Site Net Worth - August 2020

Welcome readers to our second ever Net Worth Statement! I plan to include a monthly net worth statement for a variety of reasons. First, most of the other blogs I read and follow have started out supplying income statements (we focus on net worth here so that's what I'll provide). They are a good read and give you a sense of where their focus is from a site monetization perspective. Second, because I intend to try and monetize this site I think it will be a good tool to help me track progress and share with my audience how that part of this project is going. Third/last, I think, is transparency for both myself and anyone who follows the blog.

Since this is our second net worth statement let me provide some background. About two years ago my wife and I launched a blog that mainly focused on taking care of our wonderful English Bulldog, Daisy. Shortly after we launched the blog I took a job in a new city, we moved three times in 18-months and the blog writing got away from us. I did, however, get a taste for what building a blog can be like and I loved it. I really enjoy writing, I enjoy building things, and I really like the challenge of trying to build a business online.

So about 15 days ago The Saving Dude was launched with the intent of showing our readers how to increase their net worth by tracking basic information month over month. In addition, The Saving Dude will share ways that our family has saved and made money. Some of these efforts have been difficult, but not all saving is easy. The results of our efforts have added up to an additional $250,000 added to our net worth in the last 3 years. We have also paid down nearly $100,000 in debt during that time!

If you are familiar with The Saving Dude a key focus here is net worth and growing it over time. In the spirit of consistency we will report out all of our expenses and income to report out a monthly net worth. This will look slightly different than a typical net worth tracker as I will isolate income and expenses per month vs over time.

August was our first full month with the site up and we made a ton of progress toward longer term goals. I'll cross some of them off our to-do list from July below, but I definitely want to call some of them out here. We got approved for Google Adsense! This is a super basic way to monetize the site. Simply put, the more people that visit my pages the more money I can make. If I can write 20 articles that make $5/day then that equals $36,500 per year. Something I would be very happy with. We were also approved to be a Wix affiliate. Wix is the platform I use to host and build my site. I used Wix to build our first site about taking care of an English Bulldog. We tried so hard to get that site up and running, but just ran out of time to keep it going. It lives on and may get some TLC here in the near future so keep your eyes peeled for an update there.

Net Worth - $0: We broke even in August, but only because we had no expenses

Total Hours Spent (this is new to the net worth report): 30 hours - I spent about an hour a day on the blog to produce content, research, and update the site experience

Income Breakdown:

$0

We launched the site on July 28th so there hasn't been a lot of time to monetize the site. We learned a lot in the last 34 days and are executing on a ton of stuff to get us to a place of profitability. Here is a quick list of what we are worked on in August:

1. Submit more affiliate applications - Wix was approved and so was Amazon

2. Write more articles that include affiliate links for sites we are approved affiliates - we actually just focused on

3. Build content/blogs that are optimized for SEO - doing better since we got our first organic search result

4. Optimize existing blogs for SEO - getting better, but not where we need to be

5. Ad the Google Adsense plug-in (there is a lengthy approval period for this) - this is 100% complete

Expenses:

$0

Nothing to speak of here.

We are making good progress toward profitability. What I've learned in the last 31 days is that content is king. If you write good content and notify your readers that is has been published then you have a good shot of attaining readers and creating profit from a blog. We are feeling really good about what we are building here.

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Net Worth Reports:

July 2020

August 2020

September 2020

October 2020