Progress! Blog Earnings and Stats for February

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.
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.” 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.  That time has come and gone and I am in the process of scheduling out to approximately June at the moment.

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.

I am slowly (ever so slowly) working to incorporate affiliate programs that I can stand behind and that offer you value (and bring in revenue for the site). If you have some affiliate programs that you can recommend in the personal finance space, I would be grateful.

The Earnings and Stats for February

A short month can be good or bad.  Mostly, it was mediocre.

None of the DA/Moz/Etc stats changed from last month, so I’m going to skip them this time.

There were 3,932 page views in February, which is 140 per day, on average.  Guess what?  That’s the EXACT same average per day as January.

I was hoping to see a bit of growth, but I will accept no falling backward.  Especially as I did a lot more work to build traffic in January than I did in February.

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.

I am very happy to report that it’s working!!!

Twitter is the biggest success story.  See that jump?!  It’s more than double, it’s 116% higher!  It’s still growing, too, which is great.  Are YOU following me yet?   @moneypropeller  Twitter won’t let me follow any more people until I have 2000 followers, which might still take awhile!

Pinterest followers grew 29%, which is also quite delightful, as I am picking up size and speed.  I am pretty excited to announce that I just started working with Gretchen from Retired by 40 Blog to amp up my Pinterest strategy.  She’s recently released a book on Pinterest, too, called Generate Traffic with Pinterest: Your Ultimate Guide to Using Pinterest as a Personal Finance, Money, or Frugality Blogger.

I signed up for Board Booster, which is a nifty Pinterest scheduling tool.  I learned about it a few weeks ago, and since then, they have simplified the user interface.  There’s an awesome featured called looping, where it 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.  There is a 100 pin free trail, which I haven’t run out of yet!

(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:

Eh.  Flat lining, more or less.  Not an awesome month, but still making some progress.

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.

The taller the blue, the happier I am! August was a blip due to receiving funds from other bloggers who participated in a giveaway.  The site went live at the beginning of July, so December represents six months of posting and word on the street is it takes six months to make money, and it’s now starting to trickle in.  It can’t come fast enough!

February Revenue

$8.75 – CPC and CPM Advertising

$0.99 – Amazon Affiliate Earnings

$152.95 – Direct Advertising

$0  – Airbnb – A great way to travel, read about it here

$0 – Tangerine – Use my Orange Key 23676924S1 to get a $50 bonus when opening an account (until Mar 31/15)

$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

$162.69 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.

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.

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!)

February Expenses

$195.98 – Writers and VA Time

$ 195.98 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 February, most of her time was spent working on things for Unique Gifter, but her time is still charged here.

February Net Earnings

February works out to a loss of $33.29.  Definitely not where I want things to be, but, revenues were unseasonably high from other sites, so overall I am quite happy with February.  (God bless the person who bought a treadmill via my Amazon link!!)

It’s still kind of like a yo-yo… I’m more interested in a V!

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
($1,977.56)

Not there yet, not yet.  The drop still puts February ending higher than November, which was the last spike upward, so that is also awesome.  I’m starting to think that this post comes off as attempting to put a nice spin on a loss, but I’m genuinely thrilled with my revenue from other sources, and the VAs time was mostly spent on generating those other revenues.  So in the big picture, I’m pretty happy!

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

The big announcement has come, and On Your Mark, Get Set, Blog! is here.  This is your guide to setting up a new website and brand, quickly and efficiently, by laying out all of the information that you will need and and all of the steps in the right order.  Faster blogging.  For everyone.  An entire chapter is available for free download!

I spur of the moment purchased a niche site in December, too. It isn’t entirely complete, yet, but I am now the owner of CoonHuntingClub.com (yes, you can laugh, I do).  I bought a few articles for it, but haven’t had a chance to add in affiliate links and link them all together across the site yet.

Guest Posts

Can I guest post on your site?  Pretty please?  I’m also happy to have  you post here.  I won’t lie, it takes me a bit of time to get them together.

Things that I *did* Do in February

I attempted to edit the CSS a few more times, two of the things I want to work still aren’t working *sigh.*  I haven’t had a good chunk of time to try yet.  The stuff I want to do means that I need to make sure I leave extra time in case I break something, like in January.

In February I also did a bunch of networking in some Facebook blogging roups, wrote several guest posts for others, scheduled into April (but not far enough!), set up Board Booster, finished two massive posts for Unique Gifter, had long weekend guests, had a sick spouse, hired some people to do some things on niche sites I own, and did an awesome DIY that has yet to be blogged (hint: it’s awesome).

I’ve been juggling which posts to put when, which is an unusual challenge for me!

I have a million and one outstanding projects for this site, here are some examples: new header, side bar buttons, update old images, finish and schedule the 75% written posts, do more things on the book launch front, set up adsense custom channels, add words to the multitude of spreadsheet based posts I’ve started, and on and on and on!

I’m pretty stoked about some of the spreadsheet based posts that are coming up.  I recently saved my working file for one as “college students are screwed.”  🙂

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.