How to lose $2100 on the Internet – Blog Earnings and Stats for October 2014

That title got your attention, right?

I don’t think that I’ve completely lost $2100, but it’s starting to feel like I’ve invested a lot of money into this, ya know?  I’d really, really like for that to turn around soon.  Read on to find out more!

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.
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.

I’m playing catch up with these earnings reports and hopefully I manage to get November’s out the door in a more timely fashion.

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.

The Strategy

Money Propeller is an experiment in “Spend money to make money.” And I am a-spending!  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 can focus on promoting the posts and developing other aspects of the blog, like the newsletter.

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, such as the fashion posts that we have had lately. 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.

After the initial launch, I realized something: I wanted to monetize… but hadn’t put sufficient thought into how and when.  I focused on writing the content, but I didn’t search out affiliate programs to start integrating them from the beginning.  I know that direct advertising takes time, but I hadn’t thought very hard about how to start things off using affiliates, which are also less vulnerable to budget swings and the vagaries of the internet.

I am slowly (ever so slowly) working to address that. If you have some affiliate programs that you can recommend in the personal finance space, I would be grateful.

The Blog Stats

Drumroll please…

These stats are all as of the morning of November 1, 2014.

      

      

Pageviews sucked in October, too.  Again, I was working a ton, so at least I was earning more from overtime for September and October.  Here’s to November being a rebound!

There were 2,623 page views in October, which is 87 per day, on average, quite a drop from August’s 126 per day.  There are a few things that I need to do in order to drive more traffic, but I likely won’t get to those until January unfortunately.

(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:

So, another month of a razor-thin slice of blue.  August was a blip due to receiving funds from other bloggers who participated in a giveaway.  I have high hopes for November, so stick with me.  The site went live at the beginning of July, so October represents four months of posting and word on the street is it takes six months to make money.  It can’t come fast enough!

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.

Theoretically, all three bars will be above the X axis in a few months.  (I don’t want to jinx it, but that *might* be happening soon!)

October Revenue

$6.16- CPC and CPM Advertising

I don’t expect the revenues to get terribly higher for a bit yet, but I can hope! There is an assortment of affiliate links live on the site (PicMonkey, Fiverr, Amazon), but none have any revenue yet. Until the stats are higher, I expect revenues to be rather low.

If you know of any advertisers or affiliate programs who would be willing to work with the fledgling site, I would be very grateful if you could send them my way.

October Expenses

$456.36 – Writers, VA Time and Writer’s Traffic Bonus

For simplicity’s sake, all of the VA costs are charged to MP, but she does work on Unique Gifter as well.
As I mentioned, when the site launched, I had 52 articles scheduled, and at this point in time I am scheduled into February of 2015, which means the costs are very, very front loaded. I also owe a few authors for posts, but they want to receive payment when they have completed their full assignments, so there will be a solid amount of expenses when that happens, too.

In October, I paid out a traffic bonus to the writers.  The system has some flaws, but the basic premise is that the writer who gets the most page views on average, gets a cash bonus once per quarter, so the Q3 bonus paid out at the beginning of November.  That does remind me, I need to send out an update email with the current status of things, to all of the writers!

September Net Earnings
($450.20)

That is not a beautiful trend line.

YTD Earnings
($2,132.09)

Well, I crossed another threshold… in the wrong direction! I would really love it if November managed to stay in the positive values, for the month.

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

As I mentioned earlier, I am writing an eBook with Kathleen at the moment and we are inching toward the finish line!  It is quite exciting.  I think that this first book will take us the longest, by far, so hopefully we can figure out the process and move on easily from here.  What’s it about, you ask?

It’s a checklist and instructions for starting up a blog.  I wish I had made it when I got this site together.  If you’ve ever started a blog, you’ll know that you end up setting up one account, just to find out that you need to jump over somewhere else to set up another one, where you need yet another piece of information that you don’t have.  It’s very frustrating and can waste a lot of time.  This book gets you from A to B, without taking a detour to J along the way.

I also need to write and schedule things past December, as they get rather patchy at that point.

Interviews

The Jet Setter Interview series on Tuesdays seem to be going well. Let me know if you’d like to be featured.  I am also interviewing people about their experiences with Airbnb, if you are interested!

Guest Posts

I still owe several people guest posts and am hoping to get to that in the next several weeks.

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 posts, if you want to read more.