• scissors
    January 4th, 2009HARTHmmmm Things, Quickies, WooHoo

    WARNING: Unless you are blogging for money, have a multitude of sites, or basically bored out of your skull for the next 20 minutes .. I would probably read the NEXT post~! (boring alert)

    Net Income – 2008 – And Reflection

    Gross Earnings – $19,864.31
    Gross Expenses – $16,707.39
    Net Income – $3,156.92

    *ugh* .. where do I begin? Is this good? Or, is this not so good?

    Honestly .. I was hoping that I would break $25k revenues in 2008, and actually reach closer to $30k .. more than 4 times that of 2007. My traffic has doubled over the past year, and I was hoping it would be about 8 times more than in 2007.

    However, I still cannot quit my day job and still continue this HART-Empire Network as a part-time venture, despite the amount of time and involvement I have and spend online during the days, months and years. I think that if I had savings, or at least no debt obligations, and able to just spend 100% of my time on my online ventures .. I would be in a much better position that I am today. Basically I find myself putting out flames, and patching up holes and getting sidetracked on the little things … which take up time in my alotment of free time to be spending on the bigger things. In other words .. I’m not doing what I should be doing!

    Now, don’t get me wrong – you do see me out here – and I am having a ball doing this! Whenever I find myself in a situation that, well – I can’t really do anything productive or move forward with my network – I have been spending my time chatting, socializing, forum hopping and even tweeting! I surf, I help promote some of my sites, a lot of other people’s sites, and generally just “hang loose” while I try to imagine a better and wealthier life created because of all this.

    Yet – I think I am in a position that many have yet to achieve online with their blogging, and I also believe I *still* have great potential for greater success in 2009 and beyond with the HART-Empire Network. For these reasons, I have decided to share with you all of the juicy details of where my money came from, and where it went out to.

    Think of it as something my father would say to me growing up .. “Watch what I do .. and do the opposite!” Of course, I have great respect for my dad and actually worked with him in Public Practice between 1985 and 2003 and in a way, everything I learned has greatly been influenced by him, and my background.

    Meanwhile, I am very grateful for what I have and what I have built .. and I thank and appreciate all my online friends and supporters that have either helped me directly or inspired me indirectly to succeed and become better and I will never forget my friends and I mean that.

    So, besides just publishing what my 2008 earnings were this year, I have decided to expand into details to show where the money really has been coming from and where it has been going, and some of my insights that I have seen along the way. This post may soon become extremely long and boring .. so, in case you want to leave or get a fresh cup of coffee .. now is the time 🙂

    Reflection Of My Earnings 2008

    Except for the Halloween store of the HARTmarket series .. I really didn’t start to promote my other stores until Mid November. As such, the earnings are horribly embarrassing for the amount of time that I have spent against what I have earned. However, since about Christmas I have initiated random postings (1 per hour) from each of the stores to approximate (hopefully) one extra post per hour submitted to my Twitter account. Since Christmas, I have earned an extra $50 in commissions .. but, do not know how long that will transpire. I am very happy with Shareasale, and Pepperjam networks, and also use Commission Junction. I must say, though, that I hate CJ because I have to access the site from IE – it’s not too FF friendly.

    My Text-Link-Ads revenues made up 56% of my annual revenues in 2008. This scares me a little, because although for a few months I had broken the $1k mark, it is slowly declining each month. Not only that, there are some blogs that I really haven’t been blogging much on, that are earning the most revenue! I guess that’s good for me .. but, you think the advertisers would wise up more 😛 (jes keedeeng).

    I have pretty much -NIL- private sponsorship. Everything has been going through a 3rd party. It kind of bothers me that I have earned about $12,500 in 2008 – which represents about 50% because it is shared with the media company that finds, manages and maintains the advertising portion towards my blogs (TLA, LW, etc). I have started to place my own ads on my blogs that go through ‘Acrux Ads’. They do not take 1/2 and just charge me a handling fee. This enables me to charge less, yet earn more … but I have to handle all the promotion and bring the advertisers to me. (PS if interested, give me a shout!) I must say it is harder than it seems. I have yet to sell any ads, however I did mention once or twice that advertising options were available. I hate to beg or sound like I am needy. I have to change this attitude for 2009 and build on this part of my earnings.

    Revenue By Topics Series

    I consider the HART-Empire Network broken into four distinct “series” of blogs and sites, and then everything else. Here is how my revenue was broken down by series:

    @ HART Market Series – 1% of my revenue
    And You Will series – 10% of revenues
    Battling Series – 25% of revenues
    LVR series – 35% of revenues
    Everything else – 29% of revenues

    This was a shocker for me .. because in my mind “PetLvr” is the major part of my network and I consider it to be subsidizing everything else. But, in reality – although about 44% of my traffic (uniques) are from PetLvr blog itself ..there is a lot of traffic going to alot of other sites and the little earnings of the individual blog, do add up in the whole. I feel that if I spent time developing the “everything else” sites and the “Battling” and “And You Will” series .. there is much potential.

