Day 35 | Making Dozens of Cents

It's been a hot minute, and things have happened. Nothing earth-shattering, but any progress is good progress. I'm out of the rut, and yet it's time to bury the 100-day challenge.

For some reason, I can't get back into it. My brain refuses to cooperate after having failed already. I end up reading the news or watching Youtube. No-internet just isn't happening right now.

The Journey Continues

This doesn't mean I'll stop counting the days. My journey was never meant to end at day 100, and I'll keep moving toward that elusive seven-figure goal. Or in my case, that elusive one-figure goal.

Because I still haven't reached a dollar of profit.

But only because I refuse to round up from 70 cents! Yes, you read that right. Seventy whole cents is what I've made over the past six days. And 70 cents is a heck of a lot more than 0 cents.

If I keep this up I'll be able to buy myself a cup of coffee in about a month.

I hate coffee by the way. No idea why I would use it as an example to get across the patheticness of my financial endeavors.

AdSense Reality Check

I yanked the affiliate links from my language site and switched to AdSense (they accepted my site, and it didn't even take that long). Everyone online talks about $10 to $50 RPM. The absolute floor, they say, is $2 to $5 per thousand visitors.

RPM, in case you don't know, stands for revenue per mille - it tells you how much money you earn from ads per thousand visitors.

So then what is my RPM? Drumroll please... don't gasp... 30 cents. Tada!

I even filtered to just United States traffic, considered top-tier in terms of earnings. And 30 cents is my magic number.

Let me break this down: A million visitors would earn me $300.

These numbers are insane. Orders of magnitude below what everyone else posts. And they don't all have finance blogs, which apparently make an especially pretty penny from ads.

Oh hey, technically speaking, this right here is a finance blog! But given how my finances are progressing (not at all), you won't have to worry about encountering ads on SolitaryWealth any time soon.

I won't be adding the AdSense cents to my profit total until they hit my actual bank account - if I ever even reach the payout threshold that is.

Tweaks of Frustration

AdSense has been live for less than a week. The RPM creeps up slightly each day - maybe the algorithm's still learning. There's always hope. Today I switched to so-called native ads, which match my site's dark theme.

No more ugly white boxes screaming I'M AN AD! Now they blend in nicely. They don't disturb the layout. They're so pretty, you couldn't possibly stop yourself from clicking them!

Click-through rate during this past week had been just over 1%. That's the lower end of what's acceptable, they say. They say a lot things, don't they?

I have a theory about the bad ad performance: I think my language site attracts too random a crowd. Visitors from everywhere, interested in everything. Hard to target ads when you don't know who you're targeting. Which makes advertisers pay less.

The Bank Loan

Speaking of payments. Remember my shrinking bank account? It was shrinking way faster than expected. Like way, way faster. You would not believe how fast it was shrinking.

The only comparison I can draw is a stash of donuts at a weight-loss convention.

So yes, I needed to intervene. Stock up on donuts, so to speak. I managed to get myself a bank loan. Should survive about 12 months now. This gives me breathing room, takes off some pressure. Good.

Small and Big Wins

Pinterest came through. Finally got API access. My location site now auto-posts twice daily to X and Pinterest. Not much traction yet, but at least it's automated.

Dropped $200 on listings. Found a service that listed my tool site on 100 SaaS directories. It made the domain rating jump from 0 to 19. And a handful of people actually used my interactive tools. Was it worth $200? Jury's still out.

The product site is live! Amazon affiliate links galore. Just submitted to Google and Bing. This could be the one - visitors here are already looking to buy stuff. Maybe I'll get my first Amazon commission soon - something that my film site has been unable to pull off so far.

Progress Check

Original goal: 5-7 new websites in 100 days. Current status: 2 new websites in 35 days.

Still on track there - only the no-internet portion has derailed.

Traffic update:

Language site: 6.8K monthly visitors (+10%)
Location site: 3.3K monthly visitors (+3%)
Film site: 591 monthly visitors (+75%)
Tool site: 81 monthly visitors (+252%)
Product site: 0 monthly visitors (just launched)

Money made so far: $0

-Hank