Yakezie Challenge Update

Yakezie Challenge Action Econ Stats 2Today marks the completion of three months of the Yakezie Challenge for Action Economics. During the past three months I have continued to post at a rate of at least 2 – 3 articles per week and have worked on promoting others as well as my blog.  Although according to Alexa ranking I have achieved the goal of the Yakezie challenge (dropped below 200,000) I still have a lot more I want to accomplish in the next 3 months. Professionally, September and October are extremely busy months for me, I am typically working 75 hours per week during that time frame.  Publishing content as frequently during this time period will be a challenge.

 

Yakezie Challenge AlexaAlexa Ranking:

When I first started the challenge my Alexa ranking was at 1,444,000, today it is down to just over 155,000.  I have already noticed a large decline in the momentum at which my Alexa ranking has fallen.  In the early stages of the challenge there were some days in which it fell by over 50,000 points, obviously those days are gone.  I still hope that I will break 100,000 by the end of the challenge.

I’ve looked into Alexa ranking a bit more and found out that Alexa looks at the prior three months of traffic data in forming its rankings, so my score in May was based on traffic dating back to March, when I had no traffic. This means my current ranking goes back to May.  I have read several articles asserting that summer is the slowest time for blogs, so my site may naturally pick up more visitors in the fall.

 

Google Analytics:

I use Google analytics to see traffic data and one aspect I find frustrating is the “none provided” term for Google searches.  Apparently if someone has their email open it does not record the term they used to search with to get to your site.  So far my most popular posts are:

Maximize Delta to Build Wealth (615 page views)

The $70 Million Paycheck (479 page views)

How Lucky We Are (354 page views)

Building a Cheap Tree House: My $300 Tree Fort (197 page views)

So far I only have one post out of about 80 that seems to rank highly with Google and that is my post on building a tree fort for under $300.  I’m not sure if as time goes on and Action Economics builds a larger base other previously published articles will start to rank higher in search, but I hope that they will.

I love the amount of data that Google collects overall.  So far my site has been visited by people across 78 countries on every continent excluding Antarctica.  It was only back in March that I was still only writing to myself. I had several days going into April where there were 0 visits, or at least 0 “non-me” visits.

It may not look from the stats above that over the last three months there has been much progress, however the first data set is somewhat skewed.  When I had taken those numbers Rockstar Finance had shared one of my articles and the referral traffic from that accounted for the vast majority of those visits. I had no large single post share this month.

Money:

Seeing as how my blog is all about personal finance I will share the information on earnings here.  So far I have earned a total of $20 through adsense.  In order to receive a payout there has to be a credit of at least $100, so no revenues have been realized.  Expenses so far for the site have been a total of around $180; two years of domain registration and hosting.  Nothing too interesting going on on this front yet.

I just read a post from Even Steven about how he hasn’t made any money from 4 months of blogging.  From what I have read around the personal finance blogging community is that it takes multiple years of producing high quality content before any real money starts to flow in.  There will of course be outliers that hit several hundred or even thousands of dollars in their first year, but they are few and far between.

The Future of Action Economics:

I recently renewed my site for another year and switched from Windows hosting to Linux hosting.  One of my goals with this move is to experiment with browser caching and see if I can speed up the load times of the site. I recently made major improvements to the financial spreadsheets offered on this site, and hope to within the next year add at least 1 more that I currently have in development.

Action Economics has overall been growing steadily. As I approach 1 year I know that my growth has not been nearly as fast as many other sites, but I am proud of what I have accomplished. I hope that over the next several months and years to increase the readership of this blog. This post marks 80 total published posts to date.  I have a large collection of post ideas written down that should keep interesting content flowing for quite some time.  Over the summer I have been treading a fine line between treating this as a hobby and as a job.

John C. started Action Economics in 2013 as a way to gain more knowledge on personal financial planning and to share that knowledge with others. Action Economics focuses on paying off the house, reducing taxes, and building wealth. John is the author of the book For My Children's Children: A Practical Guide For Building Generational Wealth.

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