I Finally Made Money in April – Money Propeller’s Blog Earnings and Stats

Oh, you want to read last month’s first?  Here’s all of the blog earnings posts.

Boarding Announcements

Money Propeller is my second blog, Unique Gifter is my first. My goal with it is to straight up make some money, while sharing what I believe is valuable information on all things money. With the goal of earning money, I am attempting to be (somewhat) strategic with how I go about this.  Online projects are my main side hustle; if that’s not your thing, there are some other ideas for you here or you can check out Thomas’s list of ways to make money online.
The plan is to be totally transparent about everything and to let you know what is and is not working for me, so you can follow me down the path or avoid the mistakes that leave me in a burning pile of wreckage.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think of these posts, or if you have any questions you would like me to answer, or stats you feel I should include.

This post contains affiliate links.

The Strategy

Money Propeller is an experiment in “Spend money to make money.”  When I decided to launch this domain name (I have a collection, like most online hustlers), my rule for pre-launch was that I needed to have 52 posts written and scheduled. That represents six months of posting twice per week, so that I could focus on promoting the posts and developing other aspects of the blog, like the newsletter.  That time has come and gone and I am now a giant slacker who doesn’t have many posts scheduled.  I have over sixty in draft form, but can’t seem to put the finishing touches on them!

On Money Propeller I also wanted to have a bunch of different voices and perspectives, right from the beginning. Believe it or not, I don’t know everything! Other people know about topics that I don’t, like fashion, and insights into education. You can read about our authors here, and there are even more in the pipeline. Do you want to tell your story? Give us a shout and come be our guest.

The Earnings and Stats for April

April had some fun things happen, especially on the page views front.

There were 12,418 page views in April, which is 414 per day, on average. It also means it’s the best month yet for page views, by a super long shot!  Ten percent growth in April over March would have been 178 views per day and I blew that out of the water.

Except, this is what it looked like:

That giant spike in the middle was from The Penny Hoarder sharing a post of mine on their Facebook page.  I wish that was an option every day!!  The post went up in the middle of the night, so you can see the increase start the day before, based on the time zone in my Google Analytics.

The plan for February was to focus on social media following – you should follow me on twitter @moneypropeller and on Pinterest!  Also check out the Pinterest People to Follow Round Up post, to follow a bunch of awesome Personal Finance bloggers.  After February’s focus, I basically completely backed off on twitter and there hasn’t been a ton of growth since, though they’re growing at a faster rate than before.  Ah well.

In March, I started working with Gretchen, from Retired by 40, on my Pinterest accounts. She literally wrote a book on Pinterest: Generate Traffic with Pinterest: Your Ultimate Guide to Using Pinterest as a Personal Finance, Money, or Frugality Blogger.

Followers are continuing to increase and traffic from Pinterest is growing, substantially as of late.  Look for a case study on ForProfitBlogging.com in the next few weeks.

Definitely consider picking up Gretchen’s book, Generate Traffic with Pinterest: Your Ultimate Guide to Using Pinterest as a Personal Finance, Money, or Frugality Blogger.

I’ve been using Board Booster and it is fantastic.  It’s a Pinterest scheduling tool, so you can go in and pin a million things without overloading your followers, plus it does this thing called looping. Looping repins things from your board, so that they get in front of new faces, and deletes the old pin so that there aren’t multiples on the board.  It’s pretty swell.  The schedule tool is also awesome, you pin to a secret board that then feeds the main board.  That means that you can schedule whatever you want, just as easily as you use Pinterest already.  There is even a 100 pin free trial.  I got hooked after that!

(PS: If you are a blogger and want a nice way to track your stats, For Profit Blogging has a free Blog Tracker available.)

The Dollars

This is the part that you all actually care about, I know. Here goes:

Alrighty, a positive month again, yay!

The expenses are the red bars and the revenues are the blue bars, and they are both positive values, so that it is easy to see their size in relation to each other.

Revenues are coming in, for sure, but the expenses are consuming them all! I wish that I recorded revenues when I earned them, not when I received them, because April was actually fantastic!  The only problem is that I haven’t been paid yet and I don’t know when I will be.

A Blogging Lesson from April

If a high profile site offers an opportunity to drive traffic to your site, and you have some say over where they point to, your best choices are from the following two:

1) Direct people to a page with an irresistible offer that causes them to sign up and wind up on your email list.  This way you have the potential to make readers and customers out of the traffic and develop a long term relationship.  If you are not sure that you can convert that traffic effectively, pick option 2.

2) A well-monetized post, and hopefully one that also converts well.

I selected option two.  I sent traffic to my (admittedly click-bait titled) post The Day I Found $3,600.  It has some Digit affiliate links in it (Digit is pretty sweet, yo!  Plus, it’s free.).  It turns out that was a fantastic decision.  That post earned over $200 that day!  Unfortunately, I don’t have the payment yet, so that revenue is not reflected in this month’s blog earning’s and stats post.

