Site Net Worth - September 2020

Welcome readers to our monthly 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 and accountability for both myself and anyone who follows the blog. The more transparent I can be about the progress I'm making them better I can focus my attention on the efforts that are moving the needle. In addition, if I know I need to write this article once a month I better have something to add!

Before we get too deep into the nitty-gritty let me add some context around how The Saving Dude came to be and a little about the Why behind the site. A few years ago my wife and I launched a blog that mainly focused on taking care of our amazing 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. Writing a blog provides me with an opportunity to exercise all those mental muscles in one place.

If you want to start your own money-making blog take a look at my step by step instructions.

So in late July 2020 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, we have and will talk about easy ways to save money, easy ways to make money, and a few other random topics that I might stumble upon that seem cool and relevant to talk about. I'll also reflect on some of the things that my wife and I have done to save money over the last few years. Some of these efforts have been difficult and 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! So I'd say it was all totally worth it.

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 that count toward our 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.

September was our second 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 August below, but I definitely want to call some of them out here.

We made our first money on the site! While it was only 3 cents it was still money that we didn't have before and a value can now be placed on the site (it's only worth 3 cents but who cares). We are on our way to the $5/day I mentioned in last month's net worth report which, if you recall would equal $36,500 per year. That is a nice chunk of change.

We also wrote and published our first article with a Wix affiliate link. 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. One of the main ways we will monetize this site is through affiliate links like the one above for Wix.

Net Worth - $0.03: We finally broke through!

Total Hours Spent (this is new to the net worth report): 40 hours - I spent about an hour a day on the blog to produce content, research, and update the site experience. This is up about 10 hours over last month, but the site needed significantly more content, updates to old content, and more research to ensure we were building the right things

Articles Written: 6 vs 9 in August

Income Breakdown:

$0.03

Here is a quick list of what we are worked on in September:

1. Gain a better understanding of SEO and how to build articles that rank

2. Write a ton more material - while we didn't write more total articles the articles we did write took more time to ensure they were thorough and ready for our readers

3. Ensure all articles have some sort of ad within them to help monetize the site

Expenses:

$0

We are making good progress toward profitability and more importantly a good quality blog that people are interested in visiting more than once. 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