A U-Turn – Blog Earnings & Stats for November

Would you look at that?  It’s December 1st and I’ve got a blog earnings and stats post for y’all already.  Consider it an early Christmas present, that probably won’t come again for a very long time!

Things are looking up for November, and I’m about to dish!

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.

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, 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.

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 December 1, 2014.  (Side note: How on earth is it December already?!)

      

  

So it looks like most of the ranking type stats are flatlined for the past few months.  I don’t know terribly much about what drives them, other than links from other sites.  Given how quickly these stats jumped up, it doesn’t surprise me that they have leveled off.  They are now on par with lots of sites which have been established for quite awhile longer.

There were 3,481 page views in November, which is 116 per day, on average.  Finally, a nice turnaround.  Work is less busy for me now, but it took me some recovery time to get back into the swing of things, as I was a bit burnt out.

There was a link from the Globe and Mail newspaper, which helped, but it was to Ways to have a Cheap(er) Wedding, so there was a limited audience for it.  It received lots of clicks, but not nearly as many as other, more generic articles, have received in the past when I’ve been linked from the G&M.  Regardless, I will take it!!

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:

Party time!  All three bars are above the X axis.  This is what we want, ladies and gentlemen!  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 November represents five 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!  It would be delightful for this trend to continue, but I suspect there will be a lull come January again.  By then, a bunch of expenses will have leveled out, though.

November Revenue

$14.55- CPC and CPM Advertising

$10.59 – Amazon

$313.47 – Direct Advertising

$338.61 Total (Net of Paypal fees)

There is an assortment of affiliate links live on the site (PicMonkey, Fiverr, 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.

November Expenses

$184.58 – 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 (quite a lot right now as it’s busy-season for that site).
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 (yes, still!), 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.

November Net Earnings
$154.03  (Yay!!)

It’s kind of like a backward checkmark. Next step: a V!

YTD Earnings
($1,982.56)

I made it back across the -$2000 threshold, woohoo.  That said, at this rate of net earnings, it would take 12.9 months to earn back everything that’s been invested so far.  Things need to keep looking up, that’s for sure.  All in all, though, I am very happy to have finally made it into positive-earnings territory for a 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!  That’s a big project to get wrapped up before the end of the year.

I spur of the moment purchased a niche site last week, too. I haven’t got a logo or a theme sorted out yet, so it’s a secret for now. I’ll let you in on the secret once some of the formatting is complete.

I also need to write and schedule things past December, for all of my sites, as they get rather patchy at that point.  For this one, I have staff posts, but not very many by me.  For once, I have a bunch of ideas, though.

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.