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.

My income goal in February was $77.63 - I didn’t achieve it but came pretty close. While my income in January 2009 was only $22.37, I managed to almost triple it in February.

Here are the income stats of Financial Jesus for February 2009.

Google Adsense – $16.65

Text Links Ads – $22.61

Direct Links – $21.5

Total earnings for February 2009 – $60.76

What happened in February?

New kinds of ads

I tested Adbrite.com ads but after only 2 day I felt that they were not working and abandoned them. For some reason the code I used never showed real ads but only a link that allowed those interested to buy a link on my website – I am pretty sure I messed up and therefore will probably test Adbrite again pretty soon. If you are familiar with Adbrite and know what I did wrong – let me know!

I managed to sell a link in one of my posts for 20 dollars – I am not sure if I will manage to do it again in March so achieving the same amount of income can prove difficult.

New Theme

I spent 168 dollars on the Thesis WordPress theme to radically improve the design and layout of financialjesus.com. This is the first time ever that I have spent money doing something for this blog – hopefully it will help to lift things up to a new level eventually!

As you are probably noticing right know – the new theme is not up yet and I am not certain when it will be – probably not before April.

Working on a new Website – LOL Finance

I am working on a new site called LOL Finance – it is a website that publishes daily funny pictures, stories and videos about finance. The site is currently under construction and I have not officially launched it yet but I am hoping to do so in March.
It is also my first test regarding the use of the Thesis theme – before converting Financial Jesus over I will try to get the feel of it to make the customization process easier!

Income goal for March 2009

$100

I sold some links in February that allowed me to temporarily pump up the income, but at the same time I didn’t react on some offers that would have allowed me to increase my revenues even more. Hopefully I will have more courage to take up these extra offers in March!

If anyone has positive experience with some ad networks in addition to Google Adsense – please let me know so I could test them out. I am willing to become your referral!

Don’t forget to sign up below to get updated how I did in March!

I am only making baby steps with Financial Jesus and its capacity to earn money – but here are the income stats for January 2009.

Google Adsense Income -$15.25

Income – $4.12

Direct Links – $3

Total Earnings for January 2009 – $22.37

The kind of money I am making with FinancialJesus.com is little at most but I am still seeing potential for it to become my main income source.

In January I joined as my first advertising program besides Google Adsense. I have to say that  Google has not being delivering the best results for me but until last month I didn’t have the motivation to try other programs – BIG MISTAKE!

While  only made me a bit over 4 dollars I started using it in the end of the month – so it will make me a lot more in February – in just 3 days it has already made me over 18 dollars – that’s about as much as I made in January combined.

January was also the first month that I made my first direct sale – selling a finance related link for 3 dollars. I had no idea how much a link in my blog should be worth but after finding out that the text link service I also joined asks $15 for a link I will probably raise the price to 10 dollars.

My blog income goal for February is $77.63

Achieving it means I have made $100 in blogging this year in just 2 months (vs the 8 months it got me to get the first 100 dollars).

What to expect in February

New theme

I am going to shop around for a premium WordPress theme. While the one I currently have is fairly good, it lacks the ability to generate more page views and has a lot of other small shortcomings that together have a tremendous impact on the usability of Financial Jesus. I intend to fix this!

More content

My blogging goal for February will be 1 post per day – which makes out a total of 28 posts. While I intend to only write about the things that are interesting to myself I also have the SEO fact in mind. Managing to get 10 new visits from organic search results for every article I write will give me an extra 240 visitors per day. While it will be a challenge I have been using a simple trick that helps me better target my posts to search engines. Don’t bother asking – I will keep it a secret!

More marketing

I have done a little research and made a list of personal finance websites that Financial Jesus has to compete with. Some of these sites have more visitors and some have less – I have prioritized them and intend to write some guest articles and use an aggressive commenting strategy to get new RSS subscribers. My goal is 300 RSS subscribers by March. It’s difficult , but achievable.

More monetization

I will try some new advertising programs to try and make some money. It seems that all the famous bloggers are right after all – the key to making money is having a lot of income sources (it’s the same in real world). If anyone has some good ideas on advertising programs to try – please let me know and I might become your affiliate if I decide to join! I am also hoping for miracles from my future theme – hopefully it will be one of the answers to making more money online.

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