Site Net Worth - July 2020

Welcome readers to our first ever Income Statement! I plan to include a monthly income statement for a variety of reasons. First, most of the other blogs I read and follow have started out supplying income statements. 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 first income statement let's talk a little about how we got here. 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!

In contrast to other sites that post income reports I'm going to post a net worth statement. 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.

Now that we have given a review of how we got here and what we are going to report on I'll dive in to the numbers.

Net Worth - (-$200): We lost money in July. This is the cost of doing business, but building a blog

Income Breakdown:

$0

We launched the site on July 28th so there wasn't a lot of time to monetize the site. We learned a lot in those 3 days and are executing on a ton of stuff in August to get us to a place of profitability. Here is a quick list of what we are working on for August:

1. Submit more affiliate applications

2. Write more articles that include affiliate links for sites we are approved affiliates

3. Build content/blogs that are optimized for SEO

4. Optimize existing blogs for SEO

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

Expenses:

$200

We had to invest a little money to get the site set up and off the ground. The hope is to recoup this investment within the first 4-6 months.

1. Register website with Wix - $198

2. Register our business email address with Google - $12

If you are interested in starting your own blog I'll be releasing a future post outlining the process I've gone through to get The Saving Dude live. A quick teaser of that article, there is a ton of work that goes in to setting up a website, monitoring traffic, driving traffic, writing content, etc. Super excited to put together a road map for future bloggers.

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Net Worth Reports:

July 2020

August 2020

September 2020

October 2020