Earnings on this site ended 2006 strongly. After subtracting $24.95 in expenses (comprised of a $9.95 monthly hosting fee and $15 to renew the domain name another year), earnings totaled $265.81 in December. In 2006, my first year of blogging, I earned a total of $772.49. I began this site with 42 visitors in January and ended with nearly 12,500 visitors in December.

I’ve been testing out a really elegant Excel add-in called Bonavista Microcharts (review forthcoming), based on Edward Tufte’s fine work on sparklines and thought I’d use it to present a summary of my revenue sources as they changed over time:

As you can see, Adsense still comprises a good chunk of my income from this site, although it’s no longer the source of the majority. I really now only use the first four affiliates listed, having decided that Emigrant Direct was too much trouble to deal with. (I also have some very paltry earnings from Amazon that I haven’t included because it’s unclear when I’ll break the $10 threshold required for a payout.)

So thank you, everyone, for making 2006 such a fun year! It’s been very interesting to watch the growth and (re-)learn how the internet integrates and disperses ideas.

Look forward to the plenty of things I plan to share in 2007!

November was a record month for Experiments in Finance. Earnings (defined as revenues – expenses) was $188.19. This month’s blogging expense was only my $9.95 monthly hosting fee. Revenue came from the following sources:

Adsense: $102.56
Linkworth: $54.61
BlogHerAds: $19.59
BlogAds: $21.43

The month-over-month doubling of earnings was driven by a 50% increase in traffic since October. I’m now averaging around 400 visitors a day, which is shocking to see, but certainly much appreciated. I did tweak the layout of this site in late October and last week so that things are more aligned and easier to read. (I think the site looks much tidier now.)

In case it’s useful to others, according to Google Analytics, I consistently have about an 80/20 split between new/returning visitors each month. I’m not sure how the split of traffic sources on other personal finance blogs compare, but about 50% of traffic to my site is through Google, so my guess is that this search engine traffic is really the biggest driver of ad revenue.

Here’s how my earnings and traffic has trended since I started this site (click to enlarge):

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Earlier in October, I announced that I’d be donating all site earnings to the Grameen Foundation in celebration of Mr. Muhammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank’s 2006 Nobel Peace Prize award. First, thanks to everyone for making it a record earnings month for Experiments in Finance and contributing to this worthy cause. It was the first month I broke the 3-figure barrier and if I can keep this up, maybe can make it to becoming a four-figure blogger.

I’m happy to report that I was wrong in my prediction that I’d have only Adsense earnings to contribute. Here’s how Experiments in Finance’s revenues broke down for October:

Adsense: $85.09
BlogHerAds: $20.52
Amazon: $0.37
Linkworth: $0.33
BlogAds: $3.57

Total: $109.88

Because affiliates have thresholds for disbursing payments, it so happens that I didn’t cross any of them and won’t be getting paid for these amounts for another month at least. But, bad as this might be in terms of revenue recognition, I felt it was right to go ahead and make the donation to the Grameen Foundation as promised. I’m big on transparency, so here’s the screen shot confirming the donation amount (click to enlarge):

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My little earnings experiment for this site continues. September earnings and traffic were down 10% and 25% respectively, largely due to my absense in blogging earlier this month. But, this was also the first month in which I had no days with 0 Adsense clicks, which means I’m getting a critical mass of traffic, I believe. My most popular post remains the one about using CAGR in Excel, written waaay back in January when I first started this site.

In other news, I signed up for BlogHerAds a couple of weeks ago, which pays based on cost per thousand impressions (CPM), to see how that goes. Last week during Google’s PR update, Experiments in Finance finally moved from a pagerank of 3 to 4, at least according to most of its datacenters.

For those interested, here’s a brief and candid review of the various monetization techniques I’ve tried and how they’ve fared. Keep in mind that they may be more successful for other bloggers!

Google Adsense: My main source of revenue. Easy to use, easy to analyze, pays consistently, and highly recommended.

Text-Link-Ads (aff): I applied to this too early, it seems, and this site was rejected based on lack of traffic and page rank. (This was back in April.) Also, you can’t resubmit your site again, but supposedly they review rejected sites regularly and send invites once they’ve hit the minimum requirement, so I take it that either Experiments in Finance hasn’t hit those requirements yet, or it’s gotten lost in the pile! Update: I wrote them this week with my stats and got this site approved the next day.

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Just a quick (but tardy) site update for consistency’s sake: August’s earnings were slightly down overall due to my 3-week post hiatus, though not as much as I expected. (Perhaps I’ve finally reached a certain level of critical mass of useful posts.) Adsense earnings continue to grow, and I received my first Adsense check as well.

Traffic hit a record 6,400 unique visitors last month. I think a lot of that came from stumbleupon, a social bookmarking-type site that Shane Ede of A Penny Saved… (and fellow Problogger group writing project devotee) pointed out to me. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, it’s a free service worth checking out that gives a nice boost to traffic. I’ve found the pages on this site that are the most popular with Google search results also do well there. Once you join, it’s easy to contribute your site, and the nice thing is that you can contribute specific pages (or posts) instead of just your site URL.