. I was inspired by other people’s reports and learned a lot from them. I’d like to keep sharing with this wonderful community moving forward as well.

However, instead of sharing the overall business bottom lines, I plan on sharing a couple of specific sites, tracking them once again, from their infancy. I have a few that are relatively new and would make good case studies for people who are getting into web publishing.

So, don’t cancel your email subscriptions just yet!

I won’t commit to a timeline at this point. I’m hoping to launch the new reports in the coming few months, but I don’t want to make any promises. It will have to wait until I have more of that oh-so-precious commodity: time.

With that in mind, my timer is about to buzz, so I need to wrap up this post. My apologies for it being so short but I’m hoping this last overall report will help inspire others in their journey too. As always, let me know what you think – but please know that it could take me a while to check comments. Thank you in advance for understanding!

p.s. I mentioned a special project with Jon Dykstra of Fat Stacks in my last post. That is still on! I talked to Jon and he was very understanding about having to postpone our special event. I hope we’ll still get around to doing that in 2021, but if not, early 2022 it is!

One more plug-in for Jon’s wonderful courses here. If you haven’t tried them out yet – do. They helped me to get to where I am today. You can read more about them and other courses and tools that I use right here.

30 Comments

  1. Congrats on the milestone Anne. You should create “10 things (or 100 things) I learnt about getting to 100k”, when you have time.

  2. Thank you so much for these updates Anne! They are always so inspiring! Sad to see the revenue updates go, but super excited to be following the younger sites once again! Can I ask, how many sites are you currently at?

    • hi Jasper, it’s 18 sites at this point. About half of them generate over $1K a month in revenue each (some way over $1k, of course) and the rest are smaller. Four are baby sites that hardly make anything and I thought it would be interesting to track them as they grow.

  3. Congrats Anne. That’s a huge milestone. You’ve built an amazing portfolio of sites all at various revenue and traffic levels which is super smart. Thanks for sharing these. I’m looking forward to our project and of course thanks as always for the mention. Good luck with the move.

    • Thank you so much! Your support along this journey has been phenomenal and I am very grateful for that! And thanks for creating the awesome Fat Stacks courses and forums. It’s great having a solid little community where we can discuss things with like-minded publishers.

  4. This is amazing Anne, and so inspiring. I regularly go back and read your older reports when I’m low on motivation and get distracted with shiny objects. They help me remember what’s important: pressing publish. Can’t wait to see your new case studies and projects in the future.

    • Thank you, Kristina! You got it right – whatever you do, keep on publishing. Publishing may not always guarantee success, but not publishing guarantees failure. So when in doubt – publish another article!

    • Thanks, Sharon! We’ll get there. We have the two places overlapping so it’s a gradual sort of move. We were there today and I realized just how much cleaning the place needs, ugh! My husband is trying to talk me into taking a cleaning service tomorrow, to save on time. We’ll see how that goes.

  5. Thanks so much for these posts!

    I find they help me avoid my shiny object syndrome to see what happens when you stay the course. Happy to see you changing things up to keep it fresh & fun for you (I hope) & working to share the early stages for folks like me.

    Best wishes on the move!

  6. Love your posts, it‘s always a pleasure reading them 🙂

    Do you roughly know, how many articles are published across your niche sites?

  7. I understand the time constraints and the amount of work a detailed income report takes.
    I do video reports not written and even those take a full day’s work once a month.
    Enjoy your new home.

  8. Hi Anne,

    New here and I am enjoying your articles here at yeys, I have a few questions (I hope you won’t mind)

    1) How much does your Top 3 sites make and how old are they?
    2) What is the number of articles on your biggest site?
    3) Have you acquired any site among your portfolio or you have built everything from scratch?

    • Hi Asjad,
      Sorry about the delay in replying here – it’s been a hectic few weeks.
      1. I don’t want to share specific numbers at this point, but roughly, I would say the three top sites make around $60K a month put together). They are 3-20 years old.
      2. Over 3,000 articles.
      3. All built from scratch. Most over the last three years.

