Hello and welcome to my Monthly Income Report for July 2021! This is my 12th monthly income report for my Lifebe.com.au blog and the last one in my little experiment! Thank you for coming along on this little journey with me.
This experiment was to see if I could start generating an income from a blog within 12 months so that I could provide myself with more options in the future.
It's all about the concept of financial freedom.
Why create a blog?
I wanted to create an opportunity for myself where if my work situation changed drastically/suddenly, then I wouldn't be completely bereft. I work primarily on projects, and while it's never happened to me personally, projects are often the first thing to be cut when a company has to make itself lean to weather a recession or economic downturn.
Essentially I want to create a situation where I am financially robust, able to cope with change somewhat easily and able to take on exciting opportunities that might not pay as well as I'm used to. I'm also really worried about retirement. I'm a couple of decades off actually retiring... but what I've seen in IT is that things get a lot harder for people in their 50s. They're often the first to be let go in a restructure, and because IT changes so ridiculously rapidly, having 20/30 years of experience isn't seen as that important compared to so many other industries... and so older IT professionals and often overlooked for their much younger peers.
For me, this means I need to be ready for retirement maybe 10 years before my friends... and even though that's still a while off, I just can't yet see a path where I'd be ready in time.
Source
Maybe I'm being silly, I don't know. No one around me seems to worry about these things.
I just figure that if I can get this all under control sooner rather than later then I (hopefully) won't find myself in a situation in my old age where I have to move away from everyone I know.
Is a blog going to help?
Honestly... I don't think so.
The people who are successful at blogging spend hours on it every day... have developed courses and products to sell, spend 90% of their time socializing their content and can be wiped out overnight with a change to a Google algorithm.
I think if you're a writer, then platforms like Medium and Substack will provide you with way more success. They have a built in audience, and that's huge.
Social media platforms absolutely don't want their users to click away onto people's blogs. They want their users to stay right there and look at their commercials. No algorithm exists to help individual blog sites... why would it?
Google isn't going to care about blog sites either... they are always going to rank sites that pay thousands in monthly advertising above anyone else... even if there is a ton more information on the topic on other sites. Google exists to increase shareholder value, not to make sure it's users get the best possible information.
Source
Is this the end of this blog?
No, not at all... in fact I literally just paid for a new year of webhosting.
The thing is... I like having my own little slice of the internet.
Ideally, instead of starting a blog, I should have spent all my spare time learning a programming language so that I could always get work via Upwork or similar if things got awkward.
I did... and haven't... because I really enjoy creating content. It's not a huge passion of mine... but every now and then I need to get things out of my head and this blog is a great way for me to do that. Blog websites constantly build on themselves, it's compounding... the more posts I do about Splinterlands, the more likely someone will find my content if they're searching for information about 'Splinterlands'...
I truly love love love the Hive blockchain, but it's a site (like so many others) where only the latest posts really matter. People almost never get comments on older posts. I don't love that, on my blog, the latest post usually has the most clicks... but all the older posts are still there grinding away... and because my site is web monetized, it means that all the posts earn me micropayments, not just the latest thing.
That said... I'm probably not going to continue with these Monthly Report posts because for the foreseeable future I won't be earning anything. Honestly, I have no problem with that. I'd rather build up an audience and traffic and then have the choice to monetize later if I need it.... or it just remains a little space for me to hang out in forever, that's fine too.
Let’s get into the Monthly Income Report for July 2021...
Monthly Income Report for July 2021
I’ve now got 77 posts on this blog. With 8 produced in July. While this wasn't as good as June... it's still a fair effort that I'm more than happy with.
This monthly income report will include not just income from this blog, but income from my blogging efforts… this includes my content on PeakD.com, Cinnamon.video and Coil.com
I won’t be including the web-monetization from Coil and Cinnamon because it consists of hundreds of transactions… it’s honestly not much, a couple of dollars a month (if that).
Income for July
+ $0
With both the Cinnamon and Coil content creator boost programs finishing up - I haven't generated any income from this blog. As far as I can tell, I haven't made anything from the affiliate links attached to the bottom of this post.
