The good news: I made more money in 2023 than I’ve ever made in any other year of my life.
The bad news: things started to unravel in October.
For those of you who haven’t been following along, consider reading my annual online business reviews for 2021 and 2022. It’ll help put everything you’re about to read into better context.
And for those of you who truly have no idea how I make money, my FAQ page summarizes it in the simplest way possible.
What my online business portfolio looked like in 2023
2023 started off as a continuation of 2022 (like, duh). I spent the majority of my time on 3 completely different brands (each consisting of a website, social media profiles, and a YouTube channel):
- My travel brand
- My automotive brand
- My design and illustration brand
I was also working on an assortment of extremely small (“micro”) side projects. I hardly spent any time on these. They were simply passion projects that brought in no income whatsoever.
My primary sources of income
The amount of money that I was making (at least up through the end of September) was good. More than I ever made at my corporate job.
- 80% of my income was via display ads on my automotive and travel websites.
- 15% of my income came from my design and illustration brand (I sell useful / editable illustrations and templates).
- The remaining 5% came from miscellaneous things such as YouTube ad revenue and affiliate sales.
The 3 key moments of 2023
A lot happened in 2023. Thinking back on it, there were three significant events that defined the year:
01. The decision to go all in on one thing
It was June or July that I decided to double down on what was working the best (my travel website). I put everything else on pause so I could put 100% of my efforts into creating travel content. I wanted to go big!
As a reminder, I am a solo content creator. I do everything myself. I do not outsource anything. It’s all me.
It’s also worth noting that I didn’t quit everything else. I simply put all my other projects on the back burner, doing the bare minimum to keep them alive (because I know I’d return to them someday).
02. Getting rekt by the algorithm
Not only did 80% of my income come from display ads, 90% of the traffic to my websites came from Google. Shame on me.
Google made some very big changes to their algorithm the very first week of October 2023. They called it the Helpful Content Update (HCU), which was designed to eliminate unhelpful content from the search results.
My automotive website got annihilated. Honestly? It was deserved. From 2019 to 2022, I spent a lot of time and money publishing “good enough” content. The goal was quantity over quality, which led me to outsource a lot of the writing. Most of that outsourced content sucked.
Not only that, I was chasing keywords that I had no business writing about (because I knew nothing about the topic).
All of this worked until it didn’t. Display ad revenue from that website peaked at $4,500 a month in September. By the end of December, it had only made $400.
03. Becoming overwhelmed with uncertainty and fear
Losing a significant amount of income so quickly was jarring. Even though my travel website had survived the algorithm update, I felt vulnerable.
For the first time since I started blogging (in 2011), I had serious doubts about the future of this business model.
Yes, my automotive website deserved to get hit. But not my travel website.
I pour my heart and soul into every article. Most importantly, I only write about topics that I have first-hand experience with. I am a total perfectionist with that project. If that got hit, then what?
Knowing that I could lose all my traffic (and income) overnight through no fault of my own was a sucky feeling indeed. I actually started losing sleep over it.
3 lessons learned in 2023
2023 was a wake up call. I felt invincible in January. By the end of December, I felt like I had a target on my back. I learned 3 very important lessons:
01. Any business that is completely dependent on another business is NOT a good business
I feel like an idiot for being comfortable with the idea of having most of my traffic coming from one source (Google).
Want to know what’s really embarrassing? It isn’t the first time that I’ve been through this. I made over $100,000 selling stock photos by the end of 2010, but it all came crashing down when the stock photo agencies changed their algorithms. And I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
You’d think that I would have learned a thing or two from that, right?
02. AI is coming for my job
AI went fully mainstream in 2023, and by mid-year it was becoming obvious that it’s a real threat to full time writers and bloggers such as myself.
The good news is that this has forced me to write only about my personal experiences. I don’t write anything that could be easily answered or created by AI anymore.
03. Selling digital products is probably the best way forward
The truth is that I enjoy writing content more than I do creating digital products. It was a good feeling to slow down on that part of my business in the middle part of the year and focus 100% on my travel blog.
However, after the HCU, I had started to (re)appreciate just how important it is to have something to sell.
Thankfully I have a loyal base of followers across various social media accounts who love my products. I also have a decent sized list of paying customers going all the way back to 2012.
Long story short, I brought this project back from hibernation in November. It may be what saves me long term…
Goals for 2024
Despite the realization that Google wants me dead, I was still feeling a smidgen of hope right at the tail end of the year. For 2024 I want to:
- Split my time evenly between my travel brand and my design and illustration brand.
- Go all in on building up my portfolio of digital products. I don’t have any sales targets, but the ultimate goal is to have digital product sales as my primary source of income – not display ads.
- Keep working on all my little micro projects (just because it’s fun to build new things).
Let’s do this!
