Well, another year is in the bag and another year of blogging concludes!
That makes it now 4 years since I started this little venture I call Accidentally Retired.
And as always I am shocked by how fast time flies. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.
It was nearly 5 years ago that I put in my notice at work to leave the company I built and the job I loved –> that fact alone is blowing my mind!
At that time, I was 36 and had toddlers running around. Now, I am 40 and my kids are ripe into their elementary years. It just all goes by TOO fast!
But alas, what can you do? As usual, this is my year in review for the blog itself.
It was a banner year for the site making the most money and driving the most traffic…and yet I spent the least amount of time and effort on it.
Let’s take a look back and see what we learn…
Year 4 of AR – A Look Back
Going into the year, I was heavily focused on continuing to grow both the site’s X account and email newsletter.
Last year I had repurposed a lot of X content into articles, so this year I wanted to write more original work and re-publish/update old content where it made sense.
I just peaked back at my strategic plan for the year and all it said was “just keep going.” Looks like I did just that!
AR – By The Numbers
Writing-wise, this was my leanest year yet, continuing a downward trend.
While AR grew to a total of 185 published posts, only 21 of them were new in 2024.
As I said last year, I wasn’t a huge fan that I was writing less, but as I mentioned in my celebration of being early retired for 4 years, most of my new writing efforts went towards writing X threads to grow on X.
The result of my focus on X was that the email newsletter has now grown to over 2,000 subscribers!
However, with my focus on X, I managed to burn myself out. Keeping up with the day to day commenting, discussions and revenue share goals really wears on you.
So I decided to take a social media sabbatical late in the summer, and that sebatical continues to this day. Just yesterday, I decided not to renew by X Premium subscription, so I am no longer able to monetize on X and will no longer be actively involved there.
To that end, I hope to use my freed up time to write more this year, but I also don’t want to push it either. To a certain extent this site has finally become a bit more passive for me, and I hope to keep it that way!
Anyways, enough of my blabbing. Lets look top content and numbers further:
Traffic/Social/Email
- Total Web Traffic: 88.5K users and 147K pageviews (up from 71.8K users and 130K pageviews)
- Twitter Followers: 19,585 (up from 14,789)
- Email Subscribers: 2,028 (up from 1,263)
Top Articles
- Should I Use a Financial Advisor or Do It Myself?
- How Much Vacation is Too Much Vacation?
- Why I Ditched a Traditional Bucket List And Switched To This Instead
- Everything I Would Do If I Woke Up Tomorrow and My Net Worth Was $0…
- How To Pay $0 Tax in Early Retirement
Top Resources
- Easy-to-Use Net Worth Spreadsheet (Template for Google Sheets & Excel)
- Profit And Loss Statement Template (FREE For Google Sheets & Excel)
- Jordan Peterson 12 Rules For Life Summary & Review
- Time to FI or FIRE Spreadsheet Calculator
- Die With Zero Book Review: ‘Meh’
AR Revenue and Expense
Revenue
While making money is not the primary goal of AR, I still want to cover the costs of operations and also provide a little extra income for myself.
I added ads in 2023, but they were crap….so this year I applied to Mediavine’s new ad network called Journey, and that turned out to be a great move.
The ads take up less space and are less cluttered, and Journey also has some useful email newsletter forms via Grow that have helped capture more subscribers as they visit the site. Journey netted $1,175.69 in revenue. Boom!
As of February 2024, I became monetized on X and that ended up netting me a total of $642.70. A big chunk of that came in the first payment, as eventually it settled into about $30-50 per month.
I think it’s great that X pays their content creators, but I don’t like the way they incentivize comments and engagement farming.
Overall, I think it made X a less fun and engaging place to be, and that is ultimately why I decided that it was no longer worth my time.
And finally, after fixing the affiliate link issues late last year, Empower and Amazon drove the remainder of the sites’ revenue at $2,630.32 for the year.
In total for Year 4, the site made $4,448.71 (up from$1,336.68). Not too shabby!
Monthly Revenue: $370.73 per month
Expense
- Hosting (AWS): $5.95 per month
- Google Workspace (email/docs): $5.50 per month
- Cloudflare (DNS, cache): $20 per month
- X Premium: $11 per month
- Hypefury (Twitter scheduling): $19 per month (split between both businesses)
- ConvertKit (email newsletter): $44.35 per month
- Canva Pro (images/graphics): $6.5 per month (split between all businesses)
Monthly Expense: ~$112 per month
Thank You
As always, a big thank you to all of my readers, email subscribers, and Twitter followers!
If you are a new subscriber, I hope to continue to write more new and original content for YOU.
Regardless, I hope that you all enjoy what I am doing and continue to come back.
I’d love to hear what you love about this site and would like to see either more or less of.
Let me know in the comments below!