How I Made $106.51 Off The Web

Getting traffic

Alright, so it was time to get traffic! Well, I emailed and messaged all my friends and they gave me some good compliments and feedback. Well, that was good. Someone must have clicked because after a couple weeks I finally saw my first $.30. Great, I thought, now I just have to get up to $100 and Google will send me a check.

I installed Google Analytics so I could track statistics about my website. Wow, no one was coming. I started to do some research about running a blog and learned not only did I actually have to keep my blog fresh, but I had to work double-time to promote it and become a part of the community. Imagine that, I actually would have to keep writing articles and not only that, but beg people to come read them! I was still at $.30 or so at this point.

I started trying to write articles every day and I posted links to my favorite blogs. Sometimes, the administrators of those blogs would see traffic coming from my site or they'd see a comment I posted on their blog and check-out my own. Eventually, I started getting some people linking to my blog and that helped get traffic. I also found sites that would watch RSS feeds from my blog. One of these that really applied to me was pfblogs.org, a site for personal finance blogs. Perfect, I started to get a little more traffic. Still around a few dollars in ad revenue at this point.

Late one Sunday night I wrote a quick article and then went to bed. The next morning I got a little confused when I looked at my stats because Google is usually a few hours behind at registering stats activity, but I had over 200 visitors to my blog that day already! Wow, it was coming from some site called reddit.com. It kind of sounded familiar, but I wasn't sure what it was. Interesting, a link to my article was at the top of the page and had been submitted by someone with high karma (for those of you not familiar with Reddit, it's a personal bookmarking site that helps you know what's new and hot on the web right now). Cool, a few hours later, and a couple hundred more visits to my blog. Wow, this was exciting... now this was what blogging on the Internet was suppose to be about! Yeah, still only around a 10 dollars or so in ad revenue after 700+ visits to the blog that day! (A quick note on reddit: I was lucky enough to meet the founders when they were in Detroit last year and they're great guys with a neat site. I would totally suggest it.)

Keeping things fresh

I soon started to realize that this was not the quick path to making a fortune, but I enjoyed what I was writing and I was learning a lot about this world of blogging and sharing information. Even though I had been online for over 13 years had a computer engineer degree blogging was giving me a reason to learn more about writing well, marketing, public relations, networking, and so much more. I learned that building a good blog and making some money was going to take some practice and an investment of time and most importantly lots of writing. I wasn't successful at writing an article everyday like many blogging tip sites suggested, but I decided a good balance of a few times a week to a few times a month was the way I would do it. Google ad clicks kept pace at around .3% of my views, or impressions, leading to an ad click and thus a small amount of money.

Another idea I had in the back of my head was to start other sites or blogs that people found useful and link between them all to hopefully grow traffic to them as a whole. I wasn't trying to scam search engines and I wanted to create things of utility and interest to other people. So, I started a personal site as an about me to the rest of the Internet, a site for a young professional organization I co-founded called Young Professional Connection, and some other things. Finding other people I could partner or work with helped to spread the work load and led to me helping to form my own sub-community in the larger community.

Making my first money

Today, I've learned that as a hobby I really enjoy the idea of helping to create a network of young professionals with resources to help them and myself to navigate the weird things life puts us all through in our 20s and 30s. The fact I enjoy doing these things will hopefully lead me to larger success, but in the meantime I think my enthusiasm and quality of work has lead to enough traffic and interest where a 3rd party was interested in paying me to place their ad on my site.

So, I ended up making my first money off Young Professional Finance Blog by selling ad space to a 3rd party. After paypal fees I ended up with $106.51, just about what I've spent on webhosting and domain name costs! So, it perhaps is silly that while being so focused on Google Adsense I end up making money some other way I didn't even imagine at the start (not to mention I still have yet to make the minimum of $100 for payment from Adsense).

Now, after a little over a year of blogging, I have finally broken even with YPFB!!! This doesn't count my time, of course, but it's been a great learning experience and there's at least some sort of model for making money that I was able to prove myself. Maybe I'll be able to grow it and actually make some money, or maybe not. In the meantime, it's a great experiment that keeps my creative and entrepreneurial juices flowing.

A big thank you to all the readers, supporters, and co-writers of the Young Professional Finance Blog. We'll look to make this blog even more relevant as we all continue to progress as young professionals, and I look forward to doing it with you.

--Alex