Getting It All Started

This is the first monthly report detailing my online business activities. As you’ll see below, the profit/loss report isn’t looking too good. I’m not worried though because I’ve only just started.

Much of January was spent just setting things up. In fact January marked a major milestone for me as I cut my work hours down to four days a week. Late last year, I arranged with my employer to take Fridays to devote to my online business. I’m working as a contractor, which makes it much easier because I only get paid the hours I work anyway. There’s no fussing about with HR organizing pay cuts and adjusting all the little details.

This gave me the extra time in January to get three web sites up and running, including this one. Not all are completed, I’ve still got to find some affiliate programs to run on some of them.

Income/Expense

January 2008 didn’t see much in the way of income, however the expenses are still there. I made a grand total of fifteen cents, and the expenses were around thirty one dollars. From a Profit/Loss perspective, January was a loss. From a learning perspective, it was a real gain.

Income

• Adsense: $0.13
• CPM Ads: $0.02
• Total: $0.15

Expenses

• Hosting: $19.92
• Domains: $12.06
• Total: $31.98

Grand Total: -$31.83

I’m using two web hosts at the moment, Site 5 for my gaming blog, and Dreamhost for the niche sites including Live Free and Blog. Hosting costs are given on a per month basis, so I’m just including the full monthly costs for the main blog on each account.

Domains on the other hand are yearly costs, and some sites have several domains. LiveFreeAndBlog uses .com, .net, and .info TLDs. So I total up each sites TLD costs and divide by 12 to give my monthly cost. That way the monthly cost is spread out over the year and gives a better idea of the true expenses.

I haven’t done any real promotion yet on the three Dreamhost sites. The game blog has been going well over a year now and is regularly promoted, but not advertised. It’s doing well with over 200 RSS subscribers, and 18000 page views a month, but I’d like it to do better. I see real potential there.

All of the income came from the last few days of January. The Adsense income came from purely organic traffic as the (so far minimal content) of that particular blog brought in some searchers.

Goals For February

Okay. Time to set some goals for February.

I still need to research and develop content for my major niche site - henceforth called Niche Site A. My goal is to have 100 articles on that site by the end of February.

The other niche site (Niche Site B) has enough content for the moment, but I need to research some affiliate programs. I’m not looking at putting Adsense on this one.

I’m also not looking at paying for any promotion in Feb. I’m expecting to dive in with paid promotion in March.

Goals

• Niche Site A - 100 Articles, 300 visitors, 600 page views.
• Niche Site B - All set up with programs
• Game Blog - 250 RSS, 30000 page views, $50 income.
• Generate total of $100 income.
• Minimize expenses.

Welcome to Live Free and Blog, a blog not just about making money online, but about the lifestyle that goes with it.

Trying to come up with a name that hadn’t already been taken was a little tough. For a while I toyed with YAMMOB (Yet Another Make Money Online Blog) but those six letters had already been taken for nothing of consequence. I considered making an offer on the domain, but realized I didn’t feel strongly enough about the name to do so.

I also considered BlogNoob as a possible name for this blog, because that is exactly what I am. A noob. I’ve been blogging in the online gaming niche since late 2006, and have learned an awful lot about what it takes. I did buy that domain when I first came up with the name, and still expect to do something with it one of these days.

It’s good in a way because coming up with names helped me to focus on what I wanted to write about, and to set the goals for this blog.

The Inspiration

Over the last year, I’ve come across a number of blogs that are being written by folks who are aiming at making a living online. These people aren’t the A List bloggers, they’re not independently wealthy, and they don’t (appear to) possess any arcane knowledge about building online wealth.

What they are is ordinary people who are taking steps, and conducting experiments, to create something that will allow them to escape the fishbowl.

It was about this time last year that I created my second blog with the goal of doing exactly that. Unfortunately, I jumped the gun. Shortly afterwards there was turmoil at work and in my life. I didn’t have the experience (or the patience) to push through the barriers and finally, lost motivation. The new blog needless to say died.

It almost killed my gaming blog too. There were several months of minimal posting resulting in lost subscribers and readers. Towards the end of the year I pulled myself together, found a new freshness, and am finally getting that blog back on track.

At the same time I found myself inspired to dip my toes once again into the world of make money online blogging.

I know. This is a subject that is being done to death. Every blogger and his dog has a MMO blog. Which is why I’m going to approach this a little differently than I did before.

Live Free and Blog is not an experiment in and of itself. As I wrote above, there are few blogs I’ve been reading where the goal is to earn an income with the blog itself. While this will be part of my strategy, it’s not the primary goal.

Live Free and Blog will essentially be the record of my experiments in making money online. Not every detail will be included. I won’t be sharing websites, keywords, or the fine details of my experiments until I have finished with them. There would be two effects of doing this.

1. The results of my tests would be influenced by observers coming from this site just to see what is going on. This would skew the results and may prevent any useful conclusions from being drawn from the data. Remember that in science, observing something changes it.
2. What I am doing will be affected by others, watering down the results. A profitable website would be copied by others who may then affect my earnings. Some may even attempt to sabotage them to gain an advantage for themselves.

What I’ll be doing is sharing what I’m learning as I go along. As I said, I’m a noob at this, and I’ve got a lot to learn. I’ll be including my mistakes in my posts so that you can learn from them.

A lot of make money online writers are quite happy to tell you what their revenues are, but they never mention the expenses. I’m never quite sure when I read the results what the profit is. Does “I earned $400,000 last month,” mean that he spent $395,000 to earn it and only made $5,000?

So, I’ll be tracking my expenses as well as my revenues at the end of each month.

The Goals

When starting something new, it’s always good to set some goals.

1. Be earning a living pre-tax income of $5000 a month in six months, and double that by the end of the year.
2. Live Free and Blog to earn $500 a month within six months, and $1000 by the end of the year. It should be about 10 percent of total earnings.
3. To have one thousand RSS subscribers reading Live Free and Blog by the end of the year.
4. To have at least three blogs, websites, or programs providing the bulk of the revenue.
5. To not rely on a single income stream and have multiple sources of income.

Escaping the Fish Bowl

When I was looking for images to use for the banner, I had all sorts of pictures floating around in my mind. None of them had anything to do with fish. But when I came across a picture of a fish leaping out of it’s bowl, I knew it was the right one. It instantly resonated with what I wanted to achieve in my life.

The metaphor of a goldfish escaping its bowl has a lot of connotations.

The first one is that this fish is escaping a tiny constricting environment. In much the same way, escaping the office or cubicle is what this blog is all about. It’s what I want to do.

However, where is the fish going to end up?

That’s not covered in this image. Is it going to land on the floor and suffocate? Or is the target a big pond or ocean? And is there a bigger fish in the pond just waiting to swallow the little goldfish?

Escaping the fishbowl means freedom. It also means risk. The leaping goldfish doesn’t know where it’s going to end up, in much the same way that I don’t know where I’ll be in a year. Sure, I’ve set some goals, and I need those to have something to aim at, but the destination is still a mystery.

Wether you leap out of the bowl with me, or just follow my progress, I hope to see you at the destination. Wherever it is.

Update: I’ve just included the earnings goals for Live Free and Blog. While they were included in the original revenue goal, I wanted to pull them out as a goal on their own.