🍾 2024 Year In Review

With it being the last day of the year, I think it’s a good time to look back at what I’ve done this year.

I’ll be talking about all the different ways of making money online that I’ve dabbled in this year. (likely take more than one email though)

And I’ll finish that up with some thoughts on which one I would pick if I could only focus on ONE for 2025.

But first, just wanna remind you (in case you missed it on the 25th) my Christmas gift to you - I’ve lowered the cost to my private Skool community to just $1.00. Join here. It’s where I talk more about the things you see in this newsletter.

I’ll likely leave it at this price through the end of the year.

The First 3 Things I Did….

As I’m confident that I am, in fact, starting the new year with the flu, I was a bit shocked to see that the first email I sent out this year (on Jan 12th) mentioned that I’d been sick with Covid and the flu.

Damn this time of year and it’s cootie-spreading ways! So, I guess another NYE sick 🤒

1. Sites

In January, I laid out the following focus for my portfolio of sites -

• Sites where my focus in on building a brand (10%)= human written content

• Sites where my focus is revenue (80%) = AI content

• Sites where my focus is on testing random shit (5%) = AI content

• Sites where I'm building a PBN (5%) = AI content

Well, that was all fine and well until Google gave me all those manual penalties in March and blew up 20% of my portfolio.

A rough estimate is around a 55% revenue drop from my portfolio of sites thanks to the manual penalties and Google changes. Having already built up Pinterest and Facebook traffic saved my ass with the site portfolio.

I’ve seen success this year with making a content site look like an ecommerce site.

And I’d focused more and more on driving traffic to my sites from Pinterest. And a little from Facebook, but mostly Pinterest.

2. Local Newsletter

This idea is what I was most excited about for 2024.

I’d starting research this as a viable business model in Q4 2023 and by April of 2024 I was ready to launch.

Based on all my research and careful planning, I made the bold assumption If things go as planned with the first launch of this idea, then I think it has the potential to be my fastest rise to $5K/month.

Yeah, things didn’t quite go as planned.

I still think it’s a viable business model. I know it is because I know several people in different markets that are crushing it.

Then there’s me. Sitting here in Vegas where the people are cheap and don’t want to pay for anything. Including local businesses.

This has been a spectacular failure. And I’ve still not broken even from the money invested.

I think it’s at just under $1,000 revenue total. And I spent something like $3,500 on Facebook ads for leads.

My plan here is to try growing the website for the newsletter and gain more/better subscribers there. But, that’s a slow process as I want all the content to be human written.

3. Niche Newsletters

Also in April, I revealed that I was getting into niche newsletters.

While I did not start as many of these as I intended to, I still think they can be a great business model…when they are part of something else.

What I’m seeing success with is sending traffic to display ad-monetized sites as well as selling POD products and digital downloads in the newsletter.

I want to open an Etsy store to promote in some of the newsletters as well.

So, I had every intention of launching a membership program + niche newsletter in the fitness niche this year. Something that has been in my “ideas” book for several years, but I just didn’t get around to it.

Money made from these is less than $1,000 for the year. That’s mostly due to most of my focus being on that money pit of a local newsletter.

I do expect bigger things from my niche newsletters in 2025.

I should also point out that I moved this email newsletter to Beehiiv in June and started ramping up the frequency of it. And by mid-late August, it was a daily email.

This daily writing thing was one of the best things that I’ve done for myself.

It’s been good for me mentally. And it’s been great for my writing as it helped me get out of that shitty SEO-optimized style that I’d been doing for years. I finally feel like I’m back to the writer I used to be before SEO took over my life.

Coming up…

I’ll share the next set of online businesses that I tried in 2024.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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