โMillion’ is a magical word. However, until a few years back, it used to be an alien word for me.
Iโm from New Delhi, India, and here we talk in Lakhs and Crores. Thanks to globalization and the growth of the blogging and startup industries, “million” is no longer a word that is exciting for me.
Why am I talking about this word?
Because ShoutMeLoud receives more than 1.5 million page views a month, and one of my goals for this year is to reach 2 million page views a month.
I think we can get there…
Welcome to this special transparency report of ShoutMeLoud!
Every few months, I publish a report like this stating what is happening with our blog, how we performed in terms of traffic and income, and a lot of new ideas and suggestions for bloggers in every niche to grow their own blogging businesses.
If you are not sure why I publish such transparency reports, then you should read our philosophy hereย andย check out previous income reports here.
To sum up, I want you to be your own boss and live a life that is truly yours. And if you follow my advice, you can definitely get there!
So now, let’s start with some of the highlights of July, and then we will have a look at our traffic and income reports.
First Remote Team Meeting
As ShoutMeLoud is growing, the biggest challenge I’m facing is providing the right base for consistent growth. The only way this can be possible is with the brightest minds working together in a large-scale, collaborative effort.
At the time of this writing, we have a team of 6 full-time people (including me), and everyone has a different and important role to play:
- 2 Content Writers
- 1 Editor
- 1 Designer
- 1 Growth Hacker
One of my goals is to take ShoutMeLoud to the next level, and this canโt be done without bringing all of my team together.
While we use Slack for daily team communications, in July, we had our first ever online team meeting (using Zoom), and it was a great experience.
A few tips for hosting your first online team meeting:
- Have a clear agenda for the meeting.
- Announce the date/time 1 week in advance. Send a calendar invite.
- Use a tool like Zoom or Skype’s Group Chat to host the meeting.
- Have one person from your team be the host.
One Important Productivity Hack
For the past 2 months, I started doing a new thing to increase my productivity, and it’s been working out great. I have started using a calendar to schedule every day one month in advance. This has helped me remove the guess work that I face on any given day, and I end up finishing most of what I need to.
If you are like me who has never been so great with calendars, I suggest you to start trying it out.
A few things that you could do:
- Use the Google Calendar app on your phone.
- Schedule all of your meetings in advance.
- When you make a promise to someone for a phone call or a meeting, add it right away to your calendar.
- Configure Calendly to schedule your online meeting. It’s a useful app to schedule calls when you are working with others in different time zones.
One major benefit of working with a calendar in this way is that I have started to truly value my limited amount of time. Now, there is no such thing as “time wasted”.
Another thing that I started doing was auditing my weekly targets. This helped me understand more about my working style, and it also allowed me to plan my upcoming week more effectively.
If you want to read more about time-management and productivity, check out this article:
ShoutMeLoud Traffic Report: July 2017
In the first week of July, I audited the SEO of ShoutMeLoud and worked on improving the existing backlink flow. Here are a few of the things that I did:
- Improved the overall internal link structure.
- Deleted low-quality posts.
- Redirected 404 pages with a high DA backlink to relevant pages on the site. SEMrush and Ahrefs helped to achieve this in a couple hours.
- Removed all broken links. (Used theย Broken Link Checker plugin.)
- Fixed anchor text for internal links.
Doing this, we had a significant improvement in traffic, receiving close to 1.65 million page views.
But we still have a lot to do to reach our new goal of 2 million page views/month.
Tip:ย If you are not utilizing web push notifications yet, you definitely should as it’s a great way to drive recurring traffic. Here at ShoutMeLoud, we use PushEngageย because they offer some cutting-edge features like Segmentationย and Automation. You can read this guide to configure Push notification for your website. Here are the stats from my PushEngage dashboard:
We are close to reaching 0.3 million subscribers on PushEngage and this gives us immense reach. If you are not using something likeย PushEngage to convert your one time visitors into regular readers, every day that goes by is a wasted opportunity.
Trouble In Paradise: ShoutMeLoud Forum Hosting
Seems like my hosting woes will never end. I will never understand paying for bot traffic…
The ShoutMeLoud forum is powered by Discourse, an ad-free forum service.
We receive about 45K page views a month and the forum is hosted on Discourse’s server which costs $99/month; the plan allows for up to 100K views a month.
Last week, I was contacted by the Discourse team and they asked me to upgrade to the next plan which costs $299.
I was surprised to discover that, according to them, we received 7 million page views.
Unfortunately, they have become one of those hosting companies that charges for bot traffic…
Most probably, the ShoutMeLoud forum will be moved to a Digital Ocean server or another private server (which costs about $20/month). So far, I have avoided doing this as I didn’t want to handle what will definitely be another headache for managing a new system.
But now it seems like there’s no otherย choice…
Tip: If you are planning to launch a forum using Discourse, you are better off self-hosting on a server like Digital Ocean, Linode, or another self-hosted server.ย
Before we end our traffic report, here is a quick shout-out to our most active Shouters on the ShoutMeLoud forum for the month of July 2017:
If I combine all of the traffic from all of our platforms (blog, forum, mobile apps), we received more than 1.7 million page views this month.
But we are still 300K short of our new target goal…
We will definitely get there.
Quick Thanks To Our July Sponsors
I’d like to take a quick moment to thank our advertisers and partners:
- NativeAds: A very profitable ad network for bloggers.
- HillTopAds: Another great ad network for bloggers. Detailed review coming soon.
If you want to advertise on ShoutMeLoud, check out ourย advertisement page.
July 2017 Income Report
July was a great month for ShoutMeLoud in terms of growth.
