Flickr photo! by 顔なし’.

Five Cents Ten Cents: An experiment in blog monetisation

This blog was started on 22 February 2007 and it has been one year plus since it was born. During that one year, I have evolved Five Cents Ten Cents from a blog with zero readers to one that has about 50-100 unique visitors generating page views of up to 100-200 a day. What started out as a blogspot site has changed into one hosted on its own domain with its own dot com name. It has and continues to be an exciting journey was I strive to move my blog to the next level.

What Five Cents Ten Cents has achieved

The most rewarding part of Five Cents Ten Cents has not been the monetary aspect but rather the discovery that some of the skills I had picked up in the past, that are relevant for the present and future. My previous experience working in an IT firm, coupled with my experience as a public speaker in toastmasters and as an ex-editor of newsletters for societies I was previously with all came together slowly as I began this process of writing out my journey towards financial freedom.

In this process, I began to simplify the approach towards financial freedom and could start to see that it basically required me to do three things that were simple in theory, but difficult in execution. The three things are to live within my means, to save and invest and to grow my means.

My blogging efforts has also seen not just the increase in depth of this blog, but also an increase in breadth. So far, this blog plus my newer ones are the best monetisers I have in my blog portfolio. However, the payoffs are more modest but reasonable in my standards given that I only started out this project a year ago literally with my bare hands and not knowing much about how the whole thing worked.

Till date, according to AdSense, Five Cents Ten Cents and my other blogs have contributed USD 588 to my retirement fund. This translates into SGD 832.20 over 12 months or $69.35 a month. Barely subsistence and it covers my broadband costs but only just. While some may scoff as such small sums, it is interesting to note that at current treasury bill yields of 0.85%, it would require you a capital sum of $97,905.88 to earn the same amount of interest in 1 year!

Beyond the money and cents, my past one year in blog monetisation has rekindled my interest in using the internet more effectively and allowed me to pick up the Web 2.0 technologies that I have neglected for some time.

Where Five Cents Ten Cents is going

Now that I have managed to bring Five Cents Ten Cents to some level of stability, the next phase is to continue to focus on quality content but also to work on monetisating it more effectively. AdSense is helpful in that you can start from zero and go to cents and dollars a day without too worrying too much about getting specific sponsors, but over time, you can see your revenue go down even when you have more pageviews and clicks because AdSense can adjust the types of advertisements that go to your site.

The real money comes from selling your own product or service rather than to be an effective affiliate unless you are going for volume and huge traffic.

I will continue to improve this blog. The first thing that is coming up real soon is a forum that discusses personal finance and financial freedom. I will be launching it quite soon with some interesting contests/activities to help generate some buzz and to build up a community of like-minded people who are interesting in personal finance to come on board. The other is to work on a more collaborative model. In fact, one of my blogs has someone helping me which takes some of the load off me to focus on the design elements and other aspects of the blog.

Growing your means

I have advocated that growing your means be part of your financial freedom strategy because time is limited for all of us. If you can squeeze out more dollars from the same 24 hours you have, then you are moving faster in your journey towards financial freedom. Of course, you have to be focussed not to blow the entire amount away by continuing to live within your means and save and invest those additional monies from growth in your means.

The investment in time and effort is like digging a well. You dig a well to get at the ground water that is stored below the ground. In order for you to access the precious life-giving resource, you need to sink in effort and energy in digging down and building up a well that can be used to draw water. Your efforts in pursuing financial freedom, especially the part on growing your means through building income sources that can be turned into investments that generate passive income will bear fruit one year, ten years, twenty years down the road. But you must start on the journey before you can ever reach your destination.

Let us journey together in our realistic steps towards financial freedom.

Be well and prosper.