I am mainly keeping Financial Jesus as a hobby but as a nice side note it also brings in a little money.

In 2009 it made me an extra 851,97 dollars.

Where I Got My Money From

Google Adsense – $519.31

Amazon.com referral program – $1.93

CPALead.com – $3.71

Direct Sales - $327.02 (101.4 dollars in December)

Total Blog income in 2009 – $ 851.97

As you see from the numbers, Google Adsense is still my number 1 earner – I am having a difficult time coming up with something more profitable. In December however I looked into direct sales and managed to pull in a rather decent income of 170 dollars. That is almost twice what I made in November.

Goal for 2010

My Blog income Goal for 2010 is 5000 dollars. That’s $416 per month on average!

I have a number of things in my mind to achieve this:

• More articles – Write constantly more articles to get more traffic. Maybe even pay someone to help me write more stuff. A poll on the website seems to suggest that people want at least 1 new article per day.
• Sell my own products – I will come up with my own digital products that I can sell on the website. This way people that are interested in some topics can find out more and at the same time they will help me to keep the site going.
• Online store – put a store on the site that would enable people buy books and other things I recommend.
• A forum – I’ll probably add a forum to the website. That way I will get more traffic and find a way for my readers to engage with each other.

Here are the income stats for www.financialjesus.com in September 2009

Google Adsense - $79.23

Direct Links – $10

Total Income – $89,23

What happened in September?

1. I redesigned the website using the premium Thesis WordPress theme. I have to say that using Thesis is the best decision I have ever done. It has an insanely huge number of tweaking options – you can change everything without writing a line of code.

2. I also decided to use ads on every blog post that is older than 7 days. That way I will spear my usual readers from seeing ads but at the same time cash in from the people who find their way here from Google or other search engines.

3. I discontinued textlink ads. It was a great program that brought me in more than Google Adsense does but for some reason Google has dropped my pagerank from 3 to 0. I don’t know the exact cause but I suspect that using textlinkads.com can be behind it. So I am discontinuing the program for a few months to see if my pagerank will change back up!

Changes in Traffic

There were 25 216 visitors to Financial Jesus in September 2009. That is a 32.1% rise from August 2009.

The daily average visitor count went from 615 the month earlier to 840.

Goal for October

My minimum income goal for Financial Jesus in October is $100 dollars. I expect the income from Adsense to decline a bit since the initial effect of a new design is going to wear down and people are starting to get ad blindness.
At the same time I will most probably break the 1000 readers a day on average mark which will also mean larger earnings.

If time allows – I will also try some new money making sources – I am getting more and more into affiliate marketing and I am thinking of leveraging the traffic here to get more money

Congratulations everybody – as of today Financial Jesus is exactly 6 months old!

Running this blog has been one of my favorite hobbies during this time but  I have never began to think that it could be something more.

Some time ago I got an email from an advertising company asking about how much money Financial Jesus charges for putting ads on our blog.

This got me thinking.

What is the maximum amount of money this website could make with my current amount of visitors?

In order to find the answer I had to calculate how much money an average visitor of Financial Jesus makes me

In November 2008 FinancialJesus.com had 13 147 visitors and my Google Adsense revenue was 28.2 dollars. (The only ads we have are on the menu and on 3 posts that are ranking high in Google  – compared to established websites this is about the same as not having ads )

Calculating the average income per visitor

To find how much each visitor makes you on average you have to do the fallowing calculation:

Average income per visitor = total website revenue / total number of visitors

In our example the average income per visitor is $28.2/13 147 = about 0.00214 dollars.

This means that whenever someone visits my website I will always make $0.00214- even if the visitor never clicks on an ad. It also means that in order to make 1 dollar Financial Jesus needs 468 visitors.

How much is someone else making in your niche?

Estimating competitor’s monthly traffic

This is the tricky part – you need to find an established website that has a similar topic to yours and that gives out details about their traffic and income. This data is often unavailable but it is possible to get some educated guesses from traffic estimation services like TrafficEstimate or Alexa.

Estimating competitor’s monthly income

Albeit more difficult – it is also possible to guess a website’s revenue. This is easier with larger websites that generally sell their ads directly to advertisers and who usually have their ad rates up on a special page. If there are no Google Adsense ads then you are in luck – simply count how many ads does a website serve and multiply them with the ad prices. This should give you a pretty good ballpark figure on how much a website makes. If a website runs ads from Google or other contextual advertising programs then I’m afraid you’re out of luck – it is very difficult to estimate how much money they make.

Example Calculation

For my calculations I used JohnChow.com. Our topics are only about 25%-30% the same, but thanks to John’s monthly income reports I know for sure that in October 2008  he made $34,350.93 and from his advertising page I learned that his website has over 200 000 visitors per month. Everyone knows that John’s blog is one of the biggest money making machine’s in the blogosphere, so I use his website as an estimate on how much Financial Jesus could make in a month.

By doing the above calculation with John’s numbers I find that on average he makes 0.172 dollars from every visitor.

$34,350.93/200.000= 0,172 dollars per visitor

Compared to the 0.00214 dollars per visitor that Financial Jesus makes, JohnChow.com is over 80 times more effective in turning visitors into money. (You get this number when dividing your competitors income per visitor with your own – in my case 0.172/0.00214 = 80.4).

If Financial Jesus would be as effective as JohnChow.com in turning visitors into money it would have made 2267.28 dollars in November 2008. (You get this number by multiplying your real income with the number your competitor is more effective than you – in our case $28.2 x 80.4 = 2267.28 dollars )

Conclusion – You can make decent money without a lot of traffic

By adding more revenue sources and ads it is possible for a website to dramatically increase its income. If FinancialJesus.com would do exactly what it has been doing but would also try to monetize itself then it would be possible to make over 80 times more money in a month than it has currently made – while 28 dollars a month doesn’t seem like much, 2267 dollars looks a lot better!

Its natural that getting the kind of efficiency that the big players have is going to be a difficult goal to achieve, but it is also true that any rise in a website’s efficiency is a great thing – while making over 2000 dollars a month could seem impossible, I am certain that increasing FinancialJesus.com’s efficiency 40 times and making 1000 dollars a month is something I can achieve in a few months.

Think about it!

How much money are you leaving on the table? How much money are you practically throwing away by not making your website more efficient?

By doing the same calculation I did, it is possible for you to estimate how much money a website can make.