Income Report

June Income Report on InvestorBlogger Dot Com

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It’s July 1st, we’ve reached the half-way through the year, and the stockmarkets are in a dive, ad revenues are falling, and oil is way up! How are we doing on InvestorBlogger? Well, in some ways it’s a very mixed bag.. here goes…

Background

In June, as many of you know, I spent nearly a week re-arranging the sites on my server as well as cleaning up the server, but server problems continued with nearly 24 hours of outage in June alone!

To that end, I’ve spent quite a bit of time setting up my primary sites on their own hosting with a fair amount of punch to each. I’ve been using several hosts, including BlueHost, and HostMonster to name but two. I’m now looking at a third ‘meatier’ host for one of my other clients… and my own blog(s). This has sapped my time, commenting and online socialization somewhat as I spent most of the time working on the sites,… I’ve still 2.5 clients to go as well.

Results

Grand Total: $11,101.00

As you can see from the numbers, I’m only recording the actual categories that have any income at all. This month, affiliates didn’t produce much income at all.

* Bank Interest: $28.71
* Dividend Income: $107.11
* Blogging: $63.75
* Advertising: $149.68
* Hosting = $131.15
* Consulting = $113.10
* Total = $593.51

This brings my grand total to a shade over $11,101 for the months since I began blogging about my journey to wealth. It’s still pretty impressive, but I’m now setting higher goals and looking at ways to boost traffic to the site in the coming months.

Traffic

In 2008, June traffic was of course DOWN on previous months, but compared to 12 months ago, it showed a healthy 50% jump, and the traffic is fairly resilient. In fact, Google Search is now sending more traffic than ever before. Other traffic is down as I’ve been less aggressive promoting my site on social networks that I typically used to. Once my sites are migrated to new servers, I’ll start doing more of this. Total page views are a little over 1920 from over 1260 visits. It’s a far cry from John Chow, isn’t it?

PayPerPost vs. SocialSpark

This has caused me to rethink my stance of 2007. While I’m not ready to abandon my stance, I feel that it’s only a matter of time now before I do.

TLA income is now reducing, and that has been my biggest reason NOT to switch policy. It’s pretty impossible to do Payperpost now anyway because of their stance on links, and my relative lack of PR. In fact, if I get PR back, then I can’t do Payperpost as you are not allowed to accept no-follow links (PPP’s choice). If I keep my stance, I can’t do PayPerPost at all, because of the lack of PR rank (PPP’s choice) and the serious competition for opps (PPP’s choice). In November 2007, and subsequently, it was possible to make a choice, but right now, Payperpost has backed me into a corner, and shows no signs on standing down on any of the three problems it has caused me:

  • 1. Opps requiring PR;
  • 2. Not requiring no_follow;
  • 3. and Inpost non-disclosure (coercive non-disclosure).

It’s now seeming very silly of me to continue to ‘co-operate’ with PayPerPost when the issues that I face are the result of decisions that PPP made. I will very likely go totally no_follow on all my links, shortly; a decision that I will not reverse again. In fact, I stopped doing PayPerPost in January, because of conflicts with my existing advertisers; and it’s ironic that a company that helped me to develop my blog is now the single thing holding back the development of my blog.

Top Five Articles in June

  1. 10 Reasons Why Adsense Sucks for your Blog
  2. A Man With A Plan
  3. Asus Eee PC 900 with Vista
  4. Weekend trips around the NE Coast of Taiwan
  5. and Harley Davidson Launches in Taiwan

Challenges

Unlike JohnChow, I didn’t set out to make money solely from this blog. Rather I set out to describe my journey to wealth, along the way noting what worked and what didn’t work. The biggest challenge I face is simply lack of time; I don’t have enough hours in the day to build up my wealth in other ways, though if I were working full-time as an employee, this would be a bitter pill to swallow. As a part business owner, I find it easier to accept!

The second challenge is sheer lack of technical skills in the area of server management and configuration. I know what I want to do, but since I’m an Arts major, I find it quite frustrating to try to fix things that go wrong. Don’t get me wrong: I do know how to fix a whole host of problems, but when it comes to networking and the Internet, I’m a relative newbie!

All of the other challenges result from these two alone! So I need to find new ways to face this!

InvestorBlogger’s March 2008 Income Report

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It’s been a bit delayed, but this post is detailing March’s Income Report. Like many bloggers, I have a number of online income sources that support this blog, but I also try to keep a number of offline sources as a way to spread the risk. January 2008 was a stellar month, February settled back somewhat, but March has been much more subdued than even February was. So don’t expect any surprises, especially as the money tends to arrive in clumps. In fact, a quarterly report might be more insightful as far as the trends go.

I’ve been plugging my free download as a way to attract visitors to download the top twenty subscriptions. Still waiting for that to work. I guess most people already seem to have their own ideas about who they want to download and listen to or read. I’ll leave it up anyway.