      • I have long thought that in order to succeed with a digital marketing website, for example a blog or some other revenue generating website, you would need to write thousands of articles. I budgeted for this and found that you could get 1,000 articles for about $10,000 and hire great quality writers.

        Can you tell me a little about your writing method, for example if you hire freelancers or if you do it all yourself? It’s really interesting, and I do hope to make plenty with my sites into the future.

        I recently started a social media agency, but I have always longed to have an affiliate marketing website or 3 that make good money. I was going to make a website about web hosting, with 400-1000 articles. For a $10,000 budget. I did the keyword research myself. Does this make sense? Thank you very much.

        • Hi Auren,
          $10 per article for great quality writers sounds too good to be true. Let me know what your method is. Even paying 1 cent per word, once you factor in editing (and 1 cent per word articles would need editing), proofreading, adding images (buying them), and formatting and uploading to WordPress, in my experience, that alone would get you to the $15-$20 per article. And that’s assuming your articles are only 1000 words long. A bit on the short side. Also, you may find that great writers at 1 cent per word aren’t that common, if they even exist…
          I blogged about how I find writers here. And I’m not even factoring the time and effort it takes to find and train writers into the above estimate. Honestly, I think that if you want good content (not to mention great), you’re looking at $50-$70 per article, at the very least.

  9. Thanks for replying Anne; I know moving to a new place can be very hectic. I have a few more questions if you don’t mind.

    1) From where are you are recruiting Editor and VA
    2) how much are you paying your Editor and VA
    3) As I was reading that you are pulling 500-700 articles every week and have just 2 editors, how many articles per day 1 editor handles?
    4) Any advice for beginners? like where should we focus if want to replicate something similar to you?

    • Hi Adjad, lets see if I can help with that –
      1. Sources vary. For offshore VA’s, I go to OnlineJobs.ph. For editors, so far we’ve promoted from writers who have been working with us for a while.
      2. That depends. For editors, we have US employees on the payroll now, so it’s a complex kind of paycheck. We pay freelancers $18 an hour. For VA’s, it’s $3-$5 per hour, depending on how long they’ve been with us. We also provide health benefits at $50 a month and the 13th month salary.
      3. I would say that with an experienced writer, an editor can cover 3-4 articles in an hour. So, the answer to your question depends on the number of hours per day they can work for you.
      4. Create your own system. Test to see what works for you and then scale that. Don’t invest too much before you know something actually works for you, as your mileage may vary.
      Good luck!

  10. SO impressive Anne
    I’ve been following along silently for awhile now and I’ve been inspired by your reports numerous times.

    Perhaps I missed it here, but how many page views did you get here to cross the 100k threshold?

    • Hi Damon,
      I don’t think I had mentioned that in the post. I guess I was just super rushed. I checked now and the number was 2.4 million pageviews in total.

  11. Hello Anne,

    Super impressed with your success…Congrats! I noticed from your posts that you sell sites that you build. Is your strategy to keep the sites that earn you over $100K per month and sell any new sites you build? Thanks in advance for sharing anything you can here.

    • Thanks, Frank!
      Actually, I am not selling any of the sites that were established before the summer or 2021 due to tax planning considerations (affected by our move to the US at that time). Moving forward, our plan is to sell new sites once they’re established, if we get the right buyer for the right price. Otherwise, I’m generally happy to keep holding on to them. No pressure either way.

  12. Hey Anne,

    any updates on the project with Jon? 🙂
    Is it going to be something like a “how to scale from 0 to 500 posts per month” kind of project? That would be so gooood 🙂

    • Hi Atti,
      Great question. I’ll be reaching out to Jon about that really soon. February and March will be super busy for me, but maybe after that. And it won’t be a joint site, more like sharing information and reflecting that in both blogs. I don’t want to share more than that, because we haven’t worked out the details for this round.

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