What we have done on 2016

It’s been almost 13 months since I published our last income report and since then, some readers have asked us why we stopped it and how the blog is doing. So in this post, I will do my best to answer some of those questions.

Why we stopped publishing income reports was entirely a business decision. After talking to some partners and our accountant, we decided to keep private what we made through our Costa Rica affiliate network. When it came to our partnerships, the businesses wanted to avoid any situation with other partners and clients.

That being said, let’s go over the highlights for the last 13 months and some of the future projects.

What we have done with the blog over the last year

This past year has been the best year so far for us and we hope to keep saying that every year. We were appointed Costa Rica Tourism Ambassadors by the Costa Rica Tourism Board and we have been working on campaigns with them. We are definitely getting our name out there which has been a huge step for us.

We recently did a content audit ion our blog and saw a 10% traffic increase the first month and a 5% drop on our bounce rate which is great. We focused on going over all the old posts to make them more SEO friendly and informative so readers stay longer and click on other links. We also deleted lots of old posts. For example, we had many posts that talked about the same thing or had irrelevant content so we removed them. If you have been thinking about doing that too,I highly recommended it. Just be careful and make sure to do the 301 redirection and check your internal linking.

I also made a new child theme for Mytanfeet. I have been using Genesis for more than two years now and had to do a new child theme to take advantage of all the update. The framework now has a responsive menu, a wider body and sidebar. I deleted 3 plugins and cut the coding to almost 50% compared to the first child theme.

We are still using Traffic Planet hosting as our hosting company. They recently changed their name to WPX Hosting and combining that with MAX CDN has been a great choice. So far this year we haven’t got any issues and the blog is still very fast.

Though we made some changes in 2016, I have a list of things that I would like to try in 2017. For now everything works the way we want it to and we would like to keep it that way for the rest of the year.

Side projects

Over the last 13 months, I got involved in 3 different projects. Thank God it’s over though. The experience was great but I will try to avoid taking side jobs in 2017. The money was good but took like 80% of my time. Don’t take it wrong, I like to develop projects and help other people, but those 3 projects were very intense and I couldn’t do all the things I wanted to for Mytanfeet. I am so lucky to have Samantha as my other half, she did most of the work on the blog as I was just focusing on the business part with my side projects.

I am planning to invest 100% of my time on our sites at least until February 2017, where we will start doing a collaboration project with the government that fits perfectly with our goals.

Businesses and money

All 2016, I invested all my available time for Mytanfeet making business deals and new contacts for the blog. We made new partnerships with local businesses and improved the ones we had. It’s been a very long process for us because we are the first bloggers in Costa Rica that are managing everything as a business. It’s something new for the local businesses here and it takes longer because at every new negotiation, we have to explain them the whole business model.

We are working on new deals for 2017 and are very happy with the results all our current partners are getting. The word has started to spread in the tourism industry and we get more requests every month. Our strategy to make money on the blog is very simple: produce the best quality content we can, build a relationship with our readers and then offer them real deals for traveling in Costa Rica with out partners.

For now I can’t say how much exactly the blog is making on profits but we already passed goals for this year and thanks to that, we were able to buy a lot! We are the proud owners of 6000 square meters of land (Approximately 1.5 acres) in Guanacaste. It’s only 15 minutes from our favorite beaches and 25 minutes from the airport. We don’t have plans to build yet but hopefully by the beginning of 2018 we will start the process for our own home.

People always like to read about making money and how to do it. I like that too but over the years of the “blogging lifestyle,” I have learned that consistency is the key to generating income online. It is very true that when the inspiration is over you need to have disciple to keep working on your projects.

Blogging is not easy otherwise everyone will do it. We just try to work as hard as we can every day.

Future plans and projects

For the rest of 2016, we will stay at home working on our sites and the 2017 goals and strategies. We have the first Mytanfeet group arriving on December 20th. This is not something we want to do all the time but we are going to take 34 people around some areas in Guanacaste.

We will see how we feel about it, thankfully we will be working with some Mytanfeet partners, but we still don’t know if this will be something we would like to keep doing. For now we want to stay closes with our audience and learn from them to give our audience what they are looking for.

That’s it for now, thanks for reading and don’t forget to subscribe.