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So let’s deal with the money fiirst this month. We’re edging ever slightly closer to the $10,000 mark. I had hoped that we’d pass it this month, but it wasn’t to be. Several sources of income proved unreliable this month as consulting work dried and I decided (temporarily) to quit PayPerPost. This really emphasizes why it is important to retain a number of income sources to prevent over-reliance on one. PayPerPost used to provide a majority of the income that this blog generated, but this past month I was forced out of the program because I had to choose between my own advertisers and PayPerPost – like that was a hard one!

* Bank Interest: $26.48
* Dividend Income: $75.52
* Affiliate Income: $3.04
* TLA – $81.43
* LinkWorth – $63.50 (for three sites)
* TopSpots – $1.78
blogging – $60.00
* hosting = $114.75
* Total = $426.50*
*there are a few other residual sources but they generally don’t generate much, like Voxant, NetAudioAds, etc. that generate only a few cents a month. In addition, some sources that generate a lot one month, but nothing the next are not included.

The odd factor about this income is that most of the money generated actually didn’t require me to do very much in terms of time, ie. it was mostly fairly passive income. If I had watched TV, written a book, slept for the entire month, or gone on a world tour, most of this money would have still been there. How nice! Of course, I wouldn’t desert my readers!

According to my plan, developing a part-time income from work is important. I have had several contacts for part-time work in Taipei, but it isn’t something I’m able to do just now. I’d love to switch my teaching load from full-time to part-time, but I can’t find anyone that would commit to working with us on a longer term basis. Renting is still an option that we’ve not explored fully yet, but my wife and I are talking about doing this in the longer term. We enjoy where we live right now, and we’re just not quite ready to move out.

Total Income Generated

Naturally, this means my total generated by blogging now jumps to $9446.87. With $10,000 just a little bit nearer, it surprises me that I could earn so much extra income just by focusing on what’s around me. Now I’m always looking for ideas to create additional income streams, and there are loads. But you can’t see them with your eyes: you have to use your head to see them.

Expenses

The blog currently only has a few expenses such as hosting through Dreamhost’s VPS system and it works well. Of course, Domains and I own about ten or so all need to be paid for annually and Paypal Fees. I currently don’t advertise, though I may do so soon again.

* hosting – $49.40 (est.)
* Fees – $0.00 (Paypal, Commissions, etc.)
* Content, Development, and Advertising – $94.20
* Total = $93.62*

*These figures are estimates as final figures haven’t been received for some, and other commissions are invisible having been deducted at source.

One other obvious factor that is now affecting earnings: the US$ vs NT$ is now approximately $1: NT$30.5 +/- 0.5 which is boosting some earnings superficially. Since I don’t do actual exchanges, the value is a notional amount, but it is worth mentioning that a few months ago the rate was over NT$32.5 so the NTD has strengthened quickly. We’d been expecting this for some time, but it was a surprise just how fast it jumped. It’s likely that we’ll see rates approaching NT$29.5 later this year, though it should stabilize in the short term. The USD is likely to remain weak for quite some time; and the GBP is looking like the next victim as the currency weakens in a slowing economy and property market. I’m not forecasting rates for that, but GBP:NTD is already 10% down from historical highs.

I keep getting cut off from my ADSL, so I guess this is a signal to finish this part of the post as quickly as possible. I’ve already written most of the traffic report, which I’ll publish tomorrow.

Weather Report: Another Dry Spell!

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Seems like the last few days I’ve been going through a dry spell! I just noticed I posted two quotations back to back, something that I never do. But yesterday I found that I had! As you can see in the jpeg, I have a lot of ideas for posts that I never get around to writing! I write the stub, and then a few words, and that’s it! See for yourself what I mean! It’s not writer’s block is it? I don’t know what to call it, perhaps writer’s stub!

dry spell

So I’ve been counselling myself like this to solve the problem, and I’d like to share these thoughts with my readers, and fellow bloggers.

  1. Since I’ve been posting basically seven days a week for the past few weeks, I’m going to have to start taking more time off to bring my ideas back to the boil! Sometimes working less achieves more.
  2. The second strategy I’m going to try is to limit the amount of time I spend on the Internet, because I find with open ended hours, I tend to be less focused and more easily distracted by Google News or Reader or Boards or whatever.
  3. The third strategy I’m trying is to write one complete post each time I sit down, no matter how short or long it is. That way I’ll leave the chair with positive feelings, not negative frustrations that so many posts are undone!
  4. Of course, the last strategy is to copy the office tidy desk strategy: write it, file it or delete it. If you write it, fine, it’s done. If you file it, file it where you can come back one day but not where it can be seen easily because it’s filed. Of course, if you delete it, then problem solved as you can’t usually retrieve it on a system like this!

So these are my four strategies for right now. How do you other bloggers deal with dry spells? Do you ever lose focus because you feel you’re trying to do too much? How do you deal that?

Love to hear your thoughts!