Blog Money Whore

May was an interesting month with much of it taken up by travel. (In fact, I’m currently writing this from a bus headed from New York City to Philadelphia.) Nevertheless, the website chugged along without much effort going into it and raked in a few bucks. May saw only three posts with a measly 952 pageviews. AdSense brought in $14.29, AdBrite brought in $0.15, and Revolution MoneyExchange brought in $20.00. Overall, this was a disappointing month with a large drop in revenue. Hopefully, June will be better.

As always, this data is in the Earnings, Pageviews & Posts table along with historical data since the start of this blog.

Sorry for the late update! I was traveling abroad for a month and just didn’t have the patience to try to do much work in internet cafes. Anyway, April was an interesting month, especially since much of the activity happened while I was away! With three posts, my pageviews went up a bit to 1,248 from 1,102. The earnings from AdSense happily went up from $23.22 to $25.42 while the earnings from AdBrite went down from $0.14 to $0.11.

More significantly, I added three new columns to the earnings, pageviews, and posts table. The first column is referrals, which will include all earnings from referrals that I can trace directly back to this blog. In April, I earned a whopping $50.00 from referrals from Revolution Money Exchange (you can still get $25 for just signing up!). The second column is ads, which will include all earnings from advertising I sell directly myself. In April, I earned $72.52 from selling sponsored ads for some of my old posts. The third column is total, which will simply be a sum of all earnings for that row.

Earnings grew tremendously last month—more than six-fold! I don’t expect this trend to continue, but it is indicative of the growing clout this blog has. I’m still not rich, but $148.05 is certainly not insignificant, especially considering the minimal amount of time I put into this blog last month!

Something else I should note is that all amounts in the table are after fees but before taxes. Nearly 50% of all earnings will likely go towards taxes due to running my own company.

March was something of an accidental experiment for me. So much for “a great deal more posting”! Although traffic to this blog is generally low, there was still enough to see whether or not frequent blogging actually matters, especially for a young blog. The results?

Google AdSense brought in $23.22 (a decrease from $25.81 in February), and AdBrite brought in a whopping $0.14 (a decrease from $0.24 in February). Keep in mind that AdBrite only runs in the bottom banner ad, so this isn’t necessarily a slight against this ad network. I also had a handful of referrals for Blingo, Prosper, and Revolution Money Exchange. I don’t think these have actually resulted in any payouts, though, and I leave them out of the final tally anyway, as I’m not 100% certain they came from this blog.

All this happened with only two posts and a total of 1,102 pageviews (a decrease from 1,312 in February) according to Google Analytics. That just goes to show that subscribers and frequent posting may not be as important as some may think. Instead, I suspect that content and search engine rankings are more important, and what I’m trying to do is capture the long tail of personal finance topics.

I’d say these are pretty impressive statistics considering the amount of actual work that went into this blog. I spent maybe two hours at most working on this, though it did constantly occupy my thoughts.

As always, this data is summarized in the earnings, pageviews & posts table.

Anyway, here’s to April and making money one post at a time! Let’s see what happens!

It’s that time of the month again!

This past February, Blog Money Whore brought in a total of $26.05 ($25.81 from AdSense and $0.24 from AdBrite). That’s quite an increase from the previous month’s total of $6.71! At the same time, pageviews fell from 1,740 to 1,312. That goes to show that it doesn’t necessarily depend on the number of pageviews but instead on the quality of pageviews. January saw a large spike of traffic from StumbleUpon, which accounted for a large number of pageviews, but those sorts of visitors tend not to be the type who click on advertising.

I’ve also added a new column to the earnings table: the number of posts. This is somewhat correlated with the amount of work I put into this site. In January, I wrote 15 posts, but in February, I wrote only 4. Yet, earnings went up nearly 4X! I’ve had similar experiences with Days That End in Y when I went through posting droughts. My theory is visitors don’t see new content, so they start looking elsewhere and tend to notice the ads. Of course, these sorts of results can’t be sustained, but I think it’s important to note that the amount of work you do isn’t necessarily positively correlated with the amount of money you make.

Anyway, March should see a great deal more posting. February was a very busy month, and I simply didn’t want to deal with writing posts after spending lots of time doing other things. I’ll also try marketing a bit more now that it’s hitting month four. We’ll see what happens!

Last month’s earnings totaled $6.71 with 1740 pageviews. $6.67 was from Google AdSense. $0.04 was from AdBrite. I’ll continue to run AdSense exclusively in most spots until I have more data to input accurate eCPMs into AdBrite, so I can use those spots for more than one advertising network.

I also had a handful of referrals for sites like Blingo and Prosper, but I can’t necessarily attribute any of those directly to this site, as there’s no way to track from where those referrals come. I do post these things to more than just this blog.

Anyway, it should be rather clear as to why there are so many young, abandoned blogs out there. Results take a while and certainly aren’t guaranteed, but you have to put in a large amount of work writing, editing, designing, promoting, etc. in order to get there. Plus, you usually have to reach a minimum threshold before you can receive any of these earnings. For example, Google AdSense requires you to hit $100 first. If you’re earning $6.67/month, then you won’t see any payments for 16 months! (Yup, not 15 months, as it takes about a month for you to get the payment!) Tack on expenses like the domain name and hosting, and most people quickly realize they won’t be able to quit their day jobs anytime soon.

As usual, I’ll add this to the earnings table for all time.