Darn it.

April Revenue

$28.07 – CPC and CPM Advertising  – The jump here is almost entirely due to the jump in traffic 🙂

$5.00 – Amazon Affiliate Earnings

$10.00 – Target Affiliate Earnings

$5.70 – Five Figure Writer: The email template and tips I used to earn $59k my first year of freelancing.

$224.59 – Direct Advertising

$0  – Airbnb – A great way to travel, read about it here. I checked out places in Rarotonga last night.

$0 – Tangerine – Use my Orange Key 23676924S1 to get a $25 bonus when opening an account

$0 – Digit – Use this app to help you save money by rounding up your transactions and saving the difference.

$0 – Vayable – Travel with personalized tour guides who are locals

$0 – Gazelle – Trade in your old electronics for cash, or buy refurbished ones for great prices.

$0 – PicMonkey – Add text to your pictures, for free!

$0 – Genesis Framework – An awesome, customizable platform for websites

$0 – Big Scoots – Web hosting that rocks

$0 – Dropbox – Free document storage and sharing, in the cloud

$0 – Rover – Pet sitting, a side hustle or an affordable way to get your pets looked after

$0 – Board Booster – 100 pin free trial – a way to repin your pins and schedule pins precisely

$0 – ViralWoot – Another free pin scheduler, and way to promote your pins

$273.36 Total (Net of Paypal fees)

There is an assortment of affiliate links live on the site (PicMonkey, Amazon), and they are slowly starting to trickle in funds. Until the stats are higher, I expect revenues to be rather low, but here’s to the trickles turning into a flood.

I also highly recommend that you check out the eBook I cowrote with Kathleen, on creating a brand and getting a blog up and running quickly and efficiently (and no, it doesn’t involve spending this much money on your site!):

(Feel free to sign up as an affiliate, as well. You get half of the sales price!)

April Expenses

$239.33 – Writers and VA Time

$5.00 – Board Booster – Pinterest scheduling tool

$ 244.33 Total 

For simplicity’s sake, all of the VA costs are charged to MP, but she does work on other sites of mine as well.  In April, she spent a bunch of time working on Pinterest and on CouponsAndFriends.com but her time is still charged here. If you’re curious about what she does, I’ve covered some things here.

Side note: Here’s a fun post

April Net Earnings

April works out to a whopping $29.03!  Oh how I wish it included the more than $200 from Digit!  Definitely not where I want things to be, but things are looking way up.

A flatline doesn’t mean it’s heart is dead, it means things are looking up!

So I am still quite a long way from zero, but more or less breaking even and getting work done in other places.  I’m still a long way from my goal, though!

Lifetime Earnings
($2,032.71)

That’s a whole thirty bucks higher than last month! Ha!

Don’t forget, everyone: it is absolutely possible to start a blog without spending this much!  I am funding this with past earnings from my other site.

Next Steps

Astute readers will have noticed a lack of posts in May.  I need to work on that, by writing! I have over 60 posts in draft form, including some awesome ones that I’ve been talking about (for freaking ages) with spreadsheet calculators, ways to earn more money for you, and DIY projects.  I need to format, finish writing, and set up the downloads for y’all.  I also need to rejig my email list sign ups, so that everyone gets all of the spreadsheets and sweet stuff I’ve built, when you sign up.

I have more images that I want to revamp, I’m picking away at them slowly and good golly are there a lot of results!  I also want to make some sidebar buttons to posts (I made two, feel mediocre about them, and need to make way more.)

I’ve still got a bunch of work to do on the niche site that I bought on a whim, CoonHuntingClub.com.  I basically haven’t touched it in months, still.  Ooops.

Plus, because I have boatloads of time on my hands (okay, I have a lot of time that I don’t effectively use, this is very, very true.  I am lazy sometimes), I am now the co-owner of a coupons and deals site.  The plan over there is to pivot a bit, so I have a fair bit of writing to do there, too.

Just for fun, I picked up another side gig last week, to keep me on my toes.

Things that I *did* Do in April

I wrote this section in February, because I felt like I didn’t get much done.  I liked it, so it’s here to stay!

In April, I put the finishing touches on the Will You Become a Millionaire just by using your TFSA? post, and the free calculator download that goes with it.  This involved figuring out how to deliver the spreadsheet and such.

I also wrote a few posts.

Deplaning

Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoyed your flight! I really do appreciate you taking the time to read all of this, and I especially hope that it is helping you to learn from my wins and major losses!  It is all of you fine folks who got me started on this blogging adventure in the first place, and it really won’t go anywhere at all without you.

If you have any suggestions, again, I would love to hear from you with a quick email or comment.

Here’s all of the blog earnings and stats posts, if you want to read more.