The Young Money Club

Introduction

I started this blog about 6-months ago after reading online about the use of blogging as an extra income stream. Being that I’m a college student myself, pursuing a degree in finance, I thought I could bring a new perspective to personal finance.

Before starting The Young Money Club, I searched for a place to learn about investing and making money. The dilemma I faced was that the vast majority of blogs/sites I encountered were either too conservative for my age (debt=bad, save everything, buy nothing, etc.) or internet “gurus” just looking to sell their expensive online courses.

At this point I noticed a gap in the market. There are tons of young, hungry, highly motivated individuals looking to learn and no place for them to go. Some brainstorming and about $100 later I had a domain, hosting for a year, and an empty blog.

What I’ve Learned So Far

Writing:

Starting out, I thought that blogging would be easy….boy I was wrong. There has been challenges, lessons, and insights at every turn.

The first lesson I learned came with my first couple of posts. I decided to start my blog right at the beginning of second semester, little did I know the amount of time it takes to research and write an entire post. With plenty of free time it’s not too hard but with a full load of classes, a job, and a girlfriend it can be hard to fit in time to write.

During the school year I averaged about one post per month, a pitiful number in the world of content creation. This showed when it comes to my traffic and rankings on search engines.

Performance:

Traffic is the number one metric used to measure a blog’s performance. Learning how to get traffic was a process and one I am still learning. SEO and social media are some of the main methods used to drive traffic to sites. I just recently (last week) started dedicated social media pages and they have already shown great results. Here are my traffic numbers for the last 6 months.

I know it’s hardly anything but the recent growth from my social media pages has been promising. With the arrival of summer I hope to increase my posting frequency at the very least to once a week. From my research, once a blog hits about 60 pages of content, traffic grows exponentially. Being that I’m only at 6 (yikes) I have a long way to go.

Earnings

This is the part most people are curious about, myself included before I started. So after 6 months of blogging, with a total of 6 posts and 3 subscribers on my email list, I have made………..drum roll please………….. $-130.00.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, I am down about $130. Now let me break this down and tell you why I haven’t made even a penny.

The first $100 was the cost of actually setting up the blog. This covered all hosting services and the cost of my domain name. The extra $30 was used for what I believed was a “free” advertising credit. Oh well, it boosted traffic to one of my posts for about a week, lesson learned.

The main way to earn money from a blog, especially early on, is through advertising and affiliate links. For affiliate links to work you have to get enough traffic so a small percentage will use your links to buy the products or service you’re offering.

To get ads posted on your site, you must first get approval from Google Adsense. I originally believed that the process wasn’t so much an application as it was a sign-up. Google is very secretive about how to qualify for it and has vague policies which give them unchecked power on who they do and don’t accept.

The Future

Over the past 6 months, I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to grow a blog. Most of what’s limited my growth in the past I’ve began to recognize, my lack of content, zero social media presence, and not announcing new posts in particular. In the last week alone, since I’ve implemented these techniques, I’ve already seen results. I plan on continuing to build on these and continue to post on a more regular schedule.

I hope to post more of these progress reports when there are new developments and growth.

Thanks for being a part of the community,

TYMC