If you’re interested in creating on the Cinnamon platform and be eligible to whatever boost programs they have in the future, please use my referral code.
This is my Cinnamon channel:
https://cinnamon.video/aussieninja
Source
Cinnamon is such an interesting platform... essentially anyone can watch videos there for free, just like YouTube. Unlike YouTube though, there aren't commercials every couple of minutes (YouTube without an ad-blocker is completely unwatchable in my opinion). Instead Coil Subscribers fund both Cinnnamon and the content creators. You get microtransactions for every second that a subscriber watches your video for.... in real time. It's all sorts of amazing.
Subscribers get access to gated content that non-subscribers can't access... and subscribers get to help out creators and live in a world without commercials, sponsors, native-ads, etc etc. In my mind it's a great deal... but Cinnamon does need way more content.
Costs for July
– $14 Fathom Analytics
- $12 Domain re-registration
My Fathom trial period is over and since I don’t have any active referrals yet (click here if you’re interested) I’m now paying full price for this honestly fantastic service. I check it every day and I can’t emphasis enough how excited I am to use it and not leak data to Google Analytics.
Happy to purchase the LifeBe.com.au domain for another year. Excited to see what I can do with this website... I've got a ton of ideas.
Results for July
Income Total – $0
Expenses Total – $22
Profit Total – -$24
I also earned 151 HIVE for my posts and investments in the Hive ecosystem… which is worth about $62. I didn’t put it in my income tally because I’m keeping all my Hive on the blockchain. It’s not true revenue…. I also made an additional 98 HIVE but I pumped that directly into my Splinterlands collection for the SPS airdrop.
I also have 4.6 HBD (HIVE backed dollars) that I would normally convert to HIVE and power up (giving me an extra 11.5 HIVE) but instead I've decided to keep that in the HBD Savings wallet where it'll earn 10% interest annually.
Analytics for July
I came into July fully enthusiastic but we actually had a guest stay with us for a week, and I managed to give myself a frustrating back injury so my content and my pimping out of that content was not nearly as comprehensive as I would have liked.
Source
More people visited my site this month compared to last month... but clicked on less pages... by a considerable amount. That said... people spent almost double the amount of time on the site than last month... so I'm really happy with that. I like to think I'm providing something useful.
This is my all time stats... I think we can definitely start to see that compounding effect...
Source
The things that people cared about the most this month are the Mint Club and Splinterlands... which is fair enough because they're both really super exciting.
I also got 235 GRANT tokens for my 2 posts which was awesome and unexpected, so that was really exciting and it looks like the Mint Club team will be continuing to reward people for helping to publicize their platform.
Here are the platforms that produced traffic for me... unfortunately no one can post links to Coil anymore so that's a shame.
Here are the countries that check my blog out...
I’m socialising my posts on Pinterest, Twitter and MG.Social. I was so good at Pinterest there for a little bit... I'd interact with the platform every day... and then I totally dropped off. Arrgh.
Source
It really is hard to know how much time to dedicate to Pinterest... in 12 months it's generated 10 clicks for me... woo... hoo. It also does seem to be the primary launchpad for so many blogposts though, so I honestly don't know. It's very possible that I'm too far ahead of the curve in terms of things normal Pinterest users are interested in - they're just not in a blockchain frame of mind yet.
I'll keep at it... but half-heartedly at best.
If you’re curious to how I went in the previous 11 months… here are some links for you:
June 2021 - Monthly Income Report
May 2021 – Monthly Income Report
April 2021 – Monthly Income Report
March 2021 – Monthly Income Report
February 2021 – Monthly Income Report
January 2021 – Monthly Income Report
December 2020 – Monthly Income Report
November 2020 – Monthly Income Report
October 2020 – Monthly Income Report
September 2020 – Monthly Income Report
August 2020 – Monthly Income Report
Thanks so much for reading my Monthly Income Report for July 2021.
Please hit me up on Twitter or throw down in the comments below if you have any questions.
Posted from my blog with Exxp : https://lifebe.com.au/digital/monthly-income-report-for-july-2021/