    I wish I could find CPM rates for all my blogs, but although 56% of my traffic that is not on CPM sounds good – when you spread it out to about 60 blogs it’s not that good. Advertisers are not jumping to get me on board, and quite frankly the lower traffic blogs make more money with google adsense actually.

    Reflection on My Expenses

    I’ve got three major expenses that are bringing down my profits dramatically. The first is my EVDO access fees. EVDO is my hi-speed wireless internet access for my laptop. Unfortunately (for my online business that is), we have a cottage on Lake Winnipeg and go every weekend between the May long-weekend and Canadian Thanksgiving. During the summer months, we take 3-4 weeks straight vacation out there continously. When I say “every weekend”, my wife begins to take Friday off and and we try to make it into a 3-day weekend. This has been hell for me – internet wise – because there is no internet out there. Already, I need about 5-6 days a week for my offline accounting and income tax business, and forced to fit this into a 4 day week – with the minor online activities and time spent. There isn’t any internet access at the cottage, unless we invest into a mega satellite dish .. which isn’t going to happen. So, I signed up for EVDO and every summer, go about 16 GIG transfer over my limit and bring about a huge bill. I recently renegotiated this back in November, so I’m hopeful to reduce this expense for 2009.

    Hosting costs. I have a super duper dedicated server and it is costing me. I wouldn’t need the super duper part, if I didn’t have the 60-70 blogs and sites on my server. I do not upgrade because of traffic growth, it’s for sheer CPU resource usage management. I really appreciate all the advice from many friends who think I should be paying half the fees with a magical system. I find it curious that, as an accountant and someone who has been online since March 1995 and blogging since 2005 and with all my sites and paying over $400 per month – every month – why they don’t think I have considered lowering my hosting costs? I have tried pretty much everything that has been suggested to me, and its unrealistic to think that I will move my accounts every 2 weeks to a different host provider to save $25-$50 per month without assurances. I believe my server is now able to handle most of the traffic now, although I am at a situation where I can upgrade this server two times more before I must look for more economical alternatives. I am using Singlehop and like their support and services.

    Writers Analysis for 2008

    I started the year with 2 writers providing me with content at the beginning of the year .. and ended up with 7 writers at the end of the year providing me with content. Altogether, I have gone through 22 writers this year in total. It is hard finding and keeping good writers and I felt that I have had great writers in the past, and all had better reasons to leave for their own benefit than to stick around for my benefit. I have been subsidizing writers for other blogs out of my own pocket and PetLvr blog earnings. Although, I didn’t start adding writers to the PetLvr blog until late June 2008, I earned about $4,300 more revenue for PetLvr blog that I paid out to writers, that went to support other writers.

    Not one other blog supported the cost of its writers – but, I honestly didn’t expect this to happen for at least 6 months. There are two blogs in the network that survived the 6 months and came close however, and feel each was just picking up steam before the sails were let out and time to look for a new writer.

    But – something strange happened in July 2008. On one blog, I decided to stop writing and just let traffic come to old posts that were doing well in the search engine. Surprising, this was on Battling Obesity blog and my traffic kept GROWING until about end of November 2008, and it was the highest grossing revenue in the Battling series. I will be resuming posting on this blog, and the other Battling series blogs without writers currently, and hope to focus 2009 into building up the “And You Will” series of blogs with content and writers.

    As for Domain renewals .. this includes a few domains that I have selected to renew for 3-5 year terms, plus obtain the .net .org domains as well. As for new registrations, I seem to have had a brain fart in the summer and registered a bunch of new domains for no reason … although, I did manage to turn one of them into a positive domain – x22c.com to shorten URLs for myself 🙂

    As for the advertising costs .. I would much rather put my money into content and writers’ fees than risk spending again with e.g. Yahoo Ads to promote my Halloween store or christmas stores. I hope the stores catch on over time in the HARTmarket – but, the whole idea for me to create them in the HART-Empire Network themed template and in the form of a blog is to avoid advertising.

    A Few Sitemeter Graphs from 2008

    Overall, traffic increases approximately 50% growth per month what it was at the beginning of the year … That’s good, right?

    sitemeter-2008-h-e-n-all

    PetLvr traffic blog traffic approximately doubled in 2008 per month, which a lot of hard effort and new writers were involved to help boost this growth

    sitemeter-2008-petlvrblog

    1-8-0-0-H-A-R-T traffic is very negligible, although about the same every year .. builds up a little during tax time, then settles off during the summer vacation and rest of the year, when I just post fluff Canada Revenue Agency news releases mostly

    sitemeter-2008-1800hartblog

    Raw Data – Summarized by ANAL-HART

    Here are the final gross revenues (by source) that my HART-Empire Network earned for 2008, 2007 and 2006 .. side by side for comparison

