Hello and welcome to my Monthly Income Report for May! This is my 10th monthly income report for my Lifebe.com.au blog.
This was a 12 month experiment to see if I could earn an income with this blog that I could build on year over year to eventually provide me with enough financial freedom to have more choices.
It honestly hasn't turned out like I expected... I was doing really well with the Coil and Cinnamon boost programs, but I wasn't creating nearly enough content to build up any sort of regular following. Now that the boost programs have been paired right down, the next options for earning an income with this blog now come down to web-monetization, affiliate links and selling courses or products.
Let's get into the income report for May... it's not going to be pretty...
Monthly Income Report for May 2021
I’ve now got 57 posts on this blog. With 4 produced in May. I'm going to need to start producing several posts per week to really start to build up an audience that might be interested in the affiliate links or web-monetization that will help me earn from these posts.
The good thing about having my own blog is that once the content really starts to fill out and the search engines are all over your site, each new piece of content adds more potential searches. The bad thing is that you don't get the audience that you might otherwise get using a Medium or Substack type platform.
More than a few people believe that Medium is the future of blogging and Substack is the future of journalism... and that personal blogs will just never quite get the traffic they need because bigger platforms that have advertising dollars will always suck up all the search engine spots, even if they're not actually the best source of information.
Focus areas for this blog
However, since I'd really like to focus on web-monetization and decentralization, I really want to see if I can get this blog off the ground and create a really useful resource for this new web3.0 world.
Ideally I'd like to become one of the world's experts on web-monetization... it's very niche but I've still got a ton of work to do to learn all the things.
The Coil creator boost is now done and Cinnnamon creator boost has changed… and both are way more open now to new creators. You’ll need a Coil account for either/or both Coil and Cinnamon, so jump over here if you’re interested or feel free to ask me all about it. Always happy to talk about the things!
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.
Income for May
+ $0
I got the Cinnamon creator boost in April which means I wasn't eligible for it in May.
I still think this is a great idea as it really does allow for new creators to earn for creating videos... and that can only help the platform as a whole...
You will need a Coil account to be eligible for the Creator Boost on Cinnamon, so if you are interested, please use my referral code.
This is my Cinnamon channel:
https://cinnamon.video/aussieninja
The way that Cinnamon works is that anyone can watch videos on the platform... but some of the better videos are locked and can only be viewed by Coil subscribers.
When Coil Subscribers watch any of the videos (either the free ones or the locked ones) a portion of their subscription goes to the creator of the video. You earn $0.36 per hour that a subscriber spends on your content... so the more subscribers consuming your content, the better for everyone!
Costs for May
– $14 Fathom Analytics
For the first time since I started this blog, my costs will outweigh my income... but I'm not about to quit Fathom Analytics because they really are amazing.
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.
Results for May
Income Total – $0
Expenses Total – $14
Profit Total – negative $14
I also earned 89.90 HIVE for my posts and investments in the Hive ecosystem… which is worth about $37.76. 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'm looking to create more posts specifically for the different communities on the Hive ecosystem to help build up my account... it's such a great community and would like to add more to that blockchain. I think it really could be all sorts of amazing in the next decade.
Analytics for May
Building up traffic is always a difficult prospect for an independent site... but I'm definitely looking to really start to amp these up. Sites like Hive and Coil are great... but your older work doesn't really seem to matter all that much... this is where having your own website can really start to work out for you.
I only posted 4 times in May... but most days have a visit or two...
The interesting thing about this graph is that the big spike on May the 24th was because of the Koinos Developer Preview step by step guide I wrote... on the 20th. It hit my blog and the Hive blockchain on the 20th... but the 24th was when I tweeted it out, and got retweeted by the Koinos Network twitter account.
I've definitely noticed that in the past, writing up something that is totally retweetable is the way to go to get traffic flowing to your site. It's a tip I continually forget about until it happens to me each time...
Obviously no surprises here...
It's no surprise that I'm getting most of my traffic from Twitter... but it's honestly a little disappointing that I only got 1 hit from Coil. It used to be where the majority of my traffic from... but in Coil's defense I've really only been posting my Koinos posts there lately... which is probably not the right target market.
Search Engine Optimization
I was curious about what was causing my Google traffic, so I did a SEO analyzer thing on Neil Patel's site.
Turns out I'm not even in the Top 100 sites in the world ranking for "Koinos"... that can't be true can it.
Ah, I just checked... there is a church named Koinos. If I put "Koinos blockchain" into Google then I'm in spot 34... and probably unlikely to get in the Top 10 since HackerNoon and CoinTelegraph are probably going to keep their spots... and the rest is official Koinos sites.
I didn't really learn anything else from Neil Patel's site - just that I need to be way more popular.
Last month I had 3 visitors from Japan and Russia, and this month I have 3 from Brazil and Germany... weird.
I’m socialising my posts on Pinterest and Twitter. There was 1 click from Pinterest above, so that’s nice. I’ve honestly rarely posted to Pinterest, but that’s something I really want to get a lot better at…. I’ve got to figure out a nice workflow to socialize my posts.
If you’re curious to how I’ve been going previous months… here are the links to previous income posts:
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 May.
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-may-2021/