Our revenue has also grown significantly as we have added more avenues of earning money from our blog. Most of these changes are happening in the backend, and by the end of September, you will see some new stuff we are trying on our media kit page and on the homepage.
Like always, I will be sharing about every change in detail so that you can also implement these techniques on your blog and improvise on my original ideas to increase your own revenue!
For now, here is how we performed in the month of July…
Income:
- eBook Sales ShoutMeLoud Store: $402
- eBook Sales Amazon: $83
- eBook Sales InstaMojo: $331
- ShoutUniversity: $37.57
- ShareASale: $994
- ClickBank: $329
- Affiliate Income: $ 39,787.72
- ConvertKit: $73.20
- Direct Ad Sales: $2,500
- LongTailPro: $141
- Ezoic AdSense Optimization: $244.74
- Shopify: $38.27
- Google AdSense: $309
- HillTopAds: $1,500
- Sponsored Listings: $ 192.3
- Advertisements: $5,472
Total Income: $52,434
From the eBook sales alone, we have made more than $800. Since I sell eBooks on various platforms, I have shared the exact amount I have earned from different sources. From the stats, I can see that we still need to improve a lot on Amazon Kindle sales.
In our last month’s transparency report, I mentioned that instead of using PayPal, I have started using wire transfers to collect payment from our many advertisers and partners. This has helped us to save a lot of money and has made our payments “on demand” which is good for business.
Tip: If you are earning more than $5,000 from any one company, you should consider getting paid via wire transfer instead of any other payment methods.
Expenses:
- Team Expenses: $8,383
- Geni.us for Amazon Links: $9
- Broadband Internet: $161
- Domain from GoDaddy: $12.99
- Dropbox: $99
- Discourse (ShoutMeLoud forum): $100
- AWeber: $52
- ConvertKit: $319
- Freelancer.com:ย $35
- Consultation: $3,500
Total Expenses: $12,670
This is the first time I have ever crossed the $50K milestone, and it feels pretty amazing.
As I mentioned earlier, a majority of this revenue is going into content production and marketing of ShoutMeLoud.
And as I discover new avenues of marketing and promotion, you will be the first ones to know.
ShoutMeLoud Continues To Grow
In the past few months, I have made a major shift in terms of how I handle ShoutMeLoud.
Now, more than ever, I’m:
- Creating more goal-based targets.
- Heavily focusing on branding.
- Building and nourishing the core team.
As it is, ShoutMeLoud is all about quality over quantity, and this is one thing you can be assured of; our readers (you) will always be put first before anyone or anything else.
With this, I close this transparency report.
It’s been a great month, and I’m excited to see what happens next!
Now it’s your turn to let me know how your month of July 2017 was in terms of traffic and income. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below!
Also, if you want me to add anything more in our transparency reports that will help you to grow your own blog, feel free to suggest away in the comments!
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Also, read:
Because of your inspiration only I had started a blogging site. At first, I was writing blogs on mylot (A blogging site which offers a reward for interaction) and then I had started a blog with a custom domain on WordPress. I did a few mistakes initially then I had learned one by one on seo. Hope I will achieve more traffic soon.
Hi Harsh,
The report is very motivating.Let me congratulate you on your achievements. Your performance is outstanding.We need young people like you.
Hello sir. I have been going through your website and read the Income reports. It seems you earned a lot from affiliate marketing and adsense. But I don’t see any Google ads in your site. Can I get to know how you’re using your site for adsense? I’m learning about affiliate marketing these days.
hello Sohini,
I don’t use Adsense on ShoutMeLoud.
I become very happy after seeing your growth for which you and your team gives great effort. From last some days i am reading your blogs which gives useful, qualitative and easy to learn content. I am seeing your blogs as a trusted and more reliable. I hope u will cross 1 million subscribers soon. Thanks for making such good content blogs and have a nice day.
Amazing stuff Harsh. You’re an inspiration to many and doing a lot of good by sharing the knowledge. Keep up the great work and may you cross the big “1M” very soon ๐
Wah! great growth Harsh brother!
You are great inspire for all.I love this site more cause our generation also have do best even with more difficulties roaming near.Keep it up brother.You can do more best then.
Congrats and hope new milestone each month. Good tips on site for inspiring us.
Congratulation sir, You deserve this.
Congrats,
I just posted my income report and I just hit 1800. You tips help me alot.
Myka
supersimpleways (dot) com
Nice work and sir! i Too Respect you. I hope ShoutMeLoud cross 2 million page views soon. Thanks for transparency it will help many bloggers for Growing them.
Inspiring..! ๐
Wish you could earn 100k soon ! ๐
Harsh, i must say you are an inspiration to me, since 2015 i have been reading your blog post but this is my first time to comment. Let me use this medium to thank you for your blog post that guided me last month when i purchased a custom domain from Godaddy. Through your post i was able to link the custom domain with blogger. Your post helped me to configure the Dodaddy DNS. Am a bloggr from Nigeria, Thank you Harsh- maybe when i come to Indian in the near future i will buy you a bottle of beer. THANK YOU FATHER OF BLOGGERS.
Very nice work sir. This article motivated me a lot. And sir i hope you crossed $100k. And thanks for transparency. Keep up with good work.
Congratulation Harsh,
I am a big fan of Shout me loud !! (But obvious the man behind it is you)
I have recently started blogging and when I was searching about how to do blogging and all, I got shout me loud!!
Still wondering, How one can make their content so addictive and useful!!
Feat Man!! Keep growing!!
Nice work and sir! i Too Respect you. I hope ShoutMeLoud cross 2 million page views soon. Thanks for transparency it will help many bloggers for Growing them.