    SOURCE

    2008

    2007

    2006

    Google Adsense $4,181.58

    $1,541.42

    $800.00
    Linkworth $806.68

    $963.59

    $0.00
    Chitika $592.32

    $37.17

    $75.00
    Amazon $25.28

    $31.76

    $100.00
    Text-Link-Ads $11,150.71

    $4,807.90

    $1,050.00
    Adify $2,661.23

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Cafepress $0.00

    $19.00

    $55.00
    Affiliate/Commissions $245.27

    $158.07

    $85.00
    Kontera $21.24

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Private Ads $30.00

    $0.00

    $1,500.00
    Rebuild Your Vision $150.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    ————

    ————

    ————
    TOTAL $19,864.31

    $7,558.91

    $3,665.00
    ========

    ==========

    ========

    Here is the allocation of the 2008 Earnings – By Blog – which only includes blogs and sites that have earned revenues in 2008

    BLOG

    LVR Series

    AndYouWill Series

    Battling Series

    HARTmarket Series

    Everything Else

    BirdLvr.com $97.75

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    CatLvr.com $64.95

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    DogLvr.com $325.98

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    FishLvr.com $65.86

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    HorseLvr.com $27.68

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    PapillonLvr.com – Blog $10.51

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    PetLvr.com – [The Blog] $6,434.31

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    And You Will [Portal] 0.00

    $0.28

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    And You Will Garden $0.00

    $107.72

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    And You Will Have Kids $0.00

    $6.46

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    And You Will Marry $0.00

    $70.41

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    And You Will Play Poker $0.00

    $406.05

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    And You Will Renovate $0.00

    $192.94

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    And You Will Retire $0.00

    $1,028.02

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    And You Will Travel $0.00

    $152.33

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling For Health [Portal] 0.00

    $0.00

    $7.37

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Addiction $0.00

    $0.00

    $775.25

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Alzheimer $0.00

    $0.00

    $279.94

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Arthritis $0.00

    $0.00

    $296.58

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Cancer $0.00

    $0.00

    $880.68

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Depression $0.00

    $0.00

    $29.00

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Diabetes $0.00

    $0.00

    $400.90

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Healthcare $0.00

    $0.00

    $19.45

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Hearing $0.00

    $0.00

    $2.71

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Heart and Stroke $0.00

    $0.00

    $319.42

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Multiple Sclerosis $0.00

    $0.00

    $283.26

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Obesity $0.00

    $0.00

    $1,391.80

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Schizophrenia $0.00

    $0.00

    $64.64

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Stress $0.00

    $0.00

    $135.80

    $0.00

    $0.00
    Battling Vision $0.00

    $0.00

    $178.39

    $0.00

    $0.00
    HARTmarket [Portal] 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $24.90

    $0.00
    Classified market 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.51

    $0.00
    Shop @ Birthday 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $21.18

    $0.00
    Shop @ Christmas 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $52.22

    $0.00
    Shop @ Furniture 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $6.74

    $0.00
    Shop @ Halloween 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $15.07

    $0.00
    Shop @ Lingerie 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $44.81

    $0.00
    Shop @ Medieval 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $53.47

    $0.00
    Shop @ Pet Care 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $22.41

    $0.00
    Shop @ Software 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.14

    $0.00
    Shop @ Tools 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $1.55

    $0.00
    Shop @ Vision 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $3.22

    $0.00
    Shop @ Wedding 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $24.46

    $0.00
    1-8-0-0-H-A-R-T 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $573.23
    1800HART’s Picks 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $715.71
    62-151 Media Group 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $621.88
    call HART crazy 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $87.81
    Corydon Clock Repair 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $232.09
    Curling Blog 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $163.37
    Easy Spyware Tools 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $11.04
    HART-Empire 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $2,599.35
    HART-Networ 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.67
    HART-Empire-Network 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $12.79
    Planet Earth Peace Party 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $111.01
    Planet Earth Research Foundation 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.55
    The Singers 0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $0.00

    $407.69
    ————

    ————

    ————

    ————

    ————

    ————

    TOTAL $7,027.04

    $1,964.21

    $5,065.19

    $270.68

    $5,537.19

    $19,864.31

    ========

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    ==========

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    ==========

    Here are my expenses for 2008 – paid on a cash basis (e.g. Jan/08 includes Dec/07 expenses and I have not included some Dec/08 items that I will not pay out until Jan/09 like writers etc)

    2008 EXPENDITURE

    AMOUNT

    Domain Renewals $684.80
    Domain Registrations $234.70
    Dedicated Server and Hosting $3,771.59
    EVDO Access $1,859.42
    Advertising – Links $60.00
    Advertising – Halloween $176.58
    Advertising – Writers $50.00
    Software / Plugins / Support $706.40
    Content and Sub-Contract $933.00
    Writers and Sub-Contract $8,099.39
    Commissions Paid $6.51
    Design and Sub-Contract $125.00
    ————
    TOTAL $16,707.39
    ========

    Here is the breakdown – by topical “series” of what I paid to writers for these blogs in 2008, in aggregate

    WRITERS AND SUB-CONTENT 2008

    AMOUNT

    LVR Series of Blogs $2,136.42
    Battling Series $5,592.01
    AndYouWill Series $370.96
    ————
    TOTAL $8,099.39
    ========
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