Money Propeller’s Blog Earnings and Stats for September

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.

Yes, I know that it is well past September.  I was busy… so you’re going to get a whole string of these Blog Earnings & Stats posts, aren’t you lucky?!

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.” 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 too much thought into HOW and WHEN.

This was my huge mistake.

Affiliate income comes from putting links on your site that, at no cost to the buyer, pay me a small bit of revenue if you click on them and decide to purchase something. I really, really should have identified affiliate opportunities right from the beginning, and written them into my content. Affiliate income requires many, many tiny streams of income, to reach a point where it adds up to a decent amount. It is also a safe, in the eyes of Google, way to earn revenue from a site.
Lately, I have been writing a lot about Airbnb and Vayable. Each Friday, I also feature a cool thing that I found on Amazon. Going forward, I plan to incorporate more affiliate links. Don’t worry, they are for things I have found interesting, reviewed, or enjoy myself!

The Blog Stats

 

Drumroll please…
These stats are all as of the morning of October 1, 2014.

   

      

So… page views tanked, a bit.  I was hoping that they wouldn’t, but it was to be expected, because I was working long hours at my day job during September and did not have nearly as much time to devote to building up this site.  Oh well, onward!

There were 3,267 page views in September, which is 109 per day, on average, a drop from August’s 126 per day.  I was hoping to crack 5000 for September, which clearly did not happen.  Everything else is on the up and up, much faster than I anticipated, actually.  Many thanks to everyone who has linked to Money Propeller and shared posts!

(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:

That tiny, razor thin slice of blue is a start… there are good things coming, but in another post!

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!)

September Revenue

$7.26- 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.

September Expenses

$346.22 – Writers and VA Time

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.

September Net Earnings
($338.96)

That is not a beautiful trend line.

YTD Earnings
($1,686.39)

Egad that is a lot in the hole!
I am not a patient grasshopper, I want to have positive revenues NOW, not six months from now! This “spend money to make money” thing had best work out.
Thankfully, I am mostly able to pay for this blog out of the revenue from the other, and it is not money that I need for other things. Please know that there are many different ways to get a blog off the ground and you absolutely, 100% do NOT have to invest this much money to do so!

Next Steps

I am in the midst of writing an eBook with Kathleen and we are hoping to have a full, final draft ready to go for the beginning of December.  I have also come up with ideas for a few more, so it looks like I’m going to be writing for months on end!

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

My spouse hates the term deplane, because “plane” is not the opposite.

Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoyed your flight! That got looooong!
If you have any suggestions, again, I would love to hear from you with a quick email or comment.