Monthly Reports 1 – January 2023 

Welcome to the first of what will be a monthly update on how well my blog stuartwesselby.com is doing in terms of traffic and income.

This is not the first iteration of this blog.

It did start out as www.smartdigitalcoaching.com, but after spending considerable time deciding to change the URL, I took the advice of my unofficial mentor Adam Enfroy and changed the blog to my name to start to create a brand for myself.

I also totally changed the blog theme to Kadence and got help from a great web developer on Fiverr of all places to update and change my blog to what it is today.

This has taken approximately six weeks of work, and I am still updating the posts to ensure they are all functioning, indexed and looking as I want them to look.

Despite what you might read or hear, blogging is not a quick-win way of trying to create a passive income. It takes a lot of time and effort to produce a blog that will be sustainable and broad enough to add relevant blog posts.

I have chosen the niche of business and education software, mainly because I have always had an interest in SaaS software and its application and secondly because I have long experience in both business and education.

It is not an easy niche as the players already on the field are long-standing and experienced and most have medium to high DR rankings.

However, my philosophy is if they can do it I can do it, which might be a little naive but I am determined to make this thing work for me and learn and enjoy on the way.

So I intend in these reports to give you all a flavour of what I am doing, what tools I use and a realistic appraisal of cost. 

Many so-called blog gurus say you can build a blog business for next to nothing. I don’t really agree with that. 

I am currently trying to establish my blog alongside working a full-time job and do not have the time to complete all the tasks that need to be done. So I use certain tools to help run my blog and hire a writer and webmaster to help me develop the blog and keep content coming in.

I intend to share with you on each of these reports the profit and loss account of my business.
( mainly loss at this stage! ) and the organic traffic I am attracting and of course any income I might be getting.

These will be warts and all monthly reports so you can make judgements if blogging is for you and what the real expectations of making a blog successful are.

I have had to learn this stuff and teach myself over the last ten years. I have tried many things and shiny objects to try and make money online, but I really feel that affiliate marketing through a blog is the best way to create a passive income business.

To keep track of my traffic, I have installed the Google Site Kit plugin and I will be using that to show you how my traffic is building.

For my accounts, I am using Quickbooks which might be a bit of overkill at this stage, but I want to start this on the right foot by treating it like a business and really tracking all expenditures to give a real picture. 

I hope you enjoy these updates and please come back to me with any questions or things I might help you with.

Monthly Report 1 – 02/01/2023

Traffic: