A Yo-Yo – Blog Earnings and Stats for December

Would you look at that?  The new year has started… and the old one is ready for a recap.

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 January 2, 2015.

       

  

More of the same old, Alicia from Financial Diffraction tells me that these are logarithmic, so it will take a lot more effort to see them increase in the future.

There were 2,286 page views in December, which is 74 per day, on average.  That’s a definitive drop from November’s 116, but to be expected with the holidays.

Now that we’re into January, I have to get back to writing up a storm.  I was able to get a few articles done on the plane, but, despite my spouse pestering me, didn’t use much of my vacation to write.  Between all of the sites and newsletters and projects I have on the go, I have to write 379 things this year, or more than one per day!

(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:

Well, after the celebration last month that everything was in the positive, we’re back to a negative net month.

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!  It would be delightful for this trend to continue, but I suspect there will be a lull through January again.  By then, a bunch of expenses will have leveled out, though.

December Revenue

$4.63- CPC and CPM Advertising

$6.53 – Amazon

$11.16 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.

December Expenses

$135.68 – 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, and in December she spent time on a new niche site, so I charged a portion of her fees there.
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.

December Net Earnings
($124.52) …Not great, but the lowest expenses month since before launch, a trend that is A-OK with me.

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

YTD Earnings
($2,107.08)

Last month I celebrated crossing back over the -$2000 threshold, only to return to -$2,107.08.  I saw this coming and will continue to hustle to bring up revenues in the new year.

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 will be a living, breathing eBook by the end of this week.  What’s it about, you ask?  Having recently started several sites, I was getting really frustrated at myself for missing steps, or doing things in the wrong order.  For example, wanting to set up a gravatar account but not having a wordpress.com account.  This book lays everything out in order, so you can stake your blogging brand and get all of the accounts in a fast and efficient manner.

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 finally had a reason to utilize a Clickable Map, which made me happy.  There are WAY too many US states.  I made 51 (D.C.) pages and had to link to them from two places.  It took an eternity, let me tell you!  You can see why I had my VA working on this project.  More content is in the works, but go take a look.  I would love to know what you think about the layout.

Interviews

The Jet Setter Interview series on Tuesdays was going well and then I dropped the ball on scheduling them.  They will return in January, as soon as I make some more graphics. 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

Can I guest post on your site?  Pretty please?  I’m also happy to have  you